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How will the App Store’s “new newsstand” be censored? We’ll know it when we see it

September 9, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

For all of you out there in media-land who still think that the iPad represents salvation for old business models and who welcome the App Store as a new platform for distributing content, I recommend a reading of Apple’s new App Store Review Guidelines as helpfully summarized by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. (It seems you have to be a registered Apple developer before you can actually read the guidelines in full, but they’re available at Gizmodo.)

Discussion of these guidelines in the tech press initially framed the move as a “relaxation” of Apple’s policies, because the company will now allow developers to use third-party frameworks and toolkits. But view the guidelines from the perspective of content publishing and “relaxation” is not the word that will spring to mind.

This item stands out:

We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.

(Gruber speculates that the my-way-or-the-highway tone of this and other passages suggests direct authorship by Steve Jobs here, and that sounds plausible, but who knows?)

Now, the App Store guidelines are designed by software developers for other software developers. The thinking is, this is our device, we want to protect our users, this ain’t no free-for-all, we’re going to police the hell out of this environment. And Apple plainly has a right to do that. It’s not the only approach to structuring a software ecosystem, but it’s certainly a legitimate one.

Trouble is, the App Store is also being framed as the New Newsstand. The idea of Apple as the keeper of such a newsstand never sat right with me: I just don’t like the idea of my information diet being regulated by any company, let alone a company as tightly wound as Apple. Now Apple has made my unease explicit. In these high-handed words, the company is saying: We will ban whoever we want. And we won’t tell you what the exact standards are. You can guess; then we’ll decide.

The immediate retort here from Apple supporters — hey, I’m one, I love my Mac and my i-devices! — will be that I’m misunderstanding the purpose of the rules, they’re meant to bar wayward code, not wayward ideas.

But how, exactly, can anyone draw a line between code and ideas today? Who says where a software tool ends and a piece of “content” begins? We’re supposed to “know” this line “when we see it,” but I don’t see it at all.

Here are some quotes from the guidelines that Engadget highlighted:

“We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.”
“If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.”
“This is a living document, and new apps presenting new questions may result in new rules at any time. Perhaps your app will trigger this.”
“If it sounds like we’re control freaks, well, maybe it’s because we’re so committed to our users and making sure they have a quality experience with our products.”

Now read these questions from the perspective of a writer or journalist or publisher, not a software developer, and tell me they don’t give you the willies.

It’s always seemed to me that Apple seriously underestimates how impossible it will be to sit as censor and nanny over a thriving content marketplace, if that is what the App Store is going to become. Look at the trouble it had with political cartoonist Mark Fiore: he had to win a Pulitzer before Apple would let him use its platform to practice his art, which happened to involve poking fun at public figures, something the App Store didn’t like. Such controversies will only multiply if the App Store becomes more popular as a content mart.

Now Apple is saying, explicitly, that it intends to draw lines, and those lines won’t be drawn beforehand — but hey, don’t worry, because we’ll just know it when we cross them!

Apple loves to maintain tight control of things. That’s been a hugely successful approach for its hardware business. It’s even a defensible position applied to software. But it’s a lousy model for a newsstand.

UPDATE: Nieman Lab’s Josh Benton reviews the guidelines, finds the special loophole Apple created post-Fiore for “professional political satirists and humorists,” and points out how ridiculous it is:

So a professional columnist or cartoonist can say nasty things about Obama, but Joe Citizen can’t? Defining who is a “professional” when it comes to opinion-sharing is sketchy enough, but when it includes political speech and the defining is being done by overworked employees of a technology company, it’s odious.

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Carr’s “The Shallows”: An Internet victim in search of lost depth

September 8, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 4 Comments

One day, immersing myself in my reading was simple as breathing. The next, it wasn’t. Once I had happily let books consume my days, with my head propped up against my pillow in bed or my body sprawled on the floor with the volume open in front of me. Now I felt restless after just a few pages, and my mind and body both refused to stay in one place. Instead of just reading, I would pause and ask, “Why am I reading this and not that? How will I ever read everything I want to or need to?”

I was 18. It would be years before I’d hear of the Internet.

Nicholas Carr had, it seems, a similar experience, quite a bit more recently. He describes it at the start of his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains:

I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

When I experienced this loss of focus, I simply blamed my new condition on my newly acquired adulthood. Carr, apparently, was lucky enough to retain his deep-reading endurance undisturbed from childhood well into his grownup years. By the time it began to slip away from him, we were all deep into the Web era. Carr decided that, whatever was going on, the Web was to blame. It wasn’t something that simply happened; it was something that the Internet was “doing to” his brain.

The Shallows has been received as a timely investigation of the danger that information overload, multitasking and the Web all pose to our culture and our individual psyches. There are serious and legitimate issues in this realm that we ignore at our peril. (Linda Stone is one important thinker in this area whose work I recommend.)

So I cannot fault Carr for asking what the Internet is doing to us. But that is only half of the picture. He fails to balance that question with its vital complement: What are we doing to, and with, the Internet? This imbalance leads him both to wildly overstate the power of the Internet to alter us, and to confuse traits that are inherent to the medium with those that are incidental.

Carr writes as a technological determinist. In asking what the Internet is “doing to” us he casts us as victims, not actors, and once that casting is in place, there’s only one way the drama can unfold. The necessary corrective to this perspective can be found in the opening chapter of Claude Fischer’s great history of the telephone, America Calling. Fischer admonishes us not to talk about technology’s “impacts” and “effects,” because such language “implies that human actions are impelled by external forces when they are really the outcomes of actors making purposeful choices under constraints.” (Emphasis mine.)
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Don’t save your links for the end — it’s more distracting!

September 7, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 5 Comments

One of the humble yet essential uses of the link is to help us avoid having to repeat what others have already said. I make no great claim to novelty for my “Defense of Links” series; much of what I said, others had already expressed earlier this year when Carr first floated his “delinkification” meme. In particular, Jason Fry’s excellent post at Nieman Lab surveyed the ground well.

Fry talked about the role of links in three areas: credibility, readability and connectivity. “Readability” is plainly the area where Carr had the most provocative and defensible case against links. My motivation from the start was to examine that case closely and evaluate the studies it was based on — to follow the links, as it were.

I found that the studies Carr relied on really didn’t support his case. Just as interesting to me was the fact that a lengthy and in-depth discussion of Carr’s argument had unfolded on the Web without anyone actually looking up the research. Would that have happened had Carr provided links to these studies? (That’s possible on a blog but not, of course, in print. Still, one can publish endnotes online and activate the links, as I have for both of my books. Carr’s book site is quite the link desert, which I guess should not surprise.)

Fry asked a question that several respondents to my series echoed: ” Is opening links in new tabs really so different from links at the end of the piece?” For me, it is: ironically, the end-linking style is, I think, far more distracting than simple inline linking.

If you’re reading along and feel the desire to dig deeper on some point and the link is right there, you can just open the link in a new tab. If it’s not, you don’t know whether the author has provided a link or not. You have an unhappy choice. You can file the question away in your brain to make sure you remember to check once you reach the end of the article (now there’s a cognitive load). Or you can stop reading and scroll down to the bottom of the story to look for the link, which involves reviewing the whole list, figuring out whether the link you seek is actually there, clicking on it if it is, and then scrolling back to the top to find where you were. All of which thoroughly disrupts the deep reading Carr aims to protect far more thoroughly than a handful of highlighted link-words.

For instance, when I read Carr’s “Delinkification” post and saw his references to the “cognitive penalty” of links, I wanted to know where the studies were that supported this claim. There are no links inline, but I knew the whole post was about the experiment of putting links at the end, so I went on a wild goose chase to the bottom of the post hoping to find the studies linked there. (They’re not.) How can this possibly serve the reader’s concentration?

Those with long memories will recall that the original incarnation of Slate, driven by Michael Kinsley’s naivete about the Web, actually employed links-at-the-end as a policy. The magazine gave it up some time later. Turns out Carr’s “experiment” already had some in-the-field results. (You can see what this looks like on this Internet Archive capture of a Jacob Weisberg piece from 1999.)

I got into some of this argument in the comments at Scott Esposito’s thoughtful response to my series. Mathew Ingram at GigaOm provided a nice summary of my lengthier musings. I would also recommend Brian Frank’s rich philosophical take.

Tomorrow, wider thoughts on The Shallows, which of course addresses far more than links!

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Cheap art

September 3, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 5 Comments

In the 1980s I worked as a theater critic. I spent a lot of time in expensive Broadway theaters and ambitious nonprofit repertory companies. But some of my most memorable experiences were at street theater events by groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater. I first saw them in Boston at a time when the manifesto below was relatively new. It’s now a quarter century old but it hasn’t lost any of its truth.

For most of my writing life I’ve had a copy of this poster on my wall near where I work. When we rebuilt my basement office I lost track of it, but recently found it and rehung it. Here it is for you. (I got this image here.)

Happy long weekend, everyone. Make some cheap art!

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In Defense of Links, part three: In links we trust

September 2, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 25 Comments

This is the third post in a three-part series. The first part was Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification. The second part was Money changes everything.

Nick Carr, like the rest of the “Web rots our brains” contingent, views links as primarily subtractive and destructive. Links direct us away from where we are to somewhere else on the Web. They impede our concentration, degrade our comprehension, and erode our attention spans.

It’s important, first, to understand that every single one of these criticisms of links has been raised against every single new media form for the past 2500 years. (Rather than rehash this hoary tale, I’ll point you to Vaughan Bell’s excellent summary in Slate. For a full and fascinating account of the earliest episode in this saga — Socrates’ denunciation of the written word — I recommend the elaboration of it in Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid.)

Throughout history, the info-panic critique has been one size fits all. The media being criticized may change, but the indictments are remarkably similar. That tells us we’re in the presence of some ancestral predilection or prejudice. We involuntarily defend the media forms we grew up with as bastions of civilization, and denounce newcomers as barbaric threats to our children and our way of life.

That’s a lot to hang on the humble link, which — in today’s Flash-addled, widget-laden, real-time-streaming environment — seems more like an anchor of stability than a force for subversion. But even if we grant Carr his premise that links slow reading and hamper understanding (which I don’t believe his evidence proves at all), I’ll still take the linked version of an article over the unlinked.

I do so because I see links as primarily additive and creative. Even if it took me a little longer to read the text-with-links, even if I had to work a bit harder to get through it, I’d come out the other side with more meat and more juice.

Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just textual tunnel-hops or narrative chutes-and-ladders. Links, properly used, don’t just pile one “And now this!” upon another. They tell us, “This relates to this, which relates to that.”

Links announce our presence. They show a writer’s work. They are badges of honesty, inviting readers to check that work. They demonstrate fairness. They can be simple gestures of communication; they can be complex signifiers of meaning. They make connections between things. They add coherence. They build context.

If I can get all that in return, why would I begrudge the link-wielding writer a few more seconds of my time, a little more of my mental effort?
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Miscellany: SAI, Crooked Timber, MediaBugs and “Inception”

September 1, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

Part Three of “In Defense of Links” coming later this week! Some little stuff in between:

  • I have begun an experiment in crossposting some of my stuff over at Silicon Alley Insider/Business Insider. Same writing, grabbier headlines! As it is, my posts appear here, and then also at Open Salon (where Salon sometimes picks them up). And I pipe them into Facebook for my friends who hang out there. The folks at SAI have picked up some of my pieces before, and I’m curious about how my point of view goes over with this somewhat different crowd.
  • Henry Farrell was kind enough to post a bit about In Defense of Links over at the Crooked Timber blog, and the discussion in comments there is just humblingly good — as well as entertaining. Would every single person who has ever issued a blanket putdown of the worthlessness of blog comments please pay this estimable community of online scholars a visit, and then pipe down? Thank you.
  • Just in time for the release of his new novel, Zero History, William Gibson has a great op-ed in the Times:

    Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory.

    In the ’90s I had the pleasure of interviewing Gibson a couple of times — here’s the 1994 edition, in which we discussed why the technology in his early novels never breaks down, and here’s part of the 1996 one, where he talks about building his first website and predicts the rise of people who “presurf” the Web for you.

    I recently caught up with Inception, and was amazed at how shot-through it is with Gibsonisms. Inception is to Neuromancer as The Matrix was to Philip K. Dick’s worlds: an adapation in everything but formal reality.

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In Defense of Links, Part Two: Money changes everything

August 31, 2010 by Scott Rosenberg 13 Comments

This is the second post in a three-part series. The first part was Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification. The third part is In links we trust.

The Web is deep in many directions, yet it is also, undeniably, full of distractions. These distractions do not lie at the root of the Web’s nature. They’re out on its branches, where we find desperate businesses perched, struggling to eke out one more click of your mouse, one more view of their page.

Yesterday I distinguished the “informational linking” most of us use on today’s Web from the “artistic linking” of literary hypertext avant-gardists. The latter, it turns out, is what researchers were examining when they produced the studies that Nick Carr dragooned into service in his campaign to prove that the Web is dulling our brains.

Today I want to talk about another kind of linking: call it “corporate linking.” (Individuals and little-guy companies do it, too, but not on the same scale.) These are links placed on pages because they provide some tangible business value to the linker: they cookie a user for an affiliate program, or boost a target page’s Google rank, or aim to increase a site’s “stickiness” by getting the reader to click through to another page.

I think Nick Carr is wrong in arguing that linked text is in itself harder to read than unlinked text. But when he maintains that reading on the Web is too often an assault of blinking distractions, well, that’s hard to deny. The evidence is all around us. The question is, why? How did the Web, a tool to forge connections and deepen understanding, become, in the eyes of so many intelligent people, an attention-mangling machine?

Practices like splitting articles into multiple pages or delivering lists via pageview-mongering slideshows have been with us since the early Web. I figured they’d die out quickly, but they’ve shown great resilience — despite being crude, annoying, ineffective, hostile to users, and harmful to the long-term interests of their practitioners. There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of media executives who misunderstand how the Web works and think that they can somehow beat it into submission. Their tactics have produced an onslaught of distractions that are neither native to the Web’s technology nor inevitable byproducts of its design. The blinking, buzzing parade is, rather, a side-effect of business failure, a desperation move on the part of flailing commercial publishers.

For instance, Monday morning I was reading Howard Kurtz’s paean to the survival of Time magazine when the Washington Post decided that I might not be sufficiently engaged with its writer’s words. A black prompt box helpfully hovered in from the right page margin with a come-hither look and a “related story” link. How mean to Howie, I thought. (Over at the New York Times, at least they save these little fly-in suggestion boxes till you’ve reached the end of a story.)

If you’re on a web page that’s weighted down with cross-promotional hand-waving, revenue-squeezing ad overload and interstitial interruptions, odds are you’re on a newspaper or magazine site. For an egregiously awful example of how business linking can ruin the experience of reading on the Web, take a look at the current version of Time.com.
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