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Selfies: “Just a thing you use to express yourself”

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The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham, in an interview by Om Malik:

I don’t buy that the internet has made us more narcissistic. It comes back to the division between how we present ourselves online and what we’re doing offline. I know I’m in a minority, and I probably will get laughed at for saying these things, but I see selfies as a version of how you present yourself online. It’s become the norm for better or for worse. And it’s easy to look at it in aggregate and think, “Uh, everyone who’s doing this is obsessed with themselves” rather than thinking about it in terms of something like an emoji, which is just a thing you use to express yourself and how you’re presenting yourself online. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing

“The ability to feel anchored in a body”

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“The surprising ways the body works with the brain to shape our sense of self,” by Anil Ananthaswamy in Quartz (3/3/16):

German philosopher Thomas Metzinger has argued that the feeling of being embodied is a pre-reflective, pre-linguistic form of selfhood — a sense that our ancestors must have had long before humans gained the capacity to use the personal pronoun in phrases like “I think.” There is no narrative in this kind of bodily self; just the ability to feel anchored in a body and distinguish between the self and the non-self.

Eventually, evolution gave us memory, cognition, culture and the ability to construct narratives. All of this has allowed us to form a psychological self that works in conjunction with our bodily one.

“The internet doesn’t have the patience for unhappiness”

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“When You Can’t Be the Person The Internet Wants You to Be,” Felicia Sullivan in her Love.Life.Eat blog (2/19/16):

Online, you can’t be a trainwreck but you can’t project perfection either — lest you be deemed inauthentic, a “fake”. You can’t be too sad or too happy. You can reveal a little about your personal life but not too much, and know that people like the comeback story rather than watching you wade helplessly through the dark. They want your dark in past tense because no one wants to deal with your present or future tense sadness. They want that storyline to be played out behind the scenes, but they’ll stick around for the post-mortem. Over the past few months, a few friends have reached out to me privately to acknowledge that their sadness has also been shamed into silence — that the Internet doesn’t have the patience for unhappiness.

“A long, unbroken string of continuous existence”

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“What Makes You You?”, by Tim Urban (Wait But Why? Dec. 2014):

A few years ago, my late grandfather, in his 90s and suffering from dementia, pointed at a picture on the wall of himself as a six-year-old. “That’s me!” he explained.

He was right. But come on. It seems ridiculous that the six-year-old in the picture and the extremely old man standing next to me could be the same person. Those two people had nothing in common. Physically, they were vastly different—almost every cell in the six-year-old’s body died decades ago. As far as their personalities—we can agree that they wouldn’t have been friends. And they shared almost no common brain data at all. Any 90-year-old man on the street is much more similar to my grandfather than that six-year-old.

But remember — maybe it’s not about similarity, but about continuity. If similarity were enough to define you, Boston you and London you, who are identical, would be the same person. The thing that my grandfather shared with the six-year-old in the picture is something he shared with no one else on Earth — they were connected to each other by a long, unbroken string of continuous existence. As an old man, he may not know anything about that six-year-old boy, but he knows something about himself as an 89-year-old, and that 89-year-old might know a bunch about himself as an 85-year-old. As a 50-year-old, he knew a ton about him as a 43-year-old, and when he was seven, he was a pro on himself as a 6-year-old. It’s a long chain of overlapping memories, personality traits, and physical characteristics.

“That all-important commitment to feel something”

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reaction

“Like This So I Know I’m Real,” Bethlehem Shoals in Hazlitt (2/24/16):

Our sense of self-worth — on the Internet and perhaps beyond, insofar as the structure of the web is increasingly the structure of our daily lives — comes not from whether or not our actions are judged in a positive light but by whether they are noticed and judged at all. The idea of spectacle or stunt is nothing new, but they’ve always been regarded as a stretch, a desperate ploy to get oneself seen no matter the impetus or eventual consequences. The need to be “liked,” as opposed to admired or well-regarded, is that same philosophy popularized, defanged, and accepted as a necessary part of mass culture. It’s akin to “any publicity is good publicity.”

We might not care to admit it, but such cynicism has become the price of admission. There’s no value judgment, no good or bad, only a value-neutral proposition that precedes any actual opinion. The fallacy of Facebook’s new options is exposed in the interface itself: All still fall under the rubric of “like,” as if emotional tenor is secondary to the decision to react in the first place. Regardless of how we feel, we must first make that all-important commitment to feel something…

But the basic, harsh truth of the Internet is that seeing and being seen remain the only ways to feel like you’re participating in the first place. We don’t exist because we will ourselves into being — we exist because others deign to notice. All we can do is try our best to strike a balance between saying what needs to be said and caring too much about what others will “like” — which is to say, whether they “like” (and like) us at all.

“Find a way to make that thing waterproof”

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Humans do the darndest things. From “Robots deliver fun with hotel room service orders, and they don’t expect a tip,” by Hugo Martin (Los Angeles Times, 2/7/16):

Although the robot’s factory name is Relay, each hotel has given its machine a unique moniker. At the Residence Inn, they call it Wally. Other hotels have dubbed it Dash and Botlr.

The robot, shaped like a giant flower vase, contains an enclosed compartment where hotel staff can put drinks, snacks or other items that guests order from the front desk. Toothpaste makes the trip most often.

There are drawbacks to a delivery robot. After Wally brought fresh towels to a room a few weeks ago, the guest dumped his used, wet towels into the robot’s compartment. Wally promptly short-circuited.

“That was a sad day,” Beedon said. “It was like having an injured employee.”

After the robot was repaired, the general manager made a suggestion to [the manufacturer] Savioke: “They have to find a way to make that thing waterproof.”

Savioke is working on a fix, Lau said.

“The idea that someone would put wet towels in it never crossed our minds,” she said.

“Uber offers an intimate space for two people to chitchat”

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Bfishadow | Flickr

Bfishadow | Flickr

Uber appears to be disrupting China, too, but in an entirely different way compared to its impact in the U.S. From “For China’s upper middle class, driving for Uber is a cure for loneliness,” by Zheping Huang (Quartz, 2/17/16):

A happily married Beijing man with a Shanghai wife, Fu splits his time equally between the two cities for his business and family. In his free time, he drives for Uber — not for extra income, he said, but to meet people.

“Under no other circumstance can I find a stranger to talk with me for like 10 to 20 minutes,” he said. His Uber record so far is 12 hours in a row of driving, because he didn’t want to go home and be alone while his wife was working. When he got out of his car, he said, he’d been driving so long that “my legs were trembling.”…

He is said to drive his car to meet new people and even provide them information if there is any new offer which they could use to get a cheaper fair. Unlike in the US, where one click on ondemandly.com/uber-promo-code-existing-users-guide/ can get a person major discounts on many of their rides, Uber still has to launch these all year long promotional codes in China.

Uber has carved out a special place in China and has created many existing user promos to expand their presence. To many upper-class Chinese drivers like Fu, Uber acts more like a social platform than a ride-sharing app, connecting them to new friends.

Uber is filling an empty niche created in an upwardly-mobile generation that finds itself far from extended families, or with lots of time on their hands after retirement. Many of them have no siblings and few cousins because of China’s one-child policy, so few relatives their own age. And they sometimes find making new friends difficult — to many Chinese who are naturally quiet and restrained, striking up a conversation with a stranger at a club or a bar is not a comfortable habit. Nor is it common for upwardly mobile workers to take on shifts as a bartender or waiter in order to meet new friends, because those jobs are deemed inferior.

But there’s no such stereotype for drivers — especially when you own the car yourself. Uber offers an intimate space for two people to chitchat for a few minutes without having to worry how to end the conversation nicely, or whether you have to meet again, unless you really want to.

“We know they want to write it”

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A decade ago, when the Huffington Post began its rise to success and search-engine-optimization nirvana — and before it built its own newsroom, preferring to rely on the contributions of a cadre of volunteer bloggers — it was frequently the target of journalistic ire. “Arianna is building her business on the backs of unpaid writers,” went the wail. Others pointed out: Um, if people want to write for free, and other people want to read what they write, what are you going to do?

But who knew that one day the editor of a British edition of the now Verizon-owned Huffington Post would make this argument (as captured by the New Statesman’s “Media Mole” columnist):

“I love this question,” said Stephen Hull, the editor-in-chief of Huffington Post UK, when Steve Hewlett asked him on Radio 4’s Media Show yesterday why he doesn’t pay his writers.

And this is the answer Hull apparently loves to give:

“If I was paying someone to write something because I want it to get advertising, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. When somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real, we know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.”

Cue the Johnsonian chorus of “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

“I did not feel the otherness”

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“Beastie Boys and Girls: The New Anthropomorphism,” By Robin Wright (The New Yorker, Feb. 10 2016):

In “Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide,” the Oxford don Charles Foster records his attempts to live as animals do — specifically, as a badger, an otter, a fox, a red deer, and a swift. The book, published in Britain last week, has caught on. The Financial Times calls it both “brilliant” and “bonkers” — “a strange kind of masterpiece: the song of a satyr, perhaps, or nature writing as extreme sport.” To be a badger, Foster took along his eight-year-old son, Tom, to better duplicate the creatures’ highly social lifestyle. The pair slept in a dirt hole and crawled on the forest floor and ate raw earthworms….

In “Being a Beast,” Foster, after recounting his badger experiment with his son, ultimately acknowledges that they failed to cross over to the world of the creatures. “No matter how much we convinced ourselves that we were part of their world, we remained as far away as ever,” he writes. ”I did not feel the ‘otherness,’ that sense of leaving human experience behind to which I aspired.” In the end, he had to concede his own nature as a human: “I preferred my ideas of badgers and the wild to real badgers and real wilderness.”

Report from the link lab, one month on

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A little over a month ago I started this link-a-day experiment, and I’ve been observing the results closely. Herewith, some results.

The plan: Each day, post a link to a provocative or valuable piece (current or older) with a key quote highlighted. Post it at my Wordyard blog and in a few other channels. See what’s working and what’s not.

The results:

(1) It’s great to be back to posting daily. Yes, I set a low bar for myself, but still: It’s fun, and a reminder of why this blogging thing made sense in the first place.

(2) It’s easy to keep up. I’m reading widely and taking these notes anyway because it’s just something I do. It makes sense to share them.

(3) The mode of link-sharing I prefer involves including a decent chunk of a quotation that highlights what interested me, and that provides some value to the reader even if she doesn’t click through to the original (though I hope she does). This makes my sharing on Twitter problematic. I’ve experimented with writing separate shorter teases that link directly to the original source rather than to Wordyard; also with linking to the Wordyard post; and with trying to cram both links into one tweet. None of these feels perfectly satisfactory. I’ll keep tinkering.

(4) Facebook is where millions of people hang out to get their links these days but Facebook is also ill-adapted to the sort of linking I want to do. The way it previews links inside the News Feed makes my highlighted blockquotes feel redundant. So I’ve had mixed results: A handful of FB posts have gotten some comments and seem to have turned up in friend’s feeds; a lot haven’t. I should probably redouble my efforts here.

(5) For the first couple weeks I put my links on This. every day. I really like the This. approach (one link per user per day), but it seems structured around a different kind of link-sharing than I’m trying to do. It’s built for each user to post his top story of the day, period, and it allows only very limited room for annotation, so the sort of highlighting I want to do doesn’t feel right. I stopped posting my links there.

(6) I turned on WordPress’s “post to Medium” plugin and began automatically reposting the WordPress posts on Medium. It’s worked out great, and requires zero additional labor. Since I’m doing other writing at Medium as well (for Backchannel), I set up a publication on Medium just for these link posts, which took about two seconds. It’s called The Authentiac (the name has to be more than one word, for some reason). I already have a sizable following on that platform, and at least some of the posts have picked up a little traction there. A

(7) I’m sending the full text of my link highlights once a week in an email to my list (75 and going strong — you can sign up here). It’s pretty easy using the MailPoet plugin, but I have to remember to do it each week. Sometimes I’ve been…late.

(8) For the first couple of weeks I wanted to make everything as simple as possible for myself, and that meant no images. But when I started playing around with images I realized, duh, of course! Adding images makes a huge difference to readership/pickup/engagement, particularly on social platforms. Even when you aren’t really out to goose the numbers and you’re not trying to build a cash business, you still, you know, want people to see what you’re doing. So I’ve been adding images whenever possible.

(9) I feel like this is just the start. The more I do this, the clearer it is to me that there ought to be an entirely more useful and valuable level of organization of these snippets beyond simple reverse-chronology. Whether it’s outlining or tagging or assembly into some kind of narrative, I don’t know. Looking forward to trying to figure that out.

Thanks for joining me on this exploration!