Politics and Ethics in the Tyrant's Camp

The study of media, politics and society has for a long time been an interest of mine, and it was for this reason that when the time came for me to write up an undergraduate dissertation I chose to focus on the Civil War epic of Lucan, which I believed would nicely tie in these topics with my discipline of Classics.

This work is not what it at first seems however: far from presenting any kind of clear political manifesto, Lucan makes use of the nuanced complexities of the epic tradition to tear apart the flaws of contemporary Roman society. Like its companion, the Masters dissertation I wrote on the poetry of Statius, this essay deals with the literature of an imperial dynasty on the brink of collapse. Suddenly denied access to the familiar corridors of power however, Lucan's work has none of Statius' aspirant optimism and instead offers a glimpse of a world torn between tyranny and chaos, where the only constant is an endless crescendo of blood, gore and death.

What we find is a sickly parody of epic poetry, full of heroics without heroism and politics without any political message. This is at its heart an ethical text in which different political standpoints are one by one rejected, their hypocrisies exposed. No doubt this will be a sensation familiar to many participants in our political system today, with protest parties such as UKIP becoming increasingly present on British ballot papers.

The Poet Lucan and the Literary Journey: The Presentation and Establishment of Political and Ethical Views in Lucan's Civil War

The Happiest Gulag in the World

After its 2011 acquisition of Zagat, a popular service that allows users to review restaurants, hotels, bars and places of interest, Google has made some headway in integrating its ratings into its own Places listings. A notable success story among many more questionable decisions (see a previous post), Zagat has come to completely replace Google's own reviewing service and has as recently as this week become the target of a further advertising campaign from the search giant.

The assumed site of today's nuclear test, viewed on Google Earth

Perhaps clumsily, this surge of publicity happens to coincide with the addition of further detail to the Google Maps imaging of North Korea. While adding such elements as the assumed locations of several of the worst prison camps in the world, the company unfortunately neglected to prevent the creation of Zagat listings for the sites, which have since acquired as many as 70 individual reviews.

Drawing comments varying from the ironic and darkly humorous to the ideological, the gulags of the East Asian fiefdom have been described by users in such terms as "a family friendly retreat" and "better than most places in the US", with discussion only occasionally turning to more serious themes. While this mischievous and playful quality of internet culture might to some extent threaten to undermine the message Google might have sought to put across through the update, released scant weeks after the company's chairman, Eric Schmidt, visited the autocracy, the new data certainly stands to raise the profile of the sites, believed to hold over 200,000 political prisoners and enemies of the regime.

Human rights activists have already found Google's satellite imaging service to be a valuable ally, assisting the earlier location of additional prison camps and, today, the identification of what is believed to be the country's latest weapons testing site. So long as users are willing to accept that others might not take the situation as seriously as they, the company's services offer an increasingly useful insight into the inner workings of one of the most secretive nations on the planet. As events unfold therefore, global commentators remain poised for future developments at the Secret Base hidden along the helpfully named "Nuclear Test Road"...

What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

Apologies for my extended hiatus from this blog: I suddenly had a great deal of time-dependant work to do, which has kept me fully occupied for most of January. While I prepare for my next post, I hope there might be some interest to be had in another one of my old essays.

In this short but somewhat steamy article I take a look at another one of the curiosities of the Roman world: the poetess Sulpicia, who remains the only extant female author of Roman love poetry.

Offering a very different perspective from her male counterparts, Sulpicia's poems reveal a great deal about the purpose of Roman love poetry as the unexpected reversals she makes suggest that, as a genre,  it was far less subversive than it might otherwise have appeared. Valuable to feminist historians, she allows the otherwise ephemeral and artificial image of the Roman woman to take solid form, albeit briefly, giving us a glance of love on the other side.

An early example of my work as an undergraduate, this is too short, a bit rough around the edges and performs all sorts of mental gymnastics to incorporate the textual criticism necessary for assessment. Nevertheless, its conclusions are sound and, playing with the limits of what qualifies as "textual criticism", it demonstrates the mutual value of modern interdisciplinary research to the Classics. Attempting to utilise recent scientific studies, it makes an effort to certify the questionable authorship of the Sulpicia poems with reference to the measurable differences exhibited between modern male and female sexual fantasies, arguing that the poems are undoubtedly female in their sexual imagery. While perhaps doubtful in that respect, the end result is regardless an interesting read, casting new light on works formerly dismissed as either false or hopelessly naïve.








The Mirror of Tibullus: The Collapse of Feminine Metaphor in the Love Poetry of Sulpicia

Uneasy Aquisitions and Polluted Ecosystems: The Google Conundrum

Regular listeners to the Full Circle Magazine podcast will know that I have spent a great deal of time pondering the value of "ecosystems" in the world of technology. What is meant by this term in context, much like its ecological equivalent, is the environment produced when a company's products are used alongside each other. In the world of technology, where services are interlinked and mutually reinforcing it also has a lot to do with "user experience", the sensation encountered when using a whole suite of products together. Look and feel therefore has an increasing impact on digital ecosystems as they grow, with an ideal outcome being that a user is able to work with multiple products from a single source together almost entirely seamlessly, finding little difference between them in terms of interface design and sensation, while having as many of their digital needs taken care of as the provider is able to manage.

An avid user of many of Google's products, including the Android smartphone operating system, I find its services tend to compare favourably with the products of most of its competitors. Much of this is due to the variety and consistent quality of what is on offer, whether it be the accurate satellite navigation provided by Google Maps, the office suite-cum-cloud storage system of Google Drive or the timely search-linked information grabber that is Google Now. While other giants such as Apple or Microsoft have certainly made brave efforts at challenging its supremacy, Google, utilising its powerful advertising-based business model alongside the sheer weight of its market momentum, seems to be uniquely able to consistently deliver such high-quality services without charge.

(Click to enlarge) Source: App Annie

(Click to enlarge) Source: App Annie

Obviously, Google's overriding goal in this is to account for every need a user could possibly think of (as well as many they probably won't), allowing them to largely corner the market in online advertising. From even a quick glance at the product ecosystem produced by this model however, it clear that this approach nevertheless faces significant drawbacks. Perhaps the most obvious of these is found in the Google Play Store, formerly known as the Android Marketplace, which offers a comparable service on Android to the App Store for Apple's iOS. Although Google offers a much less restrictive set of guidelines for developers hoping to sell their software, among a number of other factors the omnipresence of the internet giant's own free services has led to the creation of a smaller and much less lucrative market. Developers are certainly still able to earn a tidy sum from their handiwork, though a much larger proportion of revenue is drawn from advertising than on iOS equivalents, with Apple's store continuing to maintain a clear lead in direct sales. Recent data indicates that Google is rapidly closing this gap however, and it is not likely to be long before the two become much more evenly matched.

Far more worrying, though, is the confusing mass of products produced as an outcome of Google's efforts to dominate the digital world on all sides by land, sea and air. Apple, a design and device-based company at heart, has maintained its well-defended niche selling devices at a premium that offer access to a largely homogeneous set of services. Almost without exception, Apple's products offer the same user experience and, though expensive and now a little dated in appearance, it is smooth, well-maintained and neatly designed. The sensation of Apple's different services is broadly the same, allowing them each to feel like small components of a larger system. While Google's products make an effort in this direction, they still have a long way to go before they reach the same level of coordination.

To start with, the digital behemoth has a tendency for over-elaboration, adding unnecessary functionality to otherwise simple services and creating products that slip by largely ignored even within the same ecosystem. Many users of Google+ will no doubt remember the mysterious YouTube button that appeared on the site for a few weeks to offer users the dubious value of being able to watch videos in a tiny window while browsing the site. On the other hand, it is unlikely that any but the enthusiastic few will recall Google Scribe, the internet autocorrect engine that now, following the extinction of Google Labs, exists as little more than an amusing third-party plugin for the Chrome browser. Thirsty for innovation of any sort, Google hastily releases arbitrary new features in a desperate attempt to keep ahead of its competition, such as Google+'s "Party Mode" which allows event attendees to manually upload images while an event is taking place (doing little to commend the sorts of "parties" at which guests might actually be likely to do this). This is a mistaken policy, serving only to conceal genuinely useful features that the services have, such as for example the ability to invite people to events who are not themselves actually members of Google+. Such products often also disappear without warning when found to be unpopular, leaving people clueless as to how services are really designed to be used together. More detailed consideration should be put into future product releases as a priority, as hasty withdrawals leave a very poor impression among consumers.

An uncertain start is at hand for Google's Schemer

Acquisitions add a further dimension to the problem. Keen to avoid letting opportunities slip away, Google enthusiastically acquires small (and some large) services that show sufficient promise. Working with products, however clever, that were not originally designed to fit within any particular ecosystem raises significant problems. Ideally, they should be retrofitted to allow them to thrive in their own niches within Google's diverse portfolio. This is not easily done, as such products often have an existing user base resistant to large-scale change - losing these users would raise the question as to why the company did not simply set up a competing service in the first place. The more popular a service becomes, the more likely it is to acquire users other than the kinds of enthusiastic early-adopters who readily embrace change for its own sake. As a service becomes more firmly entrenched, so does its look and feel: YouTube is a key example of this, with even high-profile users reacting fairly unenthusiastically to the latest in a long series of interface changes designed to tie it in more closely with the rest of Google-land. The more companies a giant such as Google acquires, the more fractured its ecosystem becomes, threatening its stability in a manner akin to a house of cards.

Google's eagerness to find a place for every possible audience has also pushed it into competition on many fronts with countless other titans. Several endeavours, some quite poorly thought out, have caused the company to become an nuisance, if not an outright threat, to major players on the internet scene. Many will remember Buzz, the company's ill-fated Twitter-esque microblogging service which was eventually abandoned after being made redundant by the more robust Google+ (itself very close to Facebook). Some will no doubt also recall the disastrous Google Wave, which sought to revolutionise the world of email, but which achieved precious little with regard to uptake, leading to its sad withdrawal with little fanfare. For its efforts, Google has found itself with few friends among its peers. Facebook, for example, refused to play ball when asked to make friend details available to Android's "Contacts", and Apple's Steve Jobs famously declared "thermonuclear war" on the competing mobile operating system as the rivalry between the two companies caused Eric Schmidt, then Google's CEO, to resign from Apple's board of directors.

The ill-fated Wave: quickly killed off

Optimistically, there are still some surprises to be had from the giant. Google+ Communities, a recent addition to the company's social network, is hardly a revolution, offering capabilities comparable to Facebook Groups which had been sadly absent from the site previously. While it is far too early to measure the overall impact of the new feature, in my experience at least it has been a tremendous hit, almost tripling the number of quality interactions encountered. Google Drive, released earlier this year, has also been a tremendous time-saver, offering ample space to store files while granting access to a rudimentary but surprisingly powerful online office suite. Sceptical about the service at first (and disappointed that there is still no desktop client available for Linux!), I now find it more than sufficient for all but the most elaborate projects, with its sophisticated collaborative capabilities making sharing and editing much easier than any alternatives I have experienced to date. Google's creative engine, it seems, is still as lively as ever and more than able to produce a few hits under its own steam.

Ultimately, it seems Google is simply producing more products than it is able to keep track of. Many of these also have very similar roles, leaving users confused as to which they should use in each circumstance. Schemer for example is a recent innovation that allows people to create and share to-do lists. This places it in conflict with Google Calendar, which offers the ability to create and share events by email along with its own more limited "Tasks" functionality. While Schemer is supposedly aimed more at life goals and "things to do before you die", this is not immediately obvious and likely to confuse first-time users. The parallel between the two also exposes omissions: where are shopping lists supposed to be stored, for instance (frustrated by this, I actually now use a simple text document for this purpose)? Google Currents, a service for downloading and viewing magazines, is another particularly glaring example, exhibiting overlap with both RSS manager Google Reader and Google Play Magazines, and equipped with an icon of a startlingly dissimilar design from those of other flagship products. Such clashes of functionality breed user uncertainty: ideally, should someone use Google Reader or Google Currents for their subscriptions? Where are photographs and images supposed to be stored - within Picasa and Google+ Photos or Google Drive? Such uncertainty is toxic to a healthy ecosystem, which thrives on unity and smoothness, giving the impression that the software developers had little idea themselves of how their services should be properly used. The best explanation seems to be that Google, unable to decide whether it wants its products to be seen as individual services or as a true singular "suite", is striving instead to have it both ways. This is a brave choice, though it is uncertain as to whether it will pay off in the long-run.

How to Build an Emperor

Having neglected the classics somewhat in recent months, the festive season seems as good an opportunity as any to publish some more of my university work.

Dealing once again with the theory of imperial power, this short essay examines how the idea of the "Emperor" came to be developed at the beginning of the Roman Empire by an individual damned by history: the Emperor Nero.

Having lived under the continuous domination of a single dynasty, with the death of Nero the Roman people came to learn that imperial power was not something to be wielded only by a single great man and his descendants, but that it could somehow outlive those who created it and come to rest at the feet of anyone capable of successfully understanding and manipulating its many complexities.

This is made possible by the simple fact that, within its outward illusion of stability, absolute power is something that is really fundamentally amorphous and mutable. Changing at the hands of all who possess it, with each holder struggling to outdo the last, it eventually comes to take on a life of its own, with the role of "Emperor" coming to exist alongside whomever the individual "emperor" might be at a particular time. Used well, this knowledge can invigorate leaders with understanding of the ideological might their positions loan to them; employed poorly, it results in the confusion, disconnection and irrelevance warned about in a previous article.

The Formation and Transmission of Imperial Power: Ideological Domination and Transformation Under the Emperor Nero