Info, Info Everywhere, but No One Stops to Think

For yesterday's online edition of the New York Times, Timothy Egan wrote a blistering condemnation of those who believe and propagate blatant lies about President Obama:

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. . . . But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

On Becoming a Playful Blogger

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger asks, "How have you played on your blog?" Since I haven't been blogging all that much until recently, I'd have to respond, "I haven't." Though the meat of his video is thin, the sentiment is worthwhile and makes me reconsider why I started doing this in the first place.

He mentions how rants don't work for him in his space, but they do work for me. They are playful. Rants are a way to get worked up over ideas in embryo, to huff and puff without actually having to dodge falling bricks.

I don't have his playful Aussie accent or jaunty geekiness, so you won't find me posting videos of my talking head. But I have learned and developed as a result of this blog, so I'd like to let it live just a little longer. You can expect a few more rants.

Long Live the App-vertising

Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff's Wired feature "The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet" has created some buzz, so I finally read it. The piece's blurb sums it up the themes nicely:

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.

Are they right? Who knows? Time will tell. I have my own guess, but it matters about as much as theirs at this point until someone's prognostication is proven correct.

However, I can't help but think there were some forces of "inevitable capitalism" behind the timing of this piece, given that the two most prominent ads on the article's Web page were for Samsung's new touch-interface smart phone and Wired's tricked-out iPad app.

Friends Don't Let Friends Hate and Facebook

Step 1: Read this piece about a female Israeli soldier who mugged in front of some bound Arabs and posted the photo on Facebook.

Step 2: Imagine an Arab mugging in front of some bound Israelis or Americans.

Step 3: Imagine a man mugging in front of some bound women.

Step 4: Now imagine yourself as a decent human being with morals and feelings and a sense of justice who wouldn't do any of the things, real or imagined, depicted in Steps 1-3.

Children Are an Outmoded Technology

This is one of the takeaways from a recent New York magazine article by Jennifer Senior, who tries to explain "Why Parents Hate Parenting." I have to agree:

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”)

Artificial Intelligence Is Still Artificial

A half a lifetime ago, I chided Jaron Lanier for a ridiculous proposal he made in the New York Times' Op-Ed section. I stand by what my younger, wiser self had to say on the matter.

However, Lanier is bang on correct in his latest Op-Ed piece, in which he takes technologists to task for constructing a future of consumer machine-thought that even they wouldn't trust.

As Lanier rightly points out, the risk doesn't reside in the danger that we'll become flabby, unthoughtful consumers. It's in our potential devaluation of the very qualities that make us human:

What bothers me most about this trend, however, is that by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.

Online Content Is Not Worth Very Much

"The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell," Wired magazine's recent profile of online content machine Demand Media, dovetails nicely with my last post.

Bob Garfield analyzes online ad valuation from an inventory supply-side economics perspective. Demand pursues their business model from a content supply-side perspective. Both arrive at the same inevitable conclusion: cheap, fast, good enough, and at volume is the only way to earn money from the Internet—and perhaps all digital communication networks.

Demand Media crunches multiple streams of search data through several algorithms that eventually churn out search engine optimized titles that they predict will attract hits—a combination of high traffic but little competition. The result is thousands of mostly how-to articles, listed content, and informational videos that aren't high on style or even valuable content, but fill a voids that their data says the public is increasingly searching for.

Their process is getting so refined that they are ramping up to produce 1 million pieces of content per month, which the article's author Daniel Roth notes is "the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year." Roth later writes:

To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.

The result is a factory stamping out moneymaking content.

For the privilege of stamping out the actual content, writers, editors, videographers, and other creatives are paid on a scale to rival minimum wage. The videographer Roth features to begin his article, for example, gets paid $200 total for 10 videos he shoots in one day.

The moral here is that content is, once again, not king. It's barely even a serf. And we see this medium and all it transmits for what it is: cheap and fast. But is it really good enough?

The Advertising Glut

Last Thursday, I listened to a fascinating episode of the NPR program On Point with Tom Ashbrook titled "What's Next for Advertising?" You can listen to it yourself here.

During the program, Bob Garfield made a truly insightful point that I've yet to hear anywhere else. He thinks that online advertising is unsustainable. The Web is a limitless platform, offering limitless advertising space. However, There is not limitless advertising demand or inventory. There will always be a glut of advertising space or supply, which according to simple economics means prices will always be driven downward.

Therefore, the advertising business model as it currently exists cannot support the cost of creation of even small amounts of premium content, because the Web's open content creation and distribution ecology is also a leveler of content quality—the cream will always rise to the top, but it is all still there to see and fulfill niche tastes and tendencies.

This is bad news for Internet advertisers of all stripes—both the content creators and those who'd try to sell ads against their content. The only way, in this scenario, to make money is through monopoly. Which would explain Google's profits and push to grow their market share.

Please Justify Your Existence, Hollywood

Why do we need cameras and producers and CGI, when one person can set a story to music and make people cry using nothing but sand?



Addendum: To preempt the inevitable comment: yes, I do recognize the irony in using a performance for a highly produced television franchise that I found on the Web's largest video repository as evidence that we don't need technology to be entertained.

World Enough and Time

My friend Albert's recent blog post about Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" has me ruminating on that poem a lot lately. Albert focuses his explication on the enigmatically beautiful phrase "vegetable love." Yet it's that poem's first line, "Had we but world enough, and time," that still gets me.

Has there ever been a more concise, universal statement of longing?

Marvell specifically addresses a longing erotic in nature, but his hypothetical construction could be a prelude to any human passion. It is why we chase youth and money, technology and entertainment, fame and status—all things that represent control over some inexorable force.

Youth stalls time's yardstick, age. Fame enables our names to live, thus cheating time's ultimate arbiter, death. Money, status, and entertainment offer us "world enough," whether that means consumption or leisure. And, of course, technology buys us the illusion of both time and world. After all, technology saves us time and allows us to be virtually in multiple places at once.

Of course, such pursuits ultimately prove fruitless. We know this objectively, yet we pursue anyway. But we can't be blamed for this drive. It's something we struggle with today. It's something Marvell recognized 400 years ago.

However, I can't help think that the world would be somehow better if we could just recognize that world enough might be the ground we can cover with our own legs. And time enough might be living each moment in a manner meaningful to us yet mindful of others. And both could be achieved in those instants when we give over some gift of ourselves, to either a lover or a stranger, in whatever capacity we have to give, with no expectation of reciprocation yet complete surprise and delight when that gift is returned.

The World Actually IS Flat

The Internet has an end point. Who knew?

TV Fills the Void

I've always wondered why the television show Friends was so popular. It had an improbable concept (young people with no visible means of support living in gorgeous New York City apartments), formulaic sitcom banter, and some consistently annoying characters and story lines. Yet people, myself included, watched it with a devoutness that would be the envy of any church. The show was, in fact, an anchor for years of Must See TV.

Could Friends' popularity be due simply to its title? Perhaps, if one stretches the argument Jonah Lehrer reports about in his latest post on The Frontal Cortex: "the benefits of watching television when lonely . . . provide the same sort of emotional relief as spending time with real people."

Media ecologists have been observing these effects of television for decades. Marshall McLuhan identified television as the most significant electric media of his day, because it enabled the viewer to transport beyond time and space and engaged multiple senses, thus stimulating our evolutionary proclivities toward a fragmented, tribal society. Neil Postman then took up the yolk, exploring the darker implications of this feature of electric media.

But even television itself is limited, primarily by schedule, distribution, and level of interactivity. We still must watch our shows either according to a network's schedule or must wait for the DVD release, and we can't enter the narrative played out before us.

Which leads me to wonder where the Internet, which breaks through those barriers by being always already available and completely interactive, will take us. Lonelygirl15 aside, how much less lonely will we be online, even if it forces our attention away from our physical environment and into our own isolated head-space focused on a device?

Sex or Conan O'Brien?

India's Health and Family Welfare Minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, has a solution for exploding birth rates: give poor villagers electricity so they can watch late-night TV and stop fucking.

According to Rhys Blakely of the London Times, the minister said,

Don’t think that I am saying this in a lighter vein. I am serious. TV will have a great impact. It’s a great medium to tackle the problem... 80 per cent of population growth can be reduced through TV.

Why stop at TVs? Give them laptops and smartphones, and they'll never even want to touch another human.

Sustainable Work, Sustainable Life

I’ve been thinking a lot about work lately, not out of dissatisfaction or a sense of crisis. Rather, I’ve been pondering a question I’ve long put off: where do I see myself in five or ten years? Having avoided this question for so long has led me down some interesting paths, but it also means that I’ve had more jobs in the last twelve years than my father had his entire life, which is not something I think is sustainable as I get older.

I’ve been approaching this question through the lens of media ecology, which I think of less as a social science and more of as a mode of thought, and I’ve shocked myself with some of the conclusions I’ve reached. I work in the Internet industry, so I’ve had a front-seat view of the changing workplace. I love my job, but the following seven dictums suggest it’s not the right path for me.

Work has its place and should be kept in its place.
Work is a part of life, not life itself. It can be meaningful and enjoyable and offer fulfillment. However, it is still only an aspect of what makes a person whole. Work should not require my attention beyond work hours, at home, on vacation, or during the weekend. Sure, there are some people who successfully and healthfully integrate their work and personal lives thoroughly. They are rare and lucky and we should admire them. But we should not emulate them. Those who do—which is the vast majority of us who put in too many hours at a job that wouldn’t be our first choice of life’s pursuit, if given the absolute freedom to choose—shouldn’t be labeled “passionate.” We should be called by our true names: “obsessive,” “scared,” or “misguided.”

Work with people who are smarter or more skilled than you.
This will challenge you hourly, ensure you learn something daily, and lead to a deeper and more sustainable fulfillment.

Work should be described accurately as “craft.”
Not all jobs are equal here. Some, perfectly good and noble pursuits, do not qualify. I would never describe even the best retail salesperson as a “craftsman.”

Work should not involve multi-tasking.
I want to focus on one task, do it the best I can, complete it, and move on to the next task (see #3: craft). The compulsory attention deficit disorder commonly enforced in most workplaces is neither healthy nor fulfilling. I find more satisfaction in rolling one ball down a straight and narrow lane to knock down ten pins than I do in keeping those same ten pins juggled in the air. This, I know, is unavoidably changing, as more people who grew up natively in a digitally mediated world enter the workplace. But there is still value in those of us who think more linearly and methodically.

Work should involve in-person interaction or complete solitude.
I understand we live in a global, digital society. I get it. But work should limit mediated communication. This means no more phones, email, IM, teleconferencing, videoconferencing, or far-flung teams. They are an excuse to schedule meetings at all hours to accommodate all parties in all parts of the world, yet avoid the tasks at hand (see #4: attention deficit disorder). If I can’t conduct work interactions face-to-face, where I can build a relationship based on handshakes and eye contact and the subtle modulations in vocal tone and facial expressions, then just leave me alone to do my work as I see fit.

Work should not move at the speed of electricity.
Again, I know the revolution has come, but for me a work environment that is “always” and “instant” is neither sustainable nor fulfilling. I prefer to prepare rather than anticipate, to act rather than react, to consider and craft rather than iterate. A thing worth doing is a thing worth doing once and well.

Work should make others’ lives better. Period.
This is a direct call-out to Web and tech companies, who are changing our language in many of the same ways George Carlin once skewered the military and government for doing. For example, please stop talking about “evangelizing” and “designing meaningful interactions” in relation to your products, when what it is you’re really trying to do is capture a large portion of the public’s attention and sell them something. The only time Internet-speak is being truly honest is when it refers to their customers as “users,” which is also the term for drug addicts.

I’m not sure what all of this means. I’m not sure if what I seek exists. I’m not sure if I’d even know it if I found it. I’d love your take on it.

Reuters Pwns the Associated Press

Want an easy and legal way to post Reuters content in its entirety on your site with 11 clicks of your mouse—and with the choice of paying for it or allowing them to post their ads to your site with their content? You got it. I'm glad someone in journalism is paying attention.

Smartphones and Skinner Boxes

Based on the rising sales of smartphones in a down economy, it would appear as though a critical mass of Americans are now psychologically and socially prepared to immerse into the age of persistent connectivity.

According to David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, who was interviewed by Steve Lohr for an article in last Tuesday's New York Times,

The social norm is that you should respond within a couple of hours, if not immediately. If you don’t, it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don’t like the person who sent the e-mail.

Meyer goes on to liken the effect of the smartphone to that of a Skinner box.

Three's no doubt that information is a form of food to humans. We're wired to process large amounts of stimuli simultaneously from our five senses, find patterns in it, and form a coherent narrative from the patterns we perceive. By stimulating three of those senses—the eye, the ear, the touch—smartphones offer some tasty morsels. It's up to us what degree we gorge ourselves on them.

The Wheel Keeps Turning

As this article rightly notes:

Once upon a time (at the zenith of 20th century analog media), maintaining an on-site, in-house library crammed full of archived periodicals and rows and rows of hefty, solemn reference books, was all the rage at large media organizations.

However, as the article goes on to state, the now-old-and-dying-media are closing down their internal libraries as a cost-saving measure.

Just as television and radio news outlets built a news infrastructure around the old media, print, Internet companies are now building a content infrastructure around what they are overtaking: media refugees. How long before this infrastructure becomes outmoded and gets dismantled?

Huxley vs Orwell, West vs East

In his fascinating comic Amusing Ourselves to Death, Stuart McMillen captures the seemingly competing predictive fears of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

McMillen's choice of title, taken from a book by Neil Postman, suggests he too favors Huxley's vision of a future in which people willingly allow their critical ability to rot in the face of comfort and convenience. From an American perspective, that conclusion seems reasonable enough. Our attention is constantly vied for by Twitter and Facebook and Google and HBO—and they all hold out the promise in some way to make our lives better. Heck even Disney and Pixar ironically agree with Huxley.

But America and the American perspective, it increasingly appears, are no longer the center of the universe. Orwell's vision of a future in which our freedom is controlled by Big Brother is still alive and well—and, significantly, the Orwellian Nightmare accommodates the same technologies that seem to prove the prescience of the Huxleyan Warning.

Rock Hard

Does this site make geology or the 1970s seem cooler? At least it's not another Tumblr walk of shame.

I Hate [Heart] Google

They already own the search market, host waaaay too much of our data on their networks, and track our online behavior in ways too creepy to think about. But, damn it, they keep making products that I want to play with.