Sowing

Waking up a little early this (Thursday) morning, I elected to stay in bed for a bit, rather than getting up for the first tea of the day - as important now as the first fag of the day was in my younger days. And the first tea usually tastes better than those that follow, perhaps three or four of them in the course of the day.

While in bed, the phrase 'sow the fields and scatter' popped in my mind, out of the blue as far as I can remember now, an hour or so later. I thought perhaps a line from a hymn sung at school and that Bing could probably recover the hymn concerned. Which I wanted to do because sowing the seeds and then scattering did not seem right: one sowed by scattering. With even scattering being an important skill for a farmer or farm labourer - as anyone who has tried to scatter lawn seed evenly will know.

A bit later, the amended phrase 'plow the fields and scatter' popped into mind. I suppose the brain had muddled 'sow' with the nearly rhyming 'plow', with there being entry points to both words in the bin in the brain marked 'farming'. I wonder now whether the fact that the pig sort of sow does rhyme with plow (or plough) has any significance?

When I got up, Bing could indeed recover the hymn from both phrases, giving me the website snapped above. Quite an informative website, from which I learned that the hymn I knew had been lifted in the second half of the nineteenth century by one Miss. J. M. Campbell from the interior of a poem by a late eighteenth century German, Matthias Claudius, a chap from a clerical background who became a journalist, but who then found Jesus in the wake of a serious illness.

I think my memory of same must have come from assemblies in my primary school. The daily act of collective worship which was then de rigueur in our schools. Not quite the thing for a secondary school.

Moving on, I started to think about something I had noticed on the train the previous evening. That is to say a chap scrolling through a series of thumbnails - if that is the right jargon - on his telephone. Up and down he went, occasionally clicking on one of them, even more occasionally actually appearing to read the story behind one of them. How on earth does one float to the top of his world? Assuming, that is, that that is what one wants to do.

Checking this morning, I find that the thumbnails on both Microsoft Start and the Financial Times on my laptop are organised in a two dimensional format, rather than a one dimensional format. But the idea is the same: the thumbnail is a taster in the form of an image plus a classifier plus a title. Where in Microsoft Start the classifier is the source of the story and in the Financial Times the classifier is what the story is about. I dare say Chrome is much the same, but I have not bothered to check this morning.

Let us suppose we have a set of aggregators. People like Microsoft Start and the Daily Mail. A set of advertisers. A set of consumers with their telephones. A set of writers who generate the raw material, the stories.

Consumers may pay a subscription to use an aggregator, but generally speaking they do not. But when they click on a thumbnail to see a story they do get advertisements. An advertisement appearing on his telephone counts (very roughly speaking) as a click and aggregators get paid by the click, at a rate negotiated with each advertiser.

Advertisers keep an eye on their clicks and try to work out which clicks are, over time and on average, generating revenue for them in the form of sales. Lots of middlemen in the undergrowth all too willing to help them with this.

Aggregators want to maximise their income too, which may include offering interesting content which does not generate paying clicks, because that pulls consumers onto their site. Lots of middlemen in the undergrowth all too willing to help them with this too. Some of whom might like to liven up their pitches with slides like that above. And then there are the information scientists, aka geeks, who like to play with them, spend quality time with them.

Note that content being interesting is not the same as being true, sensible or helpful. Consumers like all kinds of stuff, a lot of which does not answer this description. And some of them are more interested in the clever advertisements than in the not-always-so-clever stories.

The writers of the stories are a very mixed bag, with some of them salaried by an aggregator - perhaps the Daily Mail again - or perhaps some kind of freelance. Writers who might want to make the world a better place or who might want to make a bigger place for themselves in it.

Clearly a complicated game. First tea done, perhaps I need my porridge.

PS: which duly appeared, a little later.

References

Reference 1: https://hymnary.org/person/Claudius_M. '... Translations in common use:— 1. We plough the fields and scatter, by Miss J. M. Campbell, contributed to the Rev. C. S. Bere's Garland of Songs, Lond., 1861, p. 61 (later eds. p. 27). A free rendering in 3 stanzas of 8 lines, with chorus, entitled, "Thanksgiving for the Harvest." Since its reception into the Appendix to Hymns Ancient & Modern, 1868 (No. 360, ed. 1875, No. 383), it has passed into numerous hymnals in Great Britain, and America. In Thring's Collection, 1882...'.