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My next book: the story of blogs

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I left Salon last summer with the idea of working on a new book. I’m happy to report that the book now has a deal and a publisher — Crown, with whom I had such a happy experience on DREAMING IN CODE — and I’ll be spending the next year or so researching and writing it.

I am, I think the word is, stoked.

The topic will seem obvious to any of you who’ve been reading my stuff over the years: It’s going to be a book about bloggers and blogging. The working title is SAY EVERYTHING, and we’re describing it as the story of how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and what it means for our culture.

Upon delivering this news I typically hear two wildly divergent responses from two different groups of listeners. People in the tech world tend to react like this: “Blogging? Oh, that’s so 2000!” They think blogging is something that happened way back in the early part of this decade, about which everything has already been said. Meanwhile, people outside the tech-industry bubble — who’ve never heard of Techcrunch or Techmeme — respond with variations on “I’d love to read that.”

I should probably point out here that the population of potential readers in the second group outnumbers those in the former. Yet I belong to the first group myself. So I also hope to show the insiders that there is more to be learned and understood about blogging than they perhaps realize.

In other words, I’ll continue to do the sort of writing on technology I’ve always done, since I started back at the old S.F. Examiner: trying to be accurate enough to keep the respect of those immersed in the field, and insightful enough to hold their interest, while doing my best to make sure that everything I’ve written appeals to smart people who know nothing about the subject. It’s a bit of a straddle; some readers thought I pulled it off with DREAMING IN CODE, some thought I fell to one side or the other. I’m going to try it again.

Why blogging? I think I harbor a secret wish to spend the next couple of years explaining that writing a, you know, book about blogging is really okay — and that, no, I don’t think it should have been a blog instead.

Seriously, there’s a great tale that has still not been fully told of how the practice actually evolved — from technical invention to media craze to cultural phenomenon. As the haphazard efforts to mark some sort of 10th-anniversary-of-blogging this year proved, people are still a little fuzzy on the basics of the story. (Rebecca Blood’s account from 2000 remains invaluable, but it’s incomplete and now far out of date.)

When Mike Arrington asked, last summer, “Will Someone Who Actually Cares About Blogging Please Write the History Of It?,” I just smiled. But I wasn’t ready to talk about my plans yet; I remain uncharacteristically superstitious about announcing big projects until their financing is in place. I realize this is terrible un-Web-2.0ish of me, but there it is.

So there’s a story, one about how innovations emerge, how they bubble up from the creativity of geeks and pass into the wider culture. There’s also an argument, one that I’ve been making for ages, in different forms, from my very first column on blogging eight years ago: that blogging is not, despite what you hear from so many different quarters, a trivial phenomenon. And that, despite all the dismissals (most recently by Doris Lessing), blogging — far from contributing to the demise of culture and the end of civilization — actually offers a lifeline in the sea of information overload.

There’s much further to say but that’s enough for now. More as the work progresses!
[tags]books, blogging, say everything[/tags]

Mind-changing thoughts for the new year

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Every year around this time John Brockman poses some Big Question to his Edge discussion group, a salon of scientists and intellectuals. The results are typically all over the map but you can almost always find something of value and/or use. This year’s question was “What have you changed your mind about?” Here are some nuggets I excavated from the sprawling pile:

BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin writes about how online communities need tending, describing BoingBoing’s experience with managing its comment space (the site hired Making Light‘s Teresa Nielsen Hayden to moderate). Her conclusion is that online discussions are best moderated by human hosts rather than voting systems or algorithms:

Plucking one early weed from a bed of germinating seeds changes everything. Small actions by focused participants change the tone of the whole. It is possible to maintain big healthy gardens online. The solution isn’t cheap, or easy, or hands-free. Few things of value are.

This isn’t exactly news; the gardening metaphor as applied to online conversation has a long history stretching back to the early days of the Well (and probably Usenet as well) and extending more recently into communities like Flickr and Wikipedia. But each new generation of online services needs to learn this lesson through experience; BoingBoing has managed it well.

Linda Stone writes insightfully, as always, about attention — and how we habitually hold our breath as we answer email (I tried observing myself and, yes, it’s true!):

I believe that attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit and that we can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals.

But lately I have observed that the way in which many of us interact with our personal technologies makes it impossible to use this extraordinary tool of attention to our advantage.

In observing others — in their offices, their homes, at cafes — the vast majority of people hold their breath especially when they first begin responding to email. On cell phones, especially when talking and walking, people tend to hyper-ventilate or over-breathe.

The rest is here.

Nick Carr — echoing ideas in his new book, The Big Switch, which I’m reading now — jumps off from a line by Chinese leader Hu Jintao to argue that the Net is becoming more centralized:

It’s not Hu Jintao who is deluded in believing that the net might serve as a powerful tool for central control. It is those who assume otherwise. I used to count myself among them. But I’ve changed my mind.

Kai Krause, who created software tools for designers that were hugely popular a decade or so ago, writes about the frustrating ephemerality of creativity in the software field.

Noting that “hardly any of my software even still runs at all,” he writes:

I used to think “Software Design” is an art form.

I now believe that I was half-right:
it is indeed an art, but it has a rather short half-life:
Software is merely a performance art!

A momentary flash of brilliance, doomed to be overtaken by the next wave, or maybe even by its own sequel. Eaten alive by its successors. And time…

Finally, Alison Gopnik, the psychologist and coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib, writes about the purpose of imaginative play:

Learning about the real world has obvious evolutionary advantages and kids do it better than anyone else. But why spend so much time thinking about wildly, flagrantly unreal worlds? The mystery about pretend play is connected to a mystery about adult humans – especially vivid for an English professor’s daughter like me. Why do we love obviously false plays and novels and movies?

…In fact, I think now that the two abilities — finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds — are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don’t just tell us what’s true — they tell us what’s possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don’t think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.

A fine insight — one that generations of readers of science fiction and fantasy know in their bones already.
[tags]edge, john brockman, xeni jardin, boingboing, online communities, linda stone, attention, nicholas carr, kai krause, alison gopnik[/tags]

Marshall McLuhan and the Web: Hot, cold, or…

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Today Nick Carr — whose new book, The Big Switch, comes out in January — has an interesting piece about McLuhan and today’s Web. Although Wired hoisted the Canadian media theorist into the digital era as its “patron saint” (the company’s book imprint even republished a couple of his collaborations with Quentin Fiore), it’s always been difficult to figure out how, exactly, to apply McLuhan’s theories to the Web. I took a stab at it in 1995 (an effort to which Carr kindly links), suggesting that the Web was neither a “hot” medium nor a “cold” one but rather some weird new lukewarm hybrid:

It remains almost exclusively a medium that transmits and reproduces vast quantities of text at high speeds. McLuhan interpreted the evolution of writing from ideograms and stone tablets to alphabetic characters and print reproduction as a “hotting up” “to repeatable print intensity.” By that standard, the Net is boiling.

On the other hand, its functional characteristics match those McLuhan identified as cool. There’s no question that the Internet is among the most participatory media ever invented, like the cool telephone. And its cultural patterns — with its oral-tradition-style transmission of myth and its collective anarchy — match those of McLuhan’s tribal global village.

…McLuhan said that all media are tranquilizers, but these hot-and-cold media have an especially potent numbing effect: They seduce us into lengthy engagement, offer us a feeling of empowerment and then glut our senses till we become indifferent.

My view of the Web has probably grown more positive since then; my own experience over the past 12 years has been one of growing engagement rather than creeping indifference. I think I was too pessimistic about the downside of glut.

But I think McLuhan would probably have shared that pessimism. He’s usually remembered in his high-priest-of-the-’60s mode, as a critic all too willing to dance on the grave of print. What I found when I dug deeper into McLuhan’s writings in the course of reviewing his biography for the Washington Post in 1997 (that piece is no longer available online so I’ve posted it here) was considerably more complex. He was, it turned out, most decidedly a lover of print himself.

In a 1959 letter, decades before the popularization of the Internet, he predicted: “When the globe becomes a single electronic computer, with all its languages and cultures recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant and impossible, no matter how precious.”

Ultimately, McLuhan’s perspective remains valuable more as a provocation to critical thought than as a fully worked out critical framework. He overloaded so many meanings on terms like “hot” and “cold” media that they could come to mean whatever you wanted them to mean. But there remains lasting value in McLuhan’s grand challenge to us — that we step out of the media bath in order to understand its effects on our organisms. What we most remember is his descriptive writing that mapped the impact of new media forms. We forget his prescriptive goal, of “immunizing” us from the worst influences of those media.

Carr reminds us of this in recalling McLuhan’s prophetic warning about the manipulative power of corporate media: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”
[tags]marshall mcluhan, media studies, nicholas carr[/tags]

Commerce or communication: the Net’s double-chambered heart

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Nick Carr on 8/31/07, writing about the effort to change how the Internet domain system’s “WHOIS” records work:

What makes the WHOIS deadlock interesting is that it reveals, in microcosm, the great and ever widening divide that lies at the net’s heart — the divide between the network as a platform for commerce and the network as a forum for personal communication. The way that tension is resolved — or not resolved — will go a long way toward determining the ultimate identity and role of the internet.

Carr’s succinct (and I think accurate) anatomy of the couer d’Net caught my eye and echoed something just beyond my memory’s grasp. Then I realized, right, this is very much the same dichotomy that I wrote about a long time ago in one of the annual “state of the Web” pieces (from October 1996) that I used to write for Salon:

Two very different groups are emerging with different ideas of how to drive the Web forward: call them the information peddlers and the community builders. The former see the Web as a conduit to distribute information and sell products on a few-to-many pattern; the latter see it as a place to exchange information, many-to-many — to yak.

Not only does this tension between what Carr calls “a platform for commerce” vs. “a forum for personal communication,” or what I called “the information peddlers” vs. “the community builders,” remain prevalent; it is a fissure cutting right through the center of what we’ve come to call Web 2.0.

Here’s a link to the full piece, headlined “After the Gold Rush.” Yes, we were saying that the Web gold rush was behind us. In 1996.

Gnomedex report: Friday

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Gnomedex is a friendly, human-scale conference of early-adopter geeks. When Jason Calacanis asked the crowd how many people were on the Web back in 1994 or 1995, four out of five hands went up. The event’s marketing tagline is “The Blogosphere’s Conference,” but of course this is only one slice of one blogosphere (there was, for instance, almost no overlap with this other blogosphere).

The sessions have been a wildly mixed bag. Things got off to a rocky start with the keynote by Robert Steele, a former intelligence officer turned crackpot libertarian who delivered a scattershot rant whose agenda was so vast that it was no agenda at all. For instance, Steele simultaneously advocated the “restoration” of the U.S. constitution (through, among other things, the impeachment of Dick Cheney) and the abolition of the U.S. constitution (via a new constitutional convention).

Steele believes that “central banking is an evil cancer,” but he could not make the effort to explain why. He raced flippantly through his own slides, showing a complete disrespect for the crowd (if he couldn’t take the time to prepare a presentation, why should we take the time to listen?). Among Steele’s positions: Henry Kissinger is a war criminal; the federal government is “going away”; wikipedia is for “morons” but Amazon.com will become the hub for a new global mind; we can attain world peace through “open everything” — including “open carry” of guns. There was something here for anyone to agree with, something else for anyone to disagree with, and in the end nothing of substance.

Far more valuable were Darren Barefoot‘s exploration of the relative value of different forms of digital do-good-ism and Ronni Bennett‘s presentation on aging and the Web (sites need to do a better job of making themselves accessible to the elderly). Vanessa Fox led a thoughtful discussion about the line between public and private information in a blog-based universe.

The day closed with Calacanis. His title slide read, “The Internet’s environmental crisis: How the Internet is being destroyed by selfish polluters — and how we can stop them.” Calacanis pines for the early days of the Web, before the SEO spammers got involved. But the talk was really a pitch for his new “human-powered” search company, Mahalo (which I wrote about here). Dave Winer called him out from the back row, declaring that the talk itself was “conference spam.”

I just thought there was something naive and/or disingenuous about the idea that Mahalo is a blow against spam. There are many classes of spam-related pollution of today’s Net — e-mail spam, comment spam, spam blogs — and of them all, actual spamming of search results is probably the least pressing. Google still does a pretty good job. The day that Google’s results look like the flow of spam into your e-mail inbox is the day that people will start clamoring for something like Mahalo. But unless Google slips up badly, that looks unlikely.

Mahalo is ad-free today, but sooner or later it will begin running search advertising. already runs Google text link ads, and one imagines it will push that more aggressively over time. (If the service succeeds in drawing big numbers, the pressure will be on to “monetize” the traffic; somebody has to pay all those “humans.”) Calacanis has an editorial background and promises clear labeling of all ads. That’s great. But Google’s ads are clearly labeled and separated from the search results, too. Having editors is a fine thing but it is no more a guarantee of incorruptibility than a good algorithm.

UPDATE: Darren Barefoot posted the full text of his talk. It’s an entertaining and enlightening walk through the comparative social value of many of the different kinds of volunteer activities and contributions people make on the Net to try to improve the world.
[tags]gnomedex, gnomedex 2007, robert steele, jason calacanis, mahalo, darren barefoot, ronni bennett, vanessa fox[/tags]

Meerkats inspire Wikipedia fracas

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MeerkatI watch precious little TV, but I had a long flight home late at night last Friday, and was brain-dead after too many hours awake but too wired to go to sleep. So I flipped the channels on Jetblue until I found myself staring at a group of a half-dozen or so of what looked like hybrid squirrel-rats, with raccoon eyes, who stood on their hind legs like begging dogs, only with an attentive, thousand-yard stare.

Meerkats. How little I knew! The show, Meerkat Manor — apparently, a big hit over on Animal Planet — follows a meerkat tribe or clan or whatever the term is. There’s a dominant female — she’s the only one allowed to breed — and a dominant male and a bunch of offspring. They hide from Kalahari predators in elaborate burrows — the title’s “manor” — but also engage in fierce territorial strife with other meerkat gangs.

Maybe it was my sleep deprivation, but I found these meerkats intensely dramatic: family tragedy, clan warfare, survival vs. the elements, all enacted by cute critters with sharp claws. The show anthropomorphizes its subjects to a degree that probably makes serious wildlife students cringe; each animal gets a name (like “Zaphod” and “Mozart” and “Flower”) and the gangs are “Whiskers” and “Lazuli” and such. In each show’s intro the meerkats are even given hushed voice-overs. But then the rest of the show proceeds in a less ridiculous, hyper-documentary mode. And fiber-optic cameras show you the action down in the burrows themselves! In this view, the meerkats all look like shoplifters caught on some dim subterranean security camera.

It was over to Wikipedia for me, to learn more. There I discovered that the show’s Wikipedia entry was under lock-down. There’d been an edit war over the meerkats! But why? Apparently some contributors posted information about some major deaths among the Whiskers in the latest season of the show. But that season hasn’t been aired yet in many places, so other contributors view the information as spoilers. And that has led to a fight. If you visit the discussion page you can follow an impassioned debate over whether it is possible to have a spoiler for a work of non-fiction.

If only the meerkats knew what mischief they were making for this strange species that’s filming them.
[tags]meerkat manor, documentaries, wikipedia[/tags]

Defacing online memorials: plus ca change…

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Salon has a piece today on “The New American Way of Death” about MyDeathSpace, a site that points to the MySpace profiles of recently deceased members, highlights the untimely deaths of young people and offers a discussion space for visitors to post notes — often rude — about the departed. It’s a good, well-researched article that raises questions about the site without taking a crotchety “ban the bums” line. (One of the pleasures of my new status is that I get to read the Salon daily lineup as a surprising cornucopia of reading material rather than the end-product of an inevitably messy editorial process in which I’ve been immersed.)

The thing is, there’s very little that’s “new” about MyDeathSpace. In 1996 I wrote a piece for Salon (we took that summer to publish a special “Death Issue”) titled “Ashes to Ashes, Bits to Bits.” The piece covered a number of topics, including the Well community’s response to Tom Mandel’s death and Timothy Leary’s vision of digital eternity. It also recounted an early instance of the MyDeathSpace phenomenon of flaming the dearly departed: the City of Berkeley’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial site hosted discussion boards, and they became a flashpoint for old political arguments. (The page, remarkably, is still there.)

As I wrote back in 1996: “If we are going to build our memorials on the Net, we have to expect that its boisterousness and its disrespect will spill over into their precincts.” As in the Web of “home pages” and discussion boards a decade ago, so on today’s sometimes anti-social “social Web.”
[tags]death, myspace, online memorials, salon[/tags]