Not so long ago, somebody I know was telling me how he had never used Wikipedia. His argument was that it wasn’t to be trusted:

“I heard that when a malicious change is made, it only takes a couple of minutes to fix it; but if someone changes Napoléon’s D.O.B., the person responsible for finding out which is which doesn’t necessarily know the right answer.”

It used to be, we dreamt of a monolithic computer that would know all (hello, Multivac); you’d walk up to it, and ask a question either directly or through a punched card (depending on the decade you were in). And the computer would know the answer, the way you know how to conjugate verbs or an academic knows what Napoléon’s dates are: by referring to an academic source of information. You can look around all you want nowadays, you won’t find such a thing. We do, however, have a system that gives the same result, except through very different means: by simply indexing the whole world, we have a statistical source of information.

As an example, we’ve tried for years (decades) to teach word processors to correct our mistakes: typos, orthographic mistakes, and grammar errors. A 12-year old could do it. And yet a computer still can’t, not really (admittedly, a lot of progress has been made, but programmers still took decades to achieve this).

Now on the other hand, if you simply google “napoleon 1769 1821″, without a doubt (and without even clicking on any result), you know you have the right, official, 100% certified dates for Napoleon. As another example, let’s say you’re not sure whether “unconstitutional” or “inconstitutional” is the proper spelling; just type in both, and see for yourself, again, without accessing any specific website other than Google.

Does Google know what Napoléon’s dates are? Does it have any clue as to the proper orthography of the word  “unconstitutional”? Has it been taught any grammar rules? Absolutely not. And yet you can have certainty through 2 indicators: the number of results, and the type of results - are the top links leading to official, commercial or academic websites?

The interest of this, of course, is that a single, authoritative source of information can be mistaken, voluntarily corrupted, involuntarily biased, unavailable, etc, while a statistical source - a mass of information stored all over the place - is a distributed, incorruptible source of information.

For an in-depth explanation, there’s an entire chapter in The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (some of it can be read here, in case you’re too lazy and/or cheap to by the book).

Moving on as I’m catching up with everything I didn’t have the time to watch, I finally sat through the whole first season of Dollhouse. The first time I tried, I couldn’t get passed the first episode, steered away by a nasty combination of not-so-stellar acting, and a non-compelling story. Now that I have, I’m forced to get down to the most basic questions.

What’s the series’ synopsis again? There are dolls into which you can blow your darkest, most secret fantasies.

What kind of theme does that bring about? Identity. The separation of mind and body. What if the same mind ended in two different bodies? What if someone ran away with an active to try and live a second life? What would a long-term engagement look like?

There are enough stories to tell about our weaknesses and who we are to fill a couple of seasons right there. And yet the first 7 episodes are nothing but action tales of super-duper agents – hostage negotiator, kung-fu expert, high-end thief, etc; this looks like a string of unrelated episodes of The Pretender. You could strip the whole “dollhouse” concept out of the first 7 episodes and still retain 90% of the storyline; that’s how intricated the themes are to the episode writing.

I can’t believe the writers failed to identify the question of Identity as the main theme of the series. So why is it that the only way they found to express identity crisis was through a whole lot of action, global conspiracy or even apocalypse (in the feeble “Epitaph One” episode)?

That’s exactly what happened with True Blood, as well: supposedly a vampire story, it’s like the writers had so little to say about vampires and their society, they had to throw in a psychic protagonist and what? Shape-shifters? Damn. Whether it’s about designing a product, a service or writing stories, if you fail to identify what you’re about, you’re guaranteed to end up into a wall.