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Lucas, circus, and art

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George Lucas drew a distinction for the crowd at D earlier this week that became something of a refrain for the rest of the event.

Lucas said: there’s circus, and then there’s art. “Circus is random and voyeuristic. What you see on YouTube right now — I call it feeding Christians to the lions. The movie term is, throwing puppies on a freeway. You don’t have to write anything or do anything — you just have to sit there, and it’s interesting. Like American Idol. Just put a camera on your neighbor’s window and see what happens. Then you get to art — where a particular person contrives a situation and tells a story, and hopefully that story reveals a truth behind the facts. With voyeurism all you’re getting is the facts.”

Lucas is a brilliant man who has told some great stories in his day. And I think he intended to defend the enterprise of making art, which we can always applaud. But with this generalization he has cast a great slur on the circus world.

I spent several years of my life as a working theater critic in San Francisco during the heyday of what was once known as New Vaudeville; I witnessed the work of pioneering Bay Area institutions like the Pickle Family Circus and saw the rise of “new circus” institutions like the Cirque du Soleil. And I do not think it’s going out on a limb to say that George Lucas is dead wrong in defining circus and art as opposites.

Circus is art. It doesn’t “just happen.” The people who perform in it spend years or lifetimes perfecting their skills.

Lucas, perhaps, really meant “sideshow” — where they used to put the freaks and the mutant animals and the geeks who would bite the heads off animals. In that sense, sure, YouTube is often a sideshow.

The videos Steve Jobs highlighted as he showed off AppleTV’s new YouTube connection were, essentially, sideshows. Mentos in Coke is sideshow. The “human slingshot” is sideshow.

But surprisingly often, YouTube is art. And when you experience a really great circus performance you encounter a kind of truth, too.
[tags]george lucas, d5, d conference, circus, youtube[/tags]

D Conference: highlights reel

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  • Walt Mossberg asked CBS CEO Les Moonves about Al Gore’s critique of television culture in his new book, The Assault on Reason. “Gore said that TV in general has basically destroyed American democracy. He says the Internet is the hope –”

    Moonves interrupted: “That’s because he created it.”

    Mossberg grimaced. There was not a single laugh in the room.

    It is one sign of hope for the world today that this dead old line — discredited eons ago — now evokes only contempt.

    Meanwhile, here is Moonves’s stirring defense of his medium against the complaint that TV caters to too much of our love for celebrity news at the expense of more pressing issues: “I think there are other things that may have hurt the fabric of democracy more than the media.”

  • Time Inc. boss Ann Moore said that this past year the company crossed the Rubicon: its magazines can now see how to make money online, and — no longer weighted down by the internal civil war with AOL — they’re rushing headlong into the new medium.

    According to Moore, Time’s editorial staff are beginning to have the exact experience I and my colleagues did back in 1995 when we moved from the newspaper world to the Web: the flood of reaction from readers is energizing in a way you can’t imagine until you experience it.

    “The really big breakthrough is, editorial drank the koolaid,” Moore said. “The people leading the charge are the writers. You used to hang around the mailroom waiting for letters to the editor, and when you realized you could write online and get thousands of responses from readers… Writers also like how they’re edited less heavily online, she added.

  • Jason Calacanis’s “human-powered search” startup, Mahalo, intends to take the opposite of the “long tail” approach: call it the “fat head” of search. (Or maybe not.) Mahalo is hiring editors to create human-filtered search results for the top 10,000 search terms — which, Calacanis said, account for 24% of all English language search. The idea is to defeat search spam and help people get the best results from the general queries that Google doesn’t always handle elegantly.

    It’s ambitious, and Calacanis says he has money to keep it up for five years. But isn’t it just Yahoo circa 1995 — or DMOZ? How will its results keep up with the dynamically changing Web? How will it scale? I wouldn’t write it off, but I wouldn’t bet on it, either.

  • Jeff Hawkins, co-creator of the original Palm, unveiled a new gadget called Foleo. It’s theoretically intended to be a companion to Treos and other smartphones: it’s a laptop-like device, two pounds, with a full-size keyboard and a nerly full-size screen. It syncs email wirelessly with the smartphone. It’s got no hard drive or optical drive, but it’s a full Linux-based system, with wireless, an Opera browser, and other basic applications. It’s instant-on and has all-day battery life. But its processor is too slow for good video playback.

    The D crowd was distinctly unimpressed. But for a journalist on the road, it looks like a great e-mail and note-taking machine. I don’t even have a smartphone, but for $500, I could see wanting one of these. And, hey, you even got a Trackpoint without springing a fortune for a Thinkpad.

  • Don’t miss five minutes of Steven Colbert cocking a snoot at the conference’s collection of moguls and plutocrats while ostensibly introducing his boss, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman. Demanding true broadband, Colbert attempts to sip a chocolate cake through a fiber-optic cable.

    • [tags]d5, d conference, foleo, jeff hawkins, philippe dauman, stephen colbert, mahalo, jason calacanis, les moonves, ann moore, time inc., viacom, cbs[/tags]

    Chernin, News Corp., and the Journal

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    This conference is a Wall Street Journal event, so the specter of Rupert Murdoch’s buyout hovered over everything — like the Eye of Sauron turning its gaze upon, well, not exactly a settlement of happy hobbits, but, let’s just say, a crowd of sheltered journalists. (As a Journal reader, I’d hate to see the paper’s quality decline, but then again, as I’ve said, it’s only fitting that market forces should be threatening this champion of free markets.) Pushing this analogy to an extreme would cast NewsCorp president Peter Chernin, who spoke here and defended Murdoch’s bid, as the Mouth of Sauron.

    Here is what Chernin had to say when quizzed about Murdoch’s plans for the Journal by Kara Swisher, who — like the rest of the WSJ journalists at the event — would work for him should the deal be consummated: “The notion that we want to buy one of the great trophies, a genuine public trust — the notion that we want to buy that to change it is completely counterintuitive. We made an offer at a significant premium. We believe it is the premier source of news and information on a specific aspect of this society.”

    But what else was he going to say? “We intend to rape and pillage?” Assurances like these are pro forma.

    “News Corp. is mischaracterized,” Chernin declared. “This is a very broad church.” Indeed; any media empire that can embrace moralistic right-wing politics and least-common-denominator popular entertainment has to be broad.

    It wasn’t surprising that Mossberg and Swisher would be direct in confronting a News Corp. interviewee with tough questions about the deal: It’s still an open question whether Murdoch will win his bid, and everyone here had the same questions in mind. But, if Murdoch gets the Journal, is it likely that, a year from now, at the next D conference, we’ll be watching News Corp. execs get grilled on stage?
    [tags]d5, d conference, wall street journal, peter chernin, rupert murdoch, news corporation[/tags]

    Interview: Howard Rheingold

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    As an adviser to Jay Rosen’s newassignment.net I thought the best way to help the project, and learn in the process, would be to participate. So I signed up to interview Howard Rheingold for NewAssignment’s Assignment Zero, a crowdsourced inquiry into the nature of crowdsourcing.

    The full interview is now posted. I didn’t, in truth, do things a whole lot differently than I’d do them were I conducting the interview for Salon or any other more conventional outlet. What may be less conventional is what happens to this material from here on in. My interview was one of dozens that are now up at the Zero site. The material is going to be somehow shaped by Assignment Zero itself, and also I think for Wired, and it will be fascinating to see how Jay and his staff orchestrate everything. It’s not the pure anarchy of the blogosphere; it’s not the traditional writer/editor pipeline of the old-fashioned newsroom. It’s — something we might be discovering. Or at least learning about.

    It was a pleasure talking to Rheingold about the state of the participatory Web. I have always found him far less a starry-eyed idealist or utopian than he is sometimes painted. He’s been thinking about how technology and online social practices “coevolve” longer than virtually anyone else, and his perspective continues to be incisive and challenging. Here’s a choice passage:

    Crowdsourcing is a name for something that’s new. And the name is connected to the business world. So it’s going to have that connotation. I’m going to bet that “crowdsourcing” is what most people know it as five years from now. And “non-market-incented commons-based peer production” is going to be for professors. Good marketing is engineering memes that really work. You can’t argue with that.

    [tags]howard rheingold, technology, crowdsourcing, assignment zero, newassignment.net[/tags]

    Amateur hour

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    “Is it always like this?” A business acquaintance who I chatted with briefly at the Berkeley Cybersalon earlier this evening asked me as the panel discussion — titled “New Media Wars: Amateur versus Auteur” — wound down.

    “Quite often, actually,” I answered him.

    I assumed he was referring to the heated back-and-forth between the attendees and the panelists — and, occasionally, among the panelists themselves (Dan Gillmor, Katie Hafner, Robert Scoble and Andrew Keen). The event’s hook was Keen’s new book, “The Cult of the Amateur.” Keen’s self-described “polemic” is not yet available, and I haven’t read it, so I won’t comment directly on it. But the book’s subtitle tells you where Keen’s coming from: “How today’s Internet is killing our culture.”

    Keen said his book was “designed as a grenade,” but this wasn’t really an explosive discussion — partly because, hey, nobody except the people on the panel had had a chance to read his book, but even more because the whole discussion was fragmented into the many shards of today’s complex debate over “old vs. new media.” There is no one argument — instead, many cross-conversations. And they were all represented tonight.

    There’s “What’s wrong with the professional media”: Many people still get much of their information from the pros, but they feel more and more that the professional media either (a) doesn’t portray the world the way they see it (Kaliya Hamlin said she was at the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, and what she saw isn’t what the New York Times reported); or (b) gets too much factual stuff wrong to deserve its pedestal. Blogging, Dave Winer told the journalists in the room, is simply “your sources going around the blockage.”

    There’s “what’s wrong with blogging”: Bloggers typically work alone, they don’t have travel budgets and editors, they lack both the institutional framework and the professional tradition to support the creation of a full report on the events of the world. Keen’s critique goes further; he says bloggers are “either irreverent, narcissistic or pornographic.” (I think he probably meant “irrelevant” but was typing too fast. Or maybe, in Keen’s world — he advocates a grand restoration of elite authority — “irreverent” is a put-down.)

    There’s “how do we rescue journalism now that the business model is falling apart” — complete with mentions of newsroom layoffs, arguments about Craigslist’s impact on classified ad revenue, and laments about the importance of rescuing in-depth journalism from the wreckage of the newspaper business.

    These conversations are happening almost exclusively among media people and media obsessives. Meanwhile there’s a wider conversation taking place on the Net among bloggers and participants in Web communities that has very little to do with journalism at all; it’s basically people talking to one another. At several points in the discussion tonight people got up to make this point, including one woman (I didn’t catch her name; she talked about participating in the community of mother-bloggers) who said, “I don’t know what Internet you guys are on” — and wondered how what she was doing could be considered narcissistic when so much of it involved paying attention to other people’s stories.

    These conversations are all taking place orthogonally, and progress is limited. Indeed, the discussion tonight dribbled off into a consensus embrace of the notion of “media literacy”: the media have degenerated, so now, it seems, the consumers of media had better shape up!

    Of course, the smarter people are at evaluating what they read, the better. But saying the answer to the crisis in journalism today is “better media literacy” is like saying the answer to the crisis in education is “better learning skills.”

    Keen has lobbed his bombs before — and in the same place, yet — but I find it hard to take them seriously. (I should mention that he did a podcast interview with me about my book — and he’s charming when he’s not lobbing grenades and building stockades around the ancien regime.) I don’t think he honestly believes that, as his book’s subtitle has it, “The Internet is killing our culture.” Ironically, of course, Keen himself used his own blog as a launch pad for his ideas. He admitted tonight that he is, himself, an “amateur writer.” He claims to be motivated by a desire to “annoy libertarians of the left and libertarians of the right.”

    Something tells me he might win a little less attention but a lot more credibility if he stopped trying so hard to annoy. There must be some valuable criticism lodged among all the bluster. When I read “The Cult of the Amateur” I’ll let you know what I find. But I can tell you right now that a book I have read — David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous — offers persuasive (and entertaining!) counter-arguments to those of Keen’s blunderbuss Internet put-downs that I’ve already heard.

    UPDATE: I’d forgotten that Winer posted a review of Keen’s book way back in February:

    His book, while based on an important and valuable premise, that Silicon Valley is too-much admired for the good of all of us, including the tech industry, fails to enlighten while he props up the egos of obsolete people and businesses. Each of his arguments is easily refuted, too easily.

    FURTHER UPDATE: The blogger who asked “what Internet you guys are on” (and who made what I thought was one of the most valuable contributions of the evening) is Grace Davis.

    OTHER REPORTS: Dan Farber; Robert Scoble; Renee Blodget.

    [tags]berkeley cybersalon, andrew keen, blogging, cult of the amateur[/tags]

    Real names

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    This week one could read in the Wall Street Journal that the Chinese government has had second thoughts about a plan to require bloggers to use their real names:

    The Chinese government, which sees the online world as a conduit for slander, pornography and antigovernment views, believes the real-name system would force the Internet community to watch their words and actions. But the policy received sharp protests from the technology industry.

    Now, the Ministry of Information Industry, the agency responsible for the policy, has abandoned plans for a law requiring all Chinese blog service providers to ask their users for verifiable personal details before they can start blogging….

    Analysts say the Chinese government is quickly discovering that compliance by fiat doesn’t work, especially now that it also is increasingly aware of the need to balance politics with the business interests….

    The government decided to backtrack on the real-name system after industry players argued that it would be impossible to implement.

    Then one could read, in the Washington Post, a column by Tom Grubisch arguing that the big problem with online conversation is that we don’t require people to use their real names:

    These days we want “transparency” in all institutions, even private ones. There’s one massive exception — the Internet. It is, we are told, a giant town hall. Indeed, it has millions of people speaking out in millions of online forums. But most of them are wearing the equivalent of paper bags over their heads. We know them only by their Internet “handles” — gotalife, runningwithscissors, stoptheplanet and myriad other inventive names….

    If Web sites required posters to use their real names, while giving the shield of pseudonymity when it’s merited, spirited online debate would continue unimpeded. It might even be enhanced by attracting contributors who are turned off today by name calling and worse. Except for the hate-mongers, who wouldn’t want that?

    It’s tempting just to leave these two articles in pregnant juxtaposition. But I can’t resist adding a few pontificatory wrinkles.

    I got my first taste of online conversation on the Well, a paid service on whose private boards every user’s real name is a click or two away. I found that the availability of those names helped dampen the worst flames and enforce some accountability. So in that sense, I actually share Grubisch’s perspective.

    But that was 15 years ago. The open Internet and the cross-linked Web have evolved on a different model. When we started Salon’s Table Talk in 1995 we practically begged participants to use their real names. But unless we were willing to demand credit cards and hire customer-support people to phone users and so on, we couldn’t make them — and besides, we were trying to grow fast, and didn’t want to erect too high a barrier to newcomers.

    That’s pretty much what every online community — and every newspaper that opens up discussion boards — faces: Practically speaking, demanding that people use their real names online is nearly impossible today, and if you try, you risk strangling the participation you sought, for both editorial and business reasons. Hey, even the Chinese government can’t seem to figure out how to do it!

    Over the past decade, one further reason has arisen for many people’s reluctance to sign their postings: They understand that Google reassembles every breadcrumb that bears their name into a permanent dossier. And they’re reluctant to put all those opinions and bantering jokes into the clickstream for future employers or other busybodies. There’s a lot of talk about the Web 2.0 generation’s willingness to splay every embarrassing detail of their lives onto MySpace and Facebook without fear. But I don’t think our need for privacy is dead; I think it just slumbers until after graduation, and rudely awakens upon entry into the workforce.

    Real names are powerful; they add credibility. I’m still amazed at the number of blogs I land upon, following some link, that lack a prominent credit — not because they’re anonymous (if you click around you eventually find the bloggers’ names), but because the authors somehow haven’t thought their monikers matter. Using your name is a way of claiming words and authority. But there needs to be plenty of room on the Net for people who have reasons for preferring pseudonyms.

    What about Grubisch’s “hate-mongers”? We’ll just have to keep working on our moderation skills and refining our community-based filters. That’s a lot more promising than the real-name “fiat,” anyway.
    [tags]china, identity[/tags]

    JPG Magazine drama

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    Derek Powazek has a distressing post about what, sadly, is a fairly common small-business story: Powazek and his wife, Heather Champ, started a cool little photography magazine built around contributions from a community of users. Both of them have a little experience in the online community-building area, and their magazine, JPG, was a smart experiment in combining the talents of online contributors to produce an offline (i.e., paper) magazine. (I’ve known them both for several years and have high respect for their work.)

    A little startup company formed around JPG, Powazek formed a partnership with a friend who’d helped build the site’s software, and they took some investment from a tech-publishing mogul. I think you know where this is heading: there was a falling out, and Powazek and Champ have now left the company and the magazine. (There’s a Metafilter discussion.)

    As Powazek tells it (and Champ confirms), the dispute was chiefly over their friend’s desire to expunge the record of the first six issues of the magazine’s history. On the face of it that’s a dumb idea. Presumably the partner who now runs the company will step forward and tell his side of the story, but it will take a lot of telling to make that look like anything other than a petty or stupid move: At best it places some wrongheaded notion of market-positioning above honesty, and at worst it’s an effort to revise the company’s story for financial/ownership reasons. A publishing company’s archive is its history. With Salon, we’ve kept our earliest issues live on the Web in all their crude glory; a lot of faces have come and gone since then, some acrimoniously, but we’ve never taken down a whole issue or removed an executive’s bio.

    No matter how you cut it, this sort of fight sets a company on a lousy course: users suspect foul play, and often they’re right. The emotions are like those in a messy divorce. The people involved feel it’s difficult to tell the whole story; sometimes (as is the case with Powazek) they still have a stake in the company they’ve left, and are torn — they want their baby to prosper but they’re angry at no longer having custody.

    Powazek draws the right lessons from his experience (roles and responsibilities — like, “Who’s the CEO?” — really matter; “communication between partners is mandatory”). But the larger lesson, I think, is that, no matter how idealistic you are when you start a company, the moment you take on investors, everything changes. You may still be an idealist, but the people around you are thinking about maximizing return. No matter what they say, you’d better assume that — or you’re likely to be disappointed, or even cheated.

    LATE UPDATE: In the last couple days Paul Cloutier (Powazek’s business partner) and Jason deFillippo (the company’s CTO) have both posted about this story from the other side, and, no surprise, there are multiple perspectives here, and it’s nearly impossible for an outsider to get a clear fix. (Derek has more too.) It’s sad to see all this bad blood flow.
    [tags]startups, publishing, online community, derek powazek, heather champ, jpg magazine[/tags]

    Liberals yawn as Journal burns?

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    Greg Sargent wonders why the liberal blogosphere isn’t squawking about Rupert Murdoch’s bid for the Journal. Obviously most of the liberal blogosphere hears “Journal” and thinks of the Whitewater-crazed loonies who spent most of a decade spinning Vincent Foster conspiracy theories. For anyone inclined to view the world through a partisan lens, the Journal’s editorial page has long overshadowed its higher-quality news coverage. Murdoch buying that gang? It’s “Shelob acquiring Barad-Dur, Inc.” Let them eat one another and spit out the bones!

    But there’s also a sense in which the defense of the Journal’s “quality” newsroom is a rearguard action on behalf of a dying tradition. And many people who identify themselves as bloggers, whether on the left or the right, and whether they value the Journal’s great features (as I do) or not, may feel about that tradition the way they feel about the 19th-century novel or the Hollywood comedies of the ’30s. These things are grand, but, like it or not, their time has passed. A newsroom like the Journal’s will not and cannot exist a generation from now unless someone starts figuring out how to pay for it.

    John Heilemann’s take in New York is a little contrarian and well worth reading:

    Did anybody at Dow Jones ever contemplate purchasing MySpace? Did Arthur Sulzberger or Don Graham? I don’t know, but I’d wager they didn’t even know what MySpace was. The obvious retort is, Why should they have? What does social networking have to do with journalism? And, no doubt, a precise answer is hard to conjure. But if you don’t believe that the intermingling of these spheres will be central to how future generations consume their news, you’ve apparently been sleeping—and clearly don’t have kids.

    Not that Murdoch or his people have the future figured out. But they’re groping toward it with purpose and energy—which is more than you can say for Dow Jones. God knows Murdoch’s politics aren’t my brand of vodka. But you have to admire the way he’s been an unrelenting force for change and modernization in the media racket, the way he’s shaped and adapted to epic transformations of platforms and technologies. The problem with America’s newspaper-family dynasties is that, to a greater or lesser degree, they still believe they’re in the same business they were in 30 years ago. Murdoch doesn’t—and he knows, too, that newspapers can’t be any kind of public trust if the public sees them as yesterday’s news.

    For those who think that the Bancroft family’s pride-of-ownership will save the Journal from Rupert’s clutches, I say, think again. Murdoch has offered a huge premium on the Dow Jones stock price. The Bancrofts’ control is apparently only a little over 50 percent. All Murdoch needs is one or two heirs or heiresses to say, “Wait a minute, this is good money, what are we thinking?” and the prize is his. I don’t think there are too many other people out there with the resources to pay such an inflated price or the desire to sink that much cash into what market analysts politely call a “sunset industry.”

    Every year the Journal’s publisher seizes the op-ed page for a letter to readers, and every year this missive touts the publication’s “faith in the wisdom of markets.” What’s happening here is simple: the market is having its way with the Journal. The result may not be ideal for those of us who love 5000-word features, but it is surely a kind of ironic justice.
    [tags]Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch, journalism, dow jones[/tags]

    Microhoo… Yacrosoft?

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    This time the noises about a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo sound more serious. We’re also in one of the financial markets’ combination-mad moments — these merger frenzies often arrive at a market peak.

    Remember January 2000? We woke up one morning shortly after the millennium to discover that Time Warner was buying AOL. I wrote one of the few dissenting columns about this deal, arguing that both companies were acting out of fear, not vision. I got dragged onto CNN that afternoon — I think they had a hard time finding someone to trash the deal — and the hosts treated my skepticism with disdain. Who was this punk from an upstart Web site to be questioning the actions of titans like Gerald Levin and Steve Case?

    We know how that one played out. Acquisitions at this scale virtually never lead to useful combinations, strategic synergies, or anything else of use. They are financial engineering. What’s happening with this one is pretty simple: Microsoft and Yahoo have both found themselves at dead ends, but they both have formidable assets, and their leaderships are acting out of desperation. Microsoft can’t build a successful search engine, Yahoo can’t gain traction against Google, and each may think the other can solve its problems. In the event of a deal we will probably hear, as we did with Time Warner/AOL, that it’s a merger, not an acquisition, but don’t be fooled: Microsoft has the extra billions here.

    Prediction: If Microsoft acquires Yahoo, the companies’ stock will initially prosper and the media will cheer on a new round of the War on Google. But seven years from now Yahoo will be as much of a shell as AOL is today. The talent will flee, the user base will stagnate, and Yahoo’s ability to innovate will wither under the weight of Microsoft bureaucracy and the pressure to serve Microsoft’s software interests.
    [tags]microsoft, yahoo, mergers[/tags]

    Only connect

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    Walgreens signThere’s a Walgreens on the corner I pass every morning between BART and the office. (There’s a Walgreens on most corners that haven’t already been occupied by a Starbucks.) And recently, every morning I have seen this sign, and every morning I experience a little twinge of awe.

    All Walgreens are connected!

    Are they like the Indian restaurants clustered on 6th street in New York’s East Village, long rumored to be connected via underground tunnel to one central kitchen?

    Or is this connection more metaphysical — do the stores experience that oceanic feeling of connectedness that tells them, yes, they belong here, they are at home in the world?

    I knew Walgreens was a chain. I didn’t know it was a great chain of being.