Archive for the 'Culture' Category

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Newspaper Is Not The “One Medium To Rule Them All”

Published by Jarred on February 11, 2009 in Business, Culture, News and Web 2.0. View Comments

Reminder: I speak for myself and not for my employer.

Late last month, the New York Times ran an op-ed by David Swensen and Michael Schmidt called “News You Can Endow.” It begins with this quote from Thomas Jefferson:

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right. [...] And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

And then, ominously, the authors declare:

“Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. [...] If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.”

I’ve done enough LSAT logical reasoning questions to recognize a broken argument when I see it. I could hash it out, but I much prefer passive aggressive analogies. Let’s say that Jefferson also wrote that the basis of commerce is the efficient movement of goods. Today, however, we are dangerously close to having an economy without carriages. Oh noes! If Jefferson was right that excellent transportation is the foundation of our economy, then carriages must be saved! Dunno about you, but I’m pretty sure the CEO of FedEx would disagree.

Swensen and Schmidt go on to argue that turning newspapers into non-profit organizations funded by endowments “would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down.” In other words, they believe that because newspapers are not surviving the market economy with their current business model, they should — instead of adapting to consumer demand and concentrating on moving their operations online — forgo a business model altogether and become self-sufficient institutions that are immune to the desires of their audience. I’ll give you a few seconds to apply and enjoy the carriage analogy here.

Of course, as Michael Masnick at Techdirt points out, Jefferson wasn’t really talking about newspapers as a medium, but newspapers as an implementation of journalism (just as — if my invented quote were true — he would probably have been talking about transportation, and not just carriages). Doesn’t Jefferson’s quote really imply that, if anything, a citizenry who could be informed frequently, and even in real time, would be better off than one who only received news in a single, diurnal, static form? To put it simply: wouldn’t Jefferson have been in favor of ditching newspapers for online news?

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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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Stop Creating for a Moment and Enjoy? We’re Fine, Thanks

Published by Taylor on January 26, 2009 in Culture, News and Politics. View Comments

cameraobama If you had been in the crowd pictured here, at President Obama’s Youth Inaugural Ball, would you have whipped out a digital camera to capture a shot of the first couple from among the mass of young people? Would you have tried to snap a quick picture on your iPhone? Texted your best friend? Twittered frantically: “STANDING 30 FT FROM THE NEW PRES!!”? Blogged about it the next day?

Adam Frucci on Gizmodo had a strong reaction to this image:

“[E]veryone wants their own unique shot. Is this obsessive documentation worth it?

This is definitely something I’ve noticed a lot of lately: people are more interested in taking photos of something they’re witnessing than actually, you know, witnessing it. These people are all looking at LCD screens instead of the new Presidential couple standing in front of them.”

I too initially rolled my eyes at this trend. But the more I think about it, the more I believe that what we’re witnessing in this picture and in our lived experience is actually a reflection of how we’ve grown to…well…experience anything of significance. And I’m not so sure it’s a bad thing…

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Will The Personalized Web Filter Out Diversity?

Published by Jarred on January 14, 2009 in Book Reviews, Consumer Behavior, Culture, Search, Social Networks, Sociology and Web 2.0. View Comments

About a year ago, I wrote that I had received a book for Christmas called The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was only two weeks ago, on my post-holiday flight back to California, that I finally finished it after ten months of letting it collect dust.

Carr’s attitude about the rise of cloud computing, social networking, and all the other web 2.0 buzztrends caught me off guard. While he seems to marvel at and mostly celebrate the speed and scale at which this phenomenon has grown and subsequently become integral to modern life, he does so with a very cautionary and sometimes pessimistic tone. I guess I should have expected as much after reading his piece in the Atlantic last summer (hat tip to Joel for passing it along) called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. Though I don’t share all of his concerns, it is refreshing to find a voice like his among the generally over-enthusiastic technorati (myself included).

Carr highlights a particularly interesting threat in the chapter he titles “The Great Unbundling.” While granting that the jubilation over the democratizing and barrier-lowering nature of the Internet is mostly well deserved, he also warns that these characteristics come with potential harm. What harm? In short, Carr argues that the speed and personalization offered by the Internet facilitate our natural human tendency to cluster into isolated groups that can deafen and blind us to differing opinions.

Carr’s main evidence is an experiment conducted in 1971 by a Nobel Prize winning economist named Thomas Schelling. The experiment consisted of a grid of squares and a set of white and black markers. After randomly distributing these markers to represent an “integrated” community, he moved the markers around based on the rule that no one marker could have more than 50% of its immediate neighbors be of the opposite color. This rule, Schelling posited, mirrored a natural instinct that humans possess: to be closer to people similar to ourselves than we are to those who are different. After moving pieces one at a time based on this rule, he ended up with one all-white cluster and one all-black cluster. Self-segregation, Schelling concluded, is the natural result of our instinctual preference to be closer to those that resemble us than to those who differ from us.

Extrapolating from these results, Carr hypothesizes that because the Internet removes so much friction from the market for information, self-segregation will happen much more quickly and completely online than, say, in a once-integrated neighborhood that slowly segregates over many years into two or more distinct socioeconomic or racial groups. In my opinion, however, his interpretation of Schelling’s experiment, and his application of it to the Web, is flawed from the start.

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Impatient Experts: Deciding When (Or If) To Try Something New

Published by Jarred on December 17, 2008 in Careers and Culture. View Comments

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, gave an interesting piece of advice on his blog last night: “Do something new every three years.” He writes:

For the first ten years of my career, I changed jobs every three years. Then, for the seven years I was at The Economist, I changed countries every three years (London, Hong Kong, and New York, although sadly not long enough at the last). Here at Wired, I seem to have achieved the same rhythm by publishing a book after my fifth year and, next summer, my eighth. Each time it changes my life and puts me back on a steep learning curve with a new subject to immerse in and a new pace of travel and speaking. I’ve got a new foreign land to explore.

Anderson goes on to tie his “three and flee” advice (my words) to a theory advanced by Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Outliers: that it takes about 10,000 hours of disciplined application to something to create a true master. In an excerpt from the book provided by The Guardian, Gladwell writes:

This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

Though I appreciate the unique insight he brings to interesting subjects — and I’ll also admit I haven’t yet read Outliers — I’ve always been slightly skeptical of Gladwell’s reductionist theories (see also: Thomas Friedman’s Flexible Deadlines and the F.U.). My skepticism aside, Anderson calculates that (60 hours/week) x (50 weeks/year) x (3 years) = (a little under 10,000 hours). And so, according to rough Gladwellian-Andersonian metrics, if you work your butt off for a little over three years, you can consider yourself a master in your field.

Having done that, Anderson writes: “Great. Now go do something else.”

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