|
Monday, July 10, 2006
A plea for help 
Excuse you, but you are not me
| | I've always hated it when somebody else uses the first person pronoun on my behalf. When somebody say "my folders" or "my calendar" for someting they want me to use but isn't theirs, I hear baby-talk going on. I don't even like it when they use the third person voice: "your folders", "your calendar" or whatever. |
| | I suppose it's a hopeless thing to fight, now that MySpace and YouTube are bigger than the orbit of Jupiter. |
| | So I'll reserve my cringing for stuff like Now Starring A User Named You, by Sheana Mulcahy, in OnlineSPIN. Its an interview with Adi Sideman, founder and CEO of Oddcast, which uses talking avatars to say what humans can say better. (I don't know how to put it more charitably. I do want to be nice, giver of doubt-benefits that I am. But... aw, what the hell. I hate it.) |
| | SM: Is there a limit to user-generated content? |
| | AS: The challenge with UGC is that the quality is not that high. But this will improve as users become savvier and companies provide them better tools. The sky is the limit. Hey, 'America¹s Funniest Home Videos' is one of the most successful TV shows everŠ |
The Formerlies
| | Doc and I are both attacking the same thing. TPFKATA are also TPFKATV (The People Formerly Known As The Voters). The idea of absolute top-down control in any area -- entertainment, business, technology, politics -- is simply non-optimal. Technology has enabled us all to be, in any way we wish to be, as well as audience. |
| | All the world's a stage, and all the men and women on it really players. |
| | You can react to this fact in many ways. You can try to take advantage of it. You can try to fight it. You can just go with it. |
| | But one thing you should no longer do is deny it. This is the new reality, this is what must be understood. Your place on the stage must be continually earned, and continually shared if you're to earn your keep there. |
| | This is true for newspaper columnists, for entertainers, for bloggers, for all of us. And it is, in fact, a very good thing indeed. Because we are all, sometimes, the audience. And we all want to be, sometimes, on the stage. And we all deserve to be, sometimes. We should contribute where we want, earn from that what we can, and collaborate instead of just compete. |
| | I don't deny that I am sometimes on stage and sometimes an audience member (the latter more often than the former). But I'm uncomfortable with the theater metaphor (Shakespeare withstanding), at least in respect to blogging. I think bloggers have readers, not audiences. And I think the distinction is important, if not essential. |
| | It's different with podcasting, or any other kind of 'casting. There, often (though not always) we are performing. The theater metaphor is more appropriate. Yet even here we run the risk of perceived hierarchy, since the audience is subordinate to the performer. (Podcasting, blogging) is Theater is an example of what cognitive linguists call a conceptual metaphor, or a frame. It's something we think and talk in terms of. Meaning, we borrow a concept (a frame) and and its vocabulary to understand and talk about a subject. There are entailments to the theater metaphor. One is the old top-down media that really were comprised of performers and audiences. Because peer practices like blogging and podcasting don't require the same asymetries, why continue to use an asymetrical frame when symmetrical one will do? |
| | Also, what works best with blogging and podcasting is just being ourselves. Without artifice. Without performance. Without contrivance. No less talented, but far more relaxed, than what being "on stage" traditionally, reflexively, requires. |
| | I have a small collection of podcasts I play in the kitchen through a radio with a "CD" input, from a tiny .mp3 player. On the collection are some Bill Moyers and BBC 4 items that are remarkably good. But I find myself jumping to the more relaxed stuff from Gillmor Gangs I missed, or from Jon Udell (a former, or honorary, gang member), or from IT Conversations. That's because Bill Moyers and the BBC folks are on stage, where the podcasters are not. Even when they're leveraging a stage performance at a trade show (as is the case with that last link). |
| | This is why, when I'm on podcasts, I don't think of listeners as "the audience" but just as, well, listeners. |
| | Anyway, I don't think Dana and I are far apart here. We clearly agree about participation and the toastedness of The Old Way of Thinking. |
| | And we have a long way to go. |
He said, her flack said
| | One side is represented by departed managing editor Jerry Roberts, who said that he and five other top figures from the News-Press masthead left "largely because of ethical concerns", explaining, "These are primary ethical issues of the blurring of the line between opinion and fact, editorial page and news page... More than 100 papers ran a story about the resignations on Friday, but The News-Press was not among them. It ran a column by Travis Armstrong spinning it. To me, that proves the case that they're mixing up apples and oranges and that the paper is not doing a great service to readers who expect to find news on the front page instead of opinion." |
| | On the other side, "Sam Singer, a spokesman for Ms. McCaw, said the resignations came as a result of the owner's plan to increase local news coverage." The story continues, "When asked if the dispute hinged on former staff members' concerns for journalistic standards, Mr. Singer said, 'That's nonsense.'" |
| | Also, "Mr. Singer denied allegations of management missteps. He said, 'Mrs. McCaw purchased The News-Press in order to give an independent voice to the people of Santa Barbara that is not cookie-cutter journalism.'" |
| | I'll resist jokes about dough. But what could be more cookie-cutter, and flat-out lame, than to get a flack to do your talking for you? These guys are running a newsaper, right? And the New York Fucking Times calls, wanting your side of what is clearly a story. And you send a mouthpiece? |
| | I really want to cut Wendy and Travis some slack here. I keep thinking there must be another side to this. But when all they can do is issue statements and send flacks, what good conclusions can you draw? |
| | Hey, I used to be a flack. But I never acted as a spokesman. Unless you're handling clients who are truly too busy to see everybody, being a mouthpiece can only be lame. In a crisis like this, the flack might as well go out there and say "My client is curled into a ball right now. Please come back when you're ready to believe my happy face button." |
| | In BlogaBarbara, the pseudonymous Sara De la Guerra (the surname is a founding Santa Barbarian family after which streets and landmarks are named) digs into Mr. Singer's background (here's his bio) and his firm's specialty in crisis communication. Then she adds, Crisis Management Watch may be a new feature here at BlogaBarbara -- I'm going to go dust off my copy of 1984 by George Orwell right now. Revisionism in the newsroom has begun. How do these people sleep at night? |
| | Joe Strupp also has a much longer piece in Editor & Publisher, with quotage from Roberts and columnist Barney Brantingham, who had been with the paper for 46 years. "...Many in the community are concerned that the paper might not be able to keep its credibility", Joe understates. |
| | There's not much hope for restoring that credibility. All of it starts with Wendy confronting the crisis directly and openly. Not through Travis. Not through a flack. Just Wendy. Alone. It's her paper. This is her town. They need to talk with each other. |
| | [Later...] Here's KEYT/3's lead story from the 6pm news: Barney Brantingham calling the News-Press' spin "baloney", and saying he would never go back. If you watch the video, you'll need Windows Media 9. (Grrr, but that's another rant.) |
Growing a bigger, flatter world, one yes at a time
| | On the other head, Thomas L. Friedman has come out with Version 2 of The World is Flat, Updated and Expanded, the cover says, from the original. On Page 303 he calls yours truly "one of the most respected technology writers in America". |
| | He goes on to quote from my long, two part review of the original edition. I remember, when I read the book, thinking that I had a choice in reviewing it. I could either do the usual book reviewer thing, and state a bunch of opinions about the book itself, as a static thing. Or I could write a "yes-and" response that added my own thoughts and ideas to the ones Tom Friedman had already put out there. |
| | I did the latter, and it ran something like eleven thousand words. After quoting from a passage in Part II — one that took issue with some of our assumptions about IQ — Tom does a "yes-and" as well, adding his own fresh take on the subject, bringing up the virtues of "CQ and PQ — curiousity quotient and passion quotient". |
| | This is evidence not of a new kind of journalism, but a change in the conditions underneath all kinds of journalism. Our works are no longer static. We can speak in provisional terms about subjects that are still open to debate and fresh information. |
| | And we can do it with mutual respect. |
Is production the new consumption?
| | The argument is that today TPFKATA are not content with being merely consumers: they are producers, re-mixers, contributors, product designers, fact-checkers, etc. But Rosen's remark about the old days when the population listened in isolation from one another and my own observations about the new ways in which people produce in isolation from one another leads me to ask: Are we really talking about a community of producers, or a mass of producers? Put differently: Is production the new consumption? |
| | My argument is that TPFKATA function as a mass of producers, and that this has everything to do with technology (or more specifically, with how technologies are being applied in a technocracy. Much like the old media (newspapers, radio, etc.) was instrumental in giving shape to the imagined community called a Nation (see the work of Anderson, 1991), the new media is crucial in imagining emerging forms of "virtual community." But the kinds of sociality that these "virtual communities" prescribe are actually more aligned with the dynamics of a mass than with a community. |
| | Masses are not sites of rich social interaction. Masses foster an alienated form of individualism, making it difficult for people to come together meaningfully. Because of their large numbers, masses may give the appearance of robust communities, but a closer look reveals that people feel irreparably alone in a mass. |
| | Technocracies engender masses by commodifying the interactions between people. The blogosphere is a perfect example of how interaction has been commodified and reduced to the exchange of attention. In an attention economy, attention is capital, and bloggers with (bigger) audiences can capitalize on that attention — quite literally, if they are using things like Google ads. But a blogger with lots of readers can be said to have rich social interactions with them in the same impoverished sense that a person in MySpace with lots of contacts can be said to have many good friends. In fact, I would suggest that the more attention capital is accrued, the less opportunities for meaningful social interaction are engendered, and the more entrenched one's position in a mass becomes. |
| | TPFKATA are content to believe that blogs are "First Amendment machines." That might be the case in a few instances, but not for the mass. From the perspective of a technocratic hegemony, what could be more perfect than a system where all is talk and no action? TPFKATA, armed with the new technologies, are ascending to power, we are told. But the meaning of this form of power revolves around commodification, which in the end neutralizes and domesticates it. TPFKATA have gone from being massified, pacified consumers to being massified, pacified producers. |
| | Don't get me wrong: I am very appreciative of good citizen journalism, open content projects, etc. But to assume that the mere use of the technologies is enough to liberate the old audience is unwise, and not warranted by the majority of the current examples. What we need to understand and critique (with the hope of eventually avoiding) is how the people formerly known as the audience are still very much the people currently functioning as consumers and masses. |
| | Doc Searles, in reaction to Rosen, writes of a world where "the demand side supplies itself." That's exactly my concern. Technocracy has created a scenario where the subject is willing to commodify herself unquestioningly, to aid in furthering the process of making herself part of the market. That the old institutions have not quite yet realized how to capitalize on this is simply a momentary lapse. They'll catch on soon enough. |
| | First, I don't think of my readers as an "audience", or as a "community". They are readers, and some of them communicate with me. Most of them communicate with others, sometimes through their blogs. There is zero sense of "mass" about any of it, nor a sense of alone-ness there. |
| | Second, if there is a "there", it's the category of publishing we call the blogosphere. Yes, communities do arise within it. Some are stronger than others. At Bloggercon a couple weeks back I was impressed by the very real sense of community among the organizers and participants in BlogHer. And I deal every day with development communities through my work as an editor for Linux Journal. I have even become involved in some, such as the development communities involved in moving Independent Identity forward, These communities are very real, and also very productive, in constructive ways. |
| | That is, unless you don't consider technological progress constructive. In his Technocracy essay, Ulises says, |
| | Technology does not foster community, it destroys it |
| | Masses are not sites of rich social interaction. If anything, it is the norm to feel totally alone in a mass. While technology advertises new means to 'reach out and touch someone' that supposedly make distance meaningless and the world smaller, according to Rivers technology "removes the tangibility between men" (p. 58). He asserts: "Ironically, the sure numbers of the masses are not the only thing that is onerous to an age dominated by technology, for there is also the very inability of the world to bring the individuals in the mass together" (ibid). Technology inserts itself even in our most intimate interactions, becoming our intermediary and deepening our dependence on it. No form of communication is outside its scope. "We are more at a loss in a technological age than in former ages because we have rendered ourselves helpless without it" (p. 120). |
| | Ulises sources a book by T.J. Rivers. About it, he says, |
| | Specifically, Rivers attacks our liberal rationalization of technology, our defense of technology by choosing to focus on the positive even when it is outweighed by the negative, so that the good is used not to provide a counter balance to the bad, but to deny the existence of the bad altogether (which is necessary because a genuine assessment would lead us to the realization that to truly consider the bad in technology would render it unsustainable). It is this critique of liberalism that will make it a difficult read for most folks. |
| | Well yes, I suppose it would be a difficult read for me. Not just because I like technology, and certainly not because I deny the bad things technology can do. I just disagree with Rivers. |
| | Fact is, I don't like all technology, not by a long shot. I grew up, like many who were children in the 1950s, believing that the world would very likely end in a nuclear war. One of my chief ambitions as a child was to see as many of the world's natural wonders as I possibly could, before I was killed or survived only in a ruined world with a collapsed human civilization. (I just realized that this may have something to do with my persisent interest in viewing and photographing the world through the windows of airplanes.) I thought our leaders, and their ideological hostilities, were flat-out insane. I knew industrial technology had bad uses that often outweighed good ones. My generation was born right after World War II. Our fathers, and some of our mothers, fought in that war. Where I grew up, in the New York suburbs, the Holocaust was a very real and recent event. Many kids had parents and grandparents who were survivors of concentration camps. My father was involved in liberating some of those camps. He hated dentistry because the smell of burning bone brought back memories he wouldn't talk about. It is hardly possible to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. without realizing how death itself can be industrialized, how it can create and sustain markets for transporting, imprisoning, poisoning and burning whole populaitons of human beings — while leaving participants dulled to the absolutely immoral purposes of their work. I saw, even as a child, how easily deaths of Others — and even ourselves — can be rationalized. And how technology could assist our rationalizations. |
| | While I live on the Net and make my living with computing, I don't think doing the same is healthy for children. It becomes too easily absorbing and time-consuming. It might be better than television, but only because it's less vegetative. |
| | Yet I know I would not be nearly as informed, or informative, as a human being, without the technologies that have given us the Net. Nor would I be as successful at many things. I was one of those kids who did not succeed in our industrialized education system. Yes, I graduated from college, but I regarded the whole system as a kind of prison from kindergarten onward. I don't think I got anything better than a C in any academic course until I got out of high school. I learned plenty, but I didn't perform well academically. Not by the system's standards. I was an outsider on the inside: a kid who could see school for the industrial system it was — one that processed children through a curricular mill that ran like a conveyor belt through the grades, sorting "good" and "bad" and "average" students into different sized heaps, forming with them a bell curve — regardless of the profound individuation and unique gifts of each child. It was no mistake, I saw, that we called ourselves "products" of our educations. |
| | My point here is that I think it's easy to conflate the evils of many kinds of technologies. Or to dismiss technology altogether as a Bad Thing. I gather that's what Rivers does. One sample: |
| | One assumption made of technology is that it allows us to think about ourselves, presumably because it gives us more leisure time for reflection; but it does not. Technology fails because we become dominated by its very presence, by its devices and techniques, by the complexities of its rationality and the convolutions of its methodology. Technology cannot help but drive a wedge between us and self-awareness, between us and that relational phenomenon which is grounded in inwardness, that is, in the awareness of the individual of himself [sic], of a kind of self-directedness, a reflection of the self to the self. Until we make a conscious effort to remove ourselves from technology's driving forces, it will continue to reduce our prospects of liberation. |
| | Excuse me, but that's just bullshit. Technology can also help us engage with other people, and assist with self-awareness. More importantly, it can help us grow, and help each other grow, as thinking, caring, engaged human beings. I know it has done that for me, and I'm sure it does the same for countless others. I also believe that many technolgies, and the practices they support, undermine big old bad industries, and mass-ness of many kinds. |
| | Still, I do think Ulises is correct to caution us not to read too much, or to become too idealistic, too soon, about TPFKATA. And I think he's right to try slowing the runaway optimism that often rages through the blogophere. I'm as guilty as any of that. |
| | So I look forward reading more on his blog. |
There are responses to this message:
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
