Like a Bird on a Wire
I've been waiting for a long time for Twitter to convert from a conversation about tech itself, to something with substance. Now, various big influencers are dropping in the substance of their own very heavily biased views that brook no dissent whatsoever. Will we be able to continue the conversation, or will we face brutal broadcasting that we can't turn off, because we are embedded in the social media ourselves?
I've been thinking a lot about Twitter lately because it went from being a silly curiosity, to fun, to my main quickie news source for the day, to being annoying and even a public menace sometimes, in my perception. So I'd like to study how that came about.
I guess it's no accident, comrades, that Steve Rubel, whose blog is really the best in that sort of business, for my attention-economy, has a self-professed rant up about how social media should just be called "media" now, and then Eric Schonfeld of Tech Crunch is saying that his old job as journalist and new job as blogger all seem seamlessly merged now. Because all these guys did is figure out that social media/new technology (including virtual worlds) are just ways for the few to influence the many, just a slightly different and more emotionally powerful few and many.
Tech Crunch is this site that decides whether start-ups live or die in Silicon Valley, and therefore makes grown men shit in their pants, I guess. Micropersuasion is part of Edelman, which is a very powerful global PR firm (to see how powerful, do two things: Google Edelman and find that you don't get...the Wikipedia page, which is what you get on most things in the world, but you get the firm's own website. Nice! Then go to Wikipedia, and find the entry for Edelman, and see how...lean and sparse it is lol). I guess that's why as wonderful as Steve Rubel is, I find it irritating when he says: "Follks, it's time for all of us, especially "The Joes," to give ourselves the self-respect we deserve by calling all of this work "media." Otherwise, by continuing to propagate the term "social media" we're just reserving our seat at the kids table for our little cut up pieces of chicken. it's time to feast on drumsticks like the adults do. Google doesn't delineate. So why should we?" Hey, Steve, the day I can put icons on my website that says MY EMPLOYER EDELMAN and AD AGE, I'll be eating the drumsticks with you, champ : )
So what, if like many of my readers and tenants, you have never heard of Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington, or Steve Rubel? (I had never heard of them until this last year). What happened, is that while you were still rustling the pages of your dead-tree Sunday Times on your knees next to your microwaved croissant on a hand-painted Macy's Cellar plate, thinking the Ochs Family ran things, these guys who made Internet media technology and these guys who made the advertising firms, who used to be on the other side of the editorial firewall, have simply knocked it down and taken over. I'm not sure they even know what a "firewall" between editorial and advertising *is* as most of them think a firewall is what is in your computer. Look, here's the difference: Pinch doesn't Twitter. I don't think Pinch even has a blog.
PROFESSIONAL PAID BLOGGERS AND PROFESSIONAL TECH WHINERS
Here's what I wrote to Erick's blog, which is now buried likely in like number 298 of a zillion tekkie fannings and a few anonymous snarks, so let me repost:
"Yeah, I’ve been saying this too [about journalism and blogging merging], and I find it a scary and nasty development that tekkies funded by tech companies, or covering start-ups and therefore having everybody beholden to them, are now covering the news of tech, and not just stopping there, but covering ALL news, and not covering it with sane analysis, or sound editorial judgement backed by peer review in a professional editorial board, or journalistic 5ws and fact-checking, but with emotional outbursts pretending to be cynical hard-nosed tech judgement. Like, “Let’s all hate FriendFeed or let’s all hate Second Life because it’s all lame and stupid.”
The worse thing about all this is the bleeding of the cynical geeky mentality out into covering not just tech, but *anything*. It’s the belief that because technology is fast, and it is possessed by you all, and you are Masters of the Universe, you can now just pronounce on *anything* and have it just stick, and resonate in an ego-driven echo-chamber of followers. If you all decide you love Obama because you imagine it is a blank slate you can write your tech agenda on to, then if anybody starts objecting, they get a link to a hateful anti-Hilary YouTube, or a 140-character Twitter that Hilary is a monster instead of reasoned argument.
It was one thing to have journalists, schooled in the humanities, people who had read books and philosophy and thought about universal values and such, to be writing about world and national issues, and tech too. That was the old days. Sure, some of those journalists were part of the ruling class and were indistinguishable from the titans of industry and government they were supposed to cover. But that could hardly be said of all of them or even of the last 50 years where it is journalism that uncovered Enron or Abu Ghraib.
What you now have are snotty, insolent people without any background in the humanities whatsoever, without some kind of apprenticed news judgement, merely raised on the Internet and often cloaked in anonymity, able to make everybody read Wikipedia, run by anonymous elitists without accountability, and drop any meme they like into the well.
And even where you have people who should know better who have perhaps substituted a life of studying the humanities with a lot of weekend hippie Zen retreats in California, you get really bad stuff.
DAVE WINER IS A RACIST AND SO ARE YOU
Example: Dave Winer, influencer extraordinaire, can just put up a blog and say, essentially “Everybody in the Northeast is racist”. First he asks it as a faux rhetorical question on Twitter, like "Is everybody in the Northeast racist?" not really looking for a "No, Dave, stop, Dave" but a "yes! and here's why!.
Then he speaks of "the racism of the northeast" as if this is some kind of indisputable given. He can declare Geraldine Ferraro as “racist” just because there’s a stampede that gets started that’s all about trying to prove the lefty white guys are more cool than thou. And if you try to object, if you try to say something, you can’t post on his blog, you are erased. He then follows with another post saying "Hi, I'm Dave Winer and I'm a Racist," to defuse all the revelations coming out about the Wrong Rev. Wright.
I marvel, when I see not only that he blocks my post, but he allows another guy through who spouts various kooky theories about northerners actually being more racist than southerners for economic reasons (this is the nefarious Cuban-style Marxist economic theory of all racism being based on economics, which actually leads you then to excuse racism where you think there is no economic imperative like in a socialist country).
He then berates this guy as follows, in ways that make my eyes bug out, given the FLAME that Dave Winer himself put up FIRST:
Writes Dave: "paul, you're so smart and write so well, but this is just plain nasty and where I stopped reading: "a fact that most northern white liberals either don't know or choose to ignore"
You want to make broad general statements that box people into defensive corners (ie flamebait) do it in your own space. Next time you do it here I'll moderate it out."
Moderate it out!
How can we *moderate out* these people who are pouring in the dye now upstream and making the water completely purple?! Even Dave Winer himself is sick of hearing them in his convo stream. (BTW, if you want to see something truly puzzling and bizarre, read Winer's claim that Wikipedia did him in with some back-biting jealous biased nasty edit of his entry on Wikipedia, which seems to form the basis of his basically correct critique of Wikipedia, but then go read the entry and...try to find the jealous back-biting biased stuff. It merely describes his moves from glory to glory, out of Brooklyn. Where is the nasty? Is it the bit about buying the house next to Judy Collins? About not coining the term weblog which this entry claims wasn't coined in 1997? But...it was used way before 1997, I remember it at least as early as 1994-1995, it was first used as a kind of daily diary by geeks building software or websites and would be heavily dull stuff about testing and bug hunting.
Or take Shel Israel, who can declare piously on Twitter to his 1,700 followers the the public at large, “I feel for the Tibetan people” but then back the Chinese and say the Olympics should go forward, without apparently considerating any sort of moral demonstration, even, let alone a boycott. And if you call him on behaving that way, you are called an anonymous asshole (I’m not), blocked, banned, etc.
Regular newspapers didn’t just let anybody publish, to be sure. But it’s been found in studies lately and we can all anecdotally illustrate it that the New York Times or amazon.com or New Republic have a higher tolerance for criticism, even sharp criticism, in their comments section, than many of these tech ego blogs. They can just shut down anyone they don’t like “just because” and no one can question them because, well, freedom of the press belongs to him who owns one, and if you don’t like it, start your own blog, etc.
The swarming around of these tekkie influencers into every new social media thingie that comes down the pike and their rapid slurping up of giant friend lists that slavishly follow their every pontification, all under the guise of an intimate conversation, is really one of the biggest rackets in the universe these days, because nobody is covering the news without fear our favour, or attending to the afflicting of the comfortable and comforting of the afflicted."
**
TWITTERATI
Twitter could become addictive because the maker, Evan Williams, who is this guy in the mid West who had several failed start-ups and then somehow got some of this weird Silicon Valley pass-around-pack VC money, that seems to come from...somewhere and go...somewhere (I still find it difficult to understand how VCs can put money into things with no demonstrable product, business model, or revenue-generating scheme, and yet make money themselves -- but I think it works on the Bonfire of the Vanities principle, that as they pass the pie pieces around, they keep some crumbs for themselves -- remember that line?).
The Twitter folks figured out that the way you could get a bunch of cynical tekkie geeky types to behave like giddy teenagers on AIM, and join a giant global chat room where the makers could harvest their memes, key words, and innermost desires exhibited to the masses, would be to:
o ask a question somewhat like the one God asked Adam in the Garden of Eve: "What are you doing?" and know that most people in the West would answer, instead, to another question, "What are you thinking?" or "What is your PR headline for today's news cycle?"
o make it persistent, like a virtual world, so that even after you close the window, you can come back and read several pages of history
o have little pictures -- avatars -- like a virtual worlds (Twitter is that first, light, massively multiple-player non-game virtual world that everyone was waiting for - it's here!)
o have a lite MySpace home page that shows yet another wall paper and maybe a website link and a one-liner about yourself -- but not have the ability to clutter it too much and make it stupid like MySpace or Facebook -- Zen
o make it so other people can add things like Tweetscan, which is a must for Twitter use, and the other things, like the map of Twitter around the world
o launch it at SXSW when lots of geeks and artists and rockers are looking for the bars and the parties and are too loaded to thumb their own two-way wrist-watches fast enough.
o have 60 of the top tech egos with ego blogs race to the top of it with numbers of followers (ported from blogs) sort of set the tone for it, deciding who must be blocked, who is to be declared "an asshole," who is responded to, or not, etc. (see what I mean about how it got to be a MMORPGy virtual world very fast? It has GMs, resmonds, bosses, FIC, etc. all built into it already without anybody having to code any complicated classes).
I'm not wealthy enough to pay for Twitter as an SMS coming on my cheap cell phone, or to buy a $495 device and pay $200 in mandated phone service I can't back out of, in order to be able to thumb through a huge page of twitters on a roller bar, the way the adepts can, so I tune into it a few times a day on the web.
I've collected 488 followers, and I'm not sure why first I got about 100 rushing in during a few weeks, and then a huge rush of more in like another few days, but I think it's partly the way "viruses" work, that some people in an influential group reach all their networks, and after a pause, some of them all come and join something and mine each others' friends' lists to add more people (that's how I join things, by mining Scoble's list).
Scoble, of course, is this one-man force of nature that just storms into every new piece of tech like a smart 3-year-old taking apart the entire radio in his room and reassembling it. What makes him just better than most of the tech bloggers is that for the most part, he is *nice*. He's not cynical or snarky, but enthusiastic. That goes very, very far not only in my book, but in a lot of people's book. You don't have to read this Valley Wag type stuff, dripping with sarcasm and hate, which you know is fueled with geeky insecurity and self-loathing. Scoble seems to *actually* radiate the joy and centeredness that geeks in California *should* have, given all that fake lukewarm Westernized Zen stuff they soak up on at bootcamps and barcamps and weekend retreats in ashrams. But you suspect that Scoble does this simply by...having a wife and family he spends time with, a house in Half Moon Bay (a location famouse (for me) for appearing in Kathleen Norris books from early 20th century), and people always ready to give him jobs now -- yet a keen sense of what it was like struggling to get and keep jobs. Scoble has apparently figured out how to harness ADHD for fun and profit and that's a benefit to us all.
However, Scoble, being of the Valley, isn't above being snarky on a story like Lacy and Zuckerman, and so then I'll push back.
Which brings me to my point about the way Twitter works. The people who made it -- oh, I don't know what they think. I tried to study this, I couldn't conclude whether they'd be willing to keep their service unmoderated and un TOS-ified, hoping that people will generally "play nice" or whether either griefers like the PN, or a serious and persistent critic like myself will make them protect their VC sources. We'll see. I think it's actually critical that they just not moderate it. They have to use the principle of: "If you are annoyed, unfollow. If it spams, unfollow. If you want privacy, block the reading of your posts."
THE GARDENING OF TWITTER
But...There are no shortage of "good citizens" who want to "garden" in Twitter. There are people who tell the Tech Crunch people to shut up and stop spamming (they use it as a PR-y headline service). I tell NYTimes and BBC that they are "overproducing". That's because we want to stay subscribed, but find they just fill up the page too much. If you are on a phone, you are hostage to this, unless you unfollow. Being on the Internet, you can just close the window and come back later or just use Tweetscan to hunt key words with probably more ease of use than you can from a mobile, I'm not sure. For those who really wanted to be on a blog or forums *anway* there is now quotably.com which enables you to endure Prokofy say, just once a week and not feel blindsided if you've been talked about.
These good citizens tell me to shut up, too, of course, even if I only pose 5 sharp Twitters a day, and not 50 about my dog or my dbase, which is what all the tekkies do (Jason Calicanis is especially obnoxious with his dog and then his dorky YouTube links that are mere transparent bids to come give traffic to his geeky hippie hootenany, Maholo.com).
People try to manipulate Twitter, of course -- Jason Calicanis offers a contest to win a Mac Pro if you follow him -- he camps up his traffic to his website *and* mines the friend delta stipend, just like Second Life.
Some people do what I have come to call lifeshellstreaming. Take Joi Ito, known as an enthusiastic WoW player, member of many prestigious boards, venture capitalist, and even Second Life resident with various low-key, even secretive projects. He never says anything of substance on Twitter. He will say "Boarding the plane to Tokyo" or "attending this meeting" or "Nothing to do in downtown Helsinki" or "using the neti purchased at the pharmacy" or "meditating at dawn" to let you know that he is a very big deal, very cool by being a meditator (in his case, it may be real Zen and not microwaved Westernized Zen), and just busy going around being a Master of the Metaverse (like the Tom Robbins' Masters of the Universe, only bigger and eve more influential). Joi never, ever gives a detail, of the type so many put up on Twitter, like "taking my daughter to ballet class". He never, ever, gives an opinion, like "See this YouTube about Obama". No doubt he is waiting for the right moment to bomb Twitter with his views, or seep them in subtley, knowing he has the audience primed.
Or take Pierre Omidyar, another early Twitter signer, who never said anything hardly at all, possibly just Too Busy in Real Life, and then began to drop links to Obama pages, including his own blogs.
Why would somebody's blog even deserve a comment? If he had published his article as on op-ed page in the Times, I wouldn't bother writing a letter to the editor. I wouldn't have posted a comment even on a comments-enabled blog, because he would merely be part of a predictable echo chamber on the left, echoing and re-echoing. But if he or others then come on what I feel as if my user-generated, participatory democracy, *my Twitter, too*, he will feel a push-back from me. He can't just make me roll over and click FOLLOW and FAN.
Of course, a blog like that or like the same sort of blog JoelG formerly of the Sheep or whoever posts would be too personal and opinionated even for an op-ed page -- it's very bloggy to claim that you want your children to live in a world without racism, and therefore you are voting for Obama -- as if votes for the other candidates dooms not only that guy's child, but all of our children to a horrid world of ugly racism under the other candidates -- as if they are racists, deliberatley trying to create a racist world. That is, surely, they don't *mean* to make such an emotional and strident declaration, *but they do*.
This campaign has been flush with memes and re-memes pumped to an absurd degree, making the Dean Scream seem like a mild prank. Example: Hilary and the Bosnia story. The Obama camp, and a thousand Twitterers and social media mavens were quick to declare Hillary as lying and exaggerating because she told a story about landing in Bosnia "under sniper fire".
She merely said she "misspoke". A Youtube up now even has a fake pharmaceutical ad with a happy couple talking about how they take this drug now and forget all the nasty things Hillary supposedly said, like, they claim, Hilary running down the victims of her husband's sexual excesses and abuses. Is anyone going to check that, no? And couldn't we say that *anyone* who went to Bosnia at that time was going under sniper fire, because, well, there was a war with snipers, and snipers don't wait to time their fire always to when you think it is safer. I marvel that anyone could lose sight of the value of Hilary making a trip to Bosnia at that time, and imagine that a misstatement about there precisely being sniper fire at that moment or not matters. It truly doesn't. There's something sick and mean about people willing to chose this incident as an example of "lying". They aren't credible. *They are the ones lying, and we know that, and won't forget it.*
So why do I push back hard against these people, making some of them block me, or even saying, hmm, well-earned name, "Infamous Antagonist of SL"? Because...they came in social media that was supposed to be a conversation, but they aren't using it as a conversation. So they've broken a kind of unspoken rule that many people have a sense of in their own little AIM conversations, or Yahoo Messenger conversations, or Facebook conversations. They are coming in as powerful, big influencers and NOT having a conversation, but having a broadcast. And not just a broadcast like you get from the old broadcast media, emanating from concern about news and editorial judgement, and even tempered by concern about advertisers (not the worst thing to temper leftoid emotional journos, believe me), but just...a broadcast, like a broadside, or a cast-in-stone.
I really hate it. But it will only get more like this. People dropping memes into the well, harvesting thousands upon thousands of other sub-influencers (Scoble has 16,000 followers, for example), and then if somebody talks back, or they look cross-eyed at the poster, block, ignore. Of course, one of the funny things about Tweetscan, like Google Reader when Busybody "blocks me from the Internet" ROFL) is that you can read the people who block you there *shrugs*. That may not last, if some of the bigger egos, under the guise of "data portability" decide to insist in fact that their blocks "hold" -- and they will. It's only a matter of time. Big powerful egos don't like people talking back -- they want to broadcast and they want you to shut up.
NEW MEDIA THAT IS JUST MEDIA IS BETTER...BUT WORSE THAN OLD MEDIA
That's why what we will have with social media just becoming "media" as Steve Rubel calls it, will be in part better (but maybe not for long) but then ultimately worse.
Better, because you will be able to, say, skip the time-consuming and difficult process of getting a letter to the editor at the Times published in the official letters part (I've done it a number of times, it's an art and science, I guess, and hard to get picked), and in 15 minutes, put a longer wordcount up on the blog and have it approved within an hour or two. You can even skip the opinions page process, even more brutal to clear through all the political/editorial/class hurdlges, and print something that amounts to an op-ed as a comment underneath the blogs.
Of course, there are now all these paid bloggers, who can be ESPECIALLY arrogant and unaccountable now, because they can act as if they are more cool than the professional journalists who still toil away making sayings for the dead-tree stuff used to wrap fish, because they are neo-geo groovy bloggers, but they can feel terribly superior to unpaid bloggers, from whose ranks they may have recently come. It's pretty awful to contemplate, having those people take over -- and they have. Taken over. Watch them first get Obama elected. Then take over the "advising" of Obama. This is why I, too, vote for Obama, so I can try to keep them honest and be part of the movement to mainstreamize Obama toward the liberal center, since he has been under the influence of old '60s Chicago lefties and even Farrakhan freaks his whole life and is a vehicle for move-on.org and other new media thingies.
I personally am left rather depressed at the thought of having not Anthony Lewis or Leon Wieseltier or Peter Beinhart dominate the commentary landscape, but Michael Arrington or Dave Winer or even Robert Scoble, God bless him. That is, in one sense, it's an East Coast/West Coast thing and you don't have to worry too much about one prevailing, as historically, they have balanced each other out, but still. It's unsettling.
OLD MEDIA ECOLOGY
In all the years of the "bourgeois media" running the discourse on subjects like Euromissiles or Reagan or Nicaragua, you had the Village Voice or the Nation or New Politics, largish alternative newspapers run on the ads, or establishment lefty publications financed by donors and foundations and subscribers, or scrappy little smaller independent publications run on enthusiasm and whatever somebody could scrape together from jobs. That ecology was an important intellectual landscape before the Internet arrived; when the Internet came, you first had email to send around commentary, and then finally blogs.
The blogs all seemed enthusiastic and independent and a corrective on the Democratic Party, either to the left or right. Huffington Post, which always felt like a big paid machine to me, even not being profitable, changed the landscape. (One thing that I always really loathed about HuffPo was that if you went to sign up and register on its site, it force-fed you daily deliveries, but that registering didn't enable you to post on the site. I never did manage to get to post on it, for reasons that remain a mystery to me (perhaps I was IP banned by people I never heard of and never dealt with). Valleywag, for example, lets you know that it will only clear you to post if it finds you sufficiently cool. It never did find me sufficiently cool. Gawker.com for some reason in New York did clear me, but that could just be a fluke. We can't know but that these guys pass around lists of who to IP ban or who to pass through at their little weekend Renaissance confabs or their gaming conferences or whatever it is they go to.
The Republicans harnessed the left wingnuts to kill Hi;lary, as the Village Voice deftly illustrated. They may have created a monster there, but so far, nobody except the Voice seems to notice how easily they played the wingnuts.
Was Twitter or Friendster or Facebook critical to this. Well...not quite. This sort of thing is more influential. But it helped.
I always like the contrarian ways, but I gotta say that the olden days of "humanities-schooled journalists" is rank nostalgia that doesn't hold water. It's always been political indoctrination and media bullying, with rare cases of thoughfulness. Of course, that is what made it effective, in times such as Watergate when there was a story to be dug up. So unlike these days when the Executive branch plays by the book... o.O
Posted by: Jeff McNeill | March 30, 2008 at 08:24 PM
Oh, bullshit, Jeff, it isn't anything of the kind. And there are plenty of journalists and writers even of a young age that *are* schooled in the humanities and put together very credible social media blogging-type sites, I can think of opendemocracy.net for example.
There isn't this "political indoctrination" that you imagine except in some Internet-fueled memed-up pile-on. Where does this, um, indoctrination take place, Jeff? In, uh, Skull & Bones sessions? at the Trilateral Commission lol?
And like...there is nothing that keeps a watch on the Executive Branch? Are you out of your fucking *mind*?! I mean, read Harpers, just to pick one of the leading journals of the intelligentsia. Read Scott Horton's blog on Harpers, "No Comment". Read, oh, like a million blogs ranting about Bush.
You're in some kind of tunnel.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 30, 2008 at 08:44 PM
Wow is this a long writing, I'd have to say that I'm pleased that Twitter limits you to a digestible reading of 140 characters. On the other hand, I respect that you really researched your topic on Twitter, which prompted your questions yesterday, answered by Scoble. I agree with you that Scoble is successful because he is a very likable person and I follow him because he keeps me abreast of the latest technology. On the other hand, if I need a deeper analysis of issues (even if somewhat cynical), I know that you won't disappoint. :-) Sometimes I think you should lighten up a bit and just enjoy life more, but then I reason that this world takes all kinds and I appreciate you just as you are.
- Tim
Posted by: Timothy McDoniel | March 30, 2008 at 10:35 PM
Well, I hope you stick with that idea, Tim, because many people wish to change me, but I won't be changing, so if they don't appreciate me as I am, they can press REFUND or turn the page. Thanks for your note.
I can only say to people who constantly carp about the length of my writing, or the sharpness of it: Nobody is pinning is twisting anybody's arm to read my stuff. Read Twitter if that is more digestible to you with your limited attention span. It takes time and space to think about these complex ideas, and I take the space and time to think out loud. Do it your way, if you'd rather.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 30, 2008 at 10:41 PM
its a good post. I agree and disagree. As a stock and humor guy, I use twitter to fleshout ideas and make me think an extra few seconds before doing someting. Therfore it has value.
I can follow who i want to follow and I generally follow positive and light people.
Good rant though.
You feel any better :)
Posted by: howard lindzon | March 30, 2008 at 11:26 PM
I don't "rant to feel better" as I don't believe in these hydraulic theories of human nature that are so popular. I think out loud. It's just a transcript.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 30, 2008 at 11:30 PM
No worries. The esteemed realm of psychiatry has deemed all this emailing, blogging, twittering, etc... i.e.;, hiding behind a screen and typing instead of socializing, a mental disorder. I'm sure med commercials that say the side effects include restless leg syndrome (and they have a med for that too!) will follow.
At least they are no longer drilling holes in heads to "release the demons".
Seems there is a commercial opportunity in everything these days.
Posted by: Ann Otoole | March 31, 2008 at 06:48 AM
You touch on several fundamental problems with so-called "social media" and why it isn't media at all...that pronouncements and un-researched opinions and the meme-o-the-day (and hippie zen weekends LOL) don't replace the research and professional standards of journalism, and how easily "the wingnuts" (on all sides of the political spectrum) are played.
If the aspirants to media status spent more time ensuring that they meet standards of evidence and responsible reporting/commentary, and less time telling everyone how "old media" doesn't matter...until it does, or how it is biased...except when they agree with it, or how it is irrelevant in the face of the keyboard warriors...until the commandos get that coveted spot on Fox or MSNBC, perhaps they'd have a point.
Until then, I'm happy to be too uncool to even apply to comment at some site that doesn't know the difference between fact and meme.
Posted by: Jane2 McMahon | March 31, 2008 at 09:05 AM
jane2, so often I run across people influenced by these memes, this belief that "Fox TV" runs everything -- it's a correlary of making people hysterical and helpless, this deepseated belief that there is this evil machine that runs everything. It doesn't. The Internet and television even in the US is a much broader landscape of media and opinion than you imagine. Often those on the extreme left in particular are horrified that right-wing opinion is even expressed, even allowed, and they therefore fall into this totemic belief that it has more power than it does.
And those people who *do* watch Fox TV or read MSNBC find it resonates with them because those on the left are *unpersuasive in what they say*. They don't make sense. They aren't compelling. Nobody can believe them when they say Fox is infiltrating minds everywhere and they rant on as despiser of right-wing meme drops when they themselves are guilty of just as much meme-dropping, with their support Chavez, or Castro, or for that matter, extremists like Lessig with his latest anti-corruption campaign which is also about dismantling existing democratic structures and replacing them with tekkie-run structures of elites to whiplash long tails. No thanks.
I find the new media and the new social media amplification of the new media merely creates these horridly conservative and tribalist hard leftists stewing in a soup they imagine is "progressive". They are incapable of critical thought or debate or reasoned argument. They just parrot and recite what they read somewhere which helped them have their 15 minutes of hate for the day.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 31, 2008 at 10:06 AM
"And those people who *do* watch Fox TV or read MSNBC find it resonates with them because those on the left are *unpersuasive in what they say*. They don't make sense. They aren't compelling." - Prokofy
Speaking as a Brit, I ocassionally watch Fox because I like the presentation style....whereas I find CNN presentation incredibly dry and boring.
I've yet to become a rabid neo-con. In fact.....horror of horrors...I often find myself also watching Al Jazeera's English language service as well. Extremely well presented, often with entire hour long news documentaries that are among the best quality I have seen.
I'm sure the majority of people are quite capable, with whatever media, of differentiating the substance from the spin. Few get their information entirely from one source, and thus often it is the presentation that is the primary factor in what source to use.
Posted by: Agnetha Vuckovic | March 31, 2008 at 10:55 AM
Dude, I am now a subscriber. Great writing.
Posted by: Harold | March 31, 2008 at 11:51 AM
One of the principle problems with news and debate on the Internet is that it is so easy to find communities that think just like oneself.
Sure, even in the paper media you could find a magazine for just about any political persuasion, but newspapers traditionally were more balanced, more objective (despite that paper A in a town leaned left and paper B leaned right).
That objective reporting is missing, for the most part, online. Instead it is replaced by echo chambers where bloggers link to other bloggers with similar views, news outlets with similar views and create friends lists of people with similar views.
So much so that tools are being developed that show which side of the fence is linking to an article: http://research.microsoft.com/projects/blews/blews.aspx; http://buzztracker.org/ (there is a better one that I have misplaced the link to that uses a 2D grid with the links explicitly shown and navigatible... the more links from one side of the US political debate moves the site left or right).
I doubt what I'm saying is novel, but I do find it odd that so many seem to be unable to apply critical thinking skills to the problem and simply break out of their echo chambers. I find it valuable to read both biased (in all directions) and more balanced media. After all, if you can't articulate the arguments against your position, you really don't know you own position very well. But it deeper than that: a truly informed person should be able to see the *merit* in other points of view, not just be looking to undermine things disbelieved apriori.
Posted by: John Lopez | March 31, 2008 at 12:09 PM
Prok, have you read the book Cyberselfish? (Regarding libertarianism in Silicon Valley)
Posted by: Harold | March 31, 2008 at 12:16 PM
So 100 staffers are leaving Newsweek today, taking their Humanities degrees with them. Where will they go next? Surely some of them will write online, even if just to satisfy their urge to write. (The writer's of the staff, that is.)
Will the be welcomed? Surely in some forums, but in the whirlpool we're swimming in they'll be sorely tested before their thoughts and opinions will be followed on Twitter. Many tekkies will take aim on these "Vanguards of the Old Media" the moment they post their first post-Newsweek op-ed (er, blog post).
I agree: there are plenty of tech writer's who just aren't as well-versed in the humanities or simply aren't as well-rounded as we'd hope our opinionmakers would be. It would be false to declare them all uneducated, but it would also be unrealistic to suppose that they are. Certainly many of the top bloggers achieved their status based on their knowledge of programming or Silicon Valley maneuverings, and have translated that into an authority of opinion on all matters. It reeks, but heres the problem: we keep listening to these dolts. It's time to unsubscribe; but can you? I did, for a long time, and I've successfully ignored TechCrunch until now...but the other day I subscribed, finally, to at least peripherally monitor what's being said. I read once that Winer is difficult to unsubscribe from, and I have to agree; he's one of the first I subscribe to when I'm trying out a new newsreader (though I don't use a newsreader that often these days). As long as we continue following these guys and give a sh*t about their opinions, they'll continue draw our attention away from the students of humanities. One can only hope some of the Newsweek writers fall a little in love with tech so their voices will emerge from the din of Zentech.
Posted by: Harold | March 31, 2008 at 12:57 PM
By the way, I'm not trying to hold Newsweek up as the epitome of great and well-rounded opinion. They're just a good example, especially due to today's news of the paring down of their staff. And I do believe their writers are more well-rounded than many of their Zentech peers.
Posted by: Harold | March 31, 2008 at 01:02 PM
This may be slightly off-topic, but the thing about Twitter that really started to bug me was the "hipper-than-thou" attitude of so many of its users. Anyone who refers to themselves, non-ironically, as "digerati," "twitterati," or "metarati" deserves to be forcibly removed from the knowledge economy and forced to dig ditches or pick fruit for the rest of their life. I mean, seriously... The whole audience mob mentality during the Facebook panel at SxSW was equally ridiculous. It's like all of these boys and girls who were picked on in high school have decided that they're now the "k00l kids" and they're even more insufferable than the jocks and homecoming queens who ruled back in the day. At least the jocks and the homecoming queens have an excuse for their obnoxious behavior: they were just kids! But these "metarati" and "twitterati" techno-fascists are in their twenties and thirties. They should know better. Someone needs to give them a wedgie.
Posted by: Ashen Optima | March 31, 2008 at 04:10 PM
You need to read Cyberselfish too, Ashen. I think you like it. All about the self-centered in Silicon Valley, those kids who grew up with libertarian values.
Posted by: Harold | March 31, 2008 at 04:57 PM
Going off on a non-Twitter tangent:
Well, I qualify as a left wingnut (even though I actually have rather conservative views on many issues) and I even live in NH. I voted for Edwards rather than Obama or Clinton. Right now I am definitely pro-Obama.... but there are two things about Hillary which I like a lot. #1. she doesn't play nice with the right wing (whereas Obama got screwed when he tried to mollify the FauxNews crowd by denouncing his pastor.... he should have just gone ahead and defended Rev. Wright. #2. we already know what lies and innuendos are going to be told about her, whereas Obama is an unknown quantity.
I am not too worried about the fact that whoever ends up going up against McCain is going to be severely tarnished. One thing we learned in 2004 is that tarnished candidates can win: the war was already lost in 2004 and the economy was already collapsing and Bush & Cheney were already hated by half the electorate, and yet Bush/Cheney still managed to get a plurality of the vote. Obama and Clinton (or both) can do the same in 2008.
Posted by: Tammy Nowotny | March 31, 2008 at 06:46 PM
Prokofy, have you seen that 'Wag the Dog' film (one of my fav.)?
Now, think about 'New Media' as a RETALIATION to the manipulative Murdoh-style (he owns directly or indirectly around 70% of world big-media, I'm not kidding and I'm not a paranoic, I studied the structure of the ownership).
Also... Yeah, I don't like it when the people with the lack of understanding and wisdom (I call them 'programmers', you call them geeks, but we both mean the same breed I guess) start speaking out on issues that require wisdom and attitude of a grown-up...
Having said that, what do you prefer? Professional liars all excited by the next incident with a senator in some next bathroom? C'mon. They are disgusting TOO.
The question is: how do we live in this new 'blown by the wind of information' state and world. What will society develop as a mechanism counterbalancing this vicious cycle of 'influence' and fake 'reputations'. That is the question. Any suggestions?
Posted by: Alex | April 01, 2008 at 08:56 AM
counterbalance?
so far its full steam ahead!.woo woo
googles, tubes. twitters, and facebookers...
lots of time to waste, lots of sheep to keep grazing...
-wyle e coyote,:)
Posted by: larryr | April 01, 2008 at 01:08 PM
I haven't read Cyberselfish, no, that sounds interesting. I don't think "Wag the Dog" applies to everything, no. And no, I don't think you can accurately claim Murdoch owns "70 percent media," and even if he does, so what? Most people diversify their sources of news and have the sources still out there, fortunately, from a huge wealth of all kinds of media.
Few people who haven't worked as journalists understand that journalism is a job, a job that sits somewhere between garbage man and dentist in terms of having to deal with a mundane but needed service, getting information, formatting it so people can read and understanding it, and going back and correcting it, finding new information, and so on.
It's work, it's a profession, it needs training, and it isn't glamorous. It needs to be paid for, like any service; it's best done when handled by a private rather than a public sector, but without financing from the public sector, it can't be available for everyone.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | April 01, 2008 at 01:15 PM
No doubt, Prokofy. BTW, PBS-style is indeed great, who would argue?
However, when it comes to 'reporting' the stream of events (which is not exactly a journalism) the politically correct and 'weighted', publicly subsidised model doesn't work... for some reason... for MANY reasons actually.
Anyways, I was just attempting to draw your attention to the disgusting nature of contemporary 'reporting' of ALL sorts - nearly ALL of the sources are guilty of attempts to 'influence' and build the fake 'authorities' no less than the geekish web-sites. Pretty much the same thing.
Posted by: Alex | April 01, 2008 at 02:22 PM
"70 percent media," and even if he does, so what? "
we are what we eat.....
prove me wrong...;)
c3
Posted by: larryr | April 01, 2008 at 02:51 PM
Prok...it's not that people are unwilling to listen to differing opinions. It's the simple fact that, if someone doesn't share YOUR opinion, you feel it is your duty to browbeat them until they do. And when they refuse to cave, or even worse yet "block" you, it becomes a personal affront and god help the poor soul that invoked your wrath.
My personal opinion (for what it's worth) remains the same...your knowledge, insight and careful attention to detail in your observations is beyond reproach. Sadly, however, you remain incapable of tact on any level.
Combine that with the observation that 99.9% of everything you say is negative, and of course people are going to tune you out.
Posted by: dknighton | April 04, 2008 at 09:38 AM