The Medium is the Message: Blog

Reading this recent article in the New Yorker on blog magnate Nick Denton prompted me to revisit McLuhan's adage that the medium is the message. I do not take this phrase to mean that content has no significant effect beyond the medium by which it is accessed, but rather that the medium can influence what content people end up choosing and thus alter the media experience. I also take "medium" not to mean all internet applications but to mean various websites or applications that allow users access to information in unique ways.

Denton's blog empire, which includes Gawker, Gizmodo, and Deadspin, feature a subtle but important tweak to the standard blog format (eloquently encapsulated by Ben McGrath as "links with commentary, presented in reverse chronological order"): it presents statistics on how many people have read and commented on each article. Denton also pays his writers based on the amount of readers their articles garner. There is a kind of herd mentality in readers: they read what is popular, and the more they do this, the more popular those particular articles become. It is worth asking whether the content preferred in this system is different from a system where writers and editors take it upon themselves to design the format and layout of an online publication (as is the case with traditional blogs and online news sites like NYTimes). In the New Yorker article, there seems to be agreement among journalists on both sides of the traditionalist/new wave divide that such a format leads to more "sensational" news preference.

This way of presenting news seems somehow more democratic than traditional editor-selected alternatives. It sounds as though it provides more choice, and that would be better, wouldn't it? In a way, Gawker's innovation is similar to what Google or Reddit or Digg do: they take tons of raw information and they privilege the most popular links. That judgment as to what is worthwhile is made very quickly by users. They scan headlines and if the headline is interesting enough, they click on it. The assumption that this is somehow good rests on some other fundamental assumptions worth questioning:

• We are being held back by gatekeepers (editors) from what we really want. We are used to having the type of content or experiences we have access to being controlled by gatekeepers who may not have our best interests at heart. As long as we can choose for our "selves", we'll be fine. This is, in turn, based on another assumption
  
• As individuals, we are single, desiring, decision-making selves with stable, unique sets of desires.
  

Returning to the "medium is the message" mantra, we could consider the difference between the concerns over television and the concerns over the internet. The case against television was always a case against content. Watching television was bad because most of what was on television was so bad. By contrast, the case against the internet is a case against its users. There are wonderful, amazing, informative, pro-social, productive things one can do on the internet: create and run a business or a charity, disseminate useful, accurate information, take a course online. If people fail to do these things, its not because there is any lack of positive options from which to choose, so it must be their fault.

Denton gives people what they want, and its not the caliber of people that he's polling that leads to the move away from hard news toward gossip. Its the fact that he's accessing our inner hedonists, our immediate selves.

Discipline & Privacy

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to showcase some of my ideas on networked media, selection habits, and immediate gratification (which is shaping up to be my dissertation topic) in front of some esteemed colleagues from the psych department here at UMich. The great part about giving talks like this is that it can get you to look at a problem you've been staring at for way too long in a new way.

Something Ed O'Brien said prompted me to return to the issue of privacy. Research suggests that we keep our immediate desires (or inner hedonist, if you will) in check in various ways: by making a habit of things that we don't like doing but know will help us in the long term, by taking temptations out of our immediate grasp, by having reminders of what will happen to us if we fail to curb our immediate desires, or by exercising good ol' fashioned self control. There's also another thing that prevents our inner hedonists from taking over: public censure, or the judgment of others. We don't fill our faces with chocolate cake, fritter away our time on leisure pursuits instead of working, cheat on our husbands/wives, or buy boatloads of porn for various reasons, but one of them is likely that we will be looked down upon by others. We will be publicly embarrassed. But what if you could do all of those things in private, taking the punishment or barrier of public censure and embarrassment out of the equation?

I posit that new media allows us to do just that. We can do so many things that we would have been judged for without being judged because we can do them in private. In many cases, this is good. We can pursue our true passions without repressing who we really are for fear of some sort of cultural judgment. But in other cases, the selves that are being repressed by public scrutiny are just our inner hedonists. The inner hedonist is just one aspect of a self, an aspect that has been kept in check by public scrutiny for probably all of human history in one way or another. Give that aspect of the self space to do whatever it wants and you're going to get behavior that does not reflect what you consider to be "your self." You will get behavior that reflects one aspect of your self.

Here's the counter-intuitive part of this. Most people think our privacy is being eroded by networked media, that more and more of our lives are on display. There are two problems with this line of reasoning. First, though that information is out there and it is attainable, we must look at who is attaining it, how its being used, the extent to which we know about those things, and the extent to which that feeds back to alter our behavior. I would submit that most of the information about our online habits either sits unused, is used in some sense that ultimately doesn't embarrass us or punish us directly or indirectly (used to show us various kinds of ads), and thus does not alter our patterns of behavior. Its all fine and well to quote Orwell and come up with possible future scenarios in which our data is used by others to alter our desirous behavior, but I haven't encountered any evidence that indicates that has happened or is happening.

Here's the second problem. We never had the opportunity to do so many things that we can do now with networked media. Doing any number of things that feel good in the moment but are frowned upon by society (be it cheating on your wife/husband, learning how to build a bomb, trading bigoted jokes, etc.) were just too logistically difficult to pursue. It would be too much of a pain in the ass to find the right people or goods to carry those things off, and you had to sneak around to do them. These are just much, much easier to do now with networked media. We didn't do those things partly b/c we would not have had privacy when we did them and thus we would have been punished for doing them. Now, we can use the privacy that we should expect (privacy regarding our bank statements, voting behavior, private conversations with family members) to cloak the privacy that we never had (privacy regarding things that we know we shouldn't do but do anyway, not because they don't line up with the current public's social mores, but because they conflict with our own long-term goals). Online privacy is expected to cover a wider range of activities, some of them fine and some of them not so fine, than old school offline privacy. Is privacy eroded by these technologies? The technology allows it to be eroded, but I don't see that happening.

So if the eyes of the public can't keep your inner hedonist in check, then who can? Your inner disciplinarian, of course! And various kinds of technologies (like the program Freedom, or the Me timer or time tracking software for firefox) can do something that has never been done before with such efficiency and to such an extent: it can put your self at one point in time (the self that sits there not in direct proximity to temptation, well aware of what it should do) and allow it to exert power over your self at another time (the self that is surrounded by temptation and requires the discipline of some outside force to prevent it form acting). Think of it as a more nuanced, self-imposed chastity belt.

The most important difference is that we need to realize that the inner hedonist was always being kept in check, but that he was being kept in check by forces (i.e. the public, the government, mom, dad, etc.) that didn't always have our best interests at heart and had their own incentives for altering our behavior. We've found ways around them, but are we really any better off with our inner hedonists running the show? Now we can discipline our inner hedonist while preserving our autonomy and privacy. That's a big deal, and that's what I'll most likely be studying for the next couple of years.