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Repetition ain’t the way

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Stanley_Kubrick_LACMA_exhibit_-_All_Work_And_No_Play_Makes_Jack_A_Dull_Boy

I pretty much stopped writing on this blog about a year ago, and never wrote up why.

Last year I relaunched Wordyard as “The Wordyard Project” with a new design, lots of energy, and a focus on the topic of identity and personal authenticity in digital media. I felt like I had a lot to say that I’d stored up during the years I spent editing Grist, and I began writing. I had fun! In particular, I was obsessed with writing one piece I’d been thinking about for ages — about Lou Reed, the song “Sweet Jane,” hearing Reed play that song at the Web 2.0 conference a decade ago, and how all of that related to life on the Internet as I’ve lived it for the past 20 years.

So I wrote that piece. Then I kept writing. But I lost steam. It seemed to me I was repeating myself. Looking back at the posts from that period now, I don’t think I was. But that’s how it felt.

That was the personal dimension. At the same time, in the wider world, I understood that blogging was a very different beast in the mid-2010s than it had been a few years before: not “dead” but less and less an environment where writers were congregating and software developers were innovating. I didn’t want that to be true, but it was: The conversational aspect of blogging had largely been assumed by Twitter and Facebook. If you aimed to build traffic on a blog today, you had to treat it like a publishing venture — keep pumping out lots of posts and promote them tirelessly on social media.

All of which, at that point, felt to me like more repetition.

One of the first things we learned about publishing online from the earliest days — when Hotwired ruled, Suck.com flourished, and Salon (a “Web ‘zine”!) fledged — was the imperative of repetition. I remember my colleague Andrew Ross talking about how the Web was a little like radio. He meant you could be a little more casual; you could, when news broke, just ring up an expert for a quick Q&A without waiting to assemble a more definitive story. He was right. But it was also like radio in the way you needed to remember that people were probably tuning in and out all the time, and you were going to have to repeat yourself a lot to be heard.

I’ve been writing reviews and news stories and features and columns and blog posts all my life. There are times when cranking it out is effortless, and other times when it just feels impossible. When I go through a spell of those impossibles — as I did toward the end of my days writing theater reviews, and again toward the end of my years as Salon’s managing editor, and again in autumn 2014 — I know that the best thing for me to do is to move on, change things up, try out something new. That works. But when I do it, I’m also always gnawed by the suspicion that maybe I’m just running away from what I Should Be Doing.

It’s a tough one: On the one hand, as David Byrne once sang, “Say something once! Why say it again?” On the other hand, that song is titled “Psycho Killer,” and maybe the narrator is…unreliable.

So I put Wordyard on hold, where it’s been ever since. Around the same time I also started writing some reasonably ambitious pieces for Steven Levy at Medium’s Backchannel, and those kept me busy, and felt rewarding in a different way, and let me focus on simply writing as good a piece as I could without also thinking about how to get people to come read it.

Am I going to return to any kind of posting schedule here? I honestly don’t know. I’d like to. I’m a big believer in the IndieWeb movement’s “POSSE” principle — publish on your own site, syndicate everywhere — meaning, you have a site that you own and cultivate and then you share your work in all sorts of other venues as you wish. I dream of software to make that even easier than it already is. (I like what the folks at Known have accomplished in this direction already.) I have all sorts of ideas for experiments in this area. Let’s see how far I get.

In the meantime, what I am doing today is taking that “Sweet Jane” piece and reposting it on Medium, where maybe a somewhat different bunch of readers might see it. It still says so much of what I want to say.

The hive mind migrates

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So with all this noise — all right, murmur — about a blog revival, I say, let’s talk about social networks. Because the whole discussion about blogs and social networks has always posited them as a zero-sum game: if social wins, blogs lose. And things are just way more complicated than that.

In one huge dimension, at least, the world of social networks is absolutely identical to the world of the blogosphere: Their value derives from the people who write, post, share stuff there.

Whatever is good in services like Twitter and Facebook — whatever we go there for — comes from all of us. Without people posting their thoughts and pictures and links, these platforms are nothing, nada, zilch.

There’s a whole “digital labor” conversation that tries to analyze the place of digital work in the global economy. That’s important, but I mean something far simpler: that if you and me and millions of other people stopped posting, Twitter and Facebook would spiral down towards worthlessness — a network effect in reverse.

I’m not predicting any kind of mass exodus or espousing a boycott. But there is a less dramatic sort of abandonment that happens to digital platforms more organically over time — like over-farmed turf that gradually enforces its own need to lie fallow, or hives that have served their purpose but lost their inhabitants.

Any successful community-based online enterprise — from the Well to Flickr to the fertile blog community of a decade ago to Twitter — takes off when an enthusiastic group of early adopters embraces the service and starts tinkering with it, inventing new practices and putting its functions to new uses its creators never imagined. There’s a period of excitement and delight and innovation, then a wider adoption. Cue the collective wow.

Then something happens. The early users begin to burn out, or feel neglected, or resent how the platform owner is changing things, or just chafe at problems the service has never been able to fix. Eventually, they lose the love. They start looking for a new home. If there is a hive mind at work in these matters — and there’s almost certainly not just one but many — it rouses itself and, at some critical moment, moves its energy center elsewhere.

This is a natural process, probably an inevitable one, and not cause for mourning. It is how the tech industry has worked for decades, as “developer enthusiasm” moves from one realm of technical spadework to the next.

It might be happening to Twitter right now. That’s what Alan Jacobs says: “For many of the really smart people on Twitter, it’s over.” He’s echoing Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer of the Atlantic, who wrote a “eulogy for Twitter” last April.

So yes, first, the obvious: Twitter is huge; it isn’t going anywhere. But the Twitterati are definitely restless, at least in the circles I heed. It’s a thin line between “everyone else is there so I’d better go too” and “nobody goes there anymore — it’s too crowded!” All the link-sharing trackers and analytics and tools will cease to hold our interest if the people we’re interested in move their contributions away from the platform that supports them.

This dynamic is actually heartening: It means that, in a digital environment that seems to privilege big platform owners over individual users, we have more power than we think. Another way of making the same observation can be found in Tim Carmody’s recent essay on OKCupid’s defense of its manipulation of user profiles for testing and research.

They’re all too quick to accept that users of these sites are readers who’ve agreed to let these sites show them things. They don’t recognize or respect that the users are also the ones who’ve made almost everything that those sites show. They only treat you as a customer, never a client.

This is an incredibly important point! And one that the people running today’s Web have a strong interest in blurring. In fact,this insight is so critical, so worth holding onto, that I would like to give it a label so we can’t easily forget it.

How about this? Carmody’s Law: The users of Web platforms today are also the creators of almost everything you’ll find on them.

And the inevitable corollary: They are free agents, even if they sometimes feel trapped.

So where does this leave the blogging revival? I don’t think that personal blogging will somehow become the new hotness again; you only get one lap round that track. I do think that as waves of smart people hit the limits of their frustration with Twitter and Facebook, many will look around and realize, hey, this blogging thing still makes a great deal of sense.

“Bloggy to the core” indeed

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People are talking about blogs. Again! And not just random nameless “people” cited in some clueless trend story. Specific people are talking about reviving their actual blogs. In some cases, they are even following through.

Michael Sippey, who was so early into blogging it wasn’t even called “weblogging” back then, is doing something like what he used to do in his Obvious Filter over on Medium. Elizabeth Spiers, the original Gawker (and author, most recently, of this superb profile), promises to “write mostly badly and more often” on her personal blog. Vox Media’s Lockhart Steele, declaring that “the web ecosystem will always be bloggy at its core,” announced that he is returning to personal blogging. Susannah Breslin, whose work I first encountered in the days of the original Salon Blogs program, is back at her personal blog with some reflections on “autonomy and freedom.” Christian Crumlish, too. These are people in my universe who I know or whose work I know; look around your world and you may spot similar stirrings.

Jason Kottke noticed some of these developments, and, of course, linked. Fred Wilson, the VC blogger par excellence, noticed them, too, and wrote:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

So let’s be clear: Blogging never went away; if anything, we walked away from it. In large groups, for sure — but hardly unanimously. Many extraordinary bloggers never stopped writing.

As someone who spent several years of my life chronicling the brief but colorful history of the blog, and who within the past few months has put some serious time back into my own wee project here, I’m pleased at this ferment, however it rises — or sours.

It’s a trend! And the really fun thing about trends the second time around is that the media machine generally ignores them. The breathless bad stories all got written already a long time ago. There’s nothing novel left to mine.

Are we really going to see the reconstitution of the blogging era of a decade ago? Of course I have some more thoughts about where all this is headed. But I’ll save them for the next post.

MediaBugs, now in a WordPress plugin

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Announcing the new MediaBugs plugin for WordPress. It’s for anyone who’s running a WordPress-based site that does journalism and wants readers to know that correcting errors is a priority.

Now adding a MediaBugs “report an error” button to any website that runs WordPress is a super-simple, 30-second process. If you know how to install a plugin, you can do it. (Alas, this will only work with self-hosted WordPress installations — or “WordPress.org” sites — and not with WordPress.com blogs, which don’t run plugins.)

We’ve had a MediaBugs widget that played nice with WordPress for some time now (it’s what I’ve been running here at Wordyard for some time now), but the plugin makes it much easier to add to your site — you don’t need to mess with your theme templates unless, you know, that’s something you enjoy. (Hey, some of us do!)

Here’s what the plugin does: It adds a link to the bottom of every post for users to report errors. The link is customizable — you can use text or an icon or both, and you can edit the text easily, too. When a user clicks on the link, the MediaBugs error-reporting form pops up as an overlay, with the page’s Web address and headline automatically filled in. When the user has filled out the form, the error report gets filed at MediaBugs. (Wanna see? Just click on the little “Report an Error” icon at the bottom of this post!)

If you install the plugin, you can also sign up at MediaBugs to receive an email or RSS notification each time someone reports an error on your WordPress site.

The MediaBugs plugin lives here in the WordPress.org plugin directory. Let us know if you install it — we want to know how it goes!

[Cross-posted from the MediaBugs blog]

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Another misleading story reports that blogs ‘r’ dead

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The technology press has been keen on the “blogging is dead” (or “dying”) meme for some time now, but it’s tough to find actual data or evidence supporting the notion. Blogging, of course, is changing; in the digital world, all is flux. But if you’re going to declare, as today’s New York Times headline does, that blogging is “waning,” it would be good to be able to show a decline in numbers. And that, sadly, is missing from the Times story — which cherry-picks statistics that look very different in their original contexts.

The peg for “Blogging Wanes as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter” is a study (here’s the summary) from Feb. 2010 — more than a year ago. The study showed that the number of kids ages 12-17 who are blogging dropped in half from 2006 to 2009 (14 percent report blogging, from 28 percent). The same study showed that the percentage of adults 30 and older who blog rose from 7 to 11 during the same period. Meanwhile, a more recent Pew study, the Times reports, finds that “Among 18-to-33-year-olds…blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.”

But if you actually look at that report, you find that, overall, blogging is still growing, not waning at all:

Few of the activities covered in this report have decreased in popularity for any age group, with the notable exception of blogging. Only half as many online teens work on their own blog as did in 2006, and Millennial generation adults ages 18-33 have also seen a modest decline—a development that may be related to the quickly-growing popularity of social network sites. At the same time, however, blogging’s popularity increased among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly overall from 11% in late 2008 to 14% in 2010.

Fourteen percent of online adults are making some effort to write regularly in public! That remains a phenomenal fact; if you’d predicted it a decade ago, as only a handful of visionaries did, you’d have been dismissed as a nut (or maybe a “cyber-utopian”).

So the actual story — which, to be fair, the Times’ article mostly hews to (it’s the headline and lead that skew it more sensationally) — is that blogging keeps growing, but it’s losing popularity among teens.

Social networking is changing blogging. (My postscript to the paperback edition of Say Everything addresses those changes at length.) More of us are using Facebook and Twitter for casual sharing and personal updates. That has helped clarify the place of blogging as the medium for personal writing of a more substantial nature. Keeping a blog is more work than posting to Facebook and Twitter. So I wouldn’t be surprised if, long-term, the percentage of the population blogging plateaus or even declines.

Maybe we’ll end up with roughly ten percent of the online population (Pew’s consistent finding) keeping a blog. As the online population becomes closer to universal, that is an extraordinary thing: One in ten people writing in public. Our civilization has never seen anything like it.

So you can keep your “waning” headlines, and I’ll keep my amazement and enthusiasm.

BONUS LINKS: WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg addresses the story:

At some point you’ll have more to say than fits in 140 characters, is too important to put in Facebook’s generic chrome, or you’ve matured to the point you want more flexibility and control around your words and ideas.

And Anthony DeRosa points out that Twitter isn’t very popular among the teen set either.

The road to Web serfdom: Huffington’s free-as-in-beer posts vs. the free-as-in-speech Web

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When you post to Facebook, are you a “serf”? When you write a blog post for a site that doesn’t pay you, are you a “galley slave”?

These are terms that journalists at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have recently applied to the content users contribute to various Web sites and services.

The LA Times’ Tim Rutten writes of the business model of the Huffington Post, “You need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.”

In the New York Times, David Carr’s column headlined “At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs” chronicles a Web of companies worth millions and billions — Facebook, Google, Twitter, Quora, Tumblr and, again, Huffington — and notes, “The funny thing about all these frothy millions and billions piling up? Most of the value was created by people working free.”

I resisted the urge to jump on Carr’s column because, though its confused thinking induced much head-scratching, it also contained a lot of sense. Having heard Carr reinforce some of the confusion in a brief NPR Morning Edition spot today, I think I better just say this:

As we talk about the plight of journalists trying to earn a living in a rapidly evolving digital marketplace that has devalued each individual contribution and untied the product bundle that till recently paid the media bills, we need to distinguish between the plight of the journalist in a glutted market and the concerns of the citizen seeking a free voice.

Publishing a blog post at Huffington Post for no pay is nothing like being a galley slave. No whips! No chains! It’s voluntary (as Anna Tarkov argues). You get to sit at home and type out your ideas and get a bunch of people to read them. You may well feel shafted when you realize that Huffington & co. just walked off with $300 million in AOL cash and you didn’t get a cent, but nobody made you give Arianna your words for nothing. Presumably, you gave them because you thought her site was a good place to spread your ideas or your reputation, sell your books or bring some visitors to your own site. (Stowe Boyd looks at the non-financial incentives.)

Maybe you’ll rethink that bargain now. If large numbers of people do, then Huffington and her investors may have just played AOL’s Tim Armstrong for a sucker. (Although, by Nate Silver’s calculations, most of the value and traffic on HuffPo derives from the content produced by paid staffers.) Maybe it would have been smart for Huffington to share some of her plunder with her unpaid contributors (as Dan Gillmor and others have urged); it would have been fair, certainly. But my hunch is the HuffPo bloggers aren’t going to stop writing for free. Most of them like the bargain.

There is a reasonable argument to be made about “serfdom” online, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Huffington’s paycheck-less bloggers. It has even less to do with Google’s search engine, which draws its intelligence from the links we all embed in our Web pages. One problem with Carr’s column is that he conflates all these different services and — like so many content-obsessed journalists — ignores the contributions of the platform-builders and their technology. At Google, as at many of the companies Carr lists, there’s enormous value created by paid employees — but they’re writing code instead of copy.

The aspect of the idea of digital “serfdom” that makes sense has little to do with getting a paycheck for your writing; it’s about control of the platform that delivers your writing and ownership of any (typically meager) fruits from that labor. It’s why many people, like me, choose to buy their own domain name and run their own blog software rather than use one of the free-but-corporate-owned alternatives. It doesn’t take much to have your own fief these days.

Interestingly, this is the point made by the writer from whom Carr borrows the feudal analogy — Reuters’ Anthony DeRosa:

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have any of these platforms. In a perfect world everyone would have their own piece of the web that they own entirely. … Those tech savvy enough to rent out rackspace, install their own web server and plop down their virtual piece of land on the web control and capitalize on all of the content that they deliver there.

However for most of the people on the web today, this isn’t the case. We live in a world of Digital Feudalism. The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.

(I would just add that to emancipate yourself, you don’t need to rent out rackspace and manage your own server; all you need to do is know how to FTP and pay a few bucks a month to an ISP and a domain registrar.)

The argument about “digital labor” is real and valuable and has been unfolding for some time now in the academic wing of the new-media studies world. It’s what Dave Winer has recently been writing a lot about, as he urges us to find an alternative to Twitter and Facebook that we own ourselves.

Professional journalists worried about their salaries in a world awash in posts and “content” have one set of problems; the much larger population of social-media users who ought to be thinking hard about who controls their contributions have a different one. I wish Carr had done a better job of distinguishing between these different realms rather than lumping them together in one big morass of “people working for free.”

As they say in open-source land, there’s free as in “beer” and free as in “speech” — “gratis” versus “libre.” People aren’t going to stop writing “gratis” for Huffington and her ilk, and that will continue to lower the market price of all but the most specialized and rarefied kinds of old-fashioned journalism. Of course this doesn’t make me happy as a writer, but I’m not going to pretend it will stop. For that very reason, those of us who care about our words will need to pay greater attention to the “libre” side of the freedom ledger, and pitch our posts on ground that we own or control.

There are other good posts on this theme from Michele McLellan at the Knight Digital Media Center:

Fretting about unpaid contributors is just another way of grieving journalism’s past. They’re here. They’re on social media. They’re talking. They’re writing. Get over it, journalists, and use the energy to figure out innovative ways to add the unique value of the journalist to the mix.

And Mathew Ingram at GigaOm:

The funny thing about online content, as former eHow owner Josh Hannah noted in contrasting Demand Media’s paid content-farm model with that of free sites like WikiHow, is that you often get better quality content when people write for nothing than you do when you pay them tiny sums of money, as Demand does. In other words, some people are more than willing to write for the recognition and reputation value and sheer passion (or other intangibles) rather than for money. And there will always be media entities like The Huffington Post that take advantage of that.

“Your map’s wrong”: Zuckerberg lights out for the territories

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It’s hard to think of a more meaningful recent exchange in the tech-industry world than the moment onstage at Web 2.0 last night when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg turned to conference organizers John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly and told them, “Your map’s wrong.” (I was sorry not to be there in person! I went to the first several Web 2.0 conferences but have recently tried to reduce conference attendance in an effort to Get Things Done instead.)

Zuckerberg was referring to a big map on the wall behind him that charted the conference’s theme of “points of control.” Battelle and O’Reilly had aimed to provide a graphic display of all the different entities that shape and limit our experience online today. It’s a useful exercise in many ways. But Zuckerberg argued that it was wrong-headed in describing an essentially closed system.

Here’s the full exchange, which you can watch below:

ZUCKERBERG: “I like this map that you have up here, but my first instinct was, your map’s wrong.”

BATTELLE: “Of course it’s wrong, it’s version one.”

ZUCKERBERG: “I think that the biggest part of the map has got to be the uncharted territory. Right? One of the best things about the technology industry is that it’s not zero sum. This thing makes it seem like it’s zero sum. Right? In order to take territory you have to be taking territory from someone else. But I think one of the best things is, we’re building real value in the world, not just taking value from other companies.”

Now, of course it’s in Zuckerberg’s interest to make this argument. And it would be disingenuous to maintain that Facebook isn’t engaged in some real direct competition with the other big Net-industry players today. As Tim Wu’s new book reminds us, the cycle of communications-technology innovation runs in a regular pattern in which innovators become monopolists and monopolists exact their tolls. Facebook, like its predecessors, is likely to proceed accordingly.

Nonetheless, I think Zuckerberg’s larger point is profoundly right. He found a way to remind us of something that was true when I started creating websites 15 years ago and that’s still true today: It’s still early in this game, and the game itself continues to grow. The portion of the online realm that we’ve already invented is still a mere fraction of the total job of creation that we’ll collectively perform. There is more world to come than world already made.

I find that I regularly need to remind myself of this every time I’m thinking of starting something new. When I started the Salon Blogs program in 2002 I worried that we were late arrivals to that game. Blogs had been around forever — I’d been reading them for five years! We shouldn’t forget that at the time of Google’s founding in 1998, search was considered old hat, a “solved problem.” Similarly, Facebook itself could have seemed a johnny-come-lately five years ago, coming as it did on the heels of Friendster, Orkut and MySpace.

The Net is still young and what we do with it and on it remains an early work in progress. The “uncharted territory” still beckons those who enjoy exploring. And it may be that one secret of Zuckerberg’s and Facebook’s success is that they aren’t losing sight of this truth as they plunge into the technology industry’s crazy scrum.

Here’s TechCrunch on Zuckerberg’s interview. And here’s the full video, linked to start at the 52:30 mark where the map discussion occurred:

Saying everything in Albany

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A week ago Wednesday I traveled to Albany, N.Y. at the kind invitation of some professors at the College of St. Rose. (Thanks, Cailin Brown and Dan Nester!)

Turns out that Say Everything is being used as a text in a half-dozen classes at that school. As part of the college’s participation in the National Council of Teachers of English’s National Day on Writing, and also part of a cool writer’s series called Frequency North, St. Rose asked me to come talk about blogging and writing. Which I always love to do.

The poster for the talk, reproduced above, caused me to do a doubletake, which I’m sure was the point. I’m slow, sometimes, so it took me a minute before I registered the “hanging your laundry in public” concept. Nice work, and probably the one and only time my name will share a billboard with panties.

Anyway, I had a great day at St. Rose talking with students and faculty and chatting on the local public radio affiliate.

The college has posted a complete video of the talk. (Or here’s just a three-minute taste of the audio, with some optimistic observations on the concept of information overload.) Also, I worked from pretty extensive notes, and I’ve cleaned them up, filled them out a bit and posted them on a separate page. Here it is — Large Blocks of Uninterrupted Text: A Talk on Blogging and ‘Say Everything.’

This is a pretty extensive update on the blogging talk that I was giving back when Say Everything first came out. I start with the Onion, proceed to the death of culture, and discuss the rise of blogging just a bit. Then I use the remarkable saga of Joey DeVilla the Accordion Guy and his New Girl — a story that didn’t make it into Say Everything — as a way to discuss a whole series of critiques of blogging and online discourse along some familiar vectors: truth and trust; anonymity and civility; serendipity; narcissism; shallowness and substance; attention and overload.

Blogging, empowerment, and the “adjacent possible”

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Learning to make things changes how we understand and consume those things.

When I started reporting the news as a teenager, I read the newspaper differently. When I learned to play guitar in my ’20s, I listened to songs differently. When I first played around with desktop video editing 15 years ago I began watching movies and TV differently.

It’s the same with writing: Learning how to write changes how we read — and how we think. This is from Maryanne Wolf’s excellent Proust and the Squid:

As the twentieth-century psychologist Lev Vygotsky said, the act of putting spoken words and unspoken thoughts into written words releases and, in the process, changes the thoughts themselves… In his brief life Vygotsky observed that the very process of writing one’s thoughts leads individuals to refine those thoughts and to discover new ways of thinking. In this sense the process of writing can actually reenact within a single person the dialectic that Socrates described to Phaedrus. In other words, the writer’s efforts to capture the ideas with ever more precise written words contain within them an inner dialogue, which each of us who has struggled to articulate our thoughts knows from the experience of watching our ideas change shape through the sheer effort of writing. Socrates could never have experienced this dialogic capacity of written language, because writing was still too young. Had he lived only one generation later, he might have held a more generous view.

What Vygotsky and Wolf observed about writing, we can extend and expand to writing in public. Writing for an audience is a special and important sub-case: it’s writing with feedback and consequences. Doing it yourself changes how you think about it and how you evaluate others’ efforts. The now-unfashionable word “empowerment” describes a part of that change: writing is a way of discovering one’s voice and feeling its strength. But writing in public involves discovering the boundaries and limits of that power, too. We learn all the different ways in which we are not the center of the universe. That kind of discovery has a way of helping us grow up fast.

So when I hear the still-commonplace dismissal of blogging as a trivial pastime or an amateurish hobby, I think, hold on a second. Writing — making texts — changes how we read and think. Every blogger (at least every blogger that wasn’t already a writer) is someone who has learned to read the world differently.

I’m preparing for some public talks later this month about Say Everything, which is why I’m revisiting this ground. It seems to me that, in our current bedazzlement with the transformative powers of social networking, we routinely underestimate the practical social importance of change at this individual level.

Clay Shirky, for instance, has focused, with great verve and insight, on how the Web enables us to form groups quickly and easily, and how that in turn is reshaping society. In his book Cognitive Surplus, Shirky identifies a spectrum of values stretching from personal to communal to public to civic. The spectrum, he writes, “describes the degree of value created for participants versus nonparticipants. With personal sharing, most or all of the value goes to the participants, while at the other end of the spectrum, attempts at civic sharing are specifically designed to generate real change in the society the participants are embedded in.”

This is a useful framework for discussion. What I think it neglects is the way the act of personal sharing changes individuals in ways that make the other sorts of sharing more imaginable to them. In other words, the spectrum is also a natural progression. The person who has struggled to turn a thought into a blog post, and then seen how that post has been reflected back by readers and other bloggers, is someone who can think more creatively about how sharing might work at other scales and in other contexts. A mind that has changed is more likely to imagine a world that can change.

In his great new book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson describes the concept of “the adjacent possible.” This passage is from a recent excerpt in the Wall Street Journal, in which Johnson considers the improbable yet imaginable “primordial innovation of life itself”:

The scientist Stuart Kauffman has a suggestive name for the set of all those first-order combinations: “the adjacent possible.” The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup. Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside that circle of possibility. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.

One way to assess the impact of blogging is to say that the number of people who have had the experience of writing in public has skyrocketed over the course of the last decade. Let’s say that, pre-Internet, the universe of people with experience writing in public — journalists, authors, scholars — was, perhaps, 100,000 people. And let’s say that, of the hundreds of millions of blogs reported to date, maybe 10 million of them are sustained enough efforts for us to say that their authors have gained real experience writing in public. I’m pulling these numbers out of a hat, trying to err on the conservative side. We still get an expansion of a hundredfold.

Each of these people now has an entirely new set of “adjacent possibilities” to explore. What they make of those opportunities will shape the next couple of decades in important, and still unpredictable, ways.

Some software use notes

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A miscellany today: Amazon’s Kindle for the Web, WordPress’s new Offsite Redirects feature, and a little complaint about iTunes.

  • Kindle for the Web
    Kindle for the Web lets you embed a chunk of a book onto a Web page. I thought it would be a fun thing to experiment with here and played with it a bit this morning but it turns out to look lousy in narrow column — it really needs a full-page width, which is hard on any page with a sidebar (i.e., gazillions of Web pages). So either I’m doing it wrong or it needs some tweaking.
  • WordPress Offsite Redirects
    One of the toughest choices you make as you step out onto the Web is where to put your writing. Lots of choices today, sure, from self-hosted to free or paid hosted services. But what happens if you need to move? People still need to find you, your stuff is embedded in the Web with tons of links, you’ve got some rank in Google… you don’t want to throw any of that away.

    This is called lock-in, and it’s how too many Web and software businesses hold onto customers — not, in other words, by real loyalty, but by inertia and inconvenience.

    So super kudos to the WordPress.com team for offering a new feature that lets you move away from WordPress.com and point your incoming traffic forward to your new home. It’s not a free service (don’t know how much it costs). But the most common scenario is for someone who started a free blog at WordPress.com who’s now planning to operate it as more of a business and needs the freedom and versatility of hosting their own site. That kind of user isn’t going to mind paying a small fee, whatever it is, to hold onto the links and traffic she’s already accumulated.

    As WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg said on his blog, quoting Dave Winer: “The easier you make it for people to go, the more likely they are to stay.” Indeed!

  • Irksome iTunes
    iTunes is now an almost-decade-old tool, one that supports an ever-wider array of Apple products, and that groans beneath the weight. What I don’t understand is why, in all this time, they haven’t fixed what I find to be the single most annoying problem with the interface, one that still trips me up nearly every day. It’s with how the search box works.

    Here’s the scenario:

    1. I type a search in the box at the upper right of the window — say, “Mountain Goats.”
    2. I realize I’m not finding what I’m after because the left-hand column selecter is not on my “music library” but on some playlist.
    3. I click “music library” at the top of the left column.
    4. The search term disappears from the box and so I HAVE TO TYPE IT AGAIN.

    This is a recurring irritation. Surely it’s possible to keep the search term loaded and apply it to the new choice in the left-hand column? I mean, I don’t know, maybe it’s not a really simple problem, maybe it’s even a big hairy problem. But Apple has now had how many years to fix it?

    Maybe there is some logical basis for viewing this as a feature and not a bug. If so, I certainly can’t see it!