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Interviewing the ex-audience #2: Sylvia Paull

June 27, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Sylvia Paull

This is the second post in my homage to Spalding Gray’s “Interviewing the Audience” — this time, with a spotlight on someone I’ve know for two decades. I first met Sylvia Paull when I somehow stumbled on the Cybersalon she was hosting in her Berkeley living room in the early ’90s. She is a great connector of people and ideas; these days she runs two different lunch series (one tech-oriented and one for women to share ideas) and hosts speaking events at the Hillside Club, still under the Cybersalon rubric.

A Fast Company profile once called Paull “a public relations icon.” Yet unlike so many who have labored in that field, she is fearless about speaking her own mind. I’m grateful for the time she took to answer my questions.

Who are you and what are you up to? Tell us a little about yourself — or a lot.

Who is Sylvia? That’s my email moniker, the title of a Shakespeare sonnet and a Schubert lieder, and it’s a question I ask myself every day. I’m a writer who makes her living writing for high-tech startups and nonprofits that want to be covered by media, attract an audience, and become famous for what they do.

I was the first U.S. citizen born in Germany after WWII, in 1946, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower came to visit me and my parents at the U.S. Army hospital in Frankfurt am Main. My father, trained as a conductor, was Eisenhower’s bandleader; he met my mother, a German Holocaust survivor, right after WWII when he went to find missing relatives at the Jewish refugee services, where she was working. They regarded my birth as something of a miracle. My birth certificate, which is in German, identifies me as neither German nor American but as “Israelisch.” Like many Jews of my generation, I was named after a dead relative. One of my first memories is of two Yahrzeit candles burning on the mantelpiece of our San Francisco home and my mother telling me they stood for her father and her mother.

Our house was filled with music, food, and absence. My father was gone for 18 months when he led a U.S. military band in South Korea during the so-called Korean conflict. He said that General Douglas MacArthur, the military commander, refused to let his soldiers put on winter clothing until the final victory march. There was no victory, and all of the men in my father’s band were left behind to freeze in Chinese prison camps. My father, because he was an officer, albeit the lowest ranking chief warrant officer, was in the last batch of troops ferried to an escaping ship.

Another early memory: I am five years old waiting for my father to come off a troop ship anchored in San Francisco Bay. If I listen, I can still hear the ship’s horn echoing through the fog. The ship’s passengers are quarantined because of some illness, and we stare out of the window in the Sunset District, waiting for our father to appear out of the mist. He finally comes, much heavier than before, wearing a thick winter coat. Every week during his absence, my mother had baked a marble cake — swirling chocolate into vanilla batter, which my sister and I got to taste by licking the prongs from the electric beater and the mixing bowl — and sent the cake to Korea. Dad lived on those cakes, and also canned beans, because he wouldn’t eat non-kosher meat.

I asked him if he ever shot anyone, and he wouldn’t tell me. He did say the band played live music at the front lines while the Chinese placed tape recorders and speakers in the terrain to rouse their troops to battle.

We later moved to Bremerhaven, Germany, where I got my first bicycle and pedaled over cobblestone streets. We lived in a military zone, occupied by the British and the U.S. I had to be careful never to go off road because of live landmines. Convoys of tanks regularly commandeered the roads, and I’d weave my one-speed bicycle, decked out with embroidered badges and flags, between them. At the U.S. Army school, we played ghost in a bomb shelter left over from WWII, and on Sundays, my dad would take us to a desecrated Jewish cemetery and read us stories from the Old Testament. On weekends, we went to the local opera house, rebuilt after the war, and listened to light operas like Die Fledermaus, and ate chocolates filled with real liquor.

I am a product of WWII, and although I am and have always been an American, I feel European and also part of a world that no longer exists. It’s ironic, because I make my living by celebrating the disruption of former worlds.

What does “being yourself” mean to you? what do you do that makes you feel most yourself?

Writing and bicycling make me forget who I am. Instead, I become what I do. Once I dreamt I was writing a great novel – in German – and when I woke up, I had the certain feeling that I would write that book some day. When I was 50, I took up amateur bicycle racing and raced all over Northern California. I remember a breakthrough race when my body just took over – my mind disappeared – and I felt as if my purpose in life was to bicycle fast. When my mind did reappear, it said, “This is what life is all about.” Having a child was like that, too.

Is there anything (or things) about the Web and social media today that you think get in the way of you “being yourself” — or other people being themselves?

It’s scary how ubiquitous computing has become. Going anywhere, people are always checking their mobile devices. Maybe this puts them more in touch with themselves than looking at random people and objects in the street would do, but it just seems weird and kind of habit-forming.

I used to smoke cigarettes, and the need to constantly check one’s mobile device reminds me of the nicotine habit.

What’s your media diet? How do you go about choosing what you read, see, listen to?

I read good writing, usually in print form because it’s easier on the eyes and I’m used to print. (I used to work in the UC Printing plant, where typesetters laid lead type by hand.) Every day I read The New York Times, which is delivered to my place. I start with the obituaries, then the op-ed columns, the arts, business, and finally, the “news,” which is old by the time it appears in print. I choose to read whatever my favorite reporters write, people like Patricia Leigh Brown, Kim Severson, David Carr, and Dwight Garner (these are all NY Times bylines).

I read Re/code for tech news because the writing and curation demonstrate a standard for selection, whereas most tech sites churn out whatever press releases come their way.

I’ve been reading The New Yorker since I was nine. I take handwritten notes on articles and stories I like and look up words I don’t know.

I don’t have a television and do not watch TV shows on the Internet. The only live videos I watch are bicycle races like the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France. I watch Netflix movies, mostly foreign films and particularly German movies, which are usually grim. I also go to movie theaters regularly, as well as Berkeley Rep, and the Hillside Club for concerts.

I listen to a variety of Internet radio stations, from college stations across the country to the Mozart channel and Cajun music. I rarely listen to radio news, except once in a while I’ll turn on NPR while I’m preparing a meal. I used to co-produce a radio show on science for UC called Science Editor, so I’m jaded about radio news and interviews. I know what goes into the sausage.

I give money to KQED, Grist, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Berkeleyside because I support independent journalism, but I don’t always read everything they send me. If I only have two hours a day for absorbing news, then I’ll stick to the Times and Re/code.

Give us a link to something you made, or something you love, or something that you want the rest of us to see!

Years ago, Dave Winer got me started on a blog: whoisylvia.typepad.com. It’s become a forum for me and myself, since most people don’t have time to read other people’s blogs, myself included. I also host several events, more like salons, where I like to get people questioning the way we think about work, play, and life in general. These are listed on my web site at www.sylviapaull.com.

Filed Under: Interviews, Project, Uncategorized

IndieWeb ho! A brief intro to a little movement with big ideas

June 26, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg 7 Comments

Independent Rider Rally
If you believe, as I do, that

  • Good things start small;
  • Open technology is more attractive and reliable than proprietary technology;
  • The Web works best when we connect as autonomous individuals in public space rather than as customers in private space;
  • Playing around with new Web tools is fun even when they’re not quite ready for prime time;

then you will be as excited as I am about the IndieWeb. Self-described as “a people-focused alternative to the ‘corporate web’,” the IndieWeb is an umbrella term describing what is at once a movement, a concept, and a set of nascent software tools.

To date it has manifested itself mostly in the form of informal working meetups called IndieWebCamps (the first was in 2011). The next one is this weekend, taking place both in Portland and in NYC, with some farther-flung outposts checking in as well. Since Wordyard is both a place for me to write about stuff like the IndieWeb and also to put some of these tools to use, I’m going to Portland — both to report and to participate.

There is no single iconic IndieWeb project, protocol, or standard. Here are some exemplary initiatives (these are just the ones I’m most familiar with — there’s a fuller list here):

  • IndieAuth: Method for using your own domain name to sign in to websites.
  • Bridgy: Service that feeds social-media comments on your posts back to your personal site.
  • Known: Personal publishing/community platform in development, based on IndieWeb principles.
  • P3K: Personal publishing and status updates, based on IndieWeb principles.
  • IndieBox: “Personal cloud”-style hardware for managing personal data.

That should give you a quick sense of the breadth and heterogeneity of the work by IndieWeb enthusiasts. The spirit here isn’t “let’s conquer the world”; it’s “let’s stop just talking about this stuff and start getting it to work for ourselves.” The IndieWebCamp “Principles” page is a good read if you want to understand the ideals at work behind these projects.

Wired ran a thorough write-up last summer under the headline “Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet.” Since then the IndieWeb has largely flown under the tech-media radar.

In a world where the press is mostly occupied with handicapping the participants in a corporate Battle of the Behemoths, that’s only to be expected. But I think it’s a mistake.

Unless you enjoy tinkering with unfinished software on your website (some of us do!) most of these projects aren’t going to serve your needs — yet. The IndieWeb’s collective project is simply not ready for prime time or mass adoption. And sure, it’s possible that it may never be. It may always be for pros and semi-pros, developers and technical sophisticates.

On the other hand, every time I hear that line about some new technology, I think, you know, that’s what they said about the Internet in 1993.

Filed Under: Features, Project, Uncategorized

Why Amazon vs. Hachette should have news publishers quaking

June 25, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

Amazon UK Warehouse

Proposition: Amazon is to Hachette as Facebook is to all news publishers.

You know about Amazon’s dispute with book publishing giant Hachette, right? Amazon and the collective book publishing industry have been locked in a long-term war over the price of ebooks, and that’s now left the World’s Biggest Bookstore with some unusual gaps on its shelves. There is no underdog in this fight; it’s two colossal, unsympathetic combatants rolling in the mud — the Eastern Front of the online trade wars. (Here’s a good primer on the fight.)

Amazon is powerful today because over the past 20 years it has become the central chokepoint for distribution of both physical books and ebooks. It’s not a full-on monopoly yet; it’s got one ailing large-company competitor still in Barnes & Noble, and a sea of plucky independents will still sell us books. But it’s the key player. So when it says to a publisher like Hachette, “If you don’t play along you’ll pay a price,” it can extract a price.

Amazon vs. Hachette is a fascinating story in its own right, but today I want to use it as a lens to look at a different conflict — one that hasn’t flared yet.

Over the past 2-3 years, Facebook has begun to assume an Amazon-like role in the ecosystem of online news. We have quickly moved from a Web in which you got your readers either from search or from “organic” traffic sources (home-page visitors, regulars, and e-mail subscribers) to one where you get an enormous chunk of your readers directly from Facebook shares.

Partly this has happened naturally; so many of us love to graze on Facebook links! More recently, Facebook itself has goosed the process by deliberately opening a spigot of traffic to news publishers by tweaking its News Feed algorithm to favor their links.

When this happened last year, once it became clear that the changes favored actual quality journalism over viral linkbait, there was much celebration in newsrooms. Facebook was a savior. All you had to do was beef up your social-media team, A/B test your headlines and you could count on steady, impressive traffic growth from now till doomsday.

But there is an actual doomsday on this timeline. We know this because not that long ago Facebook pulled this same act with the entire world of consumer-facing business (or “brands,” as they’ve been dubbed in this arena). Facebook sold the “brands” on using its platform to connect with Real People, and brands leapt at the opportunity, pouring money and effort into building brand pages and huge followings, and everything was great until Facebook turned around and said, “Now we are demoting your posts — if you want to reach people you’ll have to pay us.”

If you are an editor or publisher or news executive today, you must know that Facebook is going to pull exactly the same bait-and-switch move on you. Feast on free traffic! Tailor your business around it! Now, pay up! Facebook has big post-IPO revenue goals it needs to deliver on; there is no question that this is going to happen — the only uncertainty is when.

I understand that publishers today have no choice but to engage with Facebook on some level: you go where your readers are, and right now, the readers are there. But smart ones will keep an eye on the world beyond Facebook. Sooner or later they are going to find themselves, just like Hachette, locked in a commercial struggle with the entity that increasingly controls their distribution. And they’re going to have even less leverage than Hachette does.

In upcoming posts, I’ll look at what concrete steps publishers can take to avoid the Facebook trap and build a more sustainable future.

MICROECONOMICS ADDENDUM: There’s an unusual wrinkle to my analogy that is of quantitative interest. Amazon wants Hachette to sell its ebooks cheaper than Hachette wants; it’s the classic Walmart squeeze-your-suppliers tactic. With Facebook and news publishers, the news publishers (almost but not quite universally) are already giving away their product for free. So the “lower your prices” squeeze manifests itself as a negative price — i.e., Facebook ends up asking the publishers for a fee to distribute their goods.

Filed Under: Features, Project, Uncategorized

Links: Twitter trolls, data doppelgangers, Obama anon

June 21, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg 3 Comments

Twitter just got significantly crazier

Basically, a bunch of misogynist pranksters from 4chan have recently taken to creating fake Twitter accounts to impersonate feminist caricatures. This campaign in turn seems to be part of a broader effort, according to this Buzzfeed summary, “Activists Are Outing Hundreds Of Twitter Users Believed To Be 4chan Trolls Posing As Feminists”:

Operation: Lollipop is a propaganda campaign run largely by members of the Men’s Rights and Pick-Up Artist communities. The idea is to pose as women of color on Twitter and guide activist hashtags as a way to embarrass the online social justice community.

This loathsome and ridiculous development raises all sorts of disturbing questions — particularly for journalists who increasingly rely on Twitter for “person in the street” quotes and story leads. It’s good to see the pushback against these buffoons, but it’s also one more reason to use caution when relying on Twitter as a source of actual information, human sentiments, and quotations.

Personalization and its discontents

Data Doppelgängers and the Uncanny Valley of Personalization is a provocative argument by Sara Watson, in the Atlantic, about the imperfection of personalized ad-targeting and the creepy feelings it induces, with a nod to Freud:

Ads seem trivial. But when they start to question whether I’m eating enough, a line has been crossed…

My data doppelgänger is made up of my browsing history, my status updates, my GPS locations, my responses to marketing mail, my credit card transactions, and my public records. Still, it constantly gets me wrong, often to hilarious effect. I take some comfort that the system doesn’t know me too well, yet it is unnerving when something is misdirected at me. Why do I take it so personally when personalization gets it wrong?…

Personalization appeals to a Western, egocentric belief in individualism. Yet it is based on the generalizing statistical distributions and normalized curves methods used to classify and categorize large populations. Personalization purports to be uniquely meaningful, yet it alienates us in its mass application. Data tracking and personalized advertising is often described as “creepy.” Personalized ads and experiences are supposed to reflect individuals, so when these systems miss their mark, they can interfere with a person’s sense of self. It’s hard to tell whether the algorithm doesn’t know us at all, or if it actually knows us better than we know ourselves. And it’s disconcerting to think that there might be a glimmer of truth in what otherwise seems unfamiliar. This goes beyond creepy, and even beyond the sense of being watched.

We’ve wandered into the uncanny valley.

Obama <3 Anonymous

Obama Adviser Valerie Jarrett: President Has ‘Cabin Fever’:

“I might walk up to the Lincoln Memorial, sit on there,” Obama said when asked on the “Live with Kelly and Michael” talk show what he would choose if he could do anything unrecognized. “Maybe I’d wander around and find myself at a little outdoor cafe or something and sit and order something and just watch people go by. The thing you miss most about being president is anonymity.”

Before you laugh, remember that the presidential panopticon seems to be where everyday life for the rest of us is heading.

Of course, there’s always the Henry V “go incognito amongst your troops the night before battle” solution:

Gawker anatomized

Great description of Gawker in Michael Hastings’ posthumously published novel, as quoted in Dwight Garner’s review:

…Wretched, a website that resembles Gawker. It’s a site he admires and reviles, where the contributors harbor “a desire to be noticed and to criticize the criticizers of the world, to gain its acceptance by rejecting it, breeding a strange kind of apathy and nihilism and ambition.”

There is, I think, a direct line of descent — ideologically, at least — from Spy to Suck.com to Gawker.

thinksmallRequiem for a copywriter

Ad man Julian Koenig created Volkswagen’s classic “Think Small” campaign, which must have left a deep impression on the young Steve Jobs. This obit for Koenig, who also created memorable campaigns for Timex and the first Earth Day, is full of fascinating bits.

In 1966, he was inducted into the Copywriters Hall of Fame of the Advertising Writers Association of New York. He expressed his gratitude by skewering the association for giving awards based on creativity or artfulness.

Sales, he suggested, were the only important measure.

“The hardest thing in the world to resist is applause,” he said at his induction. “Your job is to reveal how good the product is, not how good you are, and the simpler the better.”

…Advertising earned Mr. Koenig a very good living, and it was important to him that he received proper credit for his work. But throughout his life he also questioned whether it was a valid profession.

He spoke candidly about his concern in a 2009 interview for the public radio program “This American Life.” The segment was produced by [his daughter] Sarah Koenig, a “This American Life” producer.

“Advertising is built on puffery — on, at heart, deception,” he said. “And I don’t think anybody can go proudly into the next world with a career built on deception — no matter how well they do it.”

Filed Under: Links, annotated, Project, Uncategorized

The power in playing small rooms

June 16, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

tmg 2014-06-15I thought I came late to John Darnielle and the Mountain Goats. By the time I discovered them in 2004, they already had a dauntingly extensive catalog of tapes and albums under their belt. But it turned out to be good timing: they were on the cusp of a creative leap. Now I’ve been a fan for a decade (previous posts here, here, and here).

I love this music, and I spent the past weekend in a happy haze of it. The band, which has built a devoted and growing following, played three remarkable shows at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. It’s a tiny place, a club that holds maybe 200, 250 people. Most performers who’ve reached the stage Darnielle is at would play bigger places exclusively.

These gigs have downsides, I’m sure, for him: Less money, no doubt. More of his time (you play three nights to reach the same number of people you could reach in one at a bigger hall). And, I have to assume, some sacrifice in the amenities available in the performers’ lounge. But the plus is a kind of familiarity and intimacy with the crowd that you simply can’t fake.

Each night this weekend, the Mountain Goats played the full sequence of songs from one of the cassette tapes they’d recorded on a boombox in the ’90s. And each night, as they dusted off these for-diehard-fans-only tracks, a significant proportion of the audience sang along.

This kind of choice may not support Darnielle in his retirement, I guess. But if one of the goals of an artist is to have one’s work connect with others — and to know that the connection has been made, to feel the circuit completed — it’s got to be a powerful thing.

There’s a parallel here between the Mountain Goats’ decision to play a smaller venue and the choice we can each make to favor meaningful exchanges over “social reach,” friend counts, and follower numbers.

If you listen to the Mountain Goats’ music or read Darnielle’s Tumblr or Twitter feeds, you get a pretty strong sense that he knows exactly what Jeff Pooley meant by the “authenticity bind.” And he has a pretty powerful strategy for, if not defeating it, at least side-stepping it.

Part of that comes from being an incredibly talented and defiantly idiosyncratic songwriter and performer. (He’s also got a novel coming out later this year.) Part of it, I imagine, also comes from a whole career spent tracing the contours of authenticity.

Last night, between songs, Darnielle delivered a disarmingly intense monologue about the challenge any performer faces in trying to stay “real” onstage night after night. It also very much applies, I think, to our everyday lives, and our online selves, too. Here it is (transcribed from the recording here):

There are some people who’ve been here three nights in a row. I don’t script what I say between songs. But then if I’m describing a song, I’m gonna say something generally in the same ballpark that i said the other night. And I’m really self-conscious about this.

Because a friend of mine waited like 15 years to see Leonard Cohen, she went to see Leonard Cohen — Leonard Cohen is of course God, and we can say nothing bad about him, he’s the best, the best among us are really not fit to shine his shoes.

But at the same time, he’s got a very different idea about performance, insofar as he didn’t do it for like 15 years… So he came out to play the show, everybody in my town went to see it and just was knocked over. He’d tell these stories between songs, he doesn’t have a teleprompter, it looks and feels like it comes straight off the dome, but that’s because he’s a performer.

The next time he came back, everybody bought tickets for two nights. They went back night two, it was the same set-list, and the same patter, some of which sounds very improvised. And they were all grief-stricken.

Now I wanted to defend Leonard Cohen, but at the same time — because, I think, this has to do with being Catholic — a deep fear is instilled in me, that if I do anything of the sort, someday I will look out at the person who I saw the previous night and I’ll be telling the same story, and their face will fill with sorrow, and they will give me a look which says: “You have betrayed me. And I didn’t need you to betray me.”

Each of us distills life into stories we tell one another — in person, in media, in art. Repetition is inevitable. Keeping it real is hard.

You can take Cohen’s road: become transcendently good at repeating yourself, at creating the performer’s magical illusion that each scripted moment is spontaneous. Or you can take Darnielle’s road: look people in the eye and pledge to do your damnedest to make each presentation of yourself as fresh and open as you know how.

I think both approaches are honorable. But Darnielle’s holds up better on the second night.

Filed Under: Features, Project, Uncategorized

Whispers and cries: The anonymous-app short-cut to intimacy is a dead end

June 9, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

The promise made by the new anonymous-confession apps — Whisper and Secret — is a paradox: you can be most yourself, they say, when you are expressing yourself anonymously.

Sure you can. You can also be anyone else you want to be.


Both Whisper and Secret have emerged as reactions against the artificial gloss of self-presentation on Facebook. On Facebook, we tend to censor all but the most positive version of our lives. The founders of Whisper and Secret explicitly aim to provide us with a new stage on which we are free to expose more of ourselves, warts and all — and we don’t even have to admit that they’re, you know, our warts.

Here’s how Secret’s founders put it in their launch essay:

Speaking on a stage in front of a mixed audience of family, friends, and acquaintances makes it hard for us to be our most authentic selves. As a result, we tend to share only our proudest moments in an attempt to portray our best selves. We filter too much, and with that, lose real human connection.

We built Secret for people to be themselves and share anything they’re thinking and feeling with their friends without judgment. We did this by eliminating profile photos and names and by putting the emphasis entirely on the words and images being shared. This way, people are free to express themselves without holding back.

And here’s the pitch from Whisper, via a CNET profile:

Whisper is not really about spreading secrets, CEO Michael Heyward insists. Rather, it’s a place where our masks come off. Social media, you see, is the purveyor of our half-truths and outright lies. As is the case with reality television, the typical social network helps people push forward a highly edited version of the truth designed to make them look better — or worse — than they really are. Whisper, then, is intended to be a place where we can be ourselves, where authenticity thrives.

“I don’t want to live in a world where you feel like you can’t be yourself,” Heyward told me.

It’s not just company founders pushing this line. Here is Frederic Lardinois in Techcrunch:

This new breed of apps allows us to be our online selves again — and leaving aside all the other (and very real) concerns around bullying and false gossip, that feels pretty freeing. Google, Facebook and all the other players in this field want to own our online identities and have made us sanitize our feeds. There is some use for that, but it’s only natural that there is a pushback now.

And here is Sarah Buhr, also in Techcrunch:

The rise of anonymous apps like Snapchat, Secret, Whisper and others allow us to be who we really are, not who we want others to perceive us as, online.

Apparently there’s a deep well of authenticity out there, just waiting to be uncorked. All we have to do is sever the connection that Facebook enforces between our self-expression and our names, and the reality geyser will spout.

Of course, the whole point of Facebook, originally, was to create an online space where you shared stuff safely with friends in a way that let you be more “yourself” than you could be on the public Internet. But “friends” gradually lost its meaning, and Facebook became a multi-billion-dollar corporation with a desperate need for revenue that impelled it to deemphasize privacy and favor public posting.

So here we are again. As Facebook did to the Web of yore, so Secret and Whisper aim to do to Facebook.

But what do people actually do with Whisper and Secret? What are the use cases for anonymous social networks? Let’s take them in descending order of value to society:

  • a conduit for whistleblowers
  • a psychic release for the stressed-out
  • a breeding ground for rumors and celebrity gossip
  • a haven for trolls and bullies


From what I can tell, there’s not a whole lot of whistleblowing happening on Secret and Whisper, which is hardly surprising, since these services’ guarantees of anonymity are full of holes, and if you had some serious corruption or violation of public trust to report, you’d probably pick a more effective megaphone.


If you take a look at either of these apps today, you will find they are serving mostly as a sort of open online confessional for users — chiefly teenagers, college students, and twenty-somethings. That puts it in a venerable tradition, including this 1999-era “virtual confessional” and the PostSecret art project, which helped inspire Whisper.

What’s most interesting about browsing both Whisper and Secret today is that neither fully succeeds in breaking through users’ self-airbrushing habit. Secret, for instance, is full of clever Twitter-like banter and jibes (“When I hear Uber I think Deutschland Uber alles”). That might be because, with both apps, posts need to get liked/faved/hearted in order to spread more widely, so you’re encouraged to play to the crowd. Or it might just be because playing to the crowd is an irrepressible human instinct, online or off.

More disturbing is how frequently threats of suicide and other kinds of self-harm turn up. “My life is worthless. I could die tonight and no one would care or even notice. Suicide is getting closer.” That confession crossed my screen during my very first spin with Secret. Since Secret promises to deliver messages from your own contacts, you can’t help feeling some obligation to do more than click on to the next item; yet you’re also pretty much helpless, since you don’t know who to console. (Ofcourse, you can post an encouraging message in response, and you can flag posts and hope that the service intervenes in some way. But the rest is invisible.)

As safety valves for the volatile pressures of the social-media universe, Secret and Whisper could fill a small niche, and maybe even do some good. But they don’t have the luxury of staying small and fine-tuning their human interactions. Both of these services are venture-capital-backed startup companies. That means someone has bet tens of millions of dollars that their products will either make lots of money themselves someday, or be deemed worth acquiring by some other company that’s in the monetizing business.

For users, there is never a good ending to this story. 
The young founders of the anonymity apps may yearn to create networks of honest self-revelation, but they have chosen vehicles that are certain to betray them.

The collective hunger these apps feed is our desire for ways to be intimate and vulnerable together — online, too. That’s what Secret and Whisper are selling. But it’s unrealistic to expect to achieve that in a fully public space; it’s unlikely for it to emerge on a for-profit platform; and it will never fully satisfy us if we don’t connect what we are saying with who we are.

There just aren’t any short-cuts to true intimacy. You can’t download the free version, and you can’t uninstall it with a click. It’s real and precious, and, although you can’t buy it, one way or another, you do have to pay for it.

Filed Under: Features, Project, Uncategorized

Links: IndieWeb optimism; Ouellette’s self analysis; native advertising’s scam

June 6, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

raygun gothic rocketship

  • How we’re on the verge of an amazing new open web: Ben Werdmuller of WithKnown lays out the IndieWeb argument:

    The social web was a proof of concept. We needed a space to experiment…. We’ve learned a lot about social behavior. We understand how to create a great user experience that people find comfortable to use; we understand how to make it easy to share and to publish. Those things didn’t come easily, but we have them, and the learning was made easier by creating simpler architectures: centralized systems where user activity could be observed.

    It’s time for the next step.

    Open follows closed. We know that we need to open our platforms, and that mass surveillance by governments around the world is a problem. It’s even fair to say that it’s a problem that’s been enabled by creating these centralized proofs of concept. Luckily, the next evolution of the web is taking place.

    The idea is simple: instead of everyone giving all their information to a site like Facebook, they keep it themselves, but still get to communicate easily using all of the great user experience discoveries we’ve made. You can still share selfies, make friends, listen to music together and share links, but now you do it in a space that’s really yours, and that you get to have more control over.

    The IndieWeb movement will be a key thread of what I’m covering here at Wordyard.

  • Jennifer Ouellette is interviewed about her new book on the science of self, Me, Myself, and Why, on public radio’s Science Friday (this bit is at the 23′ mark):

    Q: These days the self is online…. Do you think that social media has changed our selves in a fundamental way? In other words, now that we have the avatar, Facebook self, Twitter self, have we given away a part of the self? Do we need that now, because everybody else does it, to be a fully whole self?

    A: I don’t really see it as something new or dangerous. Believe it or not, I think that what we’re doing is pretty much the same thing we’ve always done when it comes to how we manage our public self. It’s just that there’s now a new realm into which we’ve extended it. One of the most amazing things about the self, and how the brain processes and constructs the self, is that it’s so flexible — it can expand and contract and adapt. And that public face, your avatar or your Twitter handle or that thing that goes out into public to represent you, is an extension of you. And we’ve always done that, whether it’s through magazines, or books, or cameras taking photographs. I think it’s always natural to assume every time there’s a new technology, that something is being lost. But it’s just a different realm, and the brain is doing what it’s always done.

    Q: As [your twitter handle and Second Life avatar] JenLucPiquant, do you think that’s allowed you to do things you wouldn’t do in normal life?

    A: She’s a fun thing, because she sometimes is my mouthpiece if there’s something kind of snarky that I don’t really want to say, I can put it in her mouth, and she can say it, and it gives me a little bit of distance. But only a little, because more and more it’s starting to become an extension of me.

  • Copyranter: BuzzFeed’s Native Advertising Is Nothing But A Confidence Game: [via Andrew Sullivan] There’s nothing new about camouflaging ads as editorial matter; it’s been going on as long as there’ve been ads and publications. (It was known as “advertorial” when I was a wee lad.) All that’s different today is the pattern on the camouflage. What’s constant is the pressure from the advertisers to blur the differentiation between the ad and the not-ad.

    This post offers an arresting take on today’s “native-ad” mania, refreshingly from the perspective of an ad guy — Mark “Copyranter” Duffy, who wrote ad reviews for Buzzfeed till he was let go.

    Duffy explains why “native ads” will fail: They serve neither the advertiser nor the reader, though at the moment they are filling Buzzfeed’s coffers and filling the “flavor of the month” niche of the Web ad business.

    Looking at BuzzFeed’s daily layout, it’s obvious that they’re praying to God you don’t notice that their ads are in fact yucky ads. It is purposely deceptive….

    The kicker is: BuzzFeed’s native advertising is really—ultimately—terrible for brands. But it’s great for BuzzFeed. And this giddy circle jerk underway between media sites desperate for revenue and misguided advertisers desperate to feel instant gratification, continues….

    …I would have asked [Buzzfeed VP Jonathan] Perelman this question: “What percentage of people who click BuzzFeed’s ad posts remember who the advertiser was?” Their data slicksters probably don’t put that number up on the wall, because I guarantee you it’s a very low one.

  • Today’s song speaks for itself: Graham Parker’s “Passion is No Ordinary Word” — this live version is from 1979.

Filed Under: Links, annotated, Project, Uncategorized

Top 10 reasons Huffington Post decided to give Facebook its comments

June 4, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg 3 Comments

The botnet did it.

The botnet did it.

The Huffington Post has announced that it is handing over its entire comments system to those crazy social-graph-heads at Facebook. (The editors made the news public over this last weekend, which tells you something about how much they wanted it to get around.)

This is noteworthy since HuffPo (now owned by AOL) has always talked a proud line about the value and importance of its community. It has invested considerable effort and resources into moderating the flood of reader comments on its high-traffic pages, and has long been a poster-child for the success of that kind of moderation. As you might expect, the site’s devoted user base simply loved the change, haha, JK.

So what gives? Herewith, some speculation, idle rumor, and pure fabrication.

HuffPo is moving its comments to Facebook because…

  • (10) …AOL CEO Tim Armstrong wants Facebook to buy the whole operation, and he’s making nice to Clan Zuckerberg.
  • (9) …HuffPo leadership understands that before much longer, 100 percent of news-site traffic will come as Facebook referrals, so why fight the future?
  • (8) …It’s all a big mistake! Someons in HuffPo operations got phished, lost control of the site’s Facebook account to a botnet in Belarus, and before the editors knew what happened, the switch got flipped.
  • (7) …No, actually, it happened while all the HuffPo honchos were taking naps.
  • (6) …Arianna Huffington woke from a nap and realized that the whole frenzied business of user comments ran counter to her Third Metric ethos of work-life balance.
  • (5) …HuffPo editors were suddenly seized with the epiphany that all the users who post angry diatribes for/against gun control/pot legalization want all their Facebook friends to see every single carefully weighed word.
  • (4) …Obviously, AOL is just protecting its dialup business, the way it always has. (OK, I don’t understand what that might have to do with the commenting platform, and neither do they. It just is.)
  • (3) …The NSA discovered that the entire corpus of 6,472,835,119 comments in HuffPo’s database actually contain an encrypted representation of the Snowden files, set to decode in the event of the whistleblower’s demise. AOL’s lawyers didn’t want any of that.
  • (2) …The Obama birth-certificate forgers who run the Democrat-loving site couldn’t handle the EXPLODING BARRELS OF TRUTH that patriot commenters were smuggling into their socialist, abortionist, homosexual-coddling pages! But they will fail! Even Facebook can’t keep the voices of freedom down!!!!!! !!!
  • (1) …As CTO Otto Toth explained in the Saturday announcement, “At The Huffington Post, we are always thinking of ways to better engage our worldwide audience and create a meaningful community for our readership.”

    But, you know, on second thought, we’ve decided it’s a hell of a lot easier to let another company do the thinking and creating for us.

Filed Under: Features, Project, Uncategorized

Apple: Leave room for “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels,” wouldja?

June 3, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg 3 Comments

Yosemite

Yesterday my feeds were full of chatter about translucency. Apple’s big announcement day included some major overhauls to the Mac operating system in its new Yosemite release. The edges of windows, henceforth, will be see-through! Some font will change. Icons, too. Big stuff afoot.

Apple’s marketing act is so well-choreographed at this point that it commands the tech world’s attention — whether there is real news or just the sort of stuff that, long ago, might have been relegated to a technical white paper.

When you are the company that produces most of the devices members of the tech press use every day, that’s understandable. But I’ve learned that every batch of Apple announcements contains some that end up making a difference and others that turn out to be duds — and the calls made by the pundits in the first 24 hours often don’t pan out.

So, as we chew on the incremental improvements and competitive feints that constitute Apple’s seasonal burping up of announcements, there’s a larger story whose thread I hope we don’t lose: As Apple continues to meld iOS (for the iPhone and iPad) with OSX (for the Mac), how will its choices expand or confine users’ creative options?

Apple has always served two crowds: The everyday non-technical user who wanted things to “just work,” and the creative professional who needed the integrated features that only Apple offered. At its very best — with extraordinary products in both ancient times (HyperCard) and the modern era (GarageBand) — Apple found ways to bridge these two worlds. It created simple tools that led users magically toward complexity without ever cramping their style.

In the world of user experience research this sort of thing is called “end-user programming.” That’s when people who can’t write code themselves are given enough power to push a creative tool in new directions — and to share their work.

Because end-user programming mobilizes the innovative energy of a much larger population with more diverse needs than the software-developer crowd, it drives unexpected sea-changes in technology. It is what sparked the adoption of spreadsheets in the ’80s, which turned out to be the early personal-computing business’s first “killer app.” It also catalyzed the initial success of the Web itself: HTML was easy to learn and write yourself; URLs were a simple, universal way to point to other people’s stuff you liked; and “view source” let you see exactly how they did it and try it out yourself.

There are still pockets of this sort of empowered creativity in the world of the Mac. There is precious little of it in the consumption-happy world of iOS. As Apple goes about merging its two universes, it needs to keep that space for “end-user programming” open — not just because advanced users want it, but because it’s where unpredictable innovations grow.

One small indication of Apple’s direction here is the way the new OSX will hide full URLs in Safari’s address bar. This isn’t the end of the world for webheads — a click will reveal the full address path — but it indicates what we can assume is Apple’s aesthetic prejudice: Code is ugly; hide it wherever possible.

On the one hand, sure! (Just let me check a preferences box that turns the full URL back on, please.) On the other, if this is a first step toward deprecating the very idea of a user-accessible Web address, well, that would be bad — not only for those of us who love the Web, but for Apple.

That’s because this prejudice against “http://” is oddly retro; it makes Apple look curmudgeonly. URLs may offend the technophobic among us, but this isn’t the ’90s. We’ve lived with them for a long time. People have grown up with them. Objecting to them is sort of like being pissed off that Interstate highways have numbers instead of names.

Today, the “URLs are gobbledygook” argument is, I think, in the same category as the “people don’t want to scroll” argument or the “people want to own their music on physical media” argument — a vestige of generational prejudice that the march of time will erode. Put them behind a scrim if you must. But leave it translucent!

Filed Under: Features, Project, Uncategorized

“A large universe of documents”

April 30, 2013 by Scott Rosenberg 3 Comments

w3c and buzzfeed2

“The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”

That’s how the Web first defined itself to the world.

Today is apparently the 20th anniversary of the moment when Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, the advanced physics lab in Geneva, made the Web’s underlying code free and public. CERN has a big project up to document and celebrate. As part of that project, it has posted a reproduction of the home page of the first public website.

The definition above is the first sentence on that page. Let’s unpack it!

The WorldWideWeb

I’m guessing this odd treatment — one word with CamelCase capitalization — was an inheritance from the Unix programming world in which Tim Berners-Lee worked and the Web hatched. It’s been years since anyone wrote it this way (even the W3C adds spaces). Spaces don’t work in old-school file names and the Web was conceived as a direct way to interconnect the file systems on networked servers, so leaving out the spaces made sense. Today it’s a style-book fight just to keep people from lower-casing “the Web.”

wide-area

The Web was all about moving our conception of a network from the thing that let one computer talk to another (or a printer) in an office to the thing that connected people and data around the world. In those days networks were considered “LANs” — local-area networks — or “WANs” — wide-area networks. LANs were in physically proximate spaces like large offices or, later, homes. WANs were bigger — computers connected first by phone lines and later by an alphabet-soup of higher-speed connections like ISDN, DSL, T1, and so forth. But it wasn’t clear what one would do with a WAN until the Web came along and showed us.

hypermedia

The term that emerged from Ted Nelson’s work on hypertext, popularized by Apple’s HyperCard, meaning texts and documents that are connected by crosslinks. The Web made links second nature for many of us, but we still haven’t fully digested all their possibilities — or stopped arguing about their pros and cons.

information retrieval

It’s fascinating to recall just how simple the Web’s bones are. Its underlying protocols provide a simple collection of action verbs — “get,” “post” and “put” — that describe sending and receiving information. That’s it. All the other stuff we do online today is built on that foundation.

initiative

The Web was not a startup. It was a collaborative “initiative.” This caused many in the tech industry to dismiss it; how could it ever compete against the mighty, money-driven behemoths like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL, or, later, MSN?

universal access

The Web would be “free” and “open,” as the CERN page now says. No tollgates or licensing fees or dues or rent. Of course there was money in the system; the rapid commercialization of the Internet on which the Web still rests still lay in the future in 1993, but it was already in sight. But the piece of the system that made the Web the Web was going to be free of charge and free to tinker with.

With the right networking technology, it’s easy to make something universally available; it’s much harder to create something that the universe actually wants. That was the genius of the Web.

large universe of documents

This is the phrase that still excites and haunts me. The Web was originally about “documents,” not functional code. It was a publishing platform for the sharing of what we now refer to as “static files.” The phrase reminds us of the irresistible invitation the Web made to non-programmers: you too can contribute! You don’t need to code! HTML is a “markup language” and can be learned in minutes! (That was true, then.)

Today’s Web is infinitely more capable, and more complex. Over the past decade, modern browsers and javascript have turned it into an adaptable programming environment that first rendered the old MSOffice-driven desktop world obsolete and now faces its own challenges in the mobile world.

That’s great! It’s where I live and work now. But there will always be a corner of my mind and heart set aside for the Web as that simpler enterprise — that thing that just lets anyone explore and expand a “large universe of documents.”

Filed Under: Net Culture, Uncategorized

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