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The Facebook/MySpace class war

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The latest paper by danah boyd, concluding that “MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth,” has been much noted already, and it’s worth reading for anyone interested in the acceleratingly complex mass society we’re building online.

According to boyd, Facebook’s clean interface and Ivy League origins have made it home for the collegiate set, where MySpace’s anarchic graphics and pop-music focus orient it more toward “alternative” kids, minorities, dropouts and outcasts. If you spend any time on these services you can find plenty of anecdotal support for her analysis. On the other hand, though Facebook is now growing faster, MySpace still dwarfs it, so this is one “alternative” environment that happens, for the moment at least, to be in the majority.

What strikes me is that this social division across technical or business boundaries is nothing new. In the early days of blogging, a free Blogger address had less status than a self-installed Movable Type blog at your own URL. Similarly, in the mid-to-late ’90s, during the homepage-building craze, a page on GeoCities or Angelfire usually signified something less cool than your own site at your own domain. Before that, your email address was the marker of your status: remember the outcry when AOL’s horde of unwashed millions plugged into the Internet proper?

The difference today, it seems to me, is not that social class divides extend from the offline world into online space, but rather that online interaction has assumed such a central place in the lives of young people that the divisions now matter far more. For teenagers trying to figure out who they are, the choice of social networking site has become one more agonizing crossroads of self-definition.

Farhad Manjoo has more over at Salon’s Machinist.
[tags]facebook, myspace, social networking, danah boyd[/tags]

Dogs, cats and Times blogs

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Professional journalists, even those who do a solid job of covering the Net industry, can’t help occasionally spraying droplets of disdain at the explosion of blogging, self-publishing and uploaded photos and videos that marks the Web’s current phase. Consider this passage from a piece by Brad Stone in today’s Times about MySpace’s new video service:

The company’s plan underscores its particular emphasis on professional video, as opposed to the homemade depictions of wrestling dogs and cats — the genre known as user-generated content — that are more prominent on most video sites.

There you have the dichotomy: video is either professional stuff, or it’s “wrestling dogs and cats.”

If you’ve spent any time on YouTube — or with any other popular “user-generated content” service — you know how narrow and inadequate that description is. Sure, you got your wrestling dogs and cats. But they no more devalue the wide spectrum of material on YouTube than, say, the daily crossword puzzle in the Times reduces the rest of the paper to mere pastime. The reality of “user-generated content” (itself a reductive media-biz term for a phenomenon that is bigger and richer than the media-biz understands) does not justify the dismissive hand-wave this passage signifies.

It’s particularly ironic to read this on the very same day that the Times unveils its new group tech blog, Bits. The newspaper’s senior Valley correspondent, John Markoff, has long made a practice of telling people who ask why he doesn’t start a blog that he already has one — “it’s called the New York Times.” So of course the first thing I did was to find his byline on the blog.

In a post introducing the new feature, Saul Hansell was smart enough to include that anecdote as his lead — inoculating Bits from any mockery on that basis from the peanut gallery (mine or any one else’s). So far it looks like a good effort: the reporters are linking out and writing a little informally and beginning to get into the spirit. (There’s no point in blogging if the prose reads like wire-service copy.) I still think they need to let their hair down a bit more. But it’s a start.
[tags]new york times, john markoff, user generated content[/tags]

How does the Web feel?

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I loved this article about information designer Jonathan Harris — even if it did use for its headline the same phrase that is the title of my book.

Several years ago, Harris created the 10×10 Web site — a snapshot of the moment’s hot news presented in the form of an image collage. He now he works as design director at Daylife. He’s a specialist in creating visualizations of Web-based pools of information — like his current project, We Feel Fine, which scours the Web for statements by bloggers and others that take the form “I feel [X]” and presents them in a novel interface that you can explore and also filter according to multiple criteria.

But these sites are best explored rather than explained. Have a look. Perhaps you will feel, as I did, happy to see such creative reuse of the Web’s expressive bounty.

UPDATE: I meant to highlight this quote from the end of the piece, with its perspective on digital storytelling:

Trying to depict everything is a fool’s game, and ultimately not that interesting — because it’s just as confusing and complicated as life. So then the task becomes limiting your scope, and within a limited scope providing amazing complexity and depth. That’s this process of ‘lens making’: coming up with a lens that you can point at all of reality but that only lets through certain things. That process is digital storytelling. It’s a process of exclusion — not a process of mimicry.

Lessig contra corruption

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Lawrence Lessig recently announced that he is changing the focus of his work from the copyright and intellectual-property realm, in which he has made such a mark over the past decade, to a new area: corruption. Having directly encountered the dysfunctionality of our system of government in his battles with the copyright lobby, the law professor and activist has decided to tackle the problem at the root:

I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

I will certainly look forward to seeing how Lessig — who has both a sharp legal mind and a stirring, impassioned presentation style — takes on “corruption”: what does he take aim at? What can he accomplish?

But corruption per se has been around forever (go read Suetonius!). It’s hard to see what headway any individual effort can make against the tide of human greed.

On the other hand, there is, it seems to me, one very specific aspect of the corruption of our politics that is both massive in its impact and tractable to reform efforts.

The money that drives American politics today isn’t, for the most part, money that ends up in pockets as crude bribes. The sums involved even in less obvious payoffs in the form of revolving-door regulators and the like are similarly not that huge. The vast bulk of the money that U.S. politicians ceaselessly seek is raised for one single purpose: to purchase TV ads.

There is an iron triangle of cash at the heart of our political system. Candidates scramble for dollars from contributors so they can hand them to TV stations. Sickeningly, our political candidates have become a valuable source of revenue for the broadcast and cable networks whose job is to cover their candidacies. The pols beg us for our money, and it goes straight to media corporations’ bottom lines.

Anything we do to break this chain will provide immediate relief to our political system. We could try to regulate the total volume of political TV advertising (difficult for First Amendment reasons). Or we could simply reduce the centrality of television itself so the ads cease to be a useful way for politicians to broadcast messages.

One way or another, the answer to cleaning up politics lies in reducing the cost of a successful candidacy by cutting TV as far out of the equation as possible. Accomplish that, and a lot of other things will take care of themselves.
[tags]lawrence lessig, political corruption, television, campaign ads[/tags]

TV, phone, or computer?

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I was catching up on old Times Business sections over the weekend and this chart, accompanying an article about video for mobile devices, jumped out at me. It shows Forrester research that asked people in different age groups, “Which device do you most feel you could not live without?” The devices in question were computer, TV and cellphone.

Easy enough for me to answer: I watch almost no TV. (I know people have a hard time accepting this, but it’s true.) I have a cellphone but it’s a clunky old thing and I use it only for utilitarian things — parent/child coordination, business details. My computer, on the other hand, is my lifeline: Source of information, social networking tool, information store, creative device, and more.

So I just had another birthday — I’ve moved into that zone of the ’40s that can’t be considered anything but “late” — and I figured that this particular set of gadget-preferences must mark me as an incipient codger. Kids these days live for their cell-phones and think e-mail is something to use when they want to communicate with those over 30, right?

Hah! Turns out I have the techno-preferences of a teen. My profile matches that of an 18-26 “Generation Y” type: they’re the only ones to rank computer first, cellphone second and TV last. My own generational cadre (“younger boomers”) puts TV at the top of its list. The accompanying article is all about how ESPN wants to put video on phone screens. It quotes one exec of a “cellphone video network” saying: “For the younger generation, the mobile phone is their most relevant device.”

But that’s not what the chart shows! Isn’t the news here that, for the consumers of tomorrow, as for me, the computer, far from being a stodgy old thing, is the desert-island device?

PC World: Feel the love

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Many thanks to the kind editors at PC World for naming this humble blog as one of its “100 Blogs We Love.”

PC World recently made headlines when its editor, Harry McCracken, resigned to protest ad-sales meddling in the publication’s editorial side. He was later reinstated and the CEO he tangled with got kicked upstairs. It was one of those perennial showdowns between editorial and business that have always marked the magazine world — and now appear to be beginning to infiltrate the blogosphere as well. (In fact, here’s McCracken’s take on the FM “People Ready” controversy: “Journalists shouldn’t write ad copy.” Of course, there are bloggers who think of themselves as journalists, and many others who don’t.)

The PC World blurb said that my “take on tech, politics, culture, and the intersections thereof is often unexpected, and always worth reading.” I’ll try to keep living up to that description.
[tags]pc world, harry mccracken, blogging[/tags]

Conversations with corporations

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This is getting interesting!

John Battelle has posted a reasonable defense of the Federated Media “conversational ad” scheme that I discussed earlier. (And it strikes a healthily non-defensive tone, too, which is awfully hard in such a situation.) He argues that he views “commercial publications” as conversations between three parties: authors, audiences and advertisers.

Well, OK. You know who the authors are; they sign their writing. You know who you are, as a member of the audience. But who, exactly, is the advertiser? That is the problem with Battelle’s formulation, as I see it.

Blogging presupposes a notion of direct communication between writer and reader, where there is no editor or intermediary bureaucracy between the two, and where the reader, as often as not, is also a blogger, ready to respond — to participate in the “conversation.”

But this advertiser-as-conversationalist thing, I’m still having a hard time with it. If you look at the “People Ready” conversation page that FM and Microsoft created, where, exactly, is Microsoft joining the conversation? I see lots of names here, but no name representing Microsoft. If you click through to the “About People Ready” page, you can read stuff like, “Microsoft sees a better way to unlock the potential of every person.” But, er, who exactly is Microsoft?

In a comment posted on Jeff Jarvis’s blog, Battelle elaborates:

Is it somehow illegal for companies to be part of a conversation? I really find that presumption offensive. Why can’t companies, which as the Cluetrain reminds us are just made up of people, be part of a conversation, and invite leader into that conversation?

I have only one problem with this argument: A corporation is not (pace the late 19th-century legal doctrine that held corporations to have the same rights as individuals) a person. There are plenty of individual people who work for corporations. (I do, too.) And when they post in online forums or start blogs or do anything that they sign their name to, I’m very happy to have a conversation with them. But that’s different from “companies being part of a conversation.” I don’t know how to do that. And I really don’t see that happening with the “People Ready” campaign.

A deep irony here is that Microsoft, of all the big tech companies, has a long and proud record of promoting blogging among its engineers and executives. I’ve learned a vast amount by reading them, and their presence online — including the famous Robert Scoble (who weighs in on this controversy here, and who of course has long since moved on from Microsoft) but extending far beyond him — has changed my understanding of the company and the people who work for it. Microsoft is already part of a panoply of real conversations on the Web. That makes this “People Ready” construct look all the more artificial.

UPDATE: More from Matthew Ingram:

If I’m talking to a bunch of people in a bar, and an advertising guy working for Coke comes up and tries to change the subject to the idea of “refreshment,” and says that he plans to tape-record my comments and use them on a billboard, then I am going to react pretty negatively to that idea. That’s not a “conversation” the way I would define it.

[tags]people ready, federated media, ethics, blogging[/tags]

Dick Cheney, constitutional Transformer

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By now you’ve no doubt heard this amusing tidbit from the Bush administration bunker: Vice president Cheney is now arguing that his office is, has been, and should be exempt from normal executive-branch oversight of its handling of classified documents because…the vice president is not part of the executive branch!

This latest in a long line of Bush administration legal doctrines of nullification and exceptionalism is based on a hair-slender reed of constitutional fact: the vice president gets to preside over the Senate and break ties there, so he does have an odd presence in the legislative branch. But saying that the entire office is simply not part of the executive is desperate madness.

Democrats in Congress sound like they’re ready to call Cheney on his bluff. Atrios posts an email reporting Rahm Emanuel’s response:

“The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch. However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot ignore executive branch rules…”

That’s got some teeth. But beyond this immediate parry-and-riposte, surely we are at a jump-the-shark moment for the Bush administration’s tortuous legal arguments defending secrecy, deception and torture.

The GOP spent many years mocking Bush’s predecessor for his lawyerly tactics during the Lewinsky affair. But a U.S. vice president claiming that he is not part of the executive branch? That makes quarrels over “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” look like the soul of reason. Does the vice-presidency exist in its own special branch? Does the office mutate by the moment from “executive” to “legislative” depending on who Cheney is fighting? Ahh — the Bush administration’s very own Transformer from Cybertron!

All his life, from his Vietnam era draft avoidance (“I had other priorities”) to this latest shenanigans, Cheney has held himself at an imperious remove from the demands our society and legal system place on mere mortals. It is past time to call him out on such behavior. De-fund the clown!
[tags]dick cheney, vice presidency, constitution[/tags]

Are advertorials “blog-ready”?

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In the murky annals of “advertorial” — the blurring of clear lines between independent editorial matter and advertising — the dustup over Federated Media’s campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “People Ready” slogan will rank as a minor affair. But it’s a useful flashpoint for looking at a central divergence in perspectives on blogging.

Federated Media, John Battelle’s ad network for high-traffic blogs, gathered a constellation of star tech-and-biz pundits who are part of its network, got them to offer comments on the theme of Microsoft’s campaign, and assembled those quotes on a Web site. Valleywag cried foul. FM refers to the technique as a “conversational marketing campaign”; the approach is really the Web equivalent of a magazine advertorial. Advertorials — including advertorials that involve a publication’s editorial staff — have been around a long time, and while they can be abused, they are hardly cause for deep moral indignation, as long as they are clearly labeled (FM’s is) and not trying to confuse readers.

On the other hand, if you run advertorials, I think you make it much harder to present yourself as the leader of any kind of business revolution. When advertisers ask for an advertorial, they typically want to confuse readers; they’re admitting that traditional ads aren’t working for them, and they’re asking for the editors or bloggers to lend an ad a bit of the content producers’ credibility — or at least ability to attract readers’ attention. This is fundamentally an old-media game.

FM and others working at the edge of new-media business models argue that they’re helping advertisers and marketers “join a conversation.” Maybe so. But the best conversations aren’t plotted by ad buyers; they’re spontaneous.

Ironically, of course, it’s the conversation about this ad campaign (Mike Arrington defends the ad, Om Malik retreats from it, Dave Winer says the bloggers may be “clouding their integrity”) that is attracting multiple posts –including, yeah, this one — and landing the controversy at the top of sites like Techmeme. So maybe FM and Microsoft knew exactly what they were doing. Maybe Nick Denton and Valleywag are in on the deal, too! (No, no, of course not: joke.)

What I find interesting in this debate is that there remains, nearly a decade into the history of blogging, a philosophical divide: Some see blogging as simply a young format for media business — and, like Federated Media or Valleywag’s owner Gawker Media, building ad-based publications on blogging platforms. Others stubbornly continue to see blogging as a uniquely new creative endeavor that puts bloggers in direct touch with readers, cutting out media-biz middle-manning. Anyone in the latter camp is going to squawk at the arrival of the blog-advertorial — not only because it’s corrupt to them, but because it’s old hat.

The people at Federated Media are smart, and I’ll give them credit for trying out new ad approaches in a not-obviously-corrupt way. If this one doesn’t work, I’m sure they’ll keep trying. But I’m skeptical of the introduction of what are, essentially, magazine-biz norms into the blogosphere. Because eventually that road ends with blogs becoming independent online magazines, and I’ve been at that game long enough to know how hard it is.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis — whose blog is repped by Federated Media — weighs in at length, concluding:

It’s the bloggers who must make these calls. That’s because advertisers will be advertisers; they will try to push for more integration with us (and we should beware taking that as flattery). And sales people will be sales people; they will try hard to get the sale. So we bloggers are left, inevitably, with the need to say no.

[tags]federated media, advertorial, microsoft, people powered, blogging[/tags]

Links for June 20th

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  • John Heilemann, in New York, has written a grand, sharp profile of Steve Jobs on the threshold of the iPhone release. One notable footnote to the piece is that — great as it is — it is forced to do a little tapdancing around the obvious fact that Jobs would not talk to Heilemann (or, at the very least, Heilemann did not interview Jobs for this piece, though he extracts key quotes from Jobs’ onstage talks at the recent D conference).

    I may be a little hyper-aware of this because, almost a decade ago — as Jobs reassumed his post at the head of Apple — I, too, tried to write a definitive portrait of Jobs without having the chance to actually sit down and talk to him. Heilemann’s piece is, I think, the better of the two, and it’s also obviously a lot more timely. Nonetheless, mine still holds up pretty well.

  • PowerPoint turns 20: Lee Gomes has a good column in the Wall Street Journal (free this week at this address, later on available for subscribers here) focusing on the creators of Powerpoint — their pride in providing the world with a popular tool, and their misgivings at how it is so often misused:

    Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

    Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”

    More at Robert Gaskins’ web site.

  • Essential reading: Julian Dibbell’s fascinating and touching New York Times Magazine piece about Chinese gold farmers (workers who perform drudgework in game worlds to earn game money that can be resold for real-world cash).
  • Also from the Times: in the wake of the “Sopranos” finale, Charles McGrath looks at the long tradition of in medias res endings, a topic in which I have an abiding personal interest.

[tags]steve jobs, john heilemann, lee gomes, powerpoint, robert gaskins, julian dibbell, chinese gold farming, charles mcgrath[/tags]