Tag Archives: Internet

Robert Silvers on a new kind of criticism

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What are the kinds of prose, and the kinds of thinking, that result from the imposition of the tweet form and other such brief reactions to extremely complex realities? My feeling is that there are millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs, and that they are not getting and will not get the critical attention that prose anywhere should have unless we find a new form of criticism …

… this means that billions of words go without the faintest sign of assessment. And yet, if one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language, such as affection, privacy, honesty, cogency, clarity—then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.

In Conversation With Robert Silvers — New York Magazine.

That’s from a much longer review with Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books. It was published before the Boston bombings, but after a week in which we saw a lot of criticism of social media for its accuracy and ability to spread misinformation, it feel prescient. What kind of criticism could address social media, besides the kind of media/journalism fact-checking we have now? How would you define a body of work—is it based on one account, one publication, an series of events? Who decides what to include? As shorter forms of disconnected text become the dominant form of discourse, it’s an interesting problem.

Librarians of the Twitterverse

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James Gleick at the NYRblog on the Library of Congress’ plan to archive tweets. All of them:

Here in the twenty-first century, the Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it—anyway, the corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot. The library embarked on this project in April 2010, when Jack Dorsey’s microblogging service was four years old, and four years of tweeting had produced 21 billion messages. Since then Twitter has grown, as these things do, and 21 billion tweets represents not much more than a month’s worth. As of December, the library had received 170 billion—each one a 140-character capsule garbed in metadata with the who-when-where.

…

Of course, the chance of even your very best tweet being seen again by human eyes is approximately zero.

The rest of the article is a little techno-cranky, but he has a point. Is it worth it? I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, if we can save every tweet we probably should. The technical challenges to actually doing something useful with all that data are going to be solved as big data computing matures. The maddening thing is that the government shouldn’t have to do the heavy lifting, Twitter itself should.

On the other hand, I now have the option to download all of my own tweets and I don’t see the point. I guess you could say that the sum total of the words I’ve typed on Twitter for the past five years is just as valuable as any essay or blog post that I carefully back up and move each time I get a new computer. But I also have more than 10 years of email archived in my Gmail account, and I can count on one hand how many times I’ve looked up something more than a few weeks old.

I’m sure there’s value in a massive tweet archive to an anthropologist, or a prosecutor, or a journalist trying to track down a fake girlfriend hoax. But for an individual, tweets feel more like our real-world conversations; valuable only within the context of a certain audience and place. If it’s important enough, you can just say it again.

Lessons from 12 Years of Blogging

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Anil Dash wrote something last month about how much the web has changed since the early aughts, when all the coolest geeks had their own blog and no one knew a thing about “social media.” It made me wistful for the old days, and now that it’s a new year I feel like giving this old thing another try.

I started this site 12 years ago. That’s longer than my marriage, longer than any job I’ve held, longer than I’ve lived anywhere since I was a kid. Even though I stopped and started blogging here too many times to count, that’s a long time. I feel like that counts for something on the web and I ought to give it some love.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I’m thinking it’ll be some combination of old fashioned blogging with the longer personal essays I’ve been doing for a couple years. My interest in blogging waned when I started using Twitter, but I’ve always felt something missing when I wanted to write a few paragraphs about something and be done with it. So here we are.

To get started, I moved everything from my own WordPress install to WordPress.com because I figured it was time to get out of the business of running my own blog software (more on that later). I spent the weekend fixing broken links and restoring images that didn’t make it in the transfer, and it gave me a chance to read through a lot of my old stuff and think about what this little project has meant to me. Here are some general observations:

  • All told I moved 1,042 posts with 631 tags over 12 years of archives. For a long time I’ve kept most of that stuff private/unpublished because I only wanted to show off my capital W “Writing,” but I figure if I’m going to give this thing a chance again I should just own it and put everything back online. So enjoy all those old political rants and pictures of my dog.
  • Looking back, a lot of what I used to post here is probably stuff I would just post on Twitter or Facebook today. I wonder if I would’ve ever started a blog if I’d had those tools back then.
  • The first things I put on this site were little anecdotes and essays my friends wrote. I envisioned it as some kind of online magazine, and even after I started posting mostly my own stuff, they kept sending me links and pictures because they didn’t have anywhere else to post them online. Now that everybody’s mom can post videos about 20 different ways from a cell phone, it’s weird to think that it used to take quite a bit of technical knowhow to put a couple pictures online.
  • Flickr really was awesome back in the day.
  • And remember what a big deal moblogging used to be?
  • I have a group of 5-6 friends from college who used to read what I posted every day, leave comments and generally make fun of me. It was really fun, and those comment threads make me laugh even today. I guess people do that kind of thing on Facebook now, but it’s not the same. I miss it.
  • I’m now on my sixth different technology for running this site, and I have to say it’s astounding how simple and easy it is to run a blog today. I started in 2001 making web pages in Microsoft Frontpage, then I moved it to the first version of Blogger that generated HTML pages and FTPed them to a server. After that I used an early version of Movable Type that made you run your own SQL scripts to set it up, then I used the self-hosted WordPress from its beginnings up until now. You kids have it too easy today.
  • Speaking of all that moving, I’m amazed I never lost any of that old stuff in the process. The oldest posts on this site are the same ones I pushed out of Frontpage in 2001. Yay me for planning well.
  • And when I was working on setting up the new site this weekend, I told Debbie I don’t think it matters what the finished product looks like. I just like puttering around on a website for a hobby, like some people enjoy gardening or playing a musical instrument. It’s a combination of writing + mid-level computer geekery that’s right in my wheelhouse.

A final technical note: When I first registered the “wood-tang.com” domain, I didn’t really think about how that worked as a web address. I just did it that way because that’s how I used to write my stupid nickname. Over the years I learned it’s kinda lame to have a dash in a URL and it’s bothered me ever since. I bought the “woodtang.com” domain a couple years ago and didn’t know what to do with it, but when I moved the site I figured out how to make it work. If I mapped the domains and set all my nameservers correctly, everything should point here, sans dash, no matter how you type the address. Technology!

So I’m excited. Can you feel it? I’ll see you later this week. Or not.

Tyler Cowen on the web attention span

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In an essay adapted from his book, Create Your Own Economy, Tyler Cowen says the internet and mass media aren’t killing our attention spans, just changing the way we use them. Our cultural creations are greater than the sum of their parts, and over time, the constant stream of blog posts, YouTube videos, and tweets builds just as rich an inner life as sitting down for three hour operas.

He compares this phenomenon to a long distance relationship, where people try to pack in as many wonderful experiences as they can into brief visits, versus marriage, where couples experience small pleasures with each other every day:

Although many long-distance relationships survive, they are difficult to sustain. When you have to travel far to meet your beloved, you want to make every trip a grand and glorious occasion. Usually you don’t fly from one coast to another just to hang out and share downtime and small talk. You go out to eat and to the theater, you make passionate love, and you have intense conversations. You have a lot of thrills, but it’s hard to make it work because in the long run it’s casually spending time together and the routines of daily life that bind two people to each other. And of course, in a long-distance relationship, a lot of the time you’re not together at all. If you really love the other person you’re not consistently happy, even though your peak experiences may be amazing …

If you are happily married, or even somewhat happily married, your internal life will be very rich. You will take all those small events and, in your mind and in the mind of your spouse, weave them together in the form of a deeply satisfying narrative, dirty diapers and all. It won’t always look glorious on the outside, but the internal experience of such a marriage is better than what’s normally possible in a long-distance relationship.

Life Without a Cell phone

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Lest you think I’m only going to write about gothic horror novels, I wound up the internet machine this morning and found this article about people who don’t have cellphones on purpose, because they don’t like the idea of being reachable at all times. A noble pursuit, but the problem is, no one else knows how to deal with it:

Ms. Mboya always picks a time and a landmark to meet friends and carries quarters in case she has to use a payphone.

Still, her friends are not used to planning their social lives in advance. A recent brunch date required several three-way planning phone calls among Ms. Mboya and two friends. “I can only do that periodically,” said Sheila Shirazi, one of the friends. “I don’t have the time and energy to coordinate to the extent it takes with somebody who isn’t mobile. It’s just not something I’m used to.”

I can definitely get behind not having a cellphone (at least the phone part, I couldn’t do without the web), but the rest of the world can’t. “Hell is other people,” as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote. But yet, nine out of the ten calls I receive are from my wife, so something tells me we could figure out ways around the limitation.

The Technology Fails Essay

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At The Millions, Catie Disabato writes about a growing subgenre of online essays borne out of the agony of losing access to some part of the internet, the Technology Fails Essay*:

A subgenre of confessional personal essay has grown from the seed of technical disasters just like mine: the Technology Fails Essay. (In my own essay, right now, I’d be talking about my frantic attempts to access the account by restarting my computer, as if I could trick the internet that way.) Most of these essays appear in online literary magazines, and they are probably so prevalent because the writers no longer have Twitter or Facebook or Gmail to distract them from writing. The essays aren’t shallow, though, because the immediate reaction to technological failure is a deeply emotional one, whether the emotion is desperation, anxiety, fear, or despair.

She comes around at the end though, as the piece is more in line with my feelings about such complaints:

When my technology fails, the lack of it consumes me. When someone else’s technology fails them, I am vaguely sympathetic, but I’m losing my ability to feel anything in response. Their problems wash over me, because it’s so simple to put contacts back into a cell phone, and if they were smart they would’ve backed up their computer files, and what are you bitching about anyway, your email will be back in 24 hours, just wait it out, it’s not that big of a deal.

I can sympathize with the Technology Fails Essay because I’m as wired as they come, but more often than not my response is, “Relax. Go have a cookie. Then take a walk.” Not to get all Merlin Mann up in here, but being cut off from email and Twitter for a few hours is a release, an excuse to go play on the swings instead of putting out the fires–real or imagined–online.

* And thankfully doesn’t employ the more common internet usage “FAIL,” which if I read one more time I might throw my laptop across the room.

Google's Power Readers and the Daily Me

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Google Reader has expanded its Power Readers to include other wonks, politico journalists, and pretty cable news talking heads. The feature promotes lists of these influentials’ RSS subscriptions, so that you, aspiring pundit, might read the same thing too.

It’s a great idea from Google’s perspective; give its users more of a reason to stick to their product by fine tuning their subscriptions. But it makes me remember an idea from Cass Sunstein’s book, Republic.com. Sunstein, now an advisor to the Obama administration, is a legal scholar from the University of Chicago. He warned against the tendency of Internet users to use its powers of filtering to create a “Daily Me,” a personalized view of the world that only reflected our personal tastes and beliefs with no dissenting opinions.

One of the standard laments about the death of newspapers is the supposed loss of serendipity in reading the news, i.e. stumbling across some story you never would have picked up on your own simply because it caught your eye amidst the other headlines. As he says:

Unplanned and unchosen encounters often turn out to do a great deal of good, both for individuals and for society at large. In some cases, they even change people’s lives. The same is true, though in a different way, for unwarranted encounters.

Sunstein’s warning was that by creating your Daily Me, you miss out on all kinds of unplanned encounters because of the perfect filtering offered by the internet. Democrats never listen to Republicans, Arabs never hear out the Israelis, cats never nuzzle with dogs. Bad, bad, bad for democracy:

If diverse groups are seeing and hearing quite different points of view, or focusing on quite different topics, mutual understanding might be difficult, and it might be increasingly hard for people to solve problems that society faces together.

Might? I’d like to hear his take on today’s healthcare “town hall meetings.”

On the surface, Google’s Power Readers feature would make it easier to expose oneself to opposing viewpoints. Look, there’s Michelle Malkin’s reading list right next to Arianna Huffington’s! Catfight, ROWR! But when you think about it, it encourages people to choose from the lists that affirm their preexisting beliefs. What self-respecting conservative is going to read off Paul Krugman’s list after all?

I don’t attribute any ill intentions to Google here, but in pushing this feature of Google Reader, which by the nature of RSS enables the Daily Me in the first place, they’re only aiding in its eventual acceptance as the norm.

The Tyranny of John Freeman's Nostalgia

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In a WSJ editorial that’s likely to get passed around quite a bit, Granta editor John Freeman lays out his “Manifesto for Slow Communication,” i.e., returning to the good old days of face-to-face communication and handwritten memos.

He starts with a classic internet horror story:

“My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband,” writes the poet Don Paterson. “I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it’s like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.”

Without the context, I don’t know whether the poet’s friend just hooked up his broadband, or whether this is a bloodshot nightmare from 1998 when the rest of us did it, but I’m pretty certain I’ve read this kind of handwringing already.

You can probably guess where the rest of the piece is going. Things were better and people were smarter before the internet. We’re all fools for being sucked into this phenomenon, and despite the social goods Freeman grants it, it’s ruining our lives:

The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, emailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us … Of course email is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives … It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.

One of his primary arguments is that the speed of communication allowed by the internet makes us sloppy:

We need time in order to properly consider the effect of what we say upon others. We need time in order to grasp the political and professional ramifica tions of our typed correspondence. We need time to shape and design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean. Communicating at great haste hones our utterances down to instincts and impulses that until now have been held back or channeled more carefully.

Freeman seems to be making a habit of project his fears onto others and extrapolating that into a massive societal problem. I don’t know about him, but I put a great deal of care into everything I write, online or off. I’ve spent just as much time on this post as I would have on a piece of similar length for print. Granted, it may be quicker for me since I’m not dipping a quill into an inkwell, but I’ll stand behind anything I post on the web. I also admit to any mistakes I may make in the process, much as he must admit to speaking out of anger in a face-to-face meeting, or had to scratch out something on a handwritten letter.

I’m no less careful online than I would be in person or in print because I understand the permanent, viral nature of the internet. I know that mistakes and embarrassments can spread far and wide on the internet, irrevocably, so I’ve learned to avoid making them. Perhaps Freeman doesn’t realize that a whole generation that knows nothing but the internet understands this as well.

His coup de grace is that the new-fangled relationships we form and nurture online are not as worthy as the old ones forged over pints at a pub:

If we spend our eve ning online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the people we could turn to for solace, humor and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this. We trade the complicated reality of friendship for its vacuum-packed idea.

This would imply that the friends I’ve made online and later met in person are somehow less important and less real, which would probably surprise them when I tell them that the next time we meet at a pub. Freeman seems to have a habit of assuming that life on the internet is mutually exclusive of life in the physical world, that if we enjoy communicating with people online, we must not do it in person.

This article is an adaptation of a forthcoming book, so perhaps I’ve missed some of the nuance of his full argument in this distilled form. But considering that the book is called The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, I suspect it’s mostly more of the same sclerotic nostalgia from someone who either can’t, or won’t, understand how the internet has changed the way we communicate. Some people have adapted. Some clearly haven’t.

News about the News on the Web

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Michael Massing has an excellent, long article in The New York Review of Books about the state of the news media, in which he heaps a lot of praise on Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall in particular:

This image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. In their sweep and scorn, however, such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive. Over the past few months alone, a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet. The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news. And unless the editors and executives at our top papers begin to take note, they will hasten their own demise.

Certainly a more nuanced view than Wired editor Chris Anderson, spouting off combative, 90′s-style internet hyperbole in Salon:

Sorry, I don’t use the word “media.” I don’t use the word “news.” I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.

Media Execs Decide We'll Pay For it, and We'll Like It

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Via Romenesko, two separate pieces in which media bigwigs have decided that we’re all just a bunch of freeloaders, and they’re going to make us pay for internet content soon whether we want to or not.

First comes Sharon Waxman from The Wrap, who says (in a completely unsourced post) that “a consensus is emerging among the leaders of the digital media industry” at conferences that “quality content matters, and people will pay for it.” Extra points to Waxman, by the way, for trotting out the blogger in pajamas stereotype again.

Next, Barry Diller, CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which runs Ask.com and Match.com, tells Bloomberg that web users better get ready to fork it over, because our free ride is over. “It is not free, and is not going to be,” he said at the Future Brainstorm conference (conferences apparently being where media moguls go to decide on their own how they’ll stop getting screwed). At the same conference, Disney CEO Robert Iger said, “We have ample evidence both in traditional and new media that people are willing to pay for quality, to pay for choice and to pay for convenience. And they are willing to pay for what they perceive as value.” (emphasis mine)

To be fair, both Iger and Waxman’s unnamed sources are right: give me something good enough, something that I can’t get elsewhere for free, and I might actually pay for it. But the thing about the web is that there is always a comparable free alternative. I have paid for internet content twice in my life: for a one-year Salon.com premium membership, and a partial year of the New York Times Times TimesSelect service. In both cases, I regretted it, not because the quality of either site wasn’t up to snuff. In fact both were excellent. But soon after charging my credit card, I felt foolish when I realized I could get basically the same thing at Slate, The Nation, Talking Points Memo, The Washington Post, et al, for free.

The Bloomberg piece cites plans by the Times, ESPN, Disney, News Corp, and others to start charging for content. I suppose one needs to know more about the costs and revenues of such services to decide whether it’s worth it to those companies to drive away eyeballs in exchange for fewer paying customers and lower ad revenues. But an important point they need to consider is that nearly every time a news organization has put its content behind a pay wall, it got left out of the conversation in blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc as people opted to link to freely accessible sites, as Kevin Kelleher pointed out recently in The Big Money:

Today, online publishers are seeing more and more traffic coming through blogs, aggregators like Google News, and social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Ignoring them is even more perilous to a paper’s image than it was two years ago, when the New York Times tore down its Times Select pay walls. The hypertext link that made the Web unique is even more powerful today, and pay walls that break those links send would-be readers a clear message: Don’t bother.

So, is it really worth it?