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Journalists follow their voices, vote with their feet

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As the beleaguring of traditional news organizations continues, newsrooms are actually growing elsewhere. You may have noticed that places like Yahoo, AOL and the Huffington Post are all hiring these days — and they’re hiring, um, actual journalists.

Yesterday we learned that New York Times economics correspondent Peter Goodman was decamping for HuffPo. “For me it’s a chance to write with a point of view,” Goodman told Howard Kurtz. He described fitting into the Times voice as “almost a process of laundering my own views, through the tried-and-true technique of dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.”

Jay Rosen commented on Twitter:

You get what this means, right? The View from Nowhere has become a liability in keeping newsroom talent

And again:

It’s not so much that @petersgoodman wants to be a pundit. He wants to report what’s really going on. In his own voice.

Yahoo has been building a bloggy news organization, too. But today we learned from Andrew Golis that one of his high-profile hires, former Gawker writer John Cook, was leaving Yahoo and returning to Gawker. Golis explained: “He decided that he prefers the license Gawker gave him to add his opinions into his reporting to the scale and credibility Yahoo! News could offer.”

So Yahoo, theoretically a “new” news organization, also finds itself losing talent because of its house rules about mixing “opinion” and reporting. The story isn’t as simple as “journalists flee old media for new so they can write in their own voices.”

Consider that the most consistently and determinedly enforced code of neutrality in today’s media world can be found not in an old-school newsroom but on Wikipedia, where “neutral point of view” is a sacred first principle. We need a better framework for talking about these issues than the crude formula of “Traditionalists prefer objectivity, new media goes for personal voice.”

I’m sympathetic to Rosen’s “View from Nowhere” argument, which neatly inverts the “fair and balanced” rhetoric of traditional objectivity to underscore its downside, and proposes “where I’m coming from” as a more tenable basis for trust in media. I think the “sacred cloak of objectivity,” to use the term recently invoked by the Times’ new public editor, is tattered beyond repair. But I also sympathize with the folks at the Times and Yahoo who just lost some talented employees by policing institutional boundaries for individual writers’ voices.

To understand today’s newsroom musical-chairs moves, I’d point you back to my post on the blog-broadcast barrier and the reach-reliability ratio. The stewards of a Yahoo News, with its phenomenal-sized audience, or a New York Times, with its blue-chip reputation, need to perform a balancing act: They can’t pretend that the world isn’t changing around them, and that their readers really do expect and demand less faux objectivity and more transparency and interpretive honesty today. But they also understand that their reach and influence demand extra protocols of responsibility and care. I think they’re right to do so, even if it means that they move a little more cautiously into the future.

The challenge for their managers is a subtle one: How to infuse their coverage with the distinctive human voices of journalistic observers who no longer wish to suppress their personal perspectives, while also insuring that the big megaphones they own do not turn into amplifiers of treacherous rumors, personal vendettas, or partisan lies. (Fox News provides a handy negative exemplar here.)

I think the answer will turn out to have a lot to do with really smart editors who are willing to experiment with new forms — editors who actively encourage writers who show “where I’m coming from” but guide them away from the worst excesses of unfiltered personal journalism.

Editing is a behind-the-scenes role, and it’s threatened by both the bruising economics of the current media biz and by the publish-first-ask-questions-later logic of the digital age. But editorial entrepreneurship is how the most creative institutions will begin to square the circle they face — finding a home for writers who expect to have strong voices while also responsibly serving their mass audiences.

The blog-broadcast barrier and the reach-responsibility ratio: How our media system crashes, and what to do about it

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This is a long post describing a phenomenon I’ve been observing for a decade and a half. Here is the summary:

You know the blood-brain barrier? It’s what protects your sensitive brain tissues from harmful substances in your bloodstream.

Our media system has its own version of this: I call it the blog-broadcast barrier. It’s a set of principles, practices and instincts that limits the transfer of unverified and unreliable information from the Internet to high-volume broadcast channels.

When errors, hoaxes and lies get widely transmitted today, it’s almost always thanks to a breakdown in this blog-broadcast barrier. News organizations with large followings will pick up some tantalizing item online, fail to vet it properly, and broadcast it to millions.

Once you notice this pattern of failure, you start finding it everywhere. The solution is obvious: the bigger a media outfit’s reach is, the stronger its filter should be — the more responsibility it should take for checking stuff out.

Maybe you came across this little story last week about Rush Limbaugh spreading a false tale about a federal judge’s hunting proclivities. Limbaugh told his considerable audience that the judge in charge of a case about the constitutionality of Obama’s health-care reform law is an avid bear hunter and amateur taxidermist — and might somehow therefore be out for liberal blood. Rush’s staff apparently picked up this bogus item from a short-lived Wikipedia hoax. The judge, it turns out, does have a thing for flowers — he’s president of the American Camellia Society — but has never shot a bear.

Now, for years, the ritual in the media when this sort of thing happened was to wag a finger at the online information source. Bad Wikipedia! Bad Web! Look at the crap those crazies publish — you just can’t trust anything you read online.

That was the line most of the press took in the granddaddy exemplar of this kind of gaffe: Pierre Salinger’s 1996 “scoop” that the US military had shot down TWA Flight 800. Salinger, a former TV correspondent and White house press aide, was shocked and chagrined to learn that the “documents” he’d discovered — and injected directly into the big-media bloodstream — had for some time been widely circulated, and thoroughly debunked, on the Internet. In 1996, commentators hung the responsibility for Salinger’s (and their own industry’s) failure of Net-smarts on the Net itself.

Fortunately, we’ve finally begun to move beyond this “blame it on the Net” reflex. (The New York Times headlined its piece about Limbaugh and the judge “Limbaugh Taken In.”) But the incidence of journalists’ falling for online hoaxes and misinformation remains high. There was the prank in which a student added a fictitious quote to Maurice Jarre’s Wikipedia bio; Wikipedia editors quickly removed the made-up material, yet the quote wound up in many of the composer’s mainstream-media obits. Recently, a Washington Post reporter quoted the Twitter feed of a fictitious California congressman as if he were a real representative.

These are all simple instances of blog-broadcast barrier failure: Media institutions with mass-market-size followings pick up bad information online and run with it, without properly checking it out.
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Forbes, fact-checking, and the media-political revolving door

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“Don’t they fact-check this stuff?”

This is the perennial cry of the outraged reader and the wronged article subject. The latest party to raise the fact-checking howl is the White House, which yesterday went public with its discontent over Forbes’ ludicrously poisonous new cover story.

The article depicts President Obama as a deranged anti-colonialist whose ideology of business-hatred was somehow implanted, Manchurian Candidate-style, by the estranged father who abandoned him when he was two. (Imagine, if you will, a leftist critique of George W. Bush that attributed his torture policies to secret indoctrination in his father’s CIA dungeons. I know, I remember reading that cover story too…)

I’ll let others do the actual point-by-point refutations of the Forbes article. I want to come at this story from two other angles.

First, that question about fact-checking: four times out of five, the answer to it is “no, they don’t.” Much of the public still believes that “fact-checking” is actually a routine part of news journalism, and most journalists aren’t in any rush to bust the myth, but myth it is.

There are two types of “fact-checking”: One is a formal procedure of the news work-flow, where somebody with the title of “fact checker” actually attempts to verify every single fact in a piece. This is the sort of thing the New Yorker is famous for. It used to be the norm at glossy magazines, but the norm is decaying in this era of media-business meltdown. I did fact-checking work at the start of my career, as many journalists did, and it’s a good discipline, but an increasingly rare one.

The other sort of fact-checking is the more informal spot-checking that has always taken place in daily newsrooms and today is common in the better online operations. This is fact-checking by sniff-test, for the most part — story editors and copy editors (where they still exist) backstopping beat reporters, looking up stuff that sounds wrong or that’s in some sensitive area. Informal spot-checking is vital but necessarily spotty. Stuff slips through. That’s why we have corrections. (We need more.)

The fact-checking picture is further muddied by the divide between reporting and analysis or commentary, a theological line that many editors still believe it’s both possible and necessary to draw. This gives some old-school editors heart in today’s overheated partisan landscape. The news reporting is where they’ll continue to fight the battle for fact; the opinion stuff can sell the product with fact-mauling innuendo.

Readers don’t care about this line. If you put the story on your cover, it’s your publication’s reputation that’s at stake. And Forbes’ has taken a serious hit.

Forbes’ defense of its work has been a classic circle-the-wagons move. Here’s the magazine’s statement in its entirety:

Dinesh D’Souza’s cover story was presented as an analysis of how the president thinks. No facts are in contention. Forbes stands by the story.

In fact, the statement “no facts are in contention” is itself counter-factual. You can’t say “no facts are in contention” when the staid Columbia Journalism Review has described your article as “a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia.”

The second point I want to make is about the changing cast of characters in this media drama. The Forbes piece is written by Dinesh D’Souza; it’s a trailer for a new book. (Books are another media type that’s far less “fact-checked” than most readers understand. That’s ironic, since magazine fact-checkers treat books as authoritative sources.) D’Souza’s career was hatched in right-wing think tanks and funded by conservative foundations. That in itself is nothing new; today, for instance, the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages serve as a full-employment act for Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute hacks.

But if you read just five paragraphs into Howard Kurtz’s piece on the Forbes flap, you notice this line: “The magazine would not make Editor in Chief Steve Forbes, who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and 2000, available for comment.” That’s right: In case you forgot, Forbes is edited by a, pardon me, politician — a conservative GOP presidential candidate.

Perhaps this has some bearing on its willingness to launch brazenly absurd and inaccurate assaults on a Democratic president. Ya think?

So we’ve moved beyond putting the commentariat on the partisan payroll. Now, more and more of your political commentary, particularly on cable, is being delivered by actual politicians. Not people who might someday consider a career in politics, but rather, people who — like Sarah Palin — are presumed active candidates. This phenomenon cuts across parties (now we’ve got New York’s former Democratic governor hosting on CNN), but plainly it’s the Republicans who have made the most of this new revolving door. Fox News has become their shadow-cabinet government. And the pols are laughing all the way to the bank: used to be, the broadcasters got their footage for free, but now, they’re collecting checks.

In this new world, the public is forced to look at news coverage with the same jaundiced eye it has long turned on stump speeches and candidate debates. Forbes’ cover story isn’t journalism; it’s essentially a campaign attack ad. Its technique is to introduce outrageous lies into the discourse so that public figures can parrot them and spread the misinformation before the truth squad can arrive on the scene.

We shouldn’t be surprised. But neither should we expect the practitioners of this dark art to care when we wonder why they’re abandoning journalistic norms.

I do feel sorry for those self-respecting journalists laboring on Forbes’ payroll who have to carry this albatross around their professional necks. Or those employees of the Web operation who landed at Forbes when it recently acquired the blogging network True/Slant. Their predicament is likely to be one that more and more journalists face over the next couple of years.

UPDATE: CJR’s Ryan Chittum did a second, more detailed takedown of the errors and misrepresentations in D’Souza’s piece.

In the context of web context: How to check out any Web page

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One of the great fears about the Web as it becomes our primary source of news is the notion that it rips stories from their moorings and delivers them to us context-free. We’re adrift! In a flood of soundbites! Borne upon a river of bits! Or something like that.

I’ve never understood this argument. As I tried to suggest in my Defense of Links posts, the convention of the link, properly used, provides more valuable context than most printed texts have ever been able to offer.

But links aren’t the only bearers of digital context. Every piece of information you receive online emits a welter of useful signals that can help you appraise it.

The techniques described here first filled my quiver in the ’90s, when I worked as Salon’s technology editor. We’d receive story tips and ideas, some of them pretty far out, and we’d scratch our heads and think, “Can this be for real?” I began applying an informal set of tests and checks to try to prevent us from being manipulated, pranked, or turned into a conduit for bad information. This was our way of trying to take the “discipline of verification” at the heart of the journalism we’d always practiced and apply it to the new medium. We knew we’d never be perfect. But there were scammers, hoaxsters and nuts out there, and we were damn sure not going to be pushovers for them.

Though some of the details have changed in the intervening years, the basic principles for evaluating an unknown source remain relevant, I think.

  • What’s the top-level domain? Is the page in question on a spammy top-level domain like “.info”? That’s not always a bad sign, but it raises your alert level a bit.
  • Look the domain name up with whois. Is the registration info available or hidden? Again, lots of domain owners hide their info for privacy reasons. But sometimes the absence of a public contact at the domain level is a sign that people would rather you not look into what they’re doing.
  • How old or new is the registration? If the site just suddenly appeared out of nowhere that can be another indication of mischief afoot.
  • Look up the site in the Internet Archive. Did it used to be something else? How has it changed over the years? Did it once reveal information that it now hides?
  • Look at the source code. Is there anything unusual or suspicious that you can see when you “view source”? (If you’re not up to this, technically, ask a friend who is.)
  • Check out the ads. Do they seem to be the main purpose of the site? Do they relate to the content or not?
  • Does the site tell you who runs it — in an about page, or a footer, or anywhere else? Is someone taking responsibility for what’s being published? If so, obviously you can begin this whole investigation again with that person or company’s name, if you need to dig deeper.
  • Is there a feedback option? Email address, contact form, public comments — any kind of feedback loop suggests there’s someone responsible at home.
  • What shape are the comments in? If they’re full of spam it may mean that nobody’s home. If people are posting critical comments and no one ever replies, that could also mean that the site owner has gone AWOL. (He might also be shy or uninterested in tangling with people.)
  • Is the content original and unique? Grab a chunk of text (a sentence or so), put it in quotes, and plug it into Google to see whether there are multiple versions of the text you’re reading. If so, which appears to be the original? Keep in mind that the original author might or might not be responsible for these multiple versions.
  • Does the article make reference to many specific sources or just a few? And are the references linked? More is usually a good sign, unless they appear to be assembled by script rather than by a human hand.
  • Links in are as important a clue as links out. If your hunt for links in turns up a ton of references from dubious sites, your article may be part of a Google-gaming effort. If you see lots of inbound links from sites that seem reputable to you, that’s a better sign.
  • Google the URL. Google the domain. Google the company name. Poke around if you have any doubts or questions. Then, of course, remember that every single question we’ve been applying here can be asked about every page Google points you to, as well.

Once you’ve done some or all of this work, it may be time to actually try to contact the author or site owner with your questions. If there’s no way to do so, that’s another bad sign. If there is, but they don’t answer, it might be a problem — or they might just be really swamped!

Software developers use the term “code smell” to describe the signals they catch from a chunk of program code that something might be off. What I’m trying to describe here is a rough equivalent for online journalism: Call it “Web smell.”

No one of these tests, typically, is conclusive in itself. But together they constitute a kind of sniff test for the quality of any given piece of Web-borne information.

There are probably many more tests that I’m not remembering — or that I never knew in the first place. If you know of some, do post them in the comments.

BONUS LINK: Craig Kanalley’s “How to verify a tweet” assembles a similar set of tests for tweets.

FOLLOWUP: Craig Silverman’s “How To Lose Your Gut” (at Columbia Journalism Review) has some more tips.

How will the App Store’s “new newsstand” be censored? We’ll know it when we see it

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For all of you out there in media-land who still think that the iPad represents salvation for old business models and who welcome the App Store as a new platform for distributing content, I recommend a reading of Apple’s new App Store Review Guidelines as helpfully summarized by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. (It seems you have to be a registered Apple developer before you can actually read the guidelines in full, but they’re available at Gizmodo.)

Discussion of these guidelines in the tech press initially framed the move as a “relaxation” of Apple’s policies, because the company will now allow developers to use third-party frameworks and toolkits. But view the guidelines from the perspective of content publishing and “relaxation” is not the word that will spring to mind.

This item stands out:

We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.

(Gruber speculates that the my-way-or-the-highway tone of this and other passages suggests direct authorship by Steve Jobs here, and that sounds plausible, but who knows?)

Now, the App Store guidelines are designed by software developers for other software developers. The thinking is, this is our device, we want to protect our users, this ain’t no free-for-all, we’re going to police the hell out of this environment. And Apple plainly has a right to do that. It’s not the only approach to structuring a software ecosystem, but it’s certainly a legitimate one.

Trouble is, the App Store is also being framed as the New Newsstand. The idea of Apple as the keeper of such a newsstand never sat right with me: I just don’t like the idea of my information diet being regulated by any company, let alone a company as tightly wound as Apple. Now Apple has made my unease explicit. In these high-handed words, the company is saying: We will ban whoever we want. And we won’t tell you what the exact standards are. You can guess; then we’ll decide.

The immediate retort here from Apple supporters — hey, I’m one, I love my Mac and my i-devices! — will be that I’m misunderstanding the purpose of the rules, they’re meant to bar wayward code, not wayward ideas.

But how, exactly, can anyone draw a line between code and ideas today? Who says where a software tool ends and a piece of “content” begins? We’re supposed to “know” this line “when we see it,” but I don’t see it at all.

Here are some quotes from the guidelines that Engadget highlighted:

“We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.”
“If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.”
“This is a living document, and new apps presenting new questions may result in new rules at any time. Perhaps your app will trigger this.”
“If it sounds like we’re control freaks, well, maybe it’s because we’re so committed to our users and making sure they have a quality experience with our products.”

Now read these questions from the perspective of a writer or journalist or publisher, not a software developer, and tell me they don’t give you the willies.

It’s always seemed to me that Apple seriously underestimates how impossible it will be to sit as censor and nanny over a thriving content marketplace, if that is what the App Store is going to become. Look at the trouble it had with political cartoonist Mark Fiore: he had to win a Pulitzer before Apple would let him use its platform to practice his art, which happened to involve poking fun at public figures, something the App Store didn’t like. Such controversies will only multiply if the App Store becomes more popular as a content mart.

Now Apple is saying, explicitly, that it intends to draw lines, and those lines won’t be drawn beforehand — but hey, don’t worry, because we’ll just know it when we cross them!

Apple loves to maintain tight control of things. That’s been a hugely successful approach for its hardware business. It’s even a defensible position applied to software. But it’s a lousy model for a newsstand.

UPDATE: Nieman Lab’s Josh Benton reviews the guidelines, finds the special loophole Apple created post-Fiore for “professional political satirists and humorists,” and points out how ridiculous it is:

So a professional columnist or cartoonist can say nasty things about Obama, but Joe Citizen can’t? Defining who is a “professional” when it comes to opinion-sharing is sketchy enough, but when it includes political speech and the defining is being done by overworked employees of a technology company, it’s odious.

Carr’s “The Shallows”: An Internet victim in search of lost depth

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One day, immersing myself in my reading was simple as breathing. The next, it wasn’t. Once I had happily let books consume my days, with my head propped up against my pillow in bed or my body sprawled on the floor with the volume open in front of me. Now I felt restless after just a few pages, and my mind and body both refused to stay in one place. Instead of just reading, I would pause and ask, “Why am I reading this and not that? How will I ever read everything I want to or need to?”

I was 18. It would be years before I’d hear of the Internet.

Nicholas Carr had, it seems, a similar experience, quite a bit more recently. He describes it at the start of his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains:

I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

When I experienced this loss of focus, I simply blamed my new condition on my newly acquired adulthood. Carr, apparently, was lucky enough to retain his deep-reading endurance undisturbed from childhood well into his grownup years. By the time it began to slip away from him, we were all deep into the Web era. Carr decided that, whatever was going on, the Web was to blame. It wasn’t something that simply happened; it was something that the Internet was “doing to” his brain.

The Shallows has been received as a timely investigation of the danger that information overload, multitasking and the Web all pose to our culture and our individual psyches. There are serious and legitimate issues in this realm that we ignore at our peril. (Linda Stone is one important thinker in this area whose work I recommend.)

So I cannot fault Carr for asking what the Internet is doing to us. But that is only half of the picture. He fails to balance that question with its vital complement: What are we doing to, and with, the Internet? This imbalance leads him both to wildly overstate the power of the Internet to alter us, and to confuse traits that are inherent to the medium with those that are incidental.

Carr writes as a technological determinist. In asking what the Internet is “doing to” us he casts us as victims, not actors, and once that casting is in place, there’s only one way the drama can unfold. The necessary corrective to this perspective can be found in the opening chapter of Claude Fischer’s great history of the telephone, America Calling. Fischer admonishes us not to talk about technology’s “impacts” and “effects,” because such language “implies that human actions are impelled by external forces when they are really the outcomes of actors making purposeful choices under constraints.” (Emphasis mine.)
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Don’t save your links for the end — it’s more distracting!

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One of the humble yet essential uses of the link is to help us avoid having to repeat what others have already said. I make no great claim to novelty for my “Defense of Links” series; much of what I said, others had already expressed earlier this year when Carr first floated his “delinkification” meme. In particular, Jason Fry’s excellent post at Nieman Lab surveyed the ground well.

Fry talked about the role of links in three areas: credibility, readability and connectivity. “Readability” is plainly the area where Carr had the most provocative and defensible case against links. My motivation from the start was to examine that case closely and evaluate the studies it was based on — to follow the links, as it were.

I found that the studies Carr relied on really didn’t support his case. Just as interesting to me was the fact that a lengthy and in-depth discussion of Carr’s argument had unfolded on the Web without anyone actually looking up the research. Would that have happened had Carr provided links to these studies? (That’s possible on a blog but not, of course, in print. Still, one can publish endnotes online and activate the links, as I have for both of my books. Carr’s book site is quite the link desert, which I guess should not surprise.)

Fry asked a question that several respondents to my series echoed: ” Is opening links in new tabs really so different from links at the end of the piece?” For me, it is: ironically, the end-linking style is, I think, far more distracting than simple inline linking.

If you’re reading along and feel the desire to dig deeper on some point and the link is right there, you can just open the link in a new tab. If it’s not, you don’t know whether the author has provided a link or not. You have an unhappy choice. You can file the question away in your brain to make sure you remember to check once you reach the end of the article (now there’s a cognitive load). Or you can stop reading and scroll down to the bottom of the story to look for the link, which involves reviewing the whole list, figuring out whether the link you seek is actually there, clicking on it if it is, and then scrolling back to the top to find where you were. All of which thoroughly disrupts the deep reading Carr aims to protect far more thoroughly than a handful of highlighted link-words.

For instance, when I read Carr’s “Delinkification” post and saw his references to the “cognitive penalty” of links, I wanted to know where the studies were that supported this claim. There are no links inline, but I knew the whole post was about the experiment of putting links at the end, so I went on a wild goose chase to the bottom of the post hoping to find the studies linked there. (They’re not.) How can this possibly serve the reader’s concentration?

Those with long memories will recall that the original incarnation of Slate, driven by Michael Kinsley’s naivete about the Web, actually employed links-at-the-end as a policy. The magazine gave it up some time later. Turns out Carr’s “experiment” already had some in-the-field results. (You can see what this looks like on this Internet Archive capture of a Jacob Weisberg piece from 1999.)

I got into some of this argument in the comments at Scott Esposito’s thoughtful response to my series. Mathew Ingram at GigaOm provided a nice summary of my lengthier musings. I would also recommend Brian Frank’s rich philosophical take.

Tomorrow, wider thoughts on The Shallows, which of course addresses far more than links!

Cheap art

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In the 1980s I worked as a theater critic. I spent a lot of time in expensive Broadway theaters and ambitious nonprofit repertory companies. But some of my most memorable experiences were at street theater events by groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater. I first saw them in Boston at a time when the manifesto below was relatively new. It’s now a quarter century old but it hasn’t lost any of its truth.

For most of my writing life I’ve had a copy of this poster on my wall near where I work. When we rebuilt my basement office I lost track of it, but recently found it and rehung it. Here it is for you. (I got this image here.)

Happy long weekend, everyone. Make some cheap art!

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

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This is the third post in a three-part series. The first part was Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification. The second part was Money changes everything.

Nick Carr, like the rest of the “Web rots our brains” contingent, views links as primarily subtractive and destructive. Links direct us away from where we are to somewhere else on the Web. They impede our concentration, degrade our comprehension, and erode our attention spans.

It’s important, first, to understand that every single one of these criticisms of links has been raised against every single new media form for the past 2500 years. (Rather than rehash this hoary tale, I’ll point you to Vaughan Bell’s excellent summary in Slate. For a full and fascinating account of the earliest episode in this saga — Socrates’ denunciation of the written word — I recommend the elaboration of it in Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid.)

Throughout history, the info-panic critique has been one size fits all. The media being criticized may change, but the indictments are remarkably similar. That tells us we’re in the presence of some ancestral predilection or prejudice. We involuntarily defend the media forms we grew up with as bastions of civilization, and denounce newcomers as barbaric threats to our children and our way of life.

That’s a lot to hang on the humble link, which — in today’s Flash-addled, widget-laden, real-time-streaming environment — seems more like an anchor of stability than a force for subversion. But even if we grant Carr his premise that links slow reading and hamper understanding (which I don’t believe his evidence proves at all), I’ll still take the linked version of an article over the unlinked.

I do so because I see links as primarily additive and creative. Even if it took me a little longer to read the text-with-links, even if I had to work a bit harder to get through it, I’d come out the other side with more meat and more juice.

Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just textual tunnel-hops or narrative chutes-and-ladders. Links, properly used, don’t just pile one “And now this!” upon another. They tell us, “This relates to this, which relates to that.”

Links announce our presence. They show a writer’s work. They are badges of honesty, inviting readers to check that work. They demonstrate fairness. They can be simple gestures of communication; they can be complex signifiers of meaning. They make connections between things. They add coherence. They build context.

If I can get all that in return, why would I begrudge the link-wielding writer a few more seconds of my time, a little more of my mental effort?
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Miscellany: SAI, Crooked Timber, MediaBugs and “Inception”

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Part Three of “In Defense of Links” coming later this week! Some little stuff in between:

  • I have begun an experiment in crossposting some of my stuff over at Silicon Alley Insider/Business Insider. Same writing, grabbier headlines! As it is, my posts appear here, and then also at Open Salon (where Salon sometimes picks them up). And I pipe them into Facebook for my friends who hang out there. The folks at SAI have picked up some of my pieces before, and I’m curious about how my point of view goes over with this somewhat different crowd.
  • Henry Farrell was kind enough to post a bit about In Defense of Links over at the Crooked Timber blog, and the discussion in comments there is just humblingly good — as well as entertaining. Would every single person who has ever issued a blanket putdown of the worthlessness of blog comments please pay this estimable community of online scholars a visit, and then pipe down? Thank you.
  • Just in time for the release of his new novel, Zero History, William Gibson has a great op-ed in the Times:

    Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory.

    In the ’90s I had the pleasure of interviewing Gibson a couple of times — here’s the 1994 edition, in which we discussed why the technology in his early novels never breaks down, and here’s part of the 1996 one, where he talks about building his first website and predicts the rise of people who “presurf” the Web for you.

    I recently caught up with Inception, and was amazed at how shot-through it is with Gibsonisms. Inception is to Neuromancer as The Matrix was to Philip K. Dick’s worlds: an adapation in everything but formal reality.