The Great Seduction

The profundity of banality

 "If you thought Facebook was banal, try Twitter," says arch techno-skeptic Margaret Wente. So why do we use the short-messaging network and how can we explain its meteoric growth? The Toronto Globe and Mail columnist/cultural anthropologist gives four possible critical explanations:

1) "Is it really hunger for community? Is it, as one Twittering friend suggested, a safe substitute for talking to yourself, something that other people tend to find disturbing?"

2) "One more symptom of mass attention-deficit disorder – yet another excuse to distract ourselves from the dull or difficult tasks at hand?"

3) "Is it really fear of dying? Maybe Twittering is just another way (like getting and sending e-mail) to reassure ourselves that we exist: Ego tweeto, ergo sum."

4) "Maybe the drive to tweet is just the logical extension of our narcissistic age, in which nothing in the world could possibly be more fascinating (to us) than what we're having for lunch."

What is particularly interesting about the Wenteian critique is the way in which she throws the philosophical bucket against Twitter. By introducing four of the most profound critiques of industrial society -- the communitarian, the narcissistic, the existential and the Luddite-- as a way of critiquing Twitter, Wente is acknowledging its significance. Thus, in reality, she is arguing that Twitter-- love it or hate it -- is actually quite profound. I agree with the Wenteian position in many ways. But I respectfully suggest the substitution of a single word in her overall argument:

"If you thought Facebook was profound, try Twitter."

Net-Gen President Obama?

Last night, I was in London doing a public debate at the RSA with Don Tapscott, the author of the new Grown Up Digital, a book which explain how, exactly, today’s “Net Generation” of digitally native kids (the 11 to 31 years-olds) is changing our world. Tapscott dedicates much of his new book to politics, explaining that these digital natives are transforming society and arguing that Barack Obama – with his successful utilization of social networks and citizen engagement in the electoral campaign – is the first Net Gen President.

So, more than fifty days into his new job, how is Obama doing? Is the BlackBerry addicted Chicago politician who, Tapscott claimed, has been created by the transformational Net Generation, now using the Internet to transform America?

To get a balanced summary on Obama’s Internet achievements so far, I spoke earlier this week to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, respectively founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, an online magazine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics. And while both men said that it remained a bit premature to judge Obama, they nonetheless acknowledged some fundamental shifts in the way the new President was using the Internet to change America.

Sifry listed three main areas of change. Firstly, using the example of the new Recovery.Gov website, the data intensive hub to track all stimulus money spent by the new administration, he explained that there was now an Internet centric commitment to transparency of information in politics. Secondly, citing the example of the Justice Department’s reversal of the Bush administration’s policy on classified documents, he explained that there had been a “huge shift” in the government’s approach toward the openness of information. Thirdly, Sifry used the examples of Obama’s use of YouTube, blogging and Twitter technology to directly distribute his message as evidence that the Internet has now become an almost convention way for the new President to communicate with the American public.

Rasiej and Sifry agreed the Internet represented a quite different series of problems and opportunities to President Obama as it had for Candidate Obama. The challenge, today, they told me, was leveraging Obama’s 13 million person base of Internet donor and supporter to the day-to-day running of the country. Sifry noted the “waning of intensity” of Obama’s online supporters and urged the new President to keep the online momentum going by once again "revving up" his core online constituency. While Rasiej urged the new President to focus less on the television sound bite and more on the bytes of the Internet to fully engage with the electorate. 

Rasiej, however, reminded me that it is much easier to be elected with the support 13 million online activists than it is to get those 13 million supporters to agree on any one specific political issue. Rasiej also explained that for all the good intentions of the Obama administration toward making the Internet central in governance, White House digital infrastructure remains underdeveloped and thus things will only change substantially when that infrastructure is made more robust.

Rasiej and Sifry’s always excellent annual Personal Democracy Forum conference takes place this year on June 29-30 in New York City. By then the Barack Obama will have had more than 100 days in office. By then, I suspect, we will have a better idea of whether he really is the first genuinely Net Gen President in American history.

Digital feudalism

I'm in London this week. Tonight I recorded a programme for the BBC tv show "It's Only A Theory" hosted by the comedians Andy Hamilton and Reginald D. Hunter. Then tomorrow night, I'm at London's RSA to respond to Don Tapscott's thoughts in the RSA/Encyclopaedia Britannica (sold-out) debate about "the Economic Crisis and the Age of Uncertainty". The debate will also feature Dan Hind of Bodley Head and The Threat To Reason fame, as well as the Cambridge economist Lord Eatwell. It promises to be a very lively discussion in which Tapscott will use his Wikinomics/Grown Up Digital argument as a way of making sense of the current economic situation. Here's the RSA's description of the event:

To what extent has the global economic crisis triggered a crisis of confidence in our previously trusted repositories of knowledge? What do the failures of the financial system tell us about the dangers of a hierarchal system of knowledge where power lies in the hands of a professional elite? Can we continue to have confidence in the professional authority of bankers, financiers and economists, when they seem to have so grossly failed us? Has economics as a discipline failed? Do these failures further case for new organisational models, based on more open, more transparent cultures of collaboration (the "wikinomics" model)? Does the democratisation of knowledge and wealth of information offered by the internet open up the possibility of taking economic decision-making out of the academy and institutions, and into the hands of individual citizens? Or should we be wary of blurring the expert/amateur divide and trusting too much in the wisdom of crowds?

On the plane from O'Hare, I read most of his latest book, Grown Up Digital which, like all Tapscott's work, is lucid and honorable. Tapscott is generous toward his ideological foes -- particularly Nick Carr and Susan Greenfield -- and I admire his willingness to criticise young people's failure to protect their online privacy. That said, of course, I don't agree with a number of the book's major premises about the positive pedagogical qualities of the Internet and I suspect that my responses to his presentation will be skeptical.

Where Tapscott and I do agree, however, is about the historical significance of the digital revolution. Like me, Tapscott sees the social media transformation as equivalent to the industrial revolution in its transformational significance. But what we don't share is a common theory of history. For Tapscott, the digital revolution represents the progressive transformation from the mass age to the age of the autonomous, liberated individual. Here, for example, is his analysis of the shift in educational terms (pp 139):

Mass education was a product of the industrial economy. It came along with mass production, mass marketing and the mass media..... This mass-education idea, however, is being challenged. Students are individuals who have individual ways of learning and absorbing information... "If the factory was the model of the typical 20th Century American school, the craftsman's shop or artist's studio is the model for the 21st century educational delivery system."

What is interesting is that Tapscott is idealizing the pre-industrial romantic vision of the "craftsman shop" or "artist's studio" as the organizing principle of the digital age. I don't agree. Yes, he's right that the mass production of the industrial age is being replaced by the digital revolution. But I fear that our new epoch will be characterized by a new kind of hyper-individualism more akin to digital feudalism than to an idyllic new age of craftsmen and artists.

More lucid than lucidity

The prominent American new media critic Nicholas Carr has been trawling the depths of our digital shallowness. And to make sense of what he calls the "twitterification phenomenon", Carr borrows from the wisdom of the French theorist Jean Baudrillard. Carr says that its Baudrillard, and not the "speechless" and "half-blind" McLuhan, who has become our "natural seer". These are the words that Carr quotes from Baudrillard's 2001 work, The Vital Illusion, to describe the nature of "realtime" electronic culture":

Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social.

Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true.

Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present.

Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real.

Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex ...

Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication ... Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event.

Sharing Baudrillard's ideas about the end of history, Carr says "mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them." But I have to confess not a little confusion at Baudrillard's mystical words. The introduction of the word "ecstasy" appears to give the Frenchman the poetic license to reinvent the conventional rules of language. I don't really understand how anything can be either "truer than true", "more real than the real" or "more sexual than sex". But, of course, the half-serious, half-shallow Baudrillard meant the opposite. All this ecstasy was allowing "instantaneity" and "omnipresence" to obliterate reality, truth, society and sex.

Is it possible that Baudrillard couldn't put into words what he meant? Or perhaps, in the grip of the ecstasy of language, he falls into his own trap and becomes more lucid than lucidity.

Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social.

Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true.

Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present.

Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real.

Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex ...

Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication ... Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event.

Sharing Baudrillard's ideas about the end of history, Carr says "mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them." But I have to confess not a little confusion at Baudrillard's mystical words. The introduction of the word "ecstasy" appears to give the Frenchman the poetic license to reinvent the conventional rules of language. I don't really understand how anything can be either "truer than true", "more real than the real" or "more sexual than sex". But, of course, the half-serious, half-shallow Baudrillard meant the opposite. All this ecstasy was allowing "instantaneity" and "omnipresence" to obliterate reality, truth, society and sex.

Is it possible that Baudrillard couldn't put into words what he meant? Or perhaps, in the grip of the ecstasy of language, he falls into his own trap and becomes more lucid than lucidity.

American newspapers are history

America’s digerati has been abuzz all this week with the gloomy words of a couple of the country’s most lucid Internet prophets. First came a speech last Friday by the author Steven Johnson at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin TX, then came an essay on Saturday by New York University digital media scholar Clay Shirky. Their words addressed the future of digital news; and both men delivered the bleakest of news to print journalists already under siege from the economic crisis afflicting almost all American newspapers.

Their media may have been different, but their shocking messages were the same: newspapers are history, the two visionaries agreed. The traditional business is no longer viable, Shirky and Johnson both announced; newspapers are being replaced by futuristic digital news networks that will barely resemble their archaic print ancestors.

Johnson, the author of the sparklingly provocative Everything Bad is Good for You, a polemic in defense of the educational value of video gaming, entitled his speech “Old Growth Media and the Future of News”. But most of Johnson’s media growth lay ten years hence – a couple of centuries in Internet time. In the short term, his prognosis was dire. Things are “ugly” right now, he acknowledged, and “they are going to get uglier”. Johnson, who is also a member of the founding team at the neighborhood news site Outside.in, not only predicted that “great journalists and editors” will lose their jobs”, but also that entire American cities will lose their papers.

But compared to Clay Shirky, Johnson was positively sunny is in his outlook. Shirky’s self-published online essay, entitled  “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, tore into the convenient lies to which many “fabulist” newspaper executives continue to cling. “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism,” he wrote, with delicious venom.  The old newspaper business model of paid content can’t be neatly and painlessly exported into new media, he explained. “Nothing, nothing will work”, Shirky argued, in a sickly newspaper culture that has become “faith-based”; there is “no general model” that will allow newspapers to transform themselves from print businesses into digital enterprises.

Like Steven Johnson, Clay Shirky is hopeful that eventually new digital models will come to replace the broken print newspaper business. But his future is even more science fictional than Johnson’s. “For the next few decades”, Shirky wrote, various new publishing businesses – represented by innovative models ranging from the non-profit ProPublica and WikiLeaks to Consumer Reports -- will seek to reinvent a viable journalism. “Many of these models will fail,” he predicted. And even in the distant long term, Shirky explained, nothing is guaranteed, there is no certainty of success.

Meanwhile, the real world continues to validate the accuracy of their depressing analysis.  Last week, for example, Hearst Corporation announced the closure of Seattle’s oldest newspaper, the Post-Intelligencer. And there were more staff cuts at a number of other newspapers including the San Diego Union-Tribune. Meanwhile Time Magazine identified the ten most doomed regional papers, a chilling list which included such historically august publications as the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle.

As Shirky wrote, “this what real revolutions are like.” They are invariably bloody and chaotic events in which “the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.” Non American journalists, publishers and editors should take note; like the unsentimental Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson, they must dare to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable.

Monetizing attention

I'm beginning to understand the revolution. In ye olden days of the copy economy, we paid professionals -- journalists, writers, film makers, musicians --  for their content. Books, movies, newspapers and the other containers of information and entertainment were considered things of monetary value. Thus we had entire industries that revolved around the discovery, refinement and distribution of this content.

Then something happened. It wasn't just the Internet, although the online revolution is heavily involved in this great transformation. But the value of the information and entertainment shifted from the content itself to the creators of that content. So it became more important who was creating the content than what was being created. And then the copy lost its monetary exchange value -- reduced to zero by digital technology.

Thus the game shifted. Rather than selling their content, creative people had to grab their audience's attention in order to sell them something other than the copy. The Internet -- and specifically post Web 2.0 plays like Twitter -- became a place where that old class of media professionals competed for attention. As I explain today on InternetEvolution:

The next big thing has finally arrived: Twitter's ascent marks the end of the Web 2.0 period (1999-2009) and the beginning of what I would call, without any originality, the "attention economy." READ ON

The revolution is simple. In the copy economy, audiences paid for content; in the attention economy, content creators will pay to be heard. I'm not sure what that will do to either the message or the messenger (read my book if you really want to know) -- but, as I argue in today's InternetEvolution piece, our new attention economy offers an interesting new business model to post Web 2.0 companies like Twitter.

Twittering about writing

I had a richly terse conversation about the future of writing last night on Twitter. It began with a tweet from Ron Hogan, the author of the always excellent Beatrice blog.

RT @RonHogan: RT @mdash "Publishing has never been in my lifetime in such a powerless state as it is now." @bruces #sxswbp

For the Twitter uninitiated, this was Hogan retweeting some words from a South By South West keynote by Bruce Sterling passed on by @mdash who, in real life, is Mark Bertils a Canadian blogger about books. Sterling's keynote at SXSW was anything but optimistic about the publishing business:

American publishing is in distress. The book stores are going, the big centralised publishers are very heavily indebted and they are small sections of the centralised American media apparatus that have lost social credibility.... People don't pay attention to novels. The socially important parts of American communication are not taking part in novels. You can write them but they are not changing public discourse... You can also say that everybody in society has moved up a notch and everybody just wants the executive summary.

Refocusing Sterling's pessimistic take on the publishing industry onto writers, I then tweeted my new literary friends:

@RonHogan #sxswbp @bruces @mdash does it follow then that writers have never in our lifetime been in such a powerless state as they are now?

This, in turn, brought book distributor Don Linn (@donlinn) into the conversation. Linn believes that new media actually could empower today's writers:

All I'm saying is if authors relying on traditional publishing & distmodel, they are screwed. They can control their destinies.

With Linn's remark, we got to the heart of the matter. New media could allow authors to "control their destinies". Somebody, I think Ron Hogan, raised the example of Cory Doctorow, the science fiction novelist, as the paradigm of a writer who was controlling his destiny on the Internet. So how did Doctorow build his brand on the Internet? Richard Nash, ex editorial director at Soft Skull Press, then jumped into the conversation:

ajkeen Actually, other way around. He gave away the content in order to establish readership and name. A process that'll become harder now.

So I tweeted Nash back to learn more about this "process" through which writers can bypass publishers and establish themselves on the Internet:

Build readership 1 reader at a time through events and social media. Cultivate intensity in readers. Akin to religious conversion

To borrow from Clay Shirky's brilliant take on the public agonista of the newspaper industry, round-and-round we go when it comes it figuring out how new media can empower writers. It's the new literary Catch 22: To build online brand, writers need recognition; and to have recognition, writers need an online brand. Ultimately, I suspect, Richard Nash is right. The challenge is to build readers one-at-a-time through both "events" and "social media". But, as he so wisely says, cultivating intensity in readers is "akin to a religious conversion". The unpalatable truth is that, in both old and new media, many are called but few are chosen.

Free market Maoism

With his customary wit and wisdom, New York University new media theorist Clay Shirky argues that the print industry is at a revolutionary moment in its 500 year-old history. Newspapers (Seattle Post, SF Chronicle, LA Times etc etc) are dead or dying, he correctly says, but nothing has yet replaced them. The digital news revolution is raging all around us, he observes, but not even the revolutionaries know what's going to replace newspapers. "I don't know," Shirky confesses. "Nobody knows." Nobody, he reminds us, can see into the future; nobody knows what commercially viable digital alternative will eventually come to replace the print newspaper business model:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

To misquote Marx, news businesses make their own histories, but they do not do it quite as they please.

Shirky argues that we are back in tumultuous year of 1500 -- in the midst of what he calls the "wrenching transition" to print. He reminds us that it was Aldus Manitius, an entrepreneurial Venetian printer/publisher -- rather than either Martin Luther or Johannes Gutenberg -- whose "smaller octave volume" really revolutionized the publishing business by making books portable.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

So if even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen, what is the Shirky solution? It's free market Maoism -- stand back and let a thousand digital flowers bloom. Since we have no idea who or what the next Aldus Manitius, we've got to try absolutely everything, he says. The piece is entitled "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" -- but its really an argument about hoping for the unhopeable or praying for the unprayable. Thus, Shirky concludes, the Aldus Manitius of tomorrow could be Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Martin Nisenholtz (NY Times), Emily Bell (Guardian) or that classic Internet entrepreneur -- the unknown 19-year old kid in their dorm room.

Shirky's piece has electrified the American digiterati because, for the first time, somebody has exposed the emperor's nakedness. As he reveals, the current newspaper business is in a death spiral from which nobody, not even America's hero of the Hudson, Captain "Sully" Sullenberger, can save it. By reminding us that "society doesn't need newspapers" and that, instead, "what we need is journalism", Shirky refocuses us on the all-important challenge of how to build viable (profit or non-profit) business models around the accurate reporting and distribution of the news.

But for all the invigorating qualities of Shirky's prose and ideas, I found the piece to be just a tad depressing. The weakness of his skeptical argument is also its great strength. Since we don't know the ending to the news business saga, we can't know for sure if this will have a happy ending. Shirky acknowledges that "many of these models will fail" and that "over time" some of these experiments might "give us the reporting we need". I've bolded and itallicized that "might" because I suspect that Shirky isn't himself completely convinced that a real solution will emerge. And that's a depressing thought because a society without journalism isn't a good society.

And the question that I'd throw back at the laissez-faire Shirky is this: how absolutely should we stand back and trust the free market to come up with a solution to the crisis of the news business? We certainly aren't trusting this unfettered market to solve Wall Street's financial crisis. Nor are most Americans happy with a free market in healthcare that has left millions of people without insurance. So if we can agree that the news business, like healthcare and the financial sector, is too important to fail, then shouldn't the government be taking a more active gardening/watering role in ensuring that at least one or two of today's digital flowers fully bloom in the future?

Day the music died

On Tuesday, the music died for British viewers of YouTube. It was then that Google, YouTube’s strict parent, began blocking UK viewers from watching what they call “premium music videos” on the Internet’s most popular video platform. The reason, of course, was money. Google had been unable to cut a new licensing or royalties deal for YouTube content with the Performing Rights Society (PRS), the body that collects royalties for music artists. Both sides naturally went in PR spin overdrive after the decision – PRS finding Google’s decision “particularly disappointing”, while a Google spokesman claimed that PRS’s financial demands were so “prohibitive” that they would force YouTube to “lose significant amounts of money with every playback.”

British music fans shouldn’t feel especially persecuted. The same thing happened in America, late last December, when Google, claiming an inability to “reach acceptable business terms”, pulled down all Warner Music Group’s music videos from YouTube. It was a cruel pre-Christmas present for YouTube regulars with every Warner music video -- from the B-52’s to Jane’s Addiction – suddenly disappearing off the site.

So what is going on, why the sudden war between YouTube and the music business? The simple truth is that Google – which is under severe economic pressure from a decline in online advertising and from powerful new social media competitors like Facebook and Twitter -- is starting to play hardball with its new YouTube baton. It’s not surprising really. YouTube, which is now the fourth most trafficked website and second largest search engine on the Internet, control around 60% of the American online video market with music representing about 30% of its views and 47% of its most popular creators being musicians. But this massive traffic (estimated to be 5 billion total video views a month in the US) isn’t translating into advertising revenue with the site still only selling around 3% of its inventory.

Thus the nasty squabbling between Google and music business about royalty and license splits. As Lord Carter, the Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting reported last week to a Commons Select Committee about the YouTube-PRS situation: “it is an example of how do you price and fund content in the digital world… We have had decades of content being funded in one way – via the license fee and advertising – and that model is changing at a rapid speed.”

If anything, Lord Carter might even be underestimating the seismic nature of the changes in the music business. Everything indeed is changing with the traditional labels, licensees, advertisers and retailers being replaced by a radically new ecosystem of musical artists, producers, distributors and consumers. And, to almost everyone’s surprise, it’s YouTube – a four year-old start-up founded by three Silicon Valley geeks who wanted a simple service to broadcast online videos of their friends and pets – which is increasingly becoming the decisive player in the music industry.

The music won’t die forever, of course, on YouTube. Google and PRS will do a deal. And Google will eventually ink strategic agreements with all four of the big labels too. But music on the Internet now has a different tune. Google is conducting things now with its new YouTube baton. And not everyone is going to like what they hear.

The end of the end of history

AP asks nervously how we'll know when the economy has bottom out. the only way to understand our current economic crisis is to study the economic crises of the past. History may not exactly repeat itself, but it's the only guide we have to the present. Indeed, we wouldn't have gotten into this ludicrous mess had we done a better job of remembering how the free market utopians had done this before, not only in Thirties, but also the Eighties and Nineties. As Eric Hobsbawn, in his magisterial The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, argues (pp 103):

Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market then so obviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period of depression in the late 1980s and 1990s, which, once again, they were equally unable to understand or to deal with. Still, this strange phenomenon should remind us of the major characteristic of history which it exemplifies: the incredible shortness of memory of both the theorists and practitioners of economics. It also provides a vivid ilustration of society's need for historians, who are the professional remembrancers of what their fellow-citizens wish to forget.

It's not just free market economists who have short memories. Theoretical political scientists too, like Francis Fukyama also have a tendency to conveniently forget the past. It was Fukuyama who twenty years ago in the free market journal The National Interest, declared that we were at the end of history and that all nations would now become liberal democracies. 1989's Fall of the Berlin Wall and the other revolutions in Eastern Europe seemed to prove Fukuyama's theoretical point. Social science trumped history. And thus the forgetting began.

As I explain in today's Daily Beast, the international financial meltdown had delivered history back to Eastern Europe with a vengeance. Just as the economic crisis in America, has woken us up to the lessons of the past, so East Europeans are nervously reminding themselves of the catastrophic Thirties and the impact of the first Wall Street Crash on the region. American foreign policy makers need to reacquaint themselves with East European history too. As Western Europe becomes more and more preoccupied with its own crisis and Putin's Russia grows in confidence, it is likely that America will once again become embroiled in the complex politics and economics of Eastern Europe.

Niall Ferguson, the Harvard economic historian who has as good a grasp of this crisis as anyone, has predicted that there will be blood. The real question now is where that blood will be spilled.