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Interviewing the ex-audience #1: Ken Hittel

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Spalding Gray used to do a show called “Interviewing the Audience,” turning the tables on his usual format, in which he presented monologues about his own life. Spalding, alas, is gone, and the word “audience” itself has lost most of its meaning. But I still love the spirit of that idea, so I want to play around with it here. Let’s call it “Interviewing The People Formerly Known As The Audience.”

I asked for volunteers from subscribers to my weekly email and got a few. At some point in the future I’ll probably just randomly email visitors and subscribers asking if they want to participate. As you can see, this is not a tough interview — just a way for me to get to know you better, for you all to hear one another’s ideas, and for Wordyard to be less one-way and more in-the-round.

Our first interview is with Ken Hittel, who blogs at SocraticObserver.com. Here he is with a cat that appears to be named Jane Austen, which is a pretty great name for a cat:

Ken Hittel

Ken, who are you and what are you up to?

Long time, now-retired corp exec, built & managed digital presence (web sites, seo/sem, email, lead gen, sales tracking and ROI, mobile, social presence, you name it) for New York Life Insurance Company — widely regarded as the best in that business, he says somewhat immodestly… & now attempting to spread a little bit of practical digital know-how and wisdom more widely…

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

Teaching (and listening & learning) — whether through writing or personal contact.

What’s one good thing you want to see happen on the web over the next year?

Roll back efforts to kill/curtail/impede net neutrality.

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

Twitter; google+; nytimes.com; salon.com; slate.com; several select bloggers; cable news (to shout at); whymycatissad.tumblr.com; lots & lots of other random stuff (friends, family; neighbors; friendly people in Riverside Park, etc.)

Choosing stuff? much is old habit, rest is serendipity.

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

Well, there’s a lot of good stuff — but I won’t resist the temptation to name my own blog: SocraticObserver.com and my constant and faithful day-time companion, Spike of Broadway:

Spike

The power in playing small rooms

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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.

Links: Twitter as distributed Turing Test; tracked till you drop; we’re all superheroes now

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bender applause

Twitter: It’s bots vs. brands, we’re just caught in the middle

Twitter seems to be becoming a giant unstructured experiment in blurring boundaries — like a massively distributed Turing Test. Who’s a human, who’s a bot? Who’s a person, who’s a company?

Kate Losse’s New Inquiry essay on “Weird Corporate Twitter” explores the latter question:

Now, a Denny’s tweet can sound more casual and on meme than any individual’s Twitter account…Just as corporations have become “persons” in law, they have also become “persons” on social media, bearing all the fruits of personhood while retaining all the massive advantages of being an entity that defies individual personhood. At the end of the day, @Dennysdiner is just a legal structuring entity housed somewhere in Delaware, formed to serve mediocre diner food in cities across America. And yet in spite of — or maybe even because of — this uncanny act of assuming personhood, we like it. Corporations can’t be lonely, but with their newfound “cute” voices they are becoming more popular than people….It isn’t enough for Denny’s to own the diners, it wants in on our alienation from power, capital, and adulthood too.

It’s a great piece — and also a perfect case study in how the authenticity bind works.

Meanwhile, MIT Technology Review tells us that Advanced Socialbots Have Infiltrated Twitter:

A significant proportion of the socialbots…not only infiltrated social groups on Twitter but became influential among them as well. What’s more, Freitas and co have identified the characteristics that make socialbots most likely to succeed…. The socialbots that generated synthetic tweets (rather than just reposting) performed better too. That suggests that Twitter users are unable to distinguish between posts generated by humans and by bots. “This is possibly because a large fraction of tweets in Twitter are written in an informal, grammatically incoherent style, so that even simple statistical models can produce tweets with quality similar to those posted by humans in Twitter,” suggest Freitas and co.

Bots might fool human Twitter users, but they’re a more serious business for the ad industry, which is finding it more and more difficult to distinguish between real human views and clicks and fake bot-generated traffic designed to inflate ad payments. The Internet Advertising Bureau trade association now has a Trustworthy Digital Supply Chain Initiative, and first on its list of imperatives is this: “We must identify bot-generated, non-human traffic and remove it from the supply chain.” (Link courtesy Alexis Madrigal’s delightful 5 Intriguing Things.)

Finally, NPR put a person at the helm of one of its automated Twitter accounts, Nieman Lab reports, and the network won more click-throughs and more new followers as a result. But human employees cost more than bots, and NPR’s budget is tight, so the bots may win on a cost-per-click basis.

Facebook extends its ad-tracking eye

Not content to mine the likes and posts you enter directly into its system to figure out what ads to show you, Facebook has announced it will also track your forays elsewhere online. But hey — you can also look behind the ads to see exactly why Facebook is targeting you a certain way. And if you want to take the time to twiddle with your preferences, you can even volunteer more info to help Facebook refine its targeting. You can do the algorithm’s work yourself!

According to Facebook this is all part of “Making Ads Better And Giving You More Control.” I’ll believe that if the preferences option — when it finally rolls out, which isn’t yet — also lets me just turn the ads off. Not counting on that one.

Of course, it could be worse. Instead of just looking at your online activity to determine what ads to show you, companies could review your social activity to make decisions about, say, whether to offer you a loan. Surely that sort of crazy thing will never come to pass? Oh, wait:

Rather than rely on FICO credit scores, Affirm calculates the risk of borrowers based on a range of personal data including information gleaned from social-media profiles as well as the cost of the items being purchased. It then determines what rate and structured payment makes sense to offer the customer.

We’re all superheroes now

Secret Identities – Online Privacy & Invisible Disease | Comics Should Be Good:

The superhero secret identity is a powerful metaphor on many levels, and one which ought to become an important device again soon. Primarily, the secret identity is an excellent metaphor for our own dual lives on and offline. There is increasing interest in reserving our privacy as we lose more and more of it to voluntarily to social networks, to (hopefully benign) NSA information mining, and to smartphone location-sharing…. When social networks first popped up it was generally assumed that (as in our real-space social lives) it would be possible to maintain a level of separation between them and our professional lives. Over time that has become increasingly difficult and it has generally accepted that most of us can no longer maintain a separation…. After years of embracing social networks people are becoming more careful about which aspects of their lives are publicly shared online in order to maintain a degree of privacy. Having everything out in the open might have felt liberating at first, it has spiraled into a sort of trap and the concept of a secret identity is starting to sound appealing again.

Update link: In Salon, Andrew Leonard is tired of Silicon Valley’s hubris in promising to deliver “superpowers” with every new app. I guess if we’re all going to need secret identities, we might as well get the x-ray vision, too.

Decentralization everywhere

Jon Udell has begun mapping the decentralization movement in a tag bucket on Pinboard. There are lots of interesting projects and ideas to explore there.

Here’s one broad concept worth including: the growth of grassroots mesh networks as a return to the Internet’s roots in the idea of a truly distributed network. The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance offers a great overview and explainer:

the idea behind mesh networking is to skip those checkpoints and cut out the middleman service provider whenever possible. This can work when each device in a network connects to the other devices, rather than each device connecting to the ISP….

“The original vision of the Internet was in fact a mesh,” said Michael Liebhold, a fellow at the Institute for the Future. “Unfortunately, what has happened over the 20 or 30 years we’ve been working on the Internet, all the traffic ends up handled by a very small number of network carriers or cloud or service operators. There’s a very small number of connection points… but they’re highly vulnerable and they’re being attacked from all directions now.”

For Liebhold, who uses a mesh network to connect to the Internet at home, mesh networking isn’t a way to “reinvent the web,” but the natural next step toward reclaiming the kind of Internet people want. It’s a way of “connecting everybody in the world and bypassing the original Internet, which is struggling in governance, cyber crime, data mining, pervasive passive surveillance, and massive hacks.”

Not everyone is trying to boost their Klout score

Invisibles by David Zweig is a new book about people in skilled but backstage or behind-the-scenes roles. The New Republic has an interview with Zweig:

In a culture that values attention above nearly everything else, who are these people who choose to go into lines of work in which, when they do their job perfectly, they’re completely invisible? What motivates them? What makes them feel fulfilled? In a culture where everyone strives for recognition both personally and professionally, what can we possibly learn from these people?

I spoke with a number of career recruiters, and they see more and more people who want careers in high-profile fields and fewer and fewer pursuing the careers of craftsmen or people who are behind-the-scenes. The larger culture has a very powerful ethos that attention equals success. In the fabric of social media, the metric for value is attention. The number of “likes” you get on a post, the number of followers you have. These are the metrics by which we’re guiding ourselves.

The authenticity bind: being yourself as a competitive edge

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Shaking Man statueWhen we say something is “real,” we usually mean there is something irrefutably solid and constant about it. Reality, as Philip Dick famously said, “is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” It is the stone you kick when — like Dr. Johnson refuting Bishop Berkeley — you need to escape abstraction for solid ground. And kicking it hurts.

But when it comes to human expression, our sense of what’s real is anything but constant. Our conception of the sound of a “real voice” is in constant flux. This is true not only in terms of actual audio recordings (where Greg Milner’s excellent Perfecting Sound Forever offers a fascinating tour of the changes in technology and fashion across the decades) but also for writing styles, art and design, film and theater, politics, and of course advertising. One generation’s “telling it like it is” becomes the next’s boring countercultural cliche. The revolution will always be commodified.

One key I’ve found to understanding the dynamics of this process is the concept of the authenticity bind. Jefferson Pooley’s essay “The Consuming Self: From Flappers to Facebook” introduced me to this idea. It’s an engrossing slice of intellectual history and cultural criticism, first published in 2010 but still fresh and more relevant than ever. I’m planning on posting a Q&A with Pooley in the near future digging deeper into the whole topic — it’s central to the stuff I aim to cover here. But first I just want to lay out the premise, because it’s worth its own post. (The essay isn’t available as a digital text but you can get a PDF from Pooley’s site here.)

Pooley traces the history of personal authenticity through the lens of a mid-20th-century American intellectual tradition — thinkers such as David Riesman and Christopher Lasch. He outlines “the contradiction that is at the core of the modern American self,” which “could be summed up as: Be true to yourself; it is to your strategic advantage.”

Our culture, Pooley writes, summons us to “embark on quests of self-discovery that promise to affirm our uniqueness”; then the “self-improvement industries and especially advertising” hitch along for the ride, or hijack the quest for their own ends. The same culture also commands us to “stage-manage the impressions we give off to others as the essential toolkit for success” — to cultivate our personal “brands.”

The contradiction between self-promotion and expressive distinction, bound up as it is with a highly adaptive market economy, is in fact self-feeding. That is, the pervasiveness of what might be called “calculated authenticity” leads…to rejectionist forms of authenticity — real authenticity, untainted by the professional smile and the glad hand. These flights to deeper kinds of authenticity are, however, marketed in turn — returned, that is, to the promotional fold. The result can be thought of as an “authenticity bind.”

Choosing to be as Pooley puts it, “instrumental about authenticity” — being yourself because, man, it sells — creates a paradox. It’s like the paradox of the businessperson who learns to meditate on the futility of striving because it helps him close deals. You can make this kind of thing work for a while, but sooner or later it will catch up with you.

The challenge of the authenticity bind might once have been primarily of concern to celebrities and public figures. But the growth of online culture and the rise of Facebook — which Pooley describes as a “calculated authenticity machine” — have put us all in the same boat.

When I first read “The Consuming Self,” it seemed to me that Pooley had connected some important dots, and begun to give us a handle on how to think more clearly about what it means to “be yourself” online. The essay offers doses of both fear and hope. The scary part is that, if you buy the logic of the authenticity bind, there’s really no way to fully escape it. The hopeful part is that, if you understand how “calculated authenticity” works, at least you won’t be ambushed by it, and you might be able to mitigate it.

In my next post I’ll begin to lay out one path where I see some prospect of transcending the authenticity bind — not wriggling entirely free, but perhaps loosening the ropes a bit.

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

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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.

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

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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.

Top 10 reasons Huffington Post decided to give Facebook its comments

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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.

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

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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!

Forgot to forget to remember: Google’s identity court

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forgetGoogle shaped today’s Internet for good and ill — first by showing us how links could create authority; then by commercializing those links, which eroded their informational value but generated hefty profits. The company has always been smart about links and code and data but a little uncomfortable around people. From its earliest days, when you couldn’t find any contact information on its pristine site, it preferred algorithms to conversations.

“Put a human face on it,” the social-media gurus tell us today. “No way!” was Google’s answer.

Of course Google evolved. Engineers stepped forward to connect with their peers; other businesspeople were hired to communicate with the outside world. But Google has remained largely impersonal in its self-presentation. (The home-page’s playful Google doodles are an exception that proves the rule.) The company is ill-at-ease with the more ambiguous dimensions of human behavior: It may not be fair to call Google anti-social, but asocial? For sure.

This awkward wallflower is the organization now tasked by the European Union with a most delicate and socially demanding effort: to adjudicate a flood of requests from individuals who will be asserting their “right to be forgotten,” asking to have information scrubbed from Google’s index. On this ill-defined new legal turf — where the human quest for privacy and self-definition runs afoul of the Internet’s relentless connecting of people and information — Google is about to start making a whole lot of close calls in tough-to-figure cases. It’s as if a chess prodigy has been asked to pinch-hit for a social worker.

The “right to be forgotten” has emerged from Europe’s legal and social tradition, which is far more sympathetic to individual autonomy and far less friendly to the privileges of corporations and the media than U.S. norms. That’s unsurprising: Europe is more crowded, has a much longer history, and lacks the American instinct for reinvention-by-moving-west.

How’d we get here? A Spanish businessman, Mario Costeja González, irked by Google’s elevation of an old report of his bankruptcy proceeding, brought suit in the EU to get Google to scrub the link, and won. (And, oopsie, now the whole world is talking about his financial past.) Isn’t this a matter of public record? Sure. Should this guy be able to tell Google not to represent accurate public information about his past? The EU says “yes.”

At first it seems the “right to be forgotten” concept simply pits advocates of press freedom and the virtues of “publicy” (the positive good that comes from openness, transparency and sharing) against believers in privacy. Interestingly, the EU isn’t asking to censor the Spanish newspaper that posted the notice of González’s woes — instead, it has targeted Google’s index. The “right to be forgotten” doesn’t seem to be about deleting the past but about making specific personal information less discoverable.

Such “personal takedown requests” have been with us almost as long as we’ve had a Web. If you’ve been publishing long enough online you have probably already been in Google’s shoes, adjudicating someone’s wish that you somehow tinker with your archives — not to fix an error but to bury some indiscretion or problematic revelation. At Salon we found ourselves regularly in this position from the moment of Google’s ascent at the turn of the millennium, as the search engine resurfaced signatures on recklessly confessional letters to the editor whose authors now had second thoughts. (Paul Ford reports a similar experience from his time working on the Harper’s website.)

These are never simple cases. They offer anything but clearcut choices, and there is no set of consensus practices for dealing with them. (The DMCA takedown request, covering copyright infringement, is a different bird: There, the standard legal drill is, unpublish first and ask questions later.) You must grapple with all sorts of issues. There’s verification: Was the published information accurate? How about what the petitioner is telling you today? There’s motive: Why does the person want to bury the information? Is he or she a public figure or not? Who will benefit? Will anyone be harmed? There’s fairness and empathy: How would you feel if you were in the other person’s position? What’s right here? And what’s kind?

(Mostly, at Salon we were reluctant to tinker with our “back issues” but chose to honor requests from people who persuaded us that leaving their letters up might harm them professionally, emotionally, or even physically. In those cases we “anonymized” the letters, usually by converting their full signatures to initials. That generally did the trick. At Harper’s, they chose to put a “go away” notice on the page for the Googlebot so it wouldn’t index it.)

Now it’s Google’s turn to try to answer these questions. The “publicy” camp would argue that it shouldn’t have to: Surely, González could just go out there and seed the Web with more positive info about himself and bury that unwanted link. (Or hire someone to do that for him.) The EU instead said: It’s not on the individual to fix this, it’s on Google.

I wish I had more confidence in how Google will fare here — not because I fear its motives, but because I doubt its capacity and judgment. The record isn’t great. Back in 2009 Eric Schmidt, Google’s then CEO and now its chairman, set off a news-bomb with this answer to TV interviewer Maria Bartiromo’s privacy question: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” The predictable outrage centered on his cavalier arrogance (plus the note of hypocrisy, since Schmidt had been fighting his own privacy battles).

But the real problem with Schmidt’s line was its innocence — its technocratic assumption that human behavior is an equation with inputs and outputs. As if people bent on doing things that are risky or hurtful or shameful or just frowned on by polite society might simply step back and, surveying the incentives, decide “not to do it in the first place.” Problem solved!

Schmidt’s statement presents a binary, “if this then that” way of looking at life. It reeks of a kind of adolescent absolutism. There is no room in it for impulse, vulnerability, or regret. If Google is to deal responsibly with the challenge of the EU’s “right to be forgotten,” it’s going to have to shed this innocence and wade into the deeper waters of grownup life.

Here’s one sign of hope: The company took its own risky step of self-revelation recently in publishing its employee diversity numbers — which, as with so many Silicon Valley icons, turned out to be pretty bad. Unsurprisingly, Google tilts male and white (and to a lesser extent Asian). Good for the folks at Google who went ahead and shared the data. Now they will have to do something about it.

The “right to be forgotten” affair gives Google one more strong reason to diversify its workforce. Thanks to the EU, it’s going to be making decisions about people’s lives and identities — about convictions and bankruptcies, divorces and affairs, claims and counter-claims, rumors and lies.

In this circumstance, as in assembling a jury, the Googlers are really going to want decision-makers with the widest possible range of backgrounds. If they’re going to make good calls, they need to draw on a broad spectrum of experiences — including that one where you stare into your own past and flinch. If the people in Google’s room don’t recognize that feeling, the “right to be forgotten” is going to baffle them, and they will bungle their response.

Other takes

  • Jeff Jarvis thinks it’s an outrage; Paul Ford says, c’mon, just deal.

    Jarvis:

The court has trampled the free-speech rights not only of Google but of the sites — and speakers — to which it links. The court has undertaken to control knowledge — to erase what is already known — which in concept is offensive to an open and modern society and in history is a device used by tyrannies…

We have collectively ceded to Google the right to define our public personas, but it’s a consumer product, not a public trust. By granting the right to be forgotten to its citizens, the EU will allow them to shape their own personas.

  • “Forgot to forget to remember” is the Mekons’ ingenious reworking (in their song “Amnesia,” from the 1986 album “Rock ‘n’ Roll”) of the title of the old country song popularized by Elvis Presley; their version laments and lampoons popular music’s unwillingness to examine its own past — something it shares with Silicon Valley.

Links: Fake readers, real rep; Paltrow, Bowie and more

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I’ve got a huge backlog of interesting stuff to share, so some of these date back a little ways.

  • The Secret About Online Ad Traffic: One-Third Is Bogus – WSJ.com: When fake readers click on fake sites, they generate real ad revenue. According to this report, one out of every three ad impressions today is bogus (generated by botnets). And that’s just conventional Web ads. Wait till the bots get to work inside an ever-more-commercialized Facebook and Twitter. (The link is behind the Journal paywall; Business Insider, of course, has the free summary.)
  • Hello, Illinois? Rep. Tim Johnson Is on the Line – NYTimes.com: This story’s from 2012, but worth revisiting:

    • Representative Tim Johnson, Republican of Illinois, perpetually paces the Capitol hallways, a cellphone pressed to his ear as he talks to constituents, whom he calls all day long, one by one, just to say hello….Mr. Johnson said his calling habits grew out of his many years in the Illinois state legislature. “I came to the conclusion that the problem with government is that they were too out of touch with people and had very little individual relationships,” he said.

  • The era of Facebook is an anomaly | The Verge: Any interview with danah boyd is worth reading in full, but this part in particular spoke to the post-social me:

    • The era of Facebook is an anomaly. The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. Is your social dynamic interest-driven or is it friendship-driven? Are you going there because there’s this place where other folks are really into anime, or is this the place you’re going because it’s where your pals from school are hanging out? That first [question] is a driving function.

  • Don’t Worry, Get Botox – NYTimes.com: This study inverts our model of the emotions: apparently, frown-prohibiting botox injections can make people feel less depressed. We think feelings originate within and are represented on our faces; but perhaps we’re not a species of method actors after all.

    • The Botox studies, by contrast, suggest a circuit between the brain and the muscles of facial expression in which the brain monitors the emotional valence of the face and responds by generating the appropriate feeling. (Obviously, information flows in both directions, as you can think yourself into practically any emotional state and then have the face to match it.)

  • Farhad Manjoo, the Man Behind Tech’s Most Captivating Tweets:

    • This is hard to say without sound like some kind of tech dope. But in some way I think the person I am on Twitter is the real me. Twitter is the online service that replicates my brain most faithfully. For good and bad! As Sam will tell you. Let me get deeper into this: Obviously saying my Twitter is “the real me” is a loaded thing. We all have shades of personality expressed in different ways. But if (for some crazy reason) you wanted to get a glimpse of how I think, or the things I’m reading that influence how I think, I don’t think you can get closer than reading my tweets. (I don’t know if this is true just of me. Often I meet people I know on Twitter and they’re totally different in real life. And I wonder which one is the more authentic version of that person. For me, the answer is my Twitter version, because in real life, especially with new people, I am not quite myself.)

  • Blackness ever blackening: my lifetime of depression | Mosaic (Jenny Diski):

    • We all have a more or less deep sense of ‘what we really are’, which is buffeted and put at risk temporarily or permanently by moods, as a boat is by the turmoil of the Bay of Biscay or the dying of the winds in the doldrums. I’ve been on both of those boats and know the power the swell or stillness has over the conveyance, that sense of being a small object in the storm or the lull as it progresses. It is possible, though, that the essential self we perceive is a mirage. It might be no more fundamental, no more unitary, than the moods we want to say affect ‘us’ and change our feelings at any moment. What if our moods are our lives, if our selves are the flicker-book: that what we really are is a continuous fluxing of emotional shades created and conditioned by our biological and experiential environments – body, mind, world – and there is no more a single self, impinged on by fleeting moods, than there is that single mood my parents defined as interrupting my real self?

  • Gwyneth Paltrow Talks About Goop, Celebrity, Trolls at Code Conference | Re/code:

    • On creating an authentic self safe from online vitriol: The part that grows impervious to negativity from a stranger is the part that has the right value, the value that you are just you. And nothing is going to change that. And the more you you can be, the more you deepen in your authenticity, no matter what anyone says. It’s no accident that as the Internet grows and all the voices grow softer and softer because there are just so many of them, we’re drawn to authenticity.”

  • David Bowie on Stardust | Blank on Blank | PBS Digital Studios – YouTube: [via Andrew Sullivan]

    • I had no problem writing something for Iggy Pop or working with Lou Reed or writing for Mott the Hoople. I could get into their mood and what they want to do. But I find it extremely hard to write for me. So I found it quite easy to write for the artists that I would create. I did find it much easier, having created Ziggy, to then write for him. Even though it’s me doing it.