What's a podcast?

Here's a number: more than 1 billion active monthly YouTube users view podcast content of some kind on the platform. 

Aside from being another data point indicating that more and more people are getting information and entertainment through podcasts, this fact also raises the question of whether the term "podcast" brings to mind something you listen to or something you watch. Podcasts - as audio-only content - have been around for 20 years, deriving their name from a particular Apple device for listening to music and other audio content. Podcasts, as a category, were fairly niche for most of that time - the vast majority of Americans, let alone people around the world, did not listen to any podcasts. Starting in 2013, they start to trend upwards, though not at the hyperbolic or exponential rate of, say, adoption of social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok. Gradually, podcasts became part of the average American's information diet. But like social media, video streaming platforms, and every other high-choice information medium of the 21st century, podcasts offered seemingly infinite variety in terms of topics and perspectives. A few superstars dominated the podcast charts, but the distribution tail was long and listenership fragmented - most listeners never listened to the most popular podcasts. 

During the pandemic, video streaming took off, owing its popularity to the prolonged shutdown of traditional media production. It's funny/sad to look back to the early stages of the pandemic at TV producers' attempts to approximate the experiences TV viewers were used to. The dissimilarities between television (particularly live TV) and this pale imitation were striking. This moment also democratized video production in the sense that the production tools - lights, camera, set design - used by TV talk show hosts were ones readily available to regular folks. It familiarized more audiences with low/no-budget talk show production. As long as you were charismatic, good-looking, and had access to interview other charismatic, good-looking people, who cared what your background looked like, whether you were on a broadcast network, or whether or not you had a studio audience? 

I recently asked a student whether she listens to any podcasts, and after saying that she didn't, she mentioned that she was recently on a podcast (which made me wonder: what would it mean if more people were either guests or hosts of podcasts than actually listened to podcasts? Might the same have been true for blogs during their initial heyday?). At least she thought it was a podcast - she wasn't sure, because it was on YouTube and it was something you watched, not something you listened to. This should give any podcast researcher pause - make sure you understand how your study participants define the term "podcast."

I'd noticed that some of the podcasts I'd listened to on Spotify had added a video component. Of course, traditional news sources like The New York Times had been pushing reluctant writers in front of video cameras for years, since the early days of online video. The visual aspect didn't add much - it wasn't as if they edited together b-roll and interview footage, which would have meant recreating the traditional television news format on a different medium. It was just people talking - either to each other or to us. It seems to have been the rise of TikTok, Twitch streamers, and YouTube-as-first-screen among Gen-Z folks that prompted the more widespread integration of video into formerly audio or text content. Video was just a means by which to reach the large audiences already on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, not a means of adding much in terms of aesthetics or meaning.

During the pandemic boom in video streaming and podcasting, I recall realizing the importance of pre-production and editing (not live editing, as is used in sports broadcasts and other live events, but post-production editing) in the context of these shows. Those were the key separators between live streamers and podcasters, the qualities that made the former feel like an attempt to connect and converse with the audience and the latter feel like an attempt to entertain them, to put on a show. Then there were scripted podcasts like Serial or S-Town which resembled - in their production scale and in their feel - documentaries. Scripted non-fiction video podcasts - perhaps too short and informal to be called documentaries - are common, and as with their audio-only counterparts, they require more time to create than simple streaming content. Somewhere in between, you had podcasts like Freakonomics that edited scripted segments together with interview clips, something more like long-form journalism. 

But rather than written journalism, it's radio that is the obvious antecedent to podcasts. How different is the streamer directly addressing his audience for hours on end from Rush Limbaugh? How different is the group of friends joking around about news, entertainment, and one another's private lives from Howard Stern? Television talk shows - daytime and late-night - are another template. How different is an intimate podcast interview with a celebrity from Oprah? And how different might their effects be on individuals or societies?

Though there are plenty of similarities between talk radio, TV talk shows, and podcasts - enough to make scholarship on those cultural forms a must-read for anyone interested in the effects of podcasts - I can think of two important differences. The first concerns the number of podcasts - many more than were available through local or syndicated radio, through broadcast or cable TV. A lower barrier to entry means more entrants to the marketplace, and so the market for podcasts - in its scale and dynamics - is closer to the market for music: millions of creators, a few superstars, a really long tail. There might be less audience churn than with music, as audiences develop a para-social connection to podcasters and podcasts don't seem as evanescent as musical trends. 

As with any long-tail marketplace, it's a mistake to only study the distribution head (and I feel like a broken record for saying this again, but...) most listeners are not listening to whatever is trending. They're fragmented across the long tail. It's possible (even likely, I'd argue) that the thousands of niches served by millions of podcasts resemble niches served by magazines in the 20th century. Most of the niches and, collectively, most of the podcast audience consist of benign special interest content (think model train podcasts). But there's no way to know until we analyze the content along the long tail.

The size and diffuseness of the podcast market means that no single podcaster has the kind of reach that broadcasters had in the 20th century. Joe Rogan has something like 11 million listeners to each podcast while Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, in their heyday, had 20 million each, and that was at a time when the U.S. population was 2/3 the size, and a decent chunk of Rogan's listeners are from outside the U.S. It's worth dwelling on this point because it applies to many podcasters, streamers, and influencers. On the one hand, they have a global reach that broadcasters in the era of nationalized media markets could only dream of. But if we're trying to discern how much attention share they have (and I'd argue that attention share is a precondition to having influence), then you should be using the global population as your denominator, not the national population. In that case, no podcaster has more than 1% of the population's attention, and nearly all of them have less than .001% of it.

The second difference is regulation, or lack thereof. Howard Stern frequently butted heads with the FCC, and Rush Limbaugh had to placate the kinds of sponsors that would have likely steered clear of some of today's most popular podcasters. In the absence of FCC content regulation, edgy talk show hosts become edgier podcasters, moving their small-but-significant audiences closer to the fringes of society. Platforms regulate their content, too - creators can still get de-platformed - but it takes a lot more to get de-platformed than it took to get fined by the FCC. Meanwhile, provocateurs expand the Overton window.

But Rogan, like Stern (but perhaps not like Limbaugh), has to maintain some variety in order to maintain his large audience. Their critics tend to focus on particularly outlandish, offensive, or dangerous moments on their shows, but a quick survey of their output suggests that its not all like that, that they attempt to cater to multiple audiences. Don't like what you're hearing? Skip that episode and tune back in later. If we care about influence, we need to take into account how content varies by episode - not an impossible task so long as researchers can analyze podcast transcripts and look for keywords. 

Just as talk shows were spaces for discussion and commentary relating to social issues, political issues, and current events, so too are podcasts. Terms like "infotainment" and "soft news" can be applied to the category, though some podcasts - in format, production, and reception - are more clearly in the tradition of documentary filmmaking or journalism, and that's the genre of podcast that excites me the most. Documentaries continue to find audiences on streaming platforms, and there is no one type of documentary. It's a vibrant cultural form. Meanwhile, journalism continues its long quest for a business model to replace the one that produced a golden era of civic awareness that is swiftly receding into the past. There are a lot of people in the podcast "space" right now - audiences, creators, investors, platforms. But the medium hasn't reached maturity; it hasn't found its Orson Welles or its Dorothea Lange. For these reasons, if I were to place a bet on a means by which to tell a non-fiction story that had real impact, I'd bet on the podcast. 

Will the Revolution be Tweeted?

I just went to a terrific, timely talk by visiting professor Michael Dobbs on social media's role in revolutions. It was a rare treat to be in a room with well-informed experts on media and politics and discuss something that was going on right at that moment. Dobbs gave many examples of the popular press claiming that social media, Twitter in particular, had precipitated the successful revolution in Tunisia and the still-in-progress revolution in Egypt. He brought up examples of techno-utopian views on the subject (e.g. Clay Shirky's TED talk on the revolutionary power of Twitter) as well as rebuttals such as Malcolm Gladwell's piece for the New Yorker.

One question that came to mind during his talk was: when assessing whether or not Twitter and social media are capable of facilitating revolutions, to what are comparing them? And by "we," I mean the users, the public, the press, the critics, anybody. Gladwell essentially compares Twitter and Facebook groups to real world activism. I think he does this because he believes (as do I) that a fair amount of social media activists think of their tweeting or Facebook-group-founding as more similar to participation in a protest than sitting at home passively in front of a television screen and watching it all unfold. They think they're being active, but Gladwell points out that they ultimately have little real power because, unlike civil rights protesters or other activists who actually changed our world, they are not making any real sacrifice; they are not risking much; they are not forming lasting bonds with people for whom they would make some real sacrifice (e.g. a large sum of money, risking one's life, etc). So that, Gladwell says is the key difference between real world protesters and virtual ones: shared sacrifice.

I basically think of online activism the way i think about online "friends": instead of just saying, "online _____ is no substitute for the real thing!", I think it presents us an opportunity to pull apart the real world phenomenon and ask what parts of it are duplicated by the online proxy, what parts of it aren't, and how those parts matter for outcomes of interest. So, what is the point of protesting?

First, its a way to devalue the ruling party's monopoly on physical force. If enough people get out there in the town square and don't back down after being physically threatened and assaulted, then the power to threaten and assault loses its meaning. There's also a "softer" power of protesting crowds: they can choose not to vote for someone, they can choose not to spend their money somewhere. Even if they don't live in a democracy, they can make it even more glaringly apparent to the outside world that they're living in a country that isn't even remotely democratic. Dobbs seemed skeptical that this could result in the overthrow of a repressive regime. It didn't work in Poland, it didn't work in Iran, and it probably wouldn't work here, not unless people make very real, significant sacrifices, ones that couldn't be done online.

Dobbs essentially said that Twitter is a way to share information. Like pamphlets distributed in other revolutions, they are a necessary but not sufficient criteria for revolution. Other things need to be in place: long-standing, easy-to-grasp grievances, for one. But I don't think social media is just a way to get information out. The difference has to do with social pressure. Television was and is quite good at presenting the spectacle of many people behaving a certain way. Combine this spectacle with many little nodes on a network behaving or expressing ideas in the same way and you've got the appearance of consensus, which is a powerful tool.

This gets me to the idea of a tipping point. There is a point at which the contagion of an idea rapidly speeds up, a point at which it seems like "everybody" is buying the same t-shirt or saying the same catch-phrase or using Facebook. These are all fairly benign trends, which makes sense. Buying a certain kind of t-shirt didn't involve much sacrifice: they're all pretty much the same to you, and if this one is popular, even if its a little more expensive, maybe you should buy it. Putting your life on the line or uprooting your family or risking your livelihood (all things that may be called for if you're participating in a revolution) involve significant risk. But those arguing against the revolutionary power of social media miss a key point: social pressure can convince you to make great sacrifices under the right circumstances.

Here's how I think it works. At the start, you need to have a group of people who are very similar to you, the Twitter user, and they have to be engaging in some activity that you were pretty close to doing. Then you might be convinced to do what they're doing. As the number of people doing that thing grows, it starts to matter less and less how similar those people are to you and how predisposed you were to act that way in the first place. When it comes to social pressure, there is an effect of sheer numbers. It doesn't replace or cancel out those other effects, but as the number grows, the effects of similarity and pre-disposition lessen. If you give people who want a revolution a sense that they can pull it off because there are so many other young, unemployed, pissed-off men who are ready to risk jail or a beating, then its more likely to happen than if you didn't give them that sense. This is something that pamphlets or television alone cannot do.

At the end of Dobbs talk, another professor pointed out how many billions of tourist dollars Egypt is losing each day. China's economy can withstand a repressive government, but it doesn't look like this one can. We'll just have to wait and see.

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.

Panic/Panek & Social Media Use

As I write, there is a tornado warning in my area. I have taken the appropriate precautions: I'm in my basement away from the West and South walls. And I brought my laptop. Aside from being the most valuable of all my possessions, my laptop (assuming its connected to the internet, which it is) is quite a valuable thing in this situation.

First, I should say that I have very little personal experience w/ tornadoes. My closest brush was when I visited a friend in Iowa and woke up to an ungodly, sustained siren. Half-conscious, I thought the world might be ending. My knowledge of tornadoes - the odds of them occurring, the damage wrought - was informed by weather channel specials and mediocre Bill Paxton movies. It turned out they were just testing the siren and there was no tornado at all.

So, I had no personal experience w/ this danger, and the second-hand knowledge I had was from unreliable sources. There's this air of paranoia that comes w/ over-preparedness that gets drummed into our heads by authority figures legitimately concerned for our safety. I would assume that this leads us to believe that the odds of encountering a life-threatening earthquake or tornado or hurricane are far higher than it actually is. Am I a fool to be in the basement?

Anyway, back to my laptop. I first knew about the warning via an almost comically old-fashioned medium - the siren. I then went online and tried to go to the weather channel website which wasn't loading, so i turned on the TV and indeed there was a tornado warning. I googled "tornado safety" to confirm my hunch that being in the basement was a good idea. I felt like an idiot for doing this, partly b/c it suggested that I was dependent on technology and possessed no horse sense of my own. Its only a matter of time before I start asking google whether or not I'm in love or where I should move.

Then I went to Twitter, which, aside from being a terrific way of knowing what David Allen Grier had for lunch, really is a great resource for immediate local news and/or reaction to an event. The only other time twitter was of use to me was when my phone wouldn't send/receive texts. I wanted to know whether it was just me or whether the network was down and Twitter told me what was up. Similarly, now, I want to know if I'm a fool for being in my basement. Twitter tells me that, at the very least, I am a fool in good company.

Its funny to imagine people like me, in a basement, who feel the need and have the ability to broadcast something to the outside world about their unusual condition. For every remarkable tweet or blog post or YouTube video of an earthquake, a tornado, or an insurgence, there must be a growing number of false alarms, dispatches from intact basements.

There is something absurd about someone in a time of genuine peril using social media, kind of a "I know I'm about to die a horrible death, but just let me tweet about it first" thing. This is not as absurd as it might initially seem. This is a natural instinct - to reach out, to try to connect w/ as many people as possible. 9/11 happened before the rise of web 2.0, mobile access to social networking sites, etc. People on the planes called the people they loved and left poignant messages. If they had the means, why wouldn't they also want to connect w/ other people they loved?

In reality, these dispatches provide valuable information to others and serve a primal instinct to connect when one's demise (however unlikely) might be near. I think of them as moments in which our survival instincts overcome social mores (the "boy, is this lame" view of the actions) and do something that we "should" be doing.

Now, with the oldest medium of all - my own two ears - I have detected that the storm has passed. That's how they did it in the old days, I suppose, before Twitter, before the emergency broadcast system, before the sirens. Weather.com still says there's a tornado warning. How long do I stay in the basement? Do I believe my ears or do I believe the website?

The Value of the Venue

Most of my "new" ideas come to me when I'm taking two different texts (be they books, TV shows, articles, blogs, whatever) and think about how one of them looks when viewed through the filter provided by the other. In this case, I was reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, then excerpts from Marx's Capital (required for a class, of course). There's a point that's made in Shirky's book about the value of sites like flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Google, wikipedia, and other social web sites that allow for new kinds of behavior (or at least expedited versions of old behavior). He claims that the activities that users engage in on these sites aren't new in and of themselves, nor are the motivations behind them, but because these people can be connected to one another in new ways, the outcomes of their actions are radically more efficient and effective in a lot of cases.

I recall seeing someone make a presenation at Emerson College sometime in early 2007 on the unjust-ness of sites like YouTube and Facebook that made billions of dollars for their creators but didn't give dime one to the users who provided all the content that apparently gave the site its appeal and was responsible for its high value. We users, collectively, spend millions of hours communicating over Facebook, sending messages and embellishing our pages while the creator of Facebook spent virtually no time generating content on the site. He gets billions of dollars, we get zilch. If we didn't put the content on his site, then there would be no reason for anyone else to go to the site, and the owners of the site wouldn't make shit. So then, don't we deserve a cut of the profits? Reading Marx's account of worker exploitation at the hands of business owners brought this to the front of my mind again.

This seemed logical enough to me at the time, but after reading Shirky, I think that this line of criticism makes a mistake. We're used to attributing credit and value to acts of creativity or "work" that we can see and measure. But here's the thing about social networking sites. We've been socially networking since the dawn of civilization. This resulted in certain kinds of relationships, both personal and professional. If there was no venue for these new connections, for these new ways of pooling information and making it searchable, then we would be doing what we were doing before: just talking to each other, making the same old kinds of connections with other people, and we certainly wouldn't expect to be getting paid for doing so. Web 2.0 sites create new kinds of connections that could not exist without these new venues.

We might acknowledge that the companies that created and maintains the infrastructure that new communication runs on (the phone companies, ISPs, etc) are owed money. But why should the inventors of Facebook and YouTube make billions when someone else could've just as easily created a venue to connect people to other people? Those venues were, in a sense, inevitable. In Marxist terms, why does there need to be that much surplus revenue?

Again, I think critics of such large profits are missing a point. What makes these sites so valuable are the subtle ways in which they make finding what you need (what you might not even have been aware that you need) easier. Search technology is incredibly hard to perfect, and the better it does its job, the less noticable it is. Google feels intuitive. It makes almost everything (socializing, shopping, traveling, schoolwork, being an informed citizen, conducting business) easier. And yet I almost never think of it as a "product" in the traditional sense. Its doubly hard to think of it as a product because you pay for it in attention to ads that you barely notice.

That's why I like thinking about these sites as venues. Like real world venues, they're so easy to forget about, yet so necessary for communication and labor. You're so focused on the visible work and communication going on around you that you don't think about the architecture, the urban planning, the engineering, the intellectual capital that was spent generating the surroundings in which you communicate and work.

Making searching for the information or the people you want better is value added. Its tough to say whether its of greater value than the content being provided. Both the content and the venue would be nothing without the other. But one is more visible and easier to think about than another, so there's a tendency to undervalue the cost of conceiving, creating, and maintaining the venue.

Its that conception phase that's the trickiest to put a pricetag on. And that's where I find Marx and the corresponding unregulated free market extremists to be of little use when determining the value of anything. Let's take all that surplus $ that CEOs and upper management make. Where does it go? Some of it is used to buy creature comforts - huge houses, huge cars, a bunch of ultimately useless shit that signals "I AM RICH." I can't argue that this is a drawback of modern capitalism (though I don't think modern capitalism necessarily promotes such extreme levels of wasteful spending. We have commercialism to thank for that, not capitalism). The truth is that the vast majority of rich people's money is invested in some way. Those investments (in principle but not in practice due to lousy accounting practices, lack of discipline, and false advertising) are used to fund people who are creating new venues, either in the form of school loans or small business loans. In principle, if everything is well regulated and on the up and up (which, admittedly, it hasn't been of late), then you get a culture that comes up with more new venues that allows people to communicate and work in new ways, like Google, Facebook, and whatever's next.

Mood/situation & the Personal Blog

After reading this week's New York Times Magazine's cover story about blogging and online life in general, I began wondering how exactly "snark," as an attitude, as a writing style, came to take over so much of the blogosphere. Blogger Emily Gould defines it as "smart yet conversational, and often funny in a merciless way," though just how smart and funny such blogs are seem to be in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps her subsequent characterization of their style as "righteously indignant but comically defeated" rings more true. Did several blogs that were written in this style become popular, inspiring other bloggers who wanted to become popular to unconsciously imitate that style?

And what of the people reading and responding to personal diary blogs? What does that tell us about the function of personal blogs for readers?

"They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations."

Keep in mind that Emily's blog on Gawker was only somewhat personal. Like a lot of blogs, its a hybrid of news, commentary, and diary. This kind of hybridization may be an inevitability caused by the desire of bloggers and their advertisers for a broader audience, or so the NYTimes piece suggests.

So, Co-workers contributing ideas: I think of them as co-authors, who then should get some of the revenue generated by the ads on the blog.

Creeps: people are out to pick other people up, on social networking sites, on adultfriendfinder, on blogs, in real life, pretty much everywhere. Rejection doesn't have much of a price in the anonymous world of blogging, so why not act creepy? Maybe she's into creeps.

Enemies: those working out identity issues or trying to affect society in some way. They find someone who represents values that they dislike and publicly express hatred towards them so as to discourage others from holding those views. We may dismiss this behavior as digital vandalism, but like real life vandalism, there are deeper social issues that motivate it that are worth exploring.

Fans: those looking for entertainment.

But maybe calling it "entertainment" or "voyeurism" is to cheapen and misunderstand it. So as to better understand what blog fans are after, I thought I'd engage in a little self-ethnography.

What do I get from reading personal blogs? When I watch TV or movies or read books or listen to music, I seem to want to identify with someone: a character, an author. Behind that desire to identify, I think there's a desire to escape but also to find someone who is in a similar situation, who is feeling what I'm feeling. I want this maybe to learn more about what to do in my mood/situation and to not feel alone in the way I'm feeling, or maybe to feel as though as foul as my mood/situation is, there are people who have it far worse than I do. This kind of "at least I'm not that awful" schadenfrued should be familiar to some fans of Jerry Springer, Flavor or Love, or other reality tv shows. Some fans watch, in part, to feel superior.

Here's the big difference between personal blogs and Big Media content in terms of how we relate to their characters or creators (either as our inferiors or sympathetic individuals whom we can identify with): considering how many millions of personal blog entries there are, I bet you that given the proper search technology, I could find someone who is in nearly the exact same mood/situation that I'm in instead of having to settle for someone whose mood/situation vaguely resembles mine. In fact, I have done this.

When we watch a TV show and read a book, we know that our mood/situation is not exactly like the character's or the author's. Maybe the character is a New York socialite or a farmer, but the story deals with themes that are universal - true love, loyalty, respect, mortality. We draw analogies to our own lives - the lack of respect afforded to Christopher Moltesanti is similar to my situation at work, or Sherman Klump's negative body image and lack of self-confidence is similar to my own. We read stories about people who lived hundreds of years ago in cultures totally dissimilar to our own, and yet somehow we can identify with the characters.

In the oral storytelling tradition before mass-media, stories could be localized or tailored to fit the listeners' lives. Once stories became commodities, then they were forced to be general and universal. We were forced to identify with people who were not like us, which probably had good consequences (we see a world that is more diverse than our particular corner of it) and bad ones (we disavow our heritage and our selves so as to try in vain to become more like the wealthy, beautiful, upbeat people on TV). With the proliferation of personal blogs, maybe stories are becoming more personal than they ever were. And don't think that its the same thing as gossip. Personal blogs function as gossip only when we know the people who are writing or are featured in them.

Imagine thinking of a phrase that described how you felt and being able to search for other people who felt the same way. Or imagine watching a clip from a movie or listening to a song that fits your mood and being able to read about the lives of the other people who were in that mood (fellow viewers and listeners). You can do all that now. And its not always about actually interacting with these like-mooded people. Sometimes, its enough to know they're out there.

Maybe finding someone in the same mood/situation as you will be a dead end. Maybe they'll have nothing new to add and their companionship, if you want to call it that, will feel hollow. But we keep searching, we keep trying to connect.

Christmas Letters: The First Blogs?

The Christmas letter, like all snail mail, seems increasingly antiquated. I was never old enough during the snail mail era to have sent or received many Christmas letters, but my parents got plenty, and so I became familiar with their format. Basically, you write old friends and casual acquaintances and tell them all the good things that have happened to you over the past year. This typically consists of babies being born, people getting married, vacations, and crazy weather. If there is bad news - say, a parent or grandparent passing away - its spun in relatively positive way (e.g. "they're in a better place"). Evidently, bragging is also a staple of the Christmas letter.

It got me to thinking about what people write in their diary blogs: does it serve the same function - keeping geographically remote people up to date on their yearly doings? What does it mean to stay in touch with people? Is it enough to passively follow their news feed on Facebook, or should I comment on their blog? Maybe there's more of an obligation to be positive in the Christmas letter than a rando blog entry, just as there's this obligation to be happy in general around the holidays. Diary blogs seem to be much more about self-loathing than bragging. Maybe the average blogger and the average Christmas card writer are leading very different lives (angsty teen vs. content grandma), or maybe the ways in which the modes of expression are made available to their readerships affects the content.

When I read diary blogs or watch diary vlogs, I desire a middle ground between too much bad news (which makes me uncomfortable b/c its just too candid, or just makes me think the writer is a pity junkie) and not enough bad news (which makes me think that the person is being fake b/c no one has that perfect of a life). As I visit with friends and family for the holiday and update them on my life, I also feel obliged to mix good news with bad (but mostly good) so as to give them the feeling that they're getting the "real" story of how my life is going. As sprawling and unrehearsed as our life stories are, I think we still try to maintain some balance of positivity and negativity in our recounting.

Levels of online discourse on message boards

After perusing two comments sections that relate to the Virginia Tech massacre - one section under the killer's video on YouTube and the other under a column written by a Dartmouth student on the NYTimes page - I've come to the conclusion that there are many different levels of discourse online. At first, it appears as though there is only one - the shrill, profanity-laden dialog you see on high-profile, heavily trafficked sites like YouTube. There's lots of talk of the disinhibiting effect of anonymity, and how it will result, inevitably, in mean-spirited discourse. But its likely that the majority of online discourse takes place "below the surface" of this level of discourse, involving groups of people with similar values who are less likely to flame one another.

The more "public" the discussion is (that is, the more hits that website gets), the more likely the discussion is to be about pecking order. The more "private" it is, the more the discussion will be about sharing information. To say that online discourse is uniformly public just because it can all be accessed by anyone misses the point of how we actually use these spaces to interact with others. We use them according to our particular tastes and desires, which are largely pre-determined by our real-world circumstances (our upbringing, what neighborhood we're living in, our profession). The way sites are linked together continues this trend of linking like-minded people to one another, resulting in smaller, less angry conversations. YouTube is a place for looking at what everyone is looking at. Blogs (where smaller groups of people congregate with like-minded folks) are the place to discuss them.

Then there's the matter of moderation (the NYTimes blog comments board makes more of a point of letting people know that its being moderated than the YouTube one). Presumably, the smaller the site, the less moderation would be needed. But that wholes process (what gets cut, why it gets cut, how many comments get cut) is never really clear. Not that we seem to mind.

Lifelogging: How We Forget

Just read this fascinating article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about life-logging: recording audio (and eventually, video) every moment of your waking life. You can then search through that data the way you would search through your memory, only it would not decay the way your memory does. Would this be a good thing?

I have kept a personal journal for 11 years now. I've made an effort to record my thoughts and many events from my life, no matter how embarrassing or mundane. Now that I've got 2000 pages worth of data, I can search for a person's name or an emotion (e.g. hate, love, crush) and analyze my life, my behavior, and my consciousness in ways that my decaying memory doesn't allow me to do. So, how is this any different than lifelogging? Isn't it just a matter of degree?

When I have a conversation with someone, even an especially private one, my memory is recording their every word. I than have the option of going back to my computer and recording those words. Those words can then end up on the Internet or who knows where (though I'm obviously very careful to guard them and not put them on the net). But we've had this option of recording private events...forever, right?

So then it is a matter of degree. But that doesn't make it any less significant in the ways in which it could potentially disrupt social life. In fact, this article finally convinced me of the worth of privacy in this age of surveillance. I was a longtime holdout only b/c the crux of most privacy advocates' arguments seemed to be invoking Orwell and leaving it at that. Indeed, its an extremely hard argument to make b/c 1) the march of surveillence technology feels inexorable and 2) its hard to point to many widespread instances of abuse or make the chilling effect on behavior visible.

But that's why this lifelogging experiment that the people in the article engaged in was worth doing. By pushing it to an extreme, by making it personal rather than political, I could finally see the ways in which it would radically alter social behavior. We totally underestimate the role of forgetting and deception in our self-images and the images of others. We are designed to underestimate these things. Perhaps we each need to record our lives (or read about someone else who has done this, in my case) to understand how much we forget and how much we distort our memories.

This brought me back to a thought I had after my hard drive crashed a few weeks ago. I was watching 2001 on TMC, and considering the words of HAL, thinking about whether or not the fear of a sentient machine was still a fear of ours, 40 years after this film was made. The big mistake HAL's programmers made (and indeed a fault of most programmers) was to think that they could design an infallible computer. No matter what, a computer, like a human, can screw up. The reason why computers are inhuman (and perhaps why they strike fear in our hearts) is because they fail in different ways than us. But if we recognized this, and tried to design them to fail in ways more like the ways in which we fail (to design them to "forget" things gradually, to act erratically in certain situations, instead of aspiring to perfection), then computers and robots wouldn't be anything worth fearing. We should get to know the design of our minds, and then design computers in a similar but slightly less flawed fashion.

Really, what makes computers unlike humans is the ways in which they decay. In one of my classes, I'd claimed that digital technology did not decay. It either worked or it did not. I was proven wrong the next week when we brought in several gaming consoles, including my old (roughly 18 year old) Nintendo Entertainment System. One of my students played Mega Man 3 (I think it was 3, but I may be misremembering) and the game gradually became more "buggy," the screen increasingly clogged with glitchy graphics until finally, inevitably, it froze. So I realized that digital technology gradually decays, but it decays in a different way than our minds. And it is vulnerable in ways that we are not.

That is what defines us, or at least sets us apart from computers: the ways in which our minds and memories decay or become damaged. The ways we forget. Perhaps we shouldn't be working on computers that recall everything, but on computers that "forget" data in the same ways we do. I suppose that's the promise of meta-data: to get computers to recognize importance and meaning in the ways that our minds do.

As applied to my personal journal, I'd need some way to teach the computer that some information (my happiest memories) is more important than others (whether it was Mega Man 3 or 4 that student was playing).


http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i23/23a03001.htm

Blogs and Comments: reacting to news (plus a few notes on controversial advertising)

Its just a few hours after a bomb scare here in Boston, one that happens to have a particularly absurd bend to it. Initially, I saw the images of traffic stopped and the bomb crews under bridges on TV, and reports that it was not a genuine threat but a hoax. Then a friend told me that he had heard on NPR that the "suspicious packages" that were causing all the hubbub were lite-brite images of Err. This sounded too ridiculous to be true, so I didn't really believe it until I got home and looked it up on the web. Most of the articles in online newspapers are of the same sort: simply reporting what happened, which is what I'd want from them. But I wanted more than that. I wanted opinions. I wasn't so much interested in the event as the public reaction to the event. Would it just blow over really quickly? Will most people side with the Mayor and the Governor against the network and the advertisers, or will most people side with Comedy Central et al?

Obviously, the sites that people comment and blog on are not representative of the public reaction, but in just 30 minutes, I was able to find a wide range of reactions to the events that brought up a lot of good points that I would've never thought of and that TV news probably wouldn't have broadcast (generally, TV just parrots the same facts over and over, or presents one highly-opinionated viewpoint): that the placement of the signs (under bridges) combined with the fact that if they were not lit up and viewed from a distance they wouldn't look like Err giving the finger as much as a box with wires sticking out of the back make the alarmist claims somewhat understandable; that Shepard Smith said, "their god is an indian...that turns into a wolf"; that Bill O'Reilly suggested that a cartoon character be arrested; that the signs had been there for 3 weeks, etc.

You have to sift through a lot of erroneous, opinionated information while trolling blogs, but when something like this happens, they're more satisfying than traditional media simply because they moves faster. That's what I came to realize: the pace of information on blogs. This makes me all the more interested in blog or comment filtering (a la digg's system of making the most-recent, most-read, most-approved comments more visible than the others). Or perhaps the thing to do is find a community of bloggers or commenters that you've come to trust and go to those sites when big events happen. I'd guess that its this sped-up information that is largely responsible for the shortening of the news cycle. Cable news and legit press are just trying to keep up.

This event could also be proof of the point I made in a previous post about the unintended effects of advertising. There's no doubt that this particular situation had more to do with poor judgment on the part of the police and government than it does with advertising, but it does bring up an interesting point about the limits of advertising. Although, if this does, in fact, create buzz for the film (which it almost certainly will), and thereby generate more revenue for the parent company, then this would be considered effective advertising, and therefore should be mimicked in the future, no? It will be incredibly difficult to draw correlations between the profitability of the Aqua Teen franchise and this controversy. But as much as this might drive up their revenue, its an impossible thing to plan or duplicate. I'd argue that its precisely the perceived unintended nature of the publicity that makes it appealing to consumers. They're drawn to the product only b/c they believe the ad agency and the network when they say "we had no idea this would happen." And really, buying something related to Aqua Teen at this point (say, an Err shirt) isn't so much a vote for headline-grabbing controversy and police-bating as much as an assertion that the police, homeland security, and the FBI need to handle potential terrorist threats in a different manner.

Blogs as conversation and lasting art

After reading some of my students' blog entries about blogs they had read, I was reminded about something intriguing about blogs in general: they're ambiguous status as personal conversation/confessional OR as a lasting statement about life, akin to a novel. Granted, most blogs are of the former kind - gut-spilling for the benefit of a select few (usually real-world friends), but I like the fact that there could be profound writing hidden among these entries, and that they are not explicitly marked as "literature" or "art." It could be one particularly interesting, well-written entry in an otherwise self-indulgent confessional blog - great writing is great writing, and to me, its almost "greater" or perhaps somehow more authentic when its not in a published anthology or in a well-known novel. Its the ambiguous status of personal blogs that keeps the blogosphere interesting to me. For this reason, I hope that people don't just see blogs as a way to refer people to interesting news sites on CNN.

Fake Blogs, Fake Vlogs, and Verisimilitude

More on Lonleygirl15...

Many artists aspire to create the most realistic art they can. Many see the arts on a steady tragectory towards art that is indistinguishable from reality. So, is Lonelygirl15 and other blogs or vlogs that are fictional the next step towards verisimilitude? Do those who fee lied to have any more of an ethical beef than people who were originally tricked into believing early films were "real?" As I recall, Lonelygirl15's creators never explicitly claimed to be non-fiction. They simply took advantage of an audience's preconceived notions of a medium.