Current category: media
Blog home
About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
email me if you have any questions or comments.
Using WordPress
3.1.3
Subtitled “The Rise and Fall of Information Empires”, Wu has no lack of ambition as he addresses how information and communication companies such as AT&T, Paramount Studios, NBC, and CBS have dominated our discourse over the past century. The title comes from a quote illustrating the perils of such domination: “At stake is not the First Amendment or the right of free speech, but exclusive custody of the master switch.” (Fred Friendly). When a single company can determine what innovations are pursued or whose message gets transmitted, it has potentially negative consequences on our society.
The book is primarily a history of the telecommunications industry in the twentieth century, as Wu examines how each new technology innovation (telephone, radio, movies, TV) arose in a spirit of changing the world, before eventually getting subsumed into a monopoly or oligopoly, created with the tacit assistance of the government, either through regulation or patent enforcement. Wu calls this “the Cycle”, and the underlying question of the book is whether the Internet will be subject to “the Cycle”, or whether this time is different. I thought that Wu had to stretch to make the case that each of these industries followed the same pattern, but it was interesting to me to read the history of each of these industries, as there was much I didn’t know.
I liked how Wu demonstrated how technology innovation was never enough to up-end an industry. Because of the nature of innovation, several independent inventors often came up with the next step at roughly the same time (e.g. Alexander Graham Bell is known as the inventor of the telephone, but Wu points out that Elisha Gray, Johann Reis and Daniel Drawbaugh also had created primitive telephones, or the various number of people who invented television). The difference in the one that we remember as the inventor is that he partnered with a business person who ruthlessly pursued the goal of creating a company based on the invention (e.g. Theodore Vail creating AT&T based on Bell’s work, or David Sarnoff creating NBC by undermining Philo Farnsworth). There is a myth of technological determinism in Silicon Valley, that the right technical innovation “naturally” becomes the dominant one, but Wu’s book shows how the right business strategy (and good timing) is also necessary.
Another good insight was the natural tendency of these telecommunications technologies to centralize because of economies of scale. Once AT&T had a set of long-distance lines in place, it was prohibitively expensive for anybody else to lay lines, so the government essentially traded AT&T a monopoly in exchange for providing universal telephone service. Once media industries realized the potential of advertising, the nationwide networks had a huge advantage in that they could spread their costs over much larger audiences. And even though AT&T was broken up into AT&T and the Baby Bells in the early 1980s, the tendency towards centralization has been demonstrated as those Baby Bells have now merged and re-merged until there are only two descendants of AT&T, the re-formed AT&T in the west, and Verizon in the east.
The centralization of these industries also deterred innovation, as the companies involved didn’t want to risk the (massive) income stream that they already had. For instance, while AT&T, and particularly Bell Labs, was the source of many great innovations including the transistor and UNIX, the company also squashed anything that might threaten telephone usage. Wu tells the story of Clarence Hickman, an AT&T engineer who created an answering machine with magnetic tape audio recording… in 1934. The technology was buried, and magnetic tape recording would only be discovered decades later. Why? Because AT&T worried that the ability to record a conversation might keep people from using the telephone and “render the telephone much less satisfactory and useful in the vast majority of cases in which it is employed”. The story of the Hush-a-Phone is also instructive, where AT&T sent dozens of lawyers after an independent inventor who dared to create a phone attachment to keep one’s conversation private. Insane in retrospect, but once a monopoly is created, its primary purpose is to perpetuate its monopoly and therefore eliminate any potential threats.
Another danger in creating such centralization is there becomes a single point at which pressure can be applied to restrict communication. For instance, I had known about the “Hays Code”, which prevailed from the 1930s to the 1950s, and ensured that only “moral” things could be shown in movies. I had always assumed that was a law or regulation. Instead, what happened was that a “Legion of Decency” threatened to boycott any theater that showed “immoral” movies. The movie industry by that point had been concentrated into the few studios that still dominate today (Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal and Fox), and those studios had full vertical integration, owning everything from the production to the distribution to the theaters where the movies were shown. All that the “Legion of Decency” had to do to get its way was convince the CEOs of those few companies that their profits would be threatened by boycotting the theaters. So a “code” that could never be passed into law due to the First Amendment was allowed to censor the industry for three decades until the vertical integration of the movie industry was broken up such that “the studios lost control over what the theaters showed”.
As can be seen, Wu has concerns about “the Cycle” with respect to telecommunications and media industries. Such industries tend to centralize quickly into one or a few companies that create efficiencies by monopolizing the industry, but that same centralization also has deleterious consequences for innovation and free speech in our society. In today’s world, we face similar questions about net neutrality (whether Verizon or Comcast can decide which content goes over its wires) and openness (the openness and chaos of the Google Android system vs. the closed but polished iPhone system from Apple), and Wu hopes that we can learn from history to make better decisions today.
Wu’s proposal is to create a “Separations Principle” that would prevent the development of vertically integrated companies in these industries. “It would mean that those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the tools or venues of access must be kept apart from one another.” If each layer of the information economy was kept separate, Wu believes that the dangers of concentration would be minimized, as innovations in one layer would not be suppressed to continue the dominance in another layer. Wu defends it as being a less subjective principle than antitrust, which has been the only tool to use against such companies to this point. I’m not sure I entirely agree with his premise, but I do think some clear guidelines on what kind of integration makes sense will be useful. And since he recently took a position as a senior advisor at the Federal Trade Commission, he will have the chance to make such recommendations. It will be interesting to see what happens.
I recommend this book if you’re interested in these sorts of issues. While Wu falls short in his attempt to draw together the overarching narrative of “the Cycle”, I appreciated the chance to learn more about the history of the telecommunications and media industries in an easy-to-read form.
Based on my previous thoughts about the decline of Absolute Truth , it’s not surprising that I wanted to read a book that is subtitled “Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society”. Manjoo observes that we, the body politic, used to agree on what was happening and the problems we were facing, but had different ideas about how to address those problems. Now we can’t even agree on what reality is. He wrote this book to try to answer the question “How can so many people who live in the same place see the world so differently?”
Manjoo cites several great experiments throughout the book that demonstrate the human psychology contributing to this divergence of “realities”. One is an experiment by Brock and Balloun to demonstrate selective exposure, which “set out to determine what happens when people are presented with information that contradicts their core beliefs”. They played audio tapes of speeches on various topics, but the tapes were recorded with a lot of static. The test subjects could eliminate the static for a few seconds by pressing the button. By correlating when subjects pressed the button with the subject of the speech, the experimenters noticed that people only wanted to hear information they matched their worldview already. The application of this idea of selective exposure in a media ecology with divergent viewpoints is obvious, as Republicans tend to listen to Fox News, and Democrats to NPR. We choose media that reinforces our existing biases, and therefore the biases become stronger, driving us further away from each other and reducing our ability to have a common dialogue.
Similarly, another experiment by Hastorf and Cantril demonstrates the power of selective perception. As Manjoo puts it, “Selective perception says that even when two people of opposing ideologies overcome their tendency toward selective exposure and choose to watch the same thing, they may still end up being pushed apart from each other…. each of them will have seen, heard, felt, and understood the “thing” vastly differently from the others who have experienced it.” Hastorf and Cantril illustrated this by showing a clip of a football game between Princeton and Dartmouth to students of the respective schools and asked them to “objectively” mark down any infractions they saw. From the same clip, the students got very different results, as Dartmouth students saw the Princeton team cheating on every play, and vice versa. Even when we see the same thing, we only notice and remember the things that fit into our existing worldview, and fill in the blanks accordingly.
So now take these two tendencies to only accept media inputs that match our biases and see only what makes sense to us, and combine them with our growing ability to locate ourselves with our communities of choice, and it’s unsurprising that we choose communities that think the same way that we do and reinforce our beliefs. After the last presidential election, a friend and I were discussing the result, and he said “Do you know any Republicans? I can’t think of any that I know.” which is an astonishing claim in a country where half the country had just voted Republican. But he lived in Boston, and I lived in the Bay Area, and those communities are decidedly liberal. We had self-sorted into communities which matched our ideologies, shielding us from having to deal with conservative viewpoints. It’s much easier to deal with the straw men put up by liberal media than it is to deal with other real people who might make good points, a phenomenon Manjoo calls “weak dissonance” – we like being able to easily refute points with which we disagree.
These trends also play into the polarization of media. We want media that is “objective”, but alas, we don’t share a definition of what “objective” is. Manjoo calls this biased assimilation:
“… each of us thinks that on any given subject our views are essentially objective, the product of a dispassionate, realistic accounting of the world. This is naive realism, though, because we are incapable of recognizing the biases that operate upon us. … You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving [the other side] equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness. … we all want objectivity, but we disagree about what objectivity is.”
Given that tendency to want “objective” news that caters to our existing opinions, and given a market economy where media channels are supported by viewership, it’s obvious why news outlets have become more polarized to satisfy audiences in a culture of niches.
I liked this book. It takes several real-world examples from across the political spectrum, from Swift Boat Veterans to the Democrats who thought the 2004 election was stolen to 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and describes psychology experiments that illustrate the underlying principles that drive such behavior. Ironically, part of the reason I liked the book is that it played into my own pre-existing biases about the fragility of Truth. Regardless, it’s a quick read that provides some insight into the world of splintering reality that we live in.
I watched the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica this morning. This wouldn’t be surprising except that I don’t get the Sci-Fi channel, which broadcasts that show on Friday evenings. I watched it over at hulu.com, the video site started by NBC (which owns the Sci-Fi channel) after they pulled their content from iTunes last summer.
What’s interesting is that NBC lost money from me in this process. I had been paying $2 an episode to watch Battlestar Galactica last year on iTunes. On hulu.com, I watched it for free, except for a total of two minutes of advertisements, clumsily sprinkled throughout the episode. I can’t imagine that the advertising revenue they are getting is worth more than the cut of the $2 they got from iTunes. So how does this make sense? It doesn’t to me. And there are a few other questions about television that don’t make sense to me either.
Why doesn’t HBO have an online portal where I can see their shows? I want to see the final season of The Wire. I don’t even get basic cable, so it would cost me $40/month to get the “standard cable” package, and then another $15/month to get HBO on top of that. It doesn’t make sense for me when I just want to watch one show. I went to iTunes but The Wire was not available there, even though I would have gladly paid $2 an episode. Heck, I would have paid $5 an episode which is comparable to their DVD pricing of $50 for a season); after all, I pay $10 for a two hour movie, and an episode of The Wire is much better than most movies. But HBO had no way for me to give them money in exchange for watching a specific show as it is released (I have to wait for the DVD).
Why do all broadcast networks have an online video on demand service now? I love it as a consumer. If I forget to tape a show, or if two shows I want to watch are on simultaneously, I can just go to the network’s site a day later and watch the show I missed. Most sites even store four episodes so that I can catch up on a series if I lost track for a few weeks. NBC has the entire run of Friday Night Lights online to try to build viewership. While it’s tremendously convenient, I don’t know how it makes sense economically (NBC doesn’t even put advertising in their online episodes).
I suppose one possibility is that the networks are using online rebroadcast of their content as a way of gaining access to a highly profitable market segment, which would be people like me that have broadband video connections and the tech savvy to even want to watch a TV show online. The problem I see with this explanation is that they don’t have any way of targeting me currently. I don’t login to hulu.com or to the network sites. So unless they start delivering advertising interspersed with the show, they’re not making money, and given typical online advertising rates, I don’t know if they’d be profitable even then.
I have been waiting for years for the “a la carte” option of television to become a possibility, where I can pay for just the content that I want to see and nothing else. I wanted this as a cable subscriber – I hated paying for the entire cable package when I really wanted just four channels. I want this as somebody who follows specific shows – I got into television as a result of becoming a Buffy fanboy, and still have an instinctive revulsion for the idea of flopping on the couch and “seeing what’s on”. The funny thing is that I would be willing to pay more to get what I specifically wanted – while the cable company charges $40/month for 40 or 50 channels, I would pay $10/month happily for the 4 channels I actually wanted. I know the economics don’t work that way (the channels I want cost more because they are higher profile) but I hate the idea of paying for something I’m not using.
I was excited by the advent of iTunes video, as it seemed like I could finally pay for only what I wanted. I’ve been following The Shield and Battlestar Galactica on iTunes because those are shows on cable channels I don’t get. I would have happily paid for The Wire if given the option. But with various content producers like NBC pulling their content from iTunes so that they can go their own way, it does not appear as if iTunes will be the “a la carte” solution I had hoped.
I wonder how much of my disappointment is because I’m decidedly atypical in my television consumption. I used to use a VCR and now use a DVR to ensure that I only watch shows that I want to watch. So I record shows, and play them back at times convenient to me, generally skipping the commercials. I’m a nightmare for the traditional television advertising model in the sense that I both time-shift and skip commercials. My viewing habits ensure that I am an advertising money-loser, so the “a la carte” solution would seem to be the only way to make money from me.
But I’m guessing most people aren’t like me when it comes to television (the Nielsen ratings back up that assertion). Most people come home from work, flip on the TV and watch whatever’s on. They surf through the channels available to them, rather than focus on specific shows. And when they do focus on specific shows, they don’t set their Tivo – they make sure they’re home to watch it. A digital analogy would be that I’m one of the minority that uses an RSS reader to follow blogs, where most people just go to a site when surfing to see if there’s new content.
Beyond the “a la carte” subscription model, there are a few other possibilities for how television gets made in the future. One possibility is a donation culture, where customers donate money to get the next book or record produced. I’m not sure that scales to the amount of money necessary to get a television episode produced, though.
Another intriguing possibility that may be what the networks are thinking is using content as a loss leader. ValleyWag had a recent article suggesting that “Recorded music is no longer a product, but advertising”, where artists should give their music away as advertising for things they can actually sell, like t-shirts and concert tickets. Perhaps television episodes could now be used to increase the power of the brand, with the actual money being made from DVD sales and other merchandising. Again, this seems unlikely with the much greater money necessary to make television than music.
Another possibility that occurred to me after posting is that networks may still consider the TV show aired in its normal time slot as the franchise. The video on demand on their sites and sites like hulu.com are merely designed as ways to bolster the original broadcast. This way, if I miss an episode, I can catch up and not feel like I missed a key plot point. Or I can watch a few episodes online and start watching a show that I might not have otherwise (this is how I started watching Friday Night Lights). The network assumes that I will then start watching the broadcast version so they can get their advertising revenue that way. But this assumption is headed towards breakdown as people become more comfortable with technology options like DVRs and video over the internet, which is inevitable as the net generation grows older.
I don’t really have answers. I’m not sure I’m even asking the right questions. But it’s an interesting topic, and I wanted to write about it while the hulu.com/iTunes discrepancy was still fresh in my brain.
Last night after class, I was skimming through my RSS feeds and saw Kevin Kelly’s post on how creators can make a sustainable business for themselves if they can get 1000 True Fans. I really liked Kelly’s take on it being more important to reach a smaller number of fanatics than to reach the mass market, as fanatics evangelize for you in a way that casual fans do not (plus they spend more).
That article linked to an article co-authored by Bruce Schneier, called The Street Performer Protocol, which suggests a way for artists and fans to securely negotiate with each other, so that fans can donate money and have some assurance that the artist will deliver a product. This is similar to the model that Jill Sobule is apparently using to fund the recording costs for her next album.
The real problem was that Kelly also mentioned that Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are doing the same thing. I adore the Liaden Universe books, and they’re posting the newest book online a chapter at a time, fuelled by donations ($300 of donations is another chapter). I said “Oh, I’ll only read a few chapters”, and the next thing I knew it was 1am and I’d read all 31 chapters (then I read the 6 chapters of the next book this morning). *sigh* I did chip in my $25 donation towards the cause, which felt good as their books have given me many hours of comfort reading pleasure over the years (plus it gets me a trade paperback edition when the book is completed and published).
I wrote about the growing Internet donation culture last year, and it’s cool to see the different ways in which it is being taken. That post mentions the different strategies people can use to get their work funded, from straight up donations to selling merchandise (T-shirts or books) to posting ads.
My favorite movie reviewer is currently struggling with these issues (see his entries on February 3rd and February 10th). He’s added several ads to his site (including a pop-under – yuck), and has been asking his readers to click on an ad or two per visit to show support. I wrote him and asked if he could add a donation button since I’d much rather give $20 directly to him than to click on ads. Interestingly, he feels more comfortable with ads than with donations, as he feels indebted if he receives donations. I don’t particularly get that, but I loathe ads.
As Shirky observes, the Internet is giving us many new ways to organize ourselves. Instead of having to go into debt with a record company to make an album, Jill Sobule can raise the money to do so from her fans. Radiohead can sell its album online with a pay-what-you-wish model. Kevin Kelly is writing his new book online in front of all of us as he tries out ideas and gets feedback. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are writing their book online, but trading chapters for donations. So many different ways to do things, and new ones are being invented all the time. It’s a pretty interesting time to watch as the “standard” way of doing things collapses because the barriers to publication have collapsed. Now it’s up to us to iterate and find new ways that suit our needs.
I need to take a break from doing class work regularly these days. Sometimes I get home from work and I’m worn out, and I need to turn off my brain for a couple hours before starting on class work for the evening. Sometimes I just want to distract myself for a bit before heading to bed. In either case, I don’t have the brainpower to write a good blog post (as evidenced by my lack of posting) or even read a book.
The interesting thing I noticed is that I’m much more prone to watch TV rather than movies when I want to be braindead. It’s not a matter of channel flipping – I only watch DVR’d TV without commercials. But for some reason, starting to watch a TV show feels like less of an investment than starting to watch a movie.
Part of that is the time commitment. A TV show without commercials is about 40-45 minutes, whereas a movie is double that length. But I’ll often watch two episodes of TV, so that negates the “I didn’t have time” argument. So what’s going on here?
I was talking about this with my friend Rebecca over Thanksgiving, who had noticed the same tendency in herself. Her explanation? “Movies are a thing.” This is the sort of argument that would be better handled by Grant McCracken, but I’ll take a swing here at what she means, which resonates with my own experience.
Watching TV is just watching TV. All of our connotations about TV are relaxed and comfortable. We flop onto the couch, grab the remote, flip on the TV and see what’s on. It’s the ultimate in informality. If we don’t like what’s on, we change the channel or turn off the TV. Many people leave the TV on while doing other activities, just to have some background noise and chatter. It’s an acquaintance, one that we can drop in on anytime we want.
Watching movies is a “thing”, a cultural experience and ritual. We make a trek to our local shrine (theater), and pay obeisance in the form of purchasing tickets. We are ushered into a temple for worship purposes at specified intervals decreed by the movie gods. Suddenly, the curtains are drawn back to reveal our object of worship, with images that are literally larger than life and surround us with a wall of sound. We shush others who dare to interrupt our experience of the movie, and leaving the theater in the middle of the movie would be sacrilege. Watching movies, at least in the theater, is a far more formal experience than watching TV ever is.
Even though watching a movie on DVD isn’t the same as going to the theater, I think these sorts of connotations and cultural archetypes affect my perception of how to consume the different forms of media. I feel like when I start a movie, I have to block out two hours of time to watch it uninterrupted, and I have to be in a frame of mind where I can focus on the movie. This rarely applies when I’m just looking for some distraction in the evening before starting class work or going to bed, so I end up watching a TV episode from my DVR or DVD collection instead.
I think I might feel differently if I were a Netflix subscriber. My sister has a much more relaxed attitude towards movies than I do, where she’ll start DVDs and stop them, leave them on while doing other things, etc., and I wonder if some of that is due to the fact that movies come to her in her living room rather than being part of the cultural ritual. The effort of going to rent movies, even back in Oakland when I lived a couple blocks from a rental place, was enough of an obstacle that I rarely did it.
The anthropological observation of my friend amused me, so I figured I’d blog about it. Plus, we got out of class early tonight, so I’m a bit more awake than usual and figured I would procrastinate productively for once. But it’s time to take another look at my master’s project.
As usual, good comments on my last post that you should read.
Anca picked up on my last point that one might be able to design the direction a community takes by designing the media interaction spaces for that community. But before trying to design something, I think it’s useful to observe my current and former communities and see how their media usage influenced their structure and interaction.
Community: TEP
Media spaces: Email lists, real world gatherings
Comments: TEP’s been using a couple email lists since before I was a freshman, and those email lists provide a level of background connection to the greater TEP community of alumni and friends of the house. As an alum who doesn’t live in Boston, I often only know the undergrads that post to the mailing lists – the others are invisible to me until I go visit. The TEP community is also obviously supplemented by regular gatherings. It’s unclear whether the mailing lists would be able to bind the community together if our community was not based in a living group so that many of us lived together at one point or another.
Community: nextNY
Media spaces: Email list, real world, wiki
Comments: The main interaction space of the nextNY community is the email list, but Nate Westheimer observes that nextNY is valuable as a social network because it spawns real world interactions. Charlie points out in a comment that the email list functions effectively because the community feels a sense of ownership in the list, and I don’t think that community ownership would exist without the regular reinforcement of actually meeting other people on the nextNY list, as people aren’t “real” when you only know them online.
Community: Ultimate frisbee games
Media spaces: Real world, sometimes email
Comments: Playing ultimate frisbee, both here in New York and back in San Francisco, is primarily centered on the real world interaction of, well, playing frisbee. We use email lists, but primarily for the purpose of organizing when people are going to be playing frisbee (somebody’s been posting about non-frisbee stuff to the NYC ultimate list and getting flamed for it). It’s interesting because the community is so focused on playing frisbee that I have spent hours in people’s company without learning their last name or where they work – I only know which throws they prefer and what routes they run on the field. I had similar experiences with singing in the chorus or playing volleyball in grad school.
Community: alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer
Media spaces: Usenet
Comments: I spent a couple years posting on alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer – I even co-wrote the first FAQ for the group. Because the community had a tight focus like ultimate frisbee, I learned how other atbvs posters thought without knowing anything about their lives. Because the interaction was purely electronic, I had no idea what these people looked like or did for a living, but we could still have endless discussions about the characters and writing on the show.
This list makes clear that communities with a tight focus can function as single purpose communities. I have several “ultimate friends” who I know nothing about other than I like hanging out with them on the field. A friend of mine used the phrase “party friend” yesterday to indicate somebody they liked hanging out with but wouldn’t depend on if they needed help. I guess that’s a reminder that friendships and social connections don’t have to be all-encompassing – one can interact happily in a limited domain without ever desiring to expand the interaction beyond that domain.
The other thing about the list is that it reinforces Nate Westheimer’s point that social software needs to “affect my offline life”. My strongest communities are the ones which either grew out of or are augmented by real life interactions. Purely online community interactions seem more fragile – when I dropped out of alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer or out of playing MUDs, nobody reached out to me and asked where I’d gone.
I’m curious what other people’s communities look like and how you think the media used to communicate affects the interactions of those communities. I don’t know if we can come up with any sort of general observations, but I think it’d be interesting nevertheless. I’d be particularly interested about experiences with wikis, as I’ve never been part of a community that used one effectively – is anybody out there a Wikipedian?
My mentor from the Columbia program, Jon Williams, recently started a blog, and asked me if I had any advice about blogging. That got me thinking about what makes for a good blog, so I’m sharing my thoughts here.
The blogosphere is intensely competitive in terms of the attention economy. When blogs I read link to other blogs, I’ll bring the new blog up in a tab and read half a post. If that snippet doesn’t interest me, I’ll leave and never come back. If I actually finish reading the post, I’ll click on a couple other recent posts to see if they can write on more than one topic, and then if it’s promising, I’ll add it to my RSS feed.
In other words, a blog has at most 30 seconds to convince me that it’s worth my time. And my experience generalizes. According to Google Analytics, the average visitor to my blog from a search engine spends about 30 seconds before leaving. That’s not much time, especially when it’s impossible to precisely control the visitor’s experience, because search engines may deposit them on any page. That’s why every page here has the sidebar that introduces me and links to recent and random posts, so visitors can have a sampling of what this blog is about no matter where they arrive.
What does a blog have to do to capture my attention?
So those are the thoughts I have on writing a blog that would be of interest to me. Note that I don’t feel strongly enough about these recommendations to follow my own advice. This blog doesn’t have a focus. It is more in the realm of self-expression than of fostering community. My posts tend towards the rambling. But I’m okay with that – I have not yet found a focus that compels me enough to write about it regularly. We’ll get there.
You convinced me. I think I was just cranky on Wednesday evening because I’d been up until 2am finishing a paper the night before, worked all day, gone to three hours of class, and then wrote that blog post. So consider this a giant retraction and flip-flop on the last post.
Christy brought up the great example of Instructables as an example of amateur hobbyists banding together and helping each other. I forgot that media such as the Internet, in addition to making us more aware of “world-class” talents, also gives amateurs a way to find each other, which is far more empowering. “Hey, if they can do that, I can do that too!” When we are only presented with the finished glitzy product as often happens in mass media like TV and magazines, it can be discouraging, and that had been the point I made last time. But social software like Instructables help us see the process, and provide a support structure for people starting for the first time.
The Internet has all sorts of great examples of this once I started thinking about it. NaNoWriMo provides the same role for would-be novelists, giving them structure, encouragement, and guidance on how to achieve their goals. I know several people who have completed novels during NaNoWriMo that would not have done so without that site existing.
I mentioned a few other examples in my post on community, such as Chris Heuer starting up the Social Media Club, which basically started with him deciding to pull together an unconference alternative to Web 2.0, posting about it in a couple places, and now it’s spun into an organization with meetings in several cities around the world. likemind is another example – Piers and Noah wanted to have coffee together six months ago, posted about it on their blogs, and now it’s a monthly get-together in 14 cities, with about 50 people showing up to the last likemind in New York.
Another factors contributing to the rise of the amateur is the democratization of technology. You used to have to invest thousands of dollars in purchasing sound editing software. Now you just buy a Mac and use GarageBand. If you are interested in photography, you don’t need access to a darkroom and tons of film, you just need a decent digital camera and Adobe Photoshop. The wonders of Moore’s law and other virtuous circles of technology are reducing the price of increasingly powerful tools so that they are affordable to somebody goofing around in their spare time.
My own blogging experience should have tipped me off. While I continue to blog mostly for myself, as a way of recording ideas as I think of them, it is truly humbling and inspiring to find that other people are reading what I have to say and take it seriously enough to respond, as evidenced by the several comments on that last post. I’ve gotten emails from around the world from people who read my blog and wanted to offer feedback. Being able to garner feedback early on is a great help to the amateur, because it’s easy to get discouraged (although based on the responses to the last post, that may be a personal hangup of mine which is probably related to Po Bronson’s article).
Now I just need to take Wes‘s advice from the comments and figure out what I truly love doing, that I would continue doing even without positive feedback.
I went to my third likemind a couple weeks ago (and, yes, I plan to continue mentioning likemind each month because I think it’s a wonderful concept, and because I continue to enjoy it). I was chatting with somebody there who expressed the opinion that he couldn’t start a blog because he wouldn’t be able to post at least once a day, and that’s now the expectation. As a blogger who posts at wildly erratic intervals, I thought that was interesting. I tried to express the idea that blogging could be used purely for expressing one’s own ideas and not to satisfy an audience, but he didn’t really accept that.
After thinking about it some more, I think this is part of a wider trend in our society. Because of media and Internet saturation, we are now exposed to the best talent in any field in a way that can be overwhelming. Taking the example of blogging, it seems pointless to try to blog when there are sites like BoingBoing or individual bloggers like Henry Jenkins or Kathy Sierra generating fantastic thoughtful content on a daily basis. Why should I even try to compete with those people?
The same extends to almost any field. When I read the brilliant writing of David Foster Wallace or Malcolm Gladwell, I sometimes find it frustrating rather than inspiring. When I watch the fantastic exploits of professional athletes, I am in awe rather than enthused to try to imitate them. I wonder if this exposure to world-class talent in every possible field is leading to the decline of the amateur practitioner, as people give up before they even start, or are told they should give up. The media often reinforces this viewpoint by telling the story with hindsight such that it seems inevitable that the star ended up as a star. They rarely tell the story of the almost-star who did everything the same way and yet failed to be successful.
Another side of this is that the world-class practitioners didn’t get that way overnight. They were not born brilliant. David Shenk, as part of his new project The Genius in All of Us, makes the observation that “We see people being good at stuff — we don’t see them becoming good.” He also points out that the main differentiator of musical talent is deliberate practice, not innate ability.
The one exception to this trend away from the amateur seems to be that of bands. There are an insane number of people who play in bands. American Idol will never run out of singers who think they are good enough to make the show. I’m not sure why this particular arena seems to be more resistant to giving up.
I think they have the right idea, though. Doing something for the sheer joy of it, for the sense of achievement and improvement, seems far more healthy to me than constantly comparing oneself to the elite in a field. I’m never going to be a great essayist like Christopher Hitchens or a prolific blogger like Scoble, but the process of writing these posts has made me a better writer and continues to give me practice in the craft of expressing my ideas clearly and concisely. And occasionally I can sound clever in conversation because I have already worked out my thoughts in writing a post here. I enjoy playing sports for the same reason. And I need to remember this attitude when I’m starting a new endeavor – measure my own progress and don’t get discouraged by comparing myself directly to the best in the world.
This semester, I’m taking a class in “Managing Emerging Technologies”. One of the points of the class is to consider not just the technology itself, but all of the social and cultural and political ramifications of the technology. To illustrate this point, we watched the movie The Future of Food in class last week, which examines some of the issues surrounding genetically modified seeds made by Monsanto, including the intellectual property battles that Monsanto waged against farmers, etc.
The thing that struck me as I was watching the film was the rampant use of framing to tilt the dialogue. Here are just a few examples that I can recall without consulting my notes:
I mean, the interesting part is that I agree with the thesis of the film for the most part – that the ramifications of genetically modified food are manifold and we should probably be more careful before deploying them. But the presentation of the material was so overtly manipulative that it completely turned me off. It reminds me of DocBug’s idea that Advertising is a form of violence, because I did feel attacked during the movie and became very defensive.
Ironically, part of the reason I’m so sensitized to framing issues and the use of tilted propaganda is because of the extensive work of the left to make me aware. Between Lakoff’s work, AlterNet, and organizations like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, I am all too aware of the omnipresence of media bias and have learned to distrust it. So even when such techniques are used in support of positions I agree with, I react against the techniques.
I’ve mentioned this before (also here), but what I’d really like to see is more training done in the area of media literacy, of teaching people how to see the frames and either ignore them, or at least distrust the sources that rely on framing. One of the things that really bothers me is the last item in that list above – that our citizens may actually be influenced enough by the media that advertising will overwhelm their ability to vote for their interests. That’s a truly depressing thought. And, unfortunately, bombarding them with propaganda using those techniques, even in the name of good, will only reinforce their herdlike mentality and inability to think for themselves.
Of course, a populace that can think for itself is a threat to pretty much all of our currently entrenched powers, from politicians to corporations to even non-profit organizations, as they are all designed around the principle of being able to scare us into obedience. So none of those powers have any incentive to teach such media literacy, which means we’re pretty much doomed. Eit.
P.S. Man, I keep on meaning to post more, but I was down with a cold last week that pretty much kept me muzzy-headed all week. I left work early on Friday afternoon, and then didn’t leave the apartment for forty-plus hours, and slept for a large percentage of that. But I think I’m mostly better now. Of course, now I’ve got to do homework for class. Eit again.
Became very defensive: I never saw Fahrenheit 9/11 or An Incomplete Truth for a similar reason. I knew I already agreed with the basic gist of those movies, and watching them would only anger me against the filmmakers because they were designed to be overtly manipulative.
