Wordyard

For the last couple of days I’ve laid out in broad strokes the areas I intend to write about — the map of my new beat, being ourselves in the post-social world, which falls into two main areas: Life after Facebook, and personal authenticity, online.

But what exactly am I going to do? How will I organize and support this project? Today, I need to get a little meta.

First, the structure:

• I will post — reported pieces, interviews, essays and commentaries, and annotated links — regularly and frequently here, at least once a (week)day. So a blog, yes, but a focused and structured one.
• Less frequently — maybe once a month, maybe more — I will produce something longer-form.
• I will most likely crosspost some of this stuff on other sites and see what works. (The IndieWeb movement’s “POSSE” concept — post on your own site, syndicate elsewhere — makes a lot of sense to me.) I may be singing the “post-social” song, but social networks are how people find stuff to read today. A paradox, perhaps, but I’m not going to let that paralyze me.
• I want to choose what I write about by combining my own instincts and hunches with what I hear back from you. I’ll experiment with different ways of opening the blog monologue into a discussion. I’ve got some fun ideas in mind.
• I want to highlight the important work other people, publishers and organizations are doing in the areas I’m covering, and to spotlight the people, events and projects that have inspired what I’m doing here.

I am not suggesting that any of this is earth-shatteringly innovative, but it’s good to lay it out up front.

The “how do I support this” part is more interesting, more complex, and much more a work in progress. Here are my starting points:

• I intend to work independently. I am not trying to grow a big enterprise. I am not building something to sell. I do not want to “scale up” (except in the broadest way, if my experiments prove useful to others). I have no exit strategy.

  I have had the fantastic experience of building a startup, riding the hockey-stick growth curve, and helping take the whole thing public in an IPO. I have also had the less fantastic experience of riding the other side of that curve, fighting for survival, and succeeding. I learned plenty from both experiences; I have no need to relive either.

• Instead, I want to see how fully today’s technology and services can support what, for me, was the promise of the Web when I first encountered it in the mid-‘90s: an independent voice, embedded in a broader conversation but not beholden to any single sponsor, funder, or boss. “Freelance” is a great word, and I’ve done that, but freelance means you’re a knight for hire. My model is more the self-directed professional: I think of it as being a writer in private practice.
• I aim to connect as directly as I can with my readers/users/audience/friends/followers, given the tools and conventions available to online publishers in the mid 2010s. Too much of publishing is still about treating readers as numbers, objects, and targets; we say we want to “know” them but what we really mean is we want to know about them so we can sell them stuff. Can we entirely remove targeting from the picture and make the whole thing as real as feasible, as natural as meeting over a beer? Can we set out, not to know about readers, but actually to know them? (Right, it doesn’t scale. I know!)

  In how many different places and ways can we meet “the people formerly known as the audience” and make the encounter honest and valuable? I’m channel-agnostic, but with a bias toward putting stuff out there without someone else’s ads or terms of service slapped on it.

Today’s publishing environment pushes us in one of two directions: You can play in the big mad game of eyeball monetization, where you set out to gather a huge crowd and then pelt it with ads; or you can content yourself with reaching a few friends and family on your blog (where you’re in charge but people’s attention is hard to dragoon) or in your social network (where your readers are congregating today but where you are at the mercy of fickle platform owners).

I believe there’s room in between — an unexplored opening between the aggressively commercial and the ambitionlessly casual. I want to test the viability of this middle ground. Is there a space to work between the frenzy of the Chartbeat addict and the dependency of the social-media sharecropper? I hope so. I think so. I’m going to find out.

Money, obviously, will be crucial, as it always is.

How to support this work? Where does the revenue come from? This question haunts every online publishing effort, large or small. I don’t have a sure answer at this point, but I have some strong feelings.

Advertising is the most common approach, and the one I have the most experience with over two decades of work in online journalism. And I have to say: it sucks. It still sucks. It’s as bad today — as invasive, as inefficient, and as widely resented — as it was when HotWired unveiled the first 468-pixel banner ad. Worse, in many ways.

Advertising pushes publishers in the direction of page-views above everything. It gets in the way of delivering a good experience to users. It forces site operators to implement technologies that cause engineers to cry out in pain. It introduces enormous overhead costs for both publisher and network. Directly or indirectly, it is responsible for nearly all of the things about the Web that irritate people — the page-view whoring, the attention-hijacking, the eyeball-hoarding, the endless tracking and privacy invasion and data appropriation.

Above all, advertising turns the simple two-way relationship between writer and reader, or publisher and user, into a treacherous triangle trade. Publishers have to pretend that the user is your customer, but everybody knows you’re actually under contract to capture those users and deliver them to the advertiser who is paying your bills.

I am not saying that all advertising-based publishing is evil. Plenty of publishers I admire — including influential sites like TPM, Slate, the Atlantic, Wired and BoingBoing, and blogging pros like Kottke and Gruber and Dooce, and tons of important local-news outlets — depend on ads. I have worked long and hard for businesses (like Salon) and nonprofits (like Grist) that relied on advertising and, who knows, I might do so again before my career is over.

So it’s not that ads are evil. But digital advertising today remains broken. It introduces endless complexity and compromise and it pushes us down roads I know too well. Right now, trying something different looks a lot more interesting.

At Salon I got the grand tour of internet-publishing business models. We tried them all, sometimes more than once: Advertising. Sponsorships. Custom content (now known as “native advertising”). Partial paywall. Full paywall. “Affinity-group”/membership program. Premium membership. IPO money. Foundation money. Desperate letters from our editor pleading for money.

One of these approaches, or some combination of them, might work — indeed, is working today — for some publishers. But none of them makes a lot of sense for what I want to do with Wordyard.

What I have in mind — in an indistinct, still-germinating way — is a simple, direct transaction: I will do this work, and if enough people like it enough to kick in a few bucks, I will be able to keep doing it. I’m not thinking “tip jar” or donations, exactly. (I’m not incorporating as a nonprofit.) I’m imagining something more like paying a small annual fee for a premium-grade Web service that you like and wish to keep around. (What the enticement might be at the higher service level — or whether there even needs to be one at all — I don’t know yet.)

Those of you who have been following this topic for a long time will recognize that this approach draws on some of Kevin Kelly’s “thousand true fans” concept (except I think of anyone reading this as a peer, not a fan) and some of Andrew Sullivan’s “Dish model.” I find both of these concepts inspiring.

Yes, this needs a lot more thinking through. It’s far too early to ask for support or money, anyway. I just want to be open about where I see this going — and also to forestall the inevitable shouts of “BUT WHERE’S THE BUSINESS MODEL?????”

Whatever course I choose, I’ll tell the story in real time here and share as much as I can of the data, the thinking behind my choices, and the outcomes. by chronicling the effort, I hope others can benefit from any success I have — and learn from all the mistakes I know I’ll make.

When I published my first independent website (my god, this coming January will mark the 20-year anniversary for that), in gloriously crude hand-hewn HTML, I had the romantic notion that this amazing new platform would allow me to strike out on my own as a one-person-does-it-all writer/editor/publisher. But I didn’t really know how to make that work in 1995 (and the good ship Salon — then, hah, Salon1999.com! — looked a lot more inviting).

I never fully shook that dream, though, and now I think I’m ready to try again.

So this whole project about “being ourselves” is also — in a roundabout, recursive way — my own attempt to be myself, right here. Since you’ve read this far: Thanks for joining me. I’m going to do my damnedest to make it worth your while.

Yesterday, I introduced my new project here, along with my new beat — being ourselves in the post-social world — and I talked about what I mean by that “post-social” thing.

Today, I’m going to talk about the “being ourselves” part.

I know it sounds a little…squishy. Identity is a gigantic topic — at one end, you’ve got big questions like “Who am I?”; and at the other, you’ve got the everyday nuisance of authenticating yourself to your bank or your email provider.

I started paying attention to this subject a few years ago during my research on the history of blogs. I noticed that there was a contradiction at the root of blogging ideology — one that has only intensified in the social media age. On the one hand, digital platforms for the self, from blogs to Facebook, promise a direct shortcut to each user’s authentic being. Accept no imitations — here’s the Real Me! On the other, these same tools offer us boundless opportunities to experiment with alternative identities, to try on different “me”s for size and reinvent ourselves. As Marshall McLuhan used to say: “Don’t like those ideas? I got others.”

It seems obvious to me that both of these conceptions of How to Be Yourself are legitimate and valuable — and that technology has made both of them more available and more tantalizing, making it easier for each of us to find direct unmediated connections with others and also to play with alternative identities and self-reinvention.

Yet, mostly, the public debate on digital identity is stuck in a polarized argument. Advocates of transparency and single identity maintain that a one-person, one-name, one-identity world creates trust and holds us accountable to one another. Believers in anonymity and multiple identities argue that masks and veils can free our voices, liberate us to be playful and vulnerable, and let us speak truth to power.

Both camps urge us to “be ourselves.” But they arrive at opposite conclusions.

Any useful analysis of the nature of identity online needs to acknowledge that neither of these modes is natural or somehow baked into the technology independent of how we use it. Our digital platforms don’t include any inherent bias toward either end of this spectrum; if they push us in one direction or the other, it’s because someone built them that way — and someone else found that useful or attractive.

In other words: The Internet didn’t make me do it! The Internet doesn’t make anyone do anything. We made the Internet ourselves, and we remake it with every click and post and line of code.

Of course different technologies have different characteristics, and those traits fascinatingly affect our experience of those technologies. But they’re not innate, immutable, or inevitable; they’re there because we put them there, and they evolved through an intimate back-and-forth between the technology and the people who make and use it. We need to resist the most common fallacy we fall into in trying to understand communications technology — the assumption that the medium itself has some native will or force that imposes itself on us. This way of thinking turns us into passive receptors of technological imperatives; it denies us our freedom to act.

All “medium is the message” arguments aside, talking about technology’s “impacts” and “effects” is, as Claude Fischer wrote (in his magisterial history of the adoption of the telephone), the “wrong language, a mechanical language that implies that human actions are impelled by external forces when they are really the outcomes of actors making purposeful choices under constraints.”

“Actors making purposeful choices under constraints” — that’s you and me, out here on the net, putting on shows for one another, looking for truth and trying to be ourselves in a rich, perilous, disorienting landscape that has become our home. (For those of you who know that I spent the first, pre-Internet part of my career as a theater critic: Yes, these dots do connect.)

That’s what I’m gonna be writing about a lot here. More tomorrow about exactly what and how.

If this stuff intrigues you, here is a five-minute Ignite talk I gave at NewsFoo 2012 about it:

After leaving my full-time job at Grist a few weeks ago, I’ve been weighing my next act, and I’ve decided what I want to write about:

Being ourselves in a post-social world.

This is my new project, here. It falls into three parts: a tech-industry beat I will cover; a cultural investigation and conversation I will undertake; and a personal-publishing venture I am kicking off now.

So let me begin to lay all this out — starting, today, with the tech-industry part.

First thing you’re thinking is, what is this “post-social world” he speaks of?

There’s a lot to say here, but at heart, what I mean is: life after Facebook.

No, I don’t think Facebook is going anywhere. It will continue to dominate much of the digital landscape for some time. But I also think peak Facebook is now behind us.

Every era-defining tech company in recent history — Microsoft, Google, and now Facebook — has seized a moment in the industry’s evolution with a single idea. And for a brief period, that idea proves so powerful that it sucks everything else into its orbit. It seems to be the only game in town, and the only possible future. It also propels utopian visions, and the people responsible for it become filled with a sense of omnipotence — a belief that their magnificent technology can and will solve every imaginable human problem as readily as it has made them rich.

This is where the innovation that originally fed the company’s growth mutates into some world-changing ambition that proves tough to square with the practical demands of quarterly reports and margin-seeking investors. Microsoft’s operating system and office tools became “a computer on every desk and in every home”; Google’s efficient, streamlined search box became “organizing the world’s information”; Facebook’s friend-connecting toolkit turned into its current mission, which is to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

But here’s what happens: The moment of corporate omnipotence passes. Always! Microsoft’s computers are still on plenty of desks and in many offices — but they are not in our pockets, where we now use digital technology the most. Google’s search model remains essential, but turns out not to be the only means by which we want to access the world’s information — sorry, Larry and Sergey. Similarly, today’s Facebook has introduced the world to the allure of friend networks and feeds, but it cannot possibly fulfill all of its ambitions or replace email, messaging, news, advertising, entertainment and everything else with its single closed “social graph” universe. The human environment and experience is far too vast to be encompassed by any one company’s data.

Just as the era of Microsoft’s leadership ended with the dotcom crash and the era of Google’s leadership ended with the financial meltdown of 2007-8, so Facebook’s mindshare dominance will end when the current tech bubble deflates. With it will end our mistaken assumption that social networking is the single paradigm that will rule the entire gamut of our Internet-borne behavior.

What comes after that? We don’t know yet. That keeps things interesting! But we have some clues, some sense of which way the pendulums are going to swing:


From the group back to the individual:

The blogging movement celebrated individual voices. The social-media era’s customs, submerging the individual in a networked environment, privilege the group. We are overdue for a correction.

From centralized platforms to peer networks:

Some systems concentrate power in one or more hubs. Others move power to the edge. Today’s Internet relies on both approaches, varying depending on which layer of the communications cake you’re talking about; but what defines it, historically and philosophically, is that it is a distributed network.

Right now we’re experiencing a moment of maximum centralization. We have one company with a near lock on our online identities. Another with the keys to our access to information. Another with a huge chunk of the retail market. In the U.S., the network itself is coming to be dominated by a single provider.

None of this bodes well. But none of it is irreversible. Technology is anything but static, and its movements and disruptions allow for regular resets of bad patterns and ingrown problems — particularly if we learn from our mistakes and nudge it. 
Fortunately, the Internet itself has created conditions that make it possible for us to do just that.


From “take my data” to “let me take my data”:

The online publishing and marketing business today depends on our willingness to give up rights to our data. It’s been difficult to get the public too worked up — at least in the U.S. — as long as this has simply meant exploiting the tracks we leave in our digital clickstream.

But increasingly, people are understanding that “my data” means everything from my medical information to my financial records to my physical travels. In the post-Snowden universe we’re more likely to question standard-issue “just relax” assurances from industry or government. Contrary to conventional-columnist wisdom, the younger cohorts of today’s Internet users take privacy more seriously, not less, than their elders. I think we’re going to spend much of the next decade rebuilding the technical, legal, and financial guts of our connected online world around a more secure, consensual approach to personal data. It will be messy and complex and fascinating.

So yes, “post-social” means “Life After Facebook,” but it’s a lot more than that. Laid out from a high altitude like this, it may sound a little abstract. Don’t worry; a lot of what I want to do here at Wordyard involves talking with people in the trenches, looking at specific ideas and projects. There are individuals and organizations and companies that are already busy trying to imagine and build this post-social world — to fix the mistakes of the past decade and figure out where we should go in the next one.

All of this is being covered in detail and in patches and shreds by the ambitious and lively tech press that has grown up with the Web. But I haven’t seen anyone out there try to put it all together.

That’s my new work! Or at least, the first part of it. Next, I’ll post at greater length about the second part — this business of “being ourselves.”