Emily: I often have the experience I get an email from someone who I really want to send a good full‑bodied response back so I don’t respond with one line immediately and then it falls back in the queue and I never get to it.
Farhad: Yeah. That happens to me all the time. I think that looking over the email that I need to send, the people in that queue are probably the people in the world that I like the most.
Emily: I feel so much better.
Category Archives: The Interwebs
Discovery and reinvention and risk
[W]hen I worry about my students being online, it’s because I imagine their moments of discovery and reinvention and risk derailed by Facebook comments from people who remember them as they weren’t and won’t let them forget it, tying them down before they lift off. … I worry there’s less room to try on and cast off new selves, as people and artists alike, but maybe that’s only an issue for someone who always finds himself writing about isolation one way or another, and for whom the most terrifying thing ever seen on TV is that eBay ad asking, “What if nothing was ever forgotten?”
The Cult of the Amateur
If you’re looking for a thoughtful discussion of amateurs vs. experts in the world of Web 2.0, Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur isn’t it. It starts out as a rant against amateurism, which Keen equates with incompetence. Obviously, this is a fallacious argument. (The book is a series of those.)
Not only that, but he doesn’t even agree with his own argument. For example, it’s highly doubtful that any of the record store sales clerks that he reveres were professional musicologists. Rather, they were knowledgeable amateurs who took sales positions at record stores because they liked music! The book is full of conflicting arguments like this. Keen protests that he’s not a Luddite but his concerns say otherwise. On one hand, he derides high schoolers editing Wikipedia. On the other, he reveres the same high schooler when he’s working in an indie record store. The only possible conclusion: his issue is not with an amateur music lover showing off his knowledge but with that knowledge being shown off online.
He considers the average person to be an idiot who can’t tell a personal blog from CNN or the NY Times and who is therefore constantly in peril of conflating Joe Blow’s opinions with those of professional journalists. Not only is this ridiculous (ok, there are probably some people who are just that dumb, but it’s obviously not true for the majority of people), but while he criticizes the bias of the amateur, he is completely uncritical of the bias of the professional. Ahem. As I think is pretty clear to the average person sitting at home watching cable news, just because someone is getting paid to talk about news on TV doesn’t make them unbiased.
He argues that buying music from Tower Records (now-defunct music store) = good! Buying music from iTunes = bad. Renting movies from Blockbuster? Good! Netflix? Bad. The hell? I mean, if his actual concern is people “stealing” intellectual property, then he shouldn’t have a preference where or how they obtain it, as long as they do in fact pay for it. He also makes such a big deal about people buying singles on iTunes, like singles are some kind of online invention (!) that’s an affront to musicians. With arguments like these, he betrays his own bias as someone who simply doesn’t want people to buy stuff online.
He is pro-corporation, expecting readers to feel bad for mega-corporations such as Disney. Seriously? Disney? The same Disney that is pretty much single-handedly responsible for crazy copyright extensions? Right.
We must keep content creators and content consumers separate, he argues. Really? Really? Give me a break. Elitist much? Sure, there’s a lot of crap online. Sure, there are legitimate issues with respect to content creation and how creators should be compensated (believe me, this is an issue I’m interested in), but the idea that only a certain class of people are allowed to create and everyone else should just sit down and shut up and consume? [censored]
Why does Jane Doe posting how-to-crochet tutorials on YouTube or John Smith blogging about the exploits of his family bother him so much? If he’s not interested in these things, he doesn’t have to “consume” them. But it seems to bother him that they exist. Or rather, that he knows they exist. Because average people have always created things, they just weren’t so visible to the elites. His big issue seems to be that he is forced to acknowledge their presence. And, of course, that their presence (content) might be competition for his.
Do I think that, if someone is an expert, their views on their subject of expertise should be given more weight than that of non-expert? Sure. But what makes someone an “expert”? Credentials? Paid employment? Being knowledgeable about a subject? Being skilled at something? What Keen seems to miss is that a) a person can be both an amateur and an expert on a subject, b) not all professionals are experts (i.e. a person might hold a paid position, but not be very knowledgeable or skilled), c) people can obtain knowledge & skills through means other than formal education & employment, and most importantly: d) every professional starts out as an amateur. You don’t get good at something by passively “consuming.” You get good by trying, doing, creating, learning, experimenting. Yeesh.
Oh wait. He didn’t actually miss that because in his acknowledgments at the end of the book he actually admits that he, writing his first book, is an amateur. So, it’s ok that he (an amateur) writes a book putting down amateurs (as well as the general population), but it’s not ok that other amateurs write (or make videos or whatever) about subjects they’re interested in? How can he not see that he’s doing exactly what he doesn’t want others to do? What makes him so special?
Finally, perhaps a bigger problem than anything I’ve discussed here is, after a few chapters, Keen veers wildly off-topic, digressing into discussions of such things as IP theft, privacy, identity theft, online gambling, online porn, and parental controls. I guess he ran out of things to say to support his stated thesis. Overall, it’s a shallow and flawed argument. Disappointing.
Nothing else going on
Just finished watching (well, listening) to this Nicholas Carr lecture in which he says:
I think one way to think about this is that what the web does—despite the fact that it’s this incredible high technology and we think of it as the cutting edge and everything—is bring us back to a much more primitive and in a way more natural style of thinking. I mean I think Fred and Barney would have been very happy online and using our new technologies, because our brains seem to be naturally wired to shift our focus very rapidly. And you can understand this if you think about our distant ancestors in Stone Age times and so forth. You were rewarded by your ability to keep track of as much of what was going on around you at once. You know by shifting your attention all the time, by shifting your focus, you were the person who survived because you saw the predator approaching before everyone else, or you were the person who survived because you spotted that bush of berries that you could eat that everybody else missed. And so in a way we’re naturally wired to be distracted, to be interrupted, and what’s hard for us is to pay attention, what goes against our instincts and our nature is to focus on one thing. You know, the worst thing a caveman could do is actually focus on one thing for a long period of time because then he would end up being eaten pretty quickly.
And I think in this regard it’s very very interesting and very informative to compare what the web is doing to us with what the other great modern information technology did for us and that is the book. I mean, think about the difference between being online between looking at a screen and sitting down with a book. The fundamental difference is that whereas the screen bombards us with distractions and interruptions, the book, the printed page, shields us from those distractions and interruptions that come at us all the time. You know, we tend to think of the book, the printed book, as somehow being flawed today because it doesn’t have links, it doesn’t have video, it doesn’t have multimedia, you can’t like check your email while you’re reading a book, but in fact that’s the fundamental strength of the book as a technology. There is nothing else going on. And so that way of thinking that’s very hard and very unnatural for us, for we human beings, that very attentive way of thinking was encouraged by the book and in fact I think you can argue that for many people over the last 500 years the story of our intellectual lives is the story of how the book helped us to pay attention. And that, because the brain is adaptable and plastic, our ability to pay attention that we learned from reading could then be applied to all sorts of other aspects of our mental lives.
—Nicholas Carr
(starting @ 49:40; emphasis added, obvs.)
The first part (single-minded focus vs. multitasking) is interesting because it fits into where I”m going with my dissertation, this idea that in online writing we have conflict and misunderstandings because of a clash between worldviews, i.e. writers (creators) and non-writers (communicators). (Or literacy/individuality vs. orality/community.)
The second part… I’m like, hmm, I’m sure I’ve said/written something to this effect before. So then I dug around in my archives a bit and aha! I did indeed. Now I just need figure out how to get people to pay me to write books and give lectures based on my amazing and prescient blog posts.
I’ll comment on yours if you comment on mine
As a concept [relatability] grew valuable, and could be attached to modes of engagement–whether artistic, socio-cultural, or political–that were previously uninterested in relating to their audience in any conscious way. The memoir boom was built on this idea, as is much of chick lit, reality TV and of course the blogoscenti. With the dawn of the internet and its attendant traffic in user-generated, confessional minutiae—and I’ll comment on yours if you comment on mine—an ascendant cultural irregularity found the medium to turn its message into a malignancy. …
The most dangerous thing about relatability is the way it is often presented (and accepted) as a reasonable facsimile of or substitute for truth. This, I worry, may handicap our culture so violently that recovery, if it comes at all, will be generations in the reckoning; if in the meantime we lose our appetite for the real thing we are pretty much doomed. The pursuit of truth is a basic human instinct, and guides our engagement with ourselves, with art, and with other human beings; the scourge of relatability—and its sweetheart deal with another basic instinct, adaptation—puts all three relationships at risk.
The Internet has changed us
The point, it seems to me, isn’t whether the Internet is “good” or “bad” for our brains. The Internet has changed us, just as the printed book and the typewriter did. The Internet sharpens us and makes us faster thinkers, more adept at shifting between tasks, even as it erodes our ability to focus on a single topic, a single work, for long periods of time. The point is that whether you think the Internet is “good for your mind”, or exactly the opposite, depends on your values.
…
it seems to me that [Nicholas Carr has] approached this problem primarily as a writer—in other words, as someone whose profession requires the ability to close oneself in a room and remain utterly focused on the business of researching and completing a manuscript for hours at a time. For a writer, an inability to focus for long periods on the work at hand is at best an impediment, at worst a disaster.
The same claim
[T]he way Facebook works, everyone on your list has the same claim on your attention. So if I made a joke that had a ten-year-history in my family, someone whom I had never met, and who could arguably be the friend of an old acquaintance of a neighbor of a cousin, made a comment about not getting it. It became necessary to explain the joke, which took away some of its humor. Or if I posted a link to an article, along with a line that I thought was clearly sarcastic, someone took it literally. I had to temper the sarcasm, which took away its bite. If I was busy and did not get a chance to respond to an incendiary comment, someone was bound to take it as an endorsement.
Captured
In a feature that Facebook thinks is great — and will thrill law enforcement and divorce lawyers — every conversation will be captured for posterity, unless users delete specific messages or entire conversations. Do you assume that the people with whom you communicate are saving every text message and IM? You’d better.
High School
Facebook: it’s all about putting you back in high school.
Creepy by definition
So what? These are not private sites, anybody can read them. —gloeden31
How is this #creepy? If one wants to discuss skin issues openly, one should be more than happy to have a skin-issue company actually observe the discussion. —EthanPeter
@EthanPeter: Because reading blogs is creepy by definition. —skahammer
How DARE they view information that I posted publicly for anyone to read.
THIS is an outrage! —LUV_TRUK
Comments in response to a Gawker post titled
“Unilever Is Listening to You Talk About Your Skin Problems.”
The Remainder Table 