This blog entry was prompted by the Formula 1 Blog entry "Vox Certatus: Playing Favourites", which was about favourite teams and drivers and why we thought them so. Initially I took the question at face value, providing a somewhat lengthy response covering Force India, Hill, Fisichella and... ...Montoya. With stating why I disliked the latter, I inadvertantly kicked over a hornet's nest.

When next I visited, I cleared up a small misunderstanding concerning how I'd worded one particular phrase (or so I thought), but then the discussion drifted in a way I hadn't expected. F1 Kitteh asked me:

So you would rather have ‘scripted **’ than ‘verbal abrasiveness’? 

This is the question which I intend to answer here, since the "essay" proved too long for the comments section of Formula 1 Blog.

In my opinion, there are three kinds of verbal abrasiveness. One of them can be a good thing. Another is generally a somewhat bad thing, but can be very bad depending on the particular circumstances. The third one is always very harmful, and unlike the second one it harms everyone, not just the speaker.

To indicate these, here is my personal sliding scale of verbal abrasiveness and scripting, from best to worst:

Situational, justified verbal abrasiveness <- scripting/situational unjustified verbal abrasiveness <- persistent verbal abrasiveness

 
If someone is liable to be sharp-tongued only in specific situations and there appears to be good reason (e.g. they've just had a really stupid steward's decision against them), that would be better than any form of scripting.

An unjustified sharp-tongued incident tends to lead to biologically scripted behaviour, which is about as accurate as behaviour scripted by the powers-that-be (i.e. not very). This is why I rate behavioural and psuedopolitical scripting on the same level. I don't expect those involved to give the explanation for their behaviour as it is frequently obvious in context, but without some reason for being abrasive, one often finds that common sense and logic go out of the window alongside the politeness. I would consider Scott Speed as an example of someone who washed out of F1 partially because there was confusion over whether his situational abrasiveness was justified or not. I thought it was (from what I heard of it) but Franz Tost differed in opinion.

It's the people who are always abrasive, who cannot seem to go five minutes without denigrating someone or pointlessly attacking some slight, who are the least accurate and the most likely to drive me up the wall even reading their words. Most people like that end up putting off their sponsors and mechanics early in the junior formulae and therefore never get seen by the talent scouts, let alone anyone in F1.

Nonetheless, a few do drift into F1. Some people really like such people, possibly because they are so different to those around them or because they can identify better with them. Personally I cannot identify with them at all because I am accustomed to people who have a reasonable (though frequently imperfect) concept of keeping a civil tongue in their heads. People who don't get mad or dismissive at absolutely everything. And it's this which made me dislike Juan Pablo Montoya and Eddie Irvine. However good they may have been as drivers, as people they disappointed me and their ways of talking about others was the primary clue for me to come to this opinion.

(Incidentally, I prefer truthfulness - whether that's Mark Webber's brand of bold statements or Kamui Kobayashi's calmer candour - over any of the above).  

Ultimately, the limitations of particular drivers' attitudes, personalities and methods of thinking have a large influence on their enduring support base. Performance comes and goes but character tends to stay stable - most of the time. Different people tend to resonate with different drivers according to those characters, unless they are the sort of people who support based on performance (be that success or underdog status) or who support more abstract entities such as teams. Even then, teams have group cultures which invoke the general principles discussed here.

Speech is one of several doorways to the revelation of character. It's one of the more accessible ones to the general spectator, especially when spoken in places where journalists have taken the trouble to record the results. Look closely enough and the clues are all there.

Which drivers really think a given way v. those who are claiming it due to conditioning. 

Which drivers really respect - or even like - another v. those who pretend to respect another v. those who have dropped the pretence.

What each driver is hoping for in F1.

Which ones are likely to be around in a strong enough position to achieve those hopes.

Some signals in speech are more obvious indicators of character than others. A habit of persistently abrasive speech is pretty obvious. I just didn't realise it would be so controversial.

Script Frenzy Update:  20 pages of prose, which should become 40 pages of script when formatted. I feel confident about this challenge.

This entry was prompted by <a href=http://joesaward.wordpress.com/2009/...om-the-thieves>Joe Saward's blog</a> writing an entry on some rather blatant plagiarism between <a href=http://formula-1.updatesport.com/new...site/view.html>Update-F1</a> and <a href=http://www.f1-daily.com/news/article...site/view.html>F1-Daily</a>. The fact that F1-Daily has a story bearing the headline:

Not related to F1-Daily

perhaps suggests which party is the guilty one in this instance. F1-Daily also went down during the typing of this entry...

<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping>Web scraping technology</a>, which has been partially prohibited in Australia since 2003 under <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_Act_2003>The Spam Act</a> but has ambiguous legality elsewhere, appears to be the cause. Surely such behaviour is against copyright if nothing else, considering that graphics and verbatim news items were copied and uploaded to the internet with only the briefest (and most unintentionally amusing) of edits.

Theft is also implied in the act. Not only is that the root of the anti-web scraping laws, but UpdateF1 had paid for material from GMM, which was scraped and published without permission. Since the information was GMM's and it was licencing it out to UpdateF1, F1-Daily was committing information property theft when it scraped that part of UpdateF1's site...

...or was it? You see, GMM, for all that it purports to produce "between 10 and 20 original, highly researched and professionally compiled Formula 1 news articles for publication every day", doesn't own much content of its own. Rather, it looks through a quantity of journalistic output relating to F1, makes edits at most and then dumps it into an information stream. It doesn't apply the "two sources" rule that, for example, the BBC generally does. It's not clear how GMM acquires permission to re-publish such stories this way, but even if it did so by the expensive-but-legal method of agreeing article distribution rights, the theft would not be against GMM but its source publications (except, of course, for the aforementioned edits). Sometimes the edits might be enough for it to be considered distinctive content and therefore GMM's own material, but that simply raises it to the level of blogger.

As far as I can see, the main problem with GMM isn't the sourcing methodology, though I might question its legality (depending on how GMM came by that information in the first place). It is that it is not entirely honest about the nature of its output (this may be an understatement). If it was honest, fewer people would purchase its output. Those who did would not only be completely aware of what they were getting and make that clear to readers, but they could better hold GMM to account. For one thing, I'd like to see anyone acting as a professional information filter (i.e. taking other people's money for the privilege) to have at least some basic information literacy so that they could do their job properly. Simply dumping stories onto a feed and relying on feed recipients to do the hard work of filtering is not only amateurish, but fairly simple to replicate for free with Web 2.0 technologies such as Yahoo! Pipes.

It shouldn't be complicated. Everyone knows (or should know) that the journalists on the scene are necessary to understanding what's going on in F1. Logic suggests that they are the ones most likely to know the truth (or something close to the truth, where stories are at the guesstimate stage) and therefore the most authoritative sources. Sometimes other sources can come up with creative takes on a situation that shed more light on it - but they shouldn't be taken as gospel. For that matter, stories that sound completely ridiculous generally warrant further investigation before being believed.

Different circumstances affect the story. If you're in a paddock, you will see different things compared to being at the race but watching from the stands. In turn, someone watching from the stands will have a different perspective from someone watching at home. Indeed, the country "home" is in and (in some cases) the availability of broadband access or quality paper journalism can significantly affect what someone understands about a situation, for each country has a different combination of people analysing the typical race.

Furthermore, each of us has a particular talent for looking at different parts of the sport and for seeing it in different ways. When we write accordingly, our work improves and we help spread understanding and strength between one another. When we feign an expertise that belongs to another, we confuse ourselves and reduce the quality of everyone else's experience.

So let's acknowledge who and what we are. Let us try to fulfil the role(s) we claim to have to the best of our abilities, let others fill the roles we cannot and act with due respect to one another for helping build the F1 community. Some of us fill several roles - in fact most of us when we note that reading, commenting and posting replies can also be roles. In no particular order:

Journalists are journalists.

Bloggers are bloggers.

Podcasters are podcasters.

Forumites are forumites.

Commenters are commenters.

Media filters are media filters.

Thieves are thieves.

It's when we pretend to be what we're not that the troubles begin...