#Chatmixer, or How I Traveled Back in Time to 1991
Tonight I participated in my first organized group live chat on Twitter. (Please don’t ask me where I’ve been all this time — you’ll hurt my feelings.) There are dozens of such chats that occur on a weekly basis around common topics or professions, which I had been peripherally aware of: Sarah Evans‘ #journchat, for instance, or Mack Collier’s #blogchat. Because I recently started following Dana Lewis (who organized SXSH 2010), I caught wind of #chatmixer, an epic convergence of 18 different weekly chats into one.
The organizers of #chatmixer had provided a convenient Tweetgrid for participants to follow along, which I found to be more than helpful. Participants could see the entire conversation stream in one column, questions from the moderators in another, and messages to themselves in a third.
My first impression, echoed by several others, was that the experience was like drinking from a fire hose. With several hundred people participating, messages whizzed by before you had time to process and respond. This is what I imagine it’s like to be following 114,000 people. But it was a casual conversation, so it didn’t matter too much that the conversation was so fragmented.
My second impression was that these types of organized group conversations around a central topic had the potential to be extremely valuable for conversing with and learning from people you’ve never connected with before. Jon Newman voiced this sentiment strongly, when he proposed that “chats are perhaps the most under-used and highest-value opportunity Twitter delivers.” I had stumbled across a sub-behavior on Twitter that I barely knew existed.
Then, a realization set in. I had seen this all somewhere before. It was a distant memory, as if from 15 years ago…
Wait, it was from 15 years ago. This felt like IRC. Internet Relay Chat was (is) a relatively early form of online chat room, invented in August 1988, and accessible by anyone with a dial-up modem. Though I haven’t used it in years, I remember the days of IRC well.
Pop quiz: What’s the difference between Twitter and IRC?
One is a form of public communication and information sharing, consisting of directed (personal) and non-directed messages; conversation are organized around topics by the use of the pound sign, as in #politics; messages are extremely brief, at times almost cryptic to the uninitiated; the members of this service are on the cutting edge of technology, exploring new frontiers in media and communication; and it has been used to report on international political incidents even when the mainstream media were prevented from reporting on the events as they happened.
And the other is Twitter.
Sound familiar? Yes, IRC is all of those things. Not many people know, as Wikipedia reports, that “IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt throughout a media blackout,” and “was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War.”
Maybe you’re still skeptical? Well, take a close look at these two screenshots. I’ll let you decide which is which. (click the images for full size)
Even if you’ve never seen an IRC client before, you can’t help but notice the similarities. But that second screenshot was taken in Macintosh System 7, which came out in 1991!
The only difference is that now, millions more people have discovered the same value — this time in the form of Twitter. Back then, in my experience, it was mostly just a bunch of hackers screwing around in random channels and not really adding much to society. Now, anyone can connect with the biggest public figures and thought leaders in the world. And loose affiliations of professionals — journalists, artists, developers, and yes, even hackers — can come together to create the leading edge of technology, as they explore new frontiers of media and communication.
UPDATE: I didn’t expect to be the first person to have noticed the similarities of Twitter and IRC, but someone has already taken it to the next level: twIRC is the perfect convergence of the two. Love it. (via Mike Whaling – @30lines)
Rupert Murdoch’s Misunderstood Plan to Institute Paywalls Might Just Work
If he were still alive today, the legendary and unconventional San Francisco ad man Howard Gossage might be the only person around voicing support of Rupert Murdoch’s plans to turn his content into a walled garden. While I don’t agree with Murdoch’s political views, I am an ardent disciple of Gossage, and so to me this application of his principles is worth exploring.
In August 1965, Gossage published an essay entitled “Our Fictitious Freedom of the Press.” This piece expressed one of many seemingly contradictory perspectives held by “The Socrates of San Francisco,” given his position as the head of an ad agency: it took issue with the very fact that publications relied so heavily on advertisers.
In this century we have seen effective control of our press shift from the public, for whom it presumably exists, to the advertiser, who merely uses it to sell his wares to the public. It has shifted so much that the life or death of a publication no longer depends on whether its readers like it but whether advertisers like it.
If you doubt this, consider that well within our lifetime over half of the daily newspapers in this country have folded and that most of them have done so with their circulations more or less intact; that magazines with circulations into the millions have gone under not because their readers didn’t love them, but because advertisers didn’t.
Gossage goes on to explain how we got into this mess in the first place:
Originally, a publication was almost wholly dependent upon its readers for financial support and therefore charged them accordingly; if a magazine was worth five cents, they paid five cents for it. However, with the growth of advertising the publication enjoyed more and more income from paid space. Now this was a very pleasant situation indeed: the advertising revenue was, in effect, found money. Moreover, it provided yet another reason for getting new readers: more could be charged for the advertising as more people bought the publication — still at a profitable five cents. Now here was an incentive plan. My God, how the money rolled in.
But not for long. At some point two opposing economic spoilsports — rising production costs and competition — started to ruin the whole lovely thing. On one hand it was necessary to raise the price to the reader; on the other hand it was desirable to keep the price down so as to attract more circulation and more advertising dollars.
Well, the publication couldn’t do both, so it made a decision, a fateful one as it turned out, for it thereby committed itself to an increasingly irreversible course, which it still pursues. It probably didn’t seem like much of a decision at the time, however. Why antagonize the customers and help the competition by raising the price from a nickel to a clumsy figure like six cents? No, what we’ll do is give the reader a break so we can keep up the circulation and get more advertising.
Some break. On the day the reader first bought a publication for less than it cost to produce he lost his economic significance and became circulation. Moreover, he traded off his end of freedom of the press. It was a forced sale; the publisher had already traded off the other end. Of course the editor was still free to write anything he wished without government censorship, but there are other freedoms upon which this freedom depends — the freedom to publish, for instance. Is freedom to publish really significant if the power to kill it has been assigned to outsiders? … None of it means a damn if the rug can be jerked out from under it by a third party.
Gossage offers a solution: forgo the allure of advertising revenue, and return to a sustainable model of subscription pricing.
Do you know what I’d do if I had a magazine that was in trouble? I think I’d change it back more or less to what it was before…. At least I’d try to give them the same feel. And then I’d let the readers in on the act: I’d write them all letters and explain to them what I was doing and why I was doing it. I think I’d level with them about some of the economic facts I’ve talked about here: of how effective control had slipped from their hands into the hands of advertisers, and that to readjust this imbalance we were going to cancel all trick subscription deals and raise the price from, say, twenty-five cents to forty cents or fifty cents, whatever it took to do it. And I’d tell them that the net result might be that the circulation would go down to perhaps three million, but they’d be the three million subscribers who really wanted the magazine; it would be their magazine, not something put out to cadge advertising revenue. If advertisers liked it, fine, but that was incidental to the purpose of putting out a magazine in the first place.
This story is eerily familiar (once you account for inflation). It’s been a big year for magazines closing their doors, and everyone is struggling to figure out how to save journalism.
One man has announce a bold, reactionary approach. Rupert Murdoch wants to stop giving away his content for free, and even go so far as to shut Google’s crawlers out of News Corp media properties. In an interview with Sky News, Murdoch discussed these two key elements of his plan.
In the age of transparency, of “new media,” this is heresy. Some even find this idea laughable. Mashable, a leading voice in the social media echo chamber, provided their analysis in a post titled “Rupert Murdoch Plans To Hide His Sites From Google, The World Yawns” back in November:
I honestly can’t understand what’s his plan here. If he plans to charge for websites, why hide them from the search engines? If you can’t actually read the content without paying, then making the content at least partly accessible to Google and other search engines can’t hurt? In fact, the WSJ that he mentions as an example isn’t hidden from Google’s indexes, you can easily find Wall Street Journal articles via Google.
This is just one part of the quite lengthy interview, but it all boils down to this: Mr. Murdoch is not ready to accept any of the changes brought forth by the Internet and the social media movement. Moreover, he doesn’t seem to understand how some parts of it work.
[Does anyone ever step back and reflect on how much "the social media movement" sounds like a cult? Just calling it a movement makes me shudder.]
I don’t mean to imply that Mashable is alone in laughing (or yawning) off Murdoch’s plan. It’s an easy position to take because his approach seems so counter to what we think we know about successfully producing content on the web; it’s just so un-Cluetrain Manifesto. But that alone is not enough reason to discredit it just yet.
News Corp’s chief digital officer, Jonathan Miller, later provided some additional context on the plan.
There is real tension surrounding the free versus pay debate. It will play out in the next two years. We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online [by giving its away for free] so something needs to happen.
He also went on to explain why News Corp is willing to give up all of the traffic coming from Google:
The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not reads one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.
An interesting observation. Sure, Google is driving millions of visits a month to News Corp properties, but maybe those visitors aren’t really worth all that much — a visitor is not a visitor is not a visitor. They apparently don’t contribute to time on site. It’s not hard to imagine (although I’m just speculating) that they’re significantly less likely to support News Corp’s advertisers (i.e. click on banners). And they certainly aren’t the folks who are going to be willing to pay a subscription fee for News Corp’s content.
So in fact, it seems Murdoch might not have all that much to lose by closing his doors to freeloaders.
In the end, of course, it will come down to Murdoch’s ability to convince his most loyal readers of the value of a paid subscription to what will necessarily have to be content of the highest quality. His pitch to them is simple: you will receive a superior editorial product as the result of the increased independence from advertisers and search engines. If he can deliver on that, he might just discover a sustainable model for journalism — in fact, the original model. Stay tuned.
Robot Journalists, Democracy, and the Paradox of Entertainment News
I had the pleasure of attending the 2009 WBUR Public Radio Gala at the Intercontinental Boston on the 19th. While the event itself was fantastic, and raised over $350,000 for WBUR, the real honor was in hearing Ted Koppel and Jeff Greenfield discuss the relationship between journalism and democracy, and explore the implications of the current upheaval in the field. (David Carr has a thoughtful — and, perhaps surprisingly, hopeful — piece in the New York Times exploring this turmoil, entitled “The Fall and Rise of Media.”)
The most salient point of the evening came from Koppel, who was asked by moderator Tom Ashbrook to identify the current biggest threat to democracy with regard to the present state of journalism. His reply was something to the effect of, “increasingly, we get the news we want to hear, and not the news we need to hear.”
I thought of this as I read Kit Eaton’s post on the Fast Company blog describing AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s plan to automate the production of news content for AOL’s web properties. (Interestingly, Eaton cites the same Carr piece mentioned earlier.) This comes on the heels of an announced 2,500 layoffs in preparation for AOL’s re-independence from Time Warner. As part of this downsizing, Armstrong plans to replace a significant portion of his writing and content-producing staff with an automated content generation system, supplemented by freelancers.
There are two significant implications of Armstrong’s strategy. These come down to how the work is produced. The writing previously done by salaried journalists, based on topics chosen by experienced, salaried editors, will now largely be produced by freelancers and a specially-designed web crawler, respectively.
I actually don’t have much to say about the first point. This is in large part due to the fact that it’s not clear to me how the freelance work will be commissioned. Is every article basically a contest, with prospective writers vying to be picked on spec? Certainly there are plenty of people who take issue with this model, and I grant that there is validity to their case. For me, there isn’t a clear answer to the question of when an open assignment is crowdsourcing and when it becomes something more like creative exploitation. But I can’t yet take a side in this instance.
The editorial side of things is far more interesting to me. Yes, there will clearly still be human beings identifying the topics to be covered, and ultimately editing the work produced by the freelance writers. But they’ll be presumably choosing topics based on the output of this algorithm, which is just a popularity filter for whatever it is we deem to be news these days.
Play this out further, and suddenly we’re only getting “news” coverage of things we’re already talking about. Even in the best case, if this algorithm is somehow able to stay ahead of the news cycle, we may never get the news we need to hear unless it’s also the news we want to hear. To paraphrase a colleague, we’d end up with four thousand articles about Black Friday and not one about the war in Afghanistan.
Where does that leave us, when enjoyment and not education is the criterion for what qualifies as news? Neil Postman famously explored this subject in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Despite now being almost 25 years old, many of his arguments are as relevant today when applied to “new media” as they were in 1985 when he railed against the medium of television. I remember the first time I read the foreword, and how it stopped me in my tracks.
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
Are we condemned if the institutions of journalism give us only what we want to hear? There is no doubt that we are a society prone to gluttony — McDonald’s wouldn’t offer supersize value meals if we didn’t keep ordering supersize value meals. Over at Examiner.com, 54% of people (as of this writing) claim to believe that there has been too much coverage of Tiger Woods’ recent shenanigans; yet clearly, the public clamors for more. Before we supposedly wanted to stop hearing about Tiger, we supposedly wanted to stop hearing about Sarah Palin; and before Sarah Palin, we supposedly wanted to stop hearing about Paris Hilton… and so on and so on.
What Ted Koppel was saying, in one sense, is that the business of news has to in some ways be independent of supply and demand. It seems we can no longer be trusted to inform ourselves. Postman would even argue that what little news we do still consume is so broken down into headlines and sound bites that ultimately the distinction between the intellectual merit of CNN versus MTV is a false one.
Somewhere along the way, the field of journalism became subject to the laws of economics in a way that it hadn’t before. Howard Gossage, famed San Francisco copywriter and agency chief, pointed to the day that newspapers became more dependent on advertising revenue than subscription revenue as the beginning of the end. He was not the only one to make this observation. Jordan Seiler over at Public Ad Campaign discusses Walter Lippmann’s assessment of “the tenuous relationship between advertisers, newspapers, and the buying public:”
[Lippmann writes,] “It would be regarded as an outrage to have to pay openly the price of a good ice cream soda for all the news of the world, though the public will pay that and more when it buys the advertised commodities. The public pays for the press, but only when the payment is concealed [by advertising].”
Unlike those commodities we are willing to pay for, the news is expected to be open, fair, truthful and above all free, in many ways a right in democratic society. It is in the end how we shape our understanding of the world we live in and then function as informed citizens.
[Lippmann continues,] ”The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of news-gathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants.”
Our inability to accept the cost of running what we want to be a democratic and transparent endeavor, the news, results in the sale of this institution to advertising and inevitably corporate interests.
Simple. In order to produce news in a world where consumers do not bear the cost of its production, media outlets need to recruit advertisers to cover the difference. In order to sell enough advertising, publishers are forced to keep pushing towards the lowest common denominator in search of more and more eyeballs. Thus we get four hours of live CNN dedicated to Balloon Boy.
Some might say that the news, in its purest sense, is not just a privilege in a democratic society, but an institution which we have an obligation to defend as a pillar of that very democracy.
Even if that is believed to be true, I don’t know how we slow the erosion of the fourth estate. I can think of a good place to start, though: don’t wait for the next gala to support your local public radio station.
Augmented Reality: Bringing You New Reasons to Dislike People Before You Meet Them
“Technology,” warns Don Draper, “is a glittering lure.”
Applications for augmented reality are appearing everywhere: you can fight zombies, find the closest subway station, and measure a virtual flat-rate box on your kitchen counter before you head to the Post office. One of the slickest examples I’ve seen (not yet on the market) uses a robust facial recognition technology developed by Polar Rose to pull social information in real time just by looking at someone’s face. It’s called AugmentedID, and power networkers everywhere are drooling.
While many of us are caught up in the allure of augmented reality’s potential, few have played out the consequences of the rapid availability of this technology. Jamais Cascio decided to do just that in an article in this month’s The Atlantic, and conceived of a dystopian nightmare of real-life popups and social filtering (automatically removing people with differing political views from your field of vision, for instance).
We’re not that far off. He writes,
Although AR now relies on handheld devices, electronics makers like Sony are working on systems that you wear like sunglasses, making augmented vision more immersive. Here’s where the first familiar online phenomenon shows up: spam. Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages. AR systems will be used for spam too, whether via graffiti-like tags, ads that pop up when you look too long at a shop, or even abstract symbols stuck to a wall or worn on a shirt that, when viewed through an AR system, turn into 3-D animations. (emphasis added — I would remove “nearly”)
Sounds cool — as long as there are only a few innovators doing it, and the executions actually add value. But it’s not hard to imagine this media opportunity spiraling rapidly out of control, as every logo ever printed becomes a point of “engagement” overnight.
The interpersonal implications are even more interesting. Cascio picks politics as an ideological differentiator to illustrate the drawbacks to instantly knowing everything about any individual you meet.
After California’s Prop 8 ban on gay marriage passed, opponents of the measure dug up public records of donors supporting the ban, and linked that data to an online map. Suddenly, you could find out which of your neighbors (or the businesses you frequent) were so opposed to gay marriage that they donated to the cause. Now imagine that instead of a map, those records were combined with an AR system able to identify faces.
You don’t want to see anybody who has donated to the Palin 2012 campaign? Gone, their faces covered up by black circles. You want to know who exactly gave money to the 2014 ban on SUVs? Easy—they now have green arrows pointing at their heads.
You want to block out any indication of viewpoints other than your own? Done.
This will not be a world conducive to political moderation, nor one where differing perspectives get along comfortably. It won’t take a majority of people using these filters to poison public discourse; imagine this summer’s town-hall screamers on constant alert, wherever they go. Yet this world will be the unintended consequence of otherwise desirable developments—spam filters, facial recognition, augmented reality—that many of us will find useful.
Now, I don’t necessarily buy that political partisanship will lead the augmented reality revolution. But here’s a far more likely scenario: augmented reality dating. Intelius recently rolled out an iPhone app called “datecheck” (video walthrough here) that performs an instant background check on anyone, reporting on details from criminal records to personal interests to estimated net worth. Imagine if this information was available in real time, based simply on facial recognition (e.g. someone you hadn’t met yet). The economist in me calls this access to near-perfect information “efficiency.” The realist in me calls this situation “everyone dies alone.” My favorite economist (and favorite professor), Steven Landsburg, would be torn.
Comedian Demetri Martin has a bit about bumper stickers that’s always resonated with me. He looks at the bright side of these eyesores:
A lot of people don’t like bumper stickers. I don’t mind them. To me they’re a short-cut to saying: “Hey, let’s never be friends.”
What happens when we’re followed around by virtual bumper stickers — not of our own choosing — at all times? Will we find new areas of commonality, or new reasons to discriminate? I worry about the latter scenario. Based only on your profile information, Facebook already thinks you’re fat; what will augmented reality present that’s any different? Some have argued that “what unites us is greater than what divides us.” But I bet you could find at least one ideologically incompatible perspective with every friend you have — after all, if your social network consists of ideological clones, what the hell do you all find to talk about?
I haven’t decided how I feel about this. I’m excited by the technology, but alarmed by the implications.
What do you think about augmented reality — good or evil?
Derivative Works in a New Media Age
Is it not stealing if your customers do it for you?
Watch this:
Then go here, and watch Amazon’s new commercial for the Kindle — which was selected as the winner of a fan contest:
I’d call it appropriation. What do you say?
Point of Sale, In Human Expression
It would be a fascinating study to use the webcams built into most modern laptops to capture photos of people’s expressions just at the moment they clicked “Submit” on different e-commerce forms. I’m not exactly sure how it would work — maybe a browser plugin, or a desktop app that ran silently in the background. You’d catch the gleam of anticipation in the eyes of the owners of new flat-screens from BestBuy.com, the trepidation of law school candidates paying their LSAT registration fees, and the victory dances of winning bidders on eBay.
You’d also see me flipping the bird at CityofBoston.gov as I submitted payment for a questionable parking ticket I received last weekend.
Like I said — the results would be pretty interesting.
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