Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

He Links Me, He Links Me Not

Published by Jarred on June 7, 2010 in Blogging, Culture, Google, Reading and Web 2.0. View Comments

I’ve been following Nicholas Carr’s thoughts and writing since I picked up The Big Switch a couple of years ago (I analyzed one particular section of the book here on Tropophilia). Shortly after that — right around when I was getting ready to move to California to join Google — Carr published the very controversial piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. Since then, he has been developing and expanding his theory that the Internet is rewiring our brains for the worse. He has just this month released the results in book form with The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains.

Carr’s central argument is that with the increased use of the Web comes a decreased ability to engage in long-form reading and deep thought. Now, a while back, I blew up at another author who made similar claims without providing much, if any, causal evidence. I am happy to see from a few of Carr’s recent shorter pieces that he at least relies on published research to back his arguments.

Calls for “Delinkification”

Believe it or not, I’ve actually just committed what Carr deems to be one of the primary crimes perpetrated by the Web against deep reading and thinking: inline, contextual hyperlinking. He explains in a post (oops, I did it again!) on his blog:

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.

Carr describes a multiplicity of reasons why the link distracts from long-form reading and comprehension:

The link, by its very existence, makes us pause in our consideration and comprehension of the overlying and surrounding text to make a decision: do I click this, or do I ignore it?
If we choose to click it, we are taken to a different page completely. Our brains must reset to prepare to capture and understand the new information. We lose focus on what we were on before.
The problem can compound if the new page itself has links for us to decide on, and possibly follow further away from the original document.

Carr concludes that “people who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.”

In his blog post, Carr cites a few experiments in “bottom linking” that seek to mitigate this allegedly attention-degrading practice. It’s just what it sounds like: instead of linking within the text to other destinations on the web, one simply collects links at the bottom of the post. I’ve seen this from time to time, and I don’t like it for a few reasons.

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Defending Social Media

Published by Taylor on February 2, 2009 in Blogging, Computing, Culture, Facebook, Lifestyle, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0. View Comments

Reader Jared (not Jarred) left a lengthy comment on my post about what I feel is our growing need and ability to create and share content. In short: our attraction to social media. I want to pull out what I think is the essence of Jared’s concern, because it merits a more complete response:

Dig[ital] interconnectedness, to me, connotes an element of dystopic irony, a warning that we might not end up getting what we want out of this, and someday find that while social media was created and driven by a fundamental desire and longing for connection…it left that behind at some point in the past. [...]

The more data and content we create, the more noise. We keep finding more noise, more noise, more noise everywhere. White noise. [...]

It’s good stuff, this Internet….as long as we know what we’re getting ourselves into.

The issue of useless “white noise” comes up a lot. The fact that the web is for all purposes infinite, and the information online limitless, makes the idea of constant content creation by an ever-expanding group of people seem completely overwhelming. “I can’t even find time to read all the online articles in the NY Times every day” we think to ourselves; “My Google Reader is up to 4,000 unread items! I don’t need MORE content–I’m barely keeping up with what I’ve already chosen to follow!”

Questioning whether the social media we use and follow will allow us to connect and grow in meaningful ways is almost completely tied to the issue of noise. After all, absent the noisy distractions that Jared describes, the Internet would be an incredibly useful place. Anyone who skims through the comments section of any popular YouTube video (a phenomenon captured brilliantly by XKCD) understands the limits of the current social web: when everyone speaks with equal weight and access, a lot of useless and ignorant crap is published online.

But let me argue that the proliferation and widespread adoption of social media–even in the midst of more noise–will be a good thing for a few reasons:

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How Blogging Changed Me (For the Better)

Published by Taylor on December 12, 2008 in Blogging. View Comments

Andrew Sullivan wrote a terrific essay on blogging in which he said:

For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud. [...]

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others [...] pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger [...] can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

That sentiment is in many ways how blogging has changed my life and perspective. To blog–in the purest and most engaging sense– is to be vulnerable. Blogging means pressing forward with sometimes whimsical or under-developed ideas; it means relying on often-times sharp-tounged commentors who will tell you that you’re wrong/stupid/crazy in no uncertain terms…but who will also introduce new ideas and perspectives to what would otherwise be an internal thought process.

That’s how I’ve changed through blogging. I’m less likely to deliberate quietly on an issue and instead more likely to provoke debate. I’m quicker to throw my thoughts or beliefs into the (modest) spotlight and more likely to change my mind. I’m thicker skinned and more aware of what I don’t know as well as those beliefs that I consider core to my being. I’ve opened up, to a potentially limitless audience, and I’m stronger for it.

But blogging is about more than vulnerability. It’s about finding new and creative ways to parse our inner struggles–be those issue debates, political choices, career decisions, or relationship woes–in the public square, engaging an audience and finding what I think of as the generalizable lessons or questions in the personal detail. This is, by itself, stepping out on a limb but it’s also a healthy way of maintaining perspective. A readable blog can’t be overly self-pitying or boastful, and in that sense blogging forces me to consider a larger picture and an audience that cares not about me but about the topics of my post.

Blogging is sometimes stressful. When I neglect the blog for days at a time (as I have all too frequently in the past few months) I feel the same guilt that I felt when I procrastinated on final papers in college. The web never sleeps, and blog posts don’t write themselves, but that too has been a lesson. We’re fortunate enough to live in a world with endless information, issues and questions worthy of our attention, and smart people to learn from. But we can’t cover it all. Blogging has forced me to focus, to recognize that sometimes being connected to the latest information must be secondary to offline or unplugged reflection. When I neglect the blog I feel as though I’m neglecting my audience to be sure, but more importantly and more deeply I feel that I’m missing an important part of my growth as an individual.

I have a few modest examples of how writing a blog has opened doors for me in my career and life, but the most signficant way that blogging has changed my life is by habitualizing my thinking and reflection in a way that exposes me to more ideas and viewpoints than I could ever hope to consider through my own (previously) silent intake of information.

Blogging Your Passions (or, How I Got Into Google)

Published by Jarred on October 7, 2008 in Blogging and Careers. View Comments

Robert Scoble, a famous tech personality in Silicon Valley, is hiring an assistant. In a post expressing his frustrations with the résumés he’s received so far, he lets the candidates know the best way to stand out: blog. Sure Scoble’s hiring for a “tech” position, but I am confident that blogging is going to play an increasingly prominent role as a qualification for all sorts of opportunities. Unfortunately, this aspect of the Web’s impact is not getting as prominent a place as the warnings against expsoing too much about yourself on Facebook. This tone damages the conversation, overemphasizing the paranoia and neglecting (if not rejecting) the positive possibilities. I want to change that tone, and that’s what this post is all about.

Scare Tactics

Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of commotion about how companies, and even universities nowadays, are investigating the digital “breadcrumbs” left across the Internet by candidates for employment/admission. Whether doing a simple Google search to see what appears in the top few results, or using dedicated tools to “check between the sofa cushions”, if you will: those whom we seek to impress are taking more and more seriously our online behavior. (On an interesting side note, Spokeo — which I covered in one of my first posts on this blog — has begun advertising itself as a tool for HR professionals to do “deep social search” on job candidates).

I’ll never forget the story my friend Henry told me of his first day at the White House as an intern last year. As they walked into one of their orientations, there was a projector and screen set up showing slideshow. The images being projected were drawn from the public albums of the new interns’ Facebook profiles; you can imagine that a good number of those pictures were, well… not flattering. When the nervous interns were settled uncomfortably in their seats, they had a nice little talking-to about how they were the face of the White House, how all these images could be accessed and republished by anyone, etc. Luckily for Henry, he had previously (and famously) sanitized his profile to include only the following message: “I’d rather talk to you in person.”

“Be careful what you leave behind,” the experts and mainstream media tell us. This is certainly fair advice. What they fail to point out are the many positive ways in which we can embrace the idea of the “perpetual digital dossier”, and harness it to really take ourselves places.

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Making Twitter Work for the Masses

Published by Jarred on September 30, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Politics and Web 2.0. View Comments

Back in February, I attempted to demystify Twitter for the non-tech oriented. The service was (and still is) trying to find its place in the crowded marketplace of tech innovations. It’s been plagued by serious downtime, and has even had to cut back on some of its features in order to provide more stability. While it continues to slowly gain recognition outside the narrow audience of technophiles, it still suffers from a big problem: you can’t explain it to your grandmother in just a few sentences.

The easiest way I know how to explain Twitter is as a “microblogging system” or “a tricked out Facebook status update”. In my blog post I called it a combination of text messaging, Facebook status, blogging, and instant messaging. Little to none of that would make sense to someone who doesn’t own a computer. Of course, it’s not like those people are the audience for Twitter. But if you can’t quickly and easily explain your product to audiences that aren’t already embedded in these developments, how can you become relevant or attractive to them?

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