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

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”

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.


 

Why trust Facebook with the future’s past?

Comments weren’t working for a while today. Apologies to anyone whose words got eaten! Should be working again now.

An odd moment during the Facebook Places rollout last week has been bugging me ever since.

From Caroline McCarthy’s account at CNet:

Facebook not only wants to be the digital sovereignty toward which all other geolocation apps direct their figurative roads, it also wants to be the Web’s own omniscient historian.

“Too many of our human stories are still collecting dust on the shelves of our collections at home,” Facebook vice president of product Christopher Cox said as he explained the sociological rationale behind Facebook Places… “Those stories are going to be placed,” Cox said. “Those stories are going to be pinned to a physical location so that maybe one day in 20 years our children will go to Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and their little magical thing will start to vibrate and say, ‘This is where your parents first kissed.’”

From Chris O’Brien’s post:

Cox: “…Technology does not need to estrange us from each other.”

“Maybe one time you walk into a bar, you sit down at the bar, and you put your magical 10-years-into-the-future phone down. And suddenly it starts to glow. ‘This is what your friend ordered here’. And it pops up these memories…’Go check out this thing about the urinal that your friend wrote about when they were here about eight months ago.’ ”

Cox explained that all these check-ins, photos, and videos could be gathered on pages about a place to create “collective memories.”

“That’s dope.”

Yeah, that’s dope all right. Doper still would be for Facebook to begin performing this role of “omniscient historian” or “memory collector” right now. As I’ve been arguing for some time, Neither Facebook nor Twitter is doing a very good job of sharing the history we’re recording on them.

Everything we put on the Web is both ephemeral and archival — ephemeral in the sense that so much of what we post is only fleetingly relevant, archival in the sense that the things we post tend to stay where we put them so we can find them years later. Most forms of social media in the pre-status-update era — blogging, Flickr, Delicious, Youtube and so on — functioned in this manner. They encouraged us to pile up our stuff in public with the promise that it would still be there when we came back. As Marc Hedlund put it: public and permanent.

Twitter, at least, places each Tweet at a “permalink”-style public URL. So if you save a particular Tweet’s address you can find it again in the future. Otherwise, you’re out of luck. (You can make local copies of your Tweetstream, but that’s more of a backup than a linkable public archive.) Presumably Twitter is keeping all this data, and they’ve said that they’re handing a complete record over to the Library of Congress. But the data isn’t public and permanent for the rest of us. I think we’re just supposed to take it on faith that we’ll get the keys back to it eventually. (Jeff Jarvis says he interviewed Evan Williams and “told him I want better ways to save my tweets, making them memory.” Hope to hear more from that. By linking to Jeff’s tweet here I have fished it out for posterity, one needle plucked from the fugitive haystack.)

Meanwhile, Facebook is even less helpful. Lord knows what happens to the old stuff there. Is there any way to find what you wrote on Facebook last year? I hope so, for the sake of the millions of people who are chronicling their lives on Mark Zuckerberg’s servers. But I’ve certainly never been able to find it.

In fact, Facebook is relentlessly now-focused. And because it uses its own proprietary software that it regularly changes, there is no way to build your own alternate set of archive links to old posts and pages the way you can on the open Web. Facebook users are pouring their hearts and souls into this system and it is tossing them into the proverbial circular file.

All of which led me to wonder what Facebook could possibly be thinking in asking us to imagine Places as a future repository for our collective history. After all, Facebook could be such a repository today, if it actually cared about history. It has given no evidence of such concern.

Maybe in the future all manner of data will, as Cox put it so charmingly, cause our “little magical things to start to vibrate.” I mean, dope! But if my kids are going to find out about the site of their parents’ first kiss, I’ll have to provide that information to someone. I don’t think it will be Facebook.


 

Heffernan vs the SciBloggers: when community becomes commodity

As you may have read, a group of high-profile and high-quality science bloggers recently left the network that had long housed them because the parent company had done a deal with Pepsi to create a nutrition blog in their midst.

Now we have a high-handed column from the New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan, which basically tells these bloggers: Grow up. Get real. This is the way the world works!

Most writers for “legacy” media like newspapers, magazines and TV see brush fires over business-editorial crossings as an occupational hazard. They don’t quit anytime there’s an ad that looks so much like an article it has to be marked “this is an advertisement.”

That may be because they have editors who (when they’re good) fight to defend standards against the encroachment of the business side. These bloggers had no choice but to represent themselves.

Heffernan goes on to fume about the bloggers’ “eek-a-mouse posturing” and mines their work for quotes that make them look silly or small-minded. I’ve read a lot of these blogs over the years and don’t recognize them in her portrait.

But she misses the bigger story here, so let me lay it out for you. The ScienceBlogs saga is a version of a tale that keeps repeating itself in our online culture — the one where a group of people who (correctly or not) thought of themselves as a community discover that they are being treated as a commodity.

This has been happening from the very beginning of human congregation online. It happened when AOL got sued by its moderators; it happened when the WELL’s pioneers lost their trust in the businessman who bought the service in the mid-’90s. I’m sure it will keep happening, so let’s try to understand it a little better than Heffernan does.

The ScienceBlogs affair is not a case of a bunch of reporters in a newsroom crying foul because a church/state line was crossed. This is a group of writers who believed they were collaborating in their own little space on the Web, a meritocracy of sorts built on their own labor. Then they woke up to the rude realization that somebody else owned their real estate — and was going to sell some of the space without their having any say in the matter.

As I understand it, the Pepsi blog was not an advertorial; it was a blog manned by Pepsico-salaried nutritional scientists. It might have been a good blog, for all we know. But it represented a change in the rules. The bloggers weren’t consulted. They thought of themselves as party hosts, and discovered that management though of them as “a source of revenue” (in the words of Bora Zivkovic, a SciBlogger who wrote the definitive post on the controversy).

For Heffernan, it might be better to try to imagine that her Times employers had sold the office or cubicle next to hers to some sponsor’s hand-picked writer, who would henceforth fill the magazine page opposite hers: “Here’s a sponsored journalist — have fun together!”

But, really, it’s not the details of the Pepsi blog that are important. After all, ScienceBlogs’ owner, Seed, withdrew the scheme once the bloggers raised a ruckus. It was too late. The bloggers had lost the illusion that they were involved in a community; they saw the businessman behind the curtain. There was no going back.

This loss of innocence is, I think, a nearly universal experience online. It occurs when one’s initial surge of idealistic delight at the freedom and opportunities of boundless self-expression slams into the realities of the media business online.

People who have experienced this will thereafter keep their antenna out and much more finely tuned to questions of ownership and governance and autonomy. They will not use the word “community” without thinking about it. They will also never again feel quite the same unqualified delight in sharing their writing online.

Should the science bloggers have known what was coming? Should they have been less innocent? Probably. But then they might not have been as exuberantly good at what they did.

I don’t think the outcome is a tragedy. The former ScienceBloggers will continue to be science bloggers, producing great posts and forming new communities. I think they’ll just handle the business-and-independence issues a little more carefully next time around. They are learning from their experience; I wish Heffernan had done so too.

BONUS LINKS: Ex-SciBlogger David Dobbs has a thoughtful response on his Neuron Culture blog.

And Jason Goldman, still on SciBlogs, helps point Heffernan to where the “real science” can be found there.

LATE UPDATE: Heffernan has posted a response at Dobbs’ blog.


 

“Blogging is like auto-save for our entire culture”

A couple months ago I gave a talk at WordCamp San Francisco, attempting to put WordPress in historical perspective. Those who know the subject know that WordPress’s adoption of the relatively strict GPL free-software licensing is central to its story. (This is the background to the recent dustup between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and the creator of the popular Thesis theme over the licensing of that theme.) Ironically, my talk was directly opposite one being given by free-software godfather Richard Stallman, the “Father of the GPL.” It was great so many people still chose to listen to me!

This is a variation on the talks I’ve been giving about Say Everything, with some additional material on WordPress, and some thoughts about the value of blogging to our collective history: “Blogging is like auto-save for our entire culture.”

[This video lives over here at WordPress.tv. Thanks to everyone at WordCamp for having me!]


 

Does the Web remember too much — or too little?

Jeffrey Rosen’s piece on “The End of Forgetting” was a big disappointment, I felt. He’s taking on important themes — how the nature of personal reputation is evolving in the Internet era, the dangers of a world in which social-network postings can get people fired, and the fuzzier prospect of a Web that prevents people from reinventing themselves or starting new lives.

But I’m afraid this New York Times Magazine cover story hangs from some very thin reeds. It offers few concrete examples of the problems it laments, resorts to vague generalizations and straw men, and lists some truly preposterous proposed remedies.

Rosen presents his premise — that information once posted to the Web is permanent and indelible — as a given. But it’s highly debatable. In the near future, we are, I’d argue, far more likely to find ourselves trying to cope with the opposite problem: the Web “forgets” far too easily.
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Help with a WordPress plugin for published versions

My “versioning for all news stories!” manifesto inspired lots of feedback. A good amount of it was along the lines of, “What are you talking about? How would this work?” I’ve been pointing people to Wikipedia’s “view history” tabs, which are a great start. (I also notice that the Guardian UK now posts, on each article, a story history, which tells you that the article was modified, but doesn’t actually show you the different versions.)

What I’d like to do now is pursue this at the level of a live demo right here on this blog. So I put out a call on Twitter for help in creating a WordPress plugin that would let me expose every version of each post. I only want to show the versions since publication — a rough draft pre-publication should remain for the author’s (and editor’s, if there is any) eyes only.

Scott Carpenter helpfully pointed me to this existing plugin, which outputs a list of all versions of each post.

This is a great start. All I need now is to add a little code to the plugin that gets it to show only the post-publication versions.

I know just enough about PHP to mess around with templates and cut-and-paste code snippets, but not enough, I think, to do this right. Anyone interested in helping out on this little project?

Someday, when this versioning thing catches on and becomes a universal practice, you’ll be able to say to yourself, with a little smile of satisfaction, “I was there when it all began.”