Frictionless Socialization - Part 2

People outside the realm of Facebook have talked about frictionless experiences before, but they have always talked about it in relationship to digital mediums. All the way back in 1996, Bill Gates was envisioning "frictionless capitalism" made possible by online, commercial communities.[1] Much more recently, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, said  that "when you reduce friction - make something easier - people do more of it." This is how he introduced the X-Ray feature on the new Kindle Touch which reduces friction in several ways. Now a reader who needs to know a definition, cross-reference, character bio, or other bits of reference information, they merely hold their finger over the word/character in question and are treated to a variety of sources instantly. Nicholas Carr, commenting on Bezos's address, outlines other points of reduced friction and gives his take on the new technology:

The friction in this case is the self-containment of the printed book, the tenacity of its grip on the reader. The reduction of the friction is the replacement of text with highly responsive hypertext. What people do more of is shift their focus and attention away from the words of the book and toward the web of snippets wrapped around the book - dictionary definitions, Wikipedia entries, character descriptions from Shelfari, and so forth. It's easy to see the usefulness of X-Ray, particularly for reference books, manuals, and other publications of a utilitarian nature. But Bezos is not X-Raying a cookbook. He's X-Raying a novel: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. He is, in a very real sense, treating a work of art as though it were an auto repair manual. Which is, of course, what the web wants a work of art to be: not a place of repose, but a jumping-off point.

When Amazon delivers a copy of The Remains of the Day to your Kindle, Bezos goes on to explain, the company "has pre-calculated all of the interesting phrases" and turned them into links. My, what a convenience! As a reader, I no longer have to waste a lot of mental energy figuring out which phrases in a book are interesting. It's all been pre-calculated for me! Here we have a preview of what happens when engineers begin to recreate books, and the experience of reading, in the image of the web. The algorithmical mind begins to run roughshod over the literary mind. Needless to say, there are also commercial angles here. Clicking on an "interesting phrase" will no doubt eventually trigger not just Wikipedia and Shelfari articles but also contextual advertisements as well as product recommendations from Amazon's store. Removing the edges from a book also serves to reduce friction in the purchasing process.

In my mind Carr picks up on a lot of important points here that will be relevant in our later discussions of Facebook. A book is no longer a self-contained entity with a clear beginning and end; now it serves as a launch pad for diversions into hyperlinked references. I grew up having to look at context to determine the meaning of unclear words or phrases which, could be argued, made me a better reader (and, perhaps, conversation partner). A frictionless version of that same predicament requires the opposite experience as it radically decontextualizes a word, phrase, or character from its literary surroundings - not to mention the interruption in style and mood that a hyperlinked book most readily provides. Here Carr makes a content/form distinction that we could categorize as genre. We don't teach (or rather, haven't taught) students to read a sonnet the same way they read a newspaper clipping. Our expectations of the two genres should be different with respect to literary style, message, and even accessibility. The way information is transmitted in this frictionless technology at least moves in the direction of flattening genres and their corresponding expectations.

Whether or not this kind of interface is bad is, I suppose, debatable. My saying that there is some benefit in having to work through a difficult passage rather than clicking on it doesn't make it true. Maybe people will still be able to be swept away in a novel without the semi-constant desire to click on words and characters (if only to see if they have an entry - a motivation I can personally attest to), but that isn't what Bezos is counting on. Remember that he said that when friction is reduced, frequency of use is increased. If that is true, there is no getting lost in compelling stories, other worlds, or quality prose. Instead, readers are led astray into a forest of hypertexts and their return is of no concern.

But at least everyone will be lost in the same, "pre-calculated" forests.

*****

So I wonder if we'll get to a point where students won't know how to use an index or gather meaning from context, but I fear the point when they won't be expected to. Maybe my academic interests are coloring this discussion. While I whole heartedly mean everything I've said here, I don't think I need to know how to do long division (though it would be helpful on occasion), or use a slide rule, or sundial. Would people on the verge of the next technology (calculators and clocks) rant like I am? Is there something special about literature or am I just sensitive to the subject and want students to go through the "friction" that I had to go through in order to understand Shakespeare or the frictionfull, Chaucer?

I'm probably biased in this discussion because I value literature and critical reading skills, but in either case it is important to see that the brains behind significant aspects of our online experiences are attempting to remove friction in important ways. And, I think, a lot of those reductions and (not yet fully realized) consequences are analogous to what is happening with social media, and Facebook particularly.

Even if there isn't something special about literature, would we say the same thing of community, relationships, and/or friendships? A lot of the same frictionless philosophy saturates Facebook. Zuckerberg's vision of frictionless experiences is a "perfected" form of Bezos's where it won't just be used more often, but it will be used constantly and unthinkingly (and, as it turned out, unknowingly).

We'll begin our frictionless-Facebook journey next time. 

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[1]. Chris Werry, “Imagined Electronic Community: Representations of Online Community in Business Texts,” in Online Community and the Future of Internet Commerce, 10. For more on friction and internet commerce see: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/antitrust_20.php

Frictionless Socialization - Part 1 - Introduction

“It is not accidental that teens live in a culture infatuated with celebrity – the “reality” presented by reality TV and the highly publicized dramas (such as that between socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie) portray a magnified (and idealized) version of the networked publics that teens are experiencing, complete with surveillance and misinterpretation. The experiences that teens are facing in the publics that they encounter appear more similar to the celebrity idea of public life than to the ones their parents face.”[1]

  

So reads one of danah boyd’s conclusions about teenage experiences in networked publics toward the end of her excellent (albeit dated) article “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites.” I have been talking about frictionless experiences ever since I heard about Mark Zuckerberg talk at the F8 conference, and there were several times in this article where this idea of friction struck me. The above quote, for example, refers primarily to the wide publicity that anyone and everyone receives now because of the internet generally and social media specifically. But I’m inclined to say that there is more similarity between teenagers’ public experiences and The Simple Life than publicity. The point of the show was to watch two second-rate celebrities, who had never experienced the kind of friction that regular folk do, perform menial, dirty, friction-filled jobs. They worked on farms, cooked meals, styled their own hair – seriously terrifying work. Their lives had been so cushioned and limited that watching them attempt these tasks or even talk to others who performed these tasks became painful. Introducing friction in the lives of two celebrities who had not previously encountered that level of resistance made for three seasons of snigger-worthy television.

Back to boyd. Her article basically explores a selected history of social networks and, specifically, the rise and fall of MySpace. Basically teenagers fled to online communities because they had nowhere else to go in the off-line world. Previously popular places like roller-skating rinks and malls started to over-regulate and increase authority presence. While kids could still be kids at Chuck-E-Cheese’s, teens couldn’t be teens at Skateland. So they took to the internet and found functionally similar spaces where they could be themselves. It didn’t take long, however, before parents started policing those spaces as well which led to multiple online identities (one for parents and one for friends) and a steady exodus of teenagers from MySpace. boyd's conclusion is that “teens need access to these publics – both mediated and unmediated – to mature, but their access is regularly restricted.”[2] She makes related points throughout her piece:

We are doing our youth a disservice if we believe that we can protect them from the world by limiting their access to public life. They must enter that arena, make mistakes, and learn from them. Our role as adults is not to be their policemen…[3]

While social interaction can and does take place in private environments, the challenges of doing so in public life are part of what help youth grow. Making mistakes and testing limits are fundamental parts of this. Yet, there is a pervading attitude that teens must be protected from their mistakes.[4]

While I agree with this philosophy generally, it seems to me that mediated public spaces aren’t designed for this kind of maturation. That is to say, if the interfaces with which teenagers (and other age groups) interact are meant to provide frictionless experiences, then are these mediated publics equal to unmediated publics in the role they play in socialization? Do people prefer mediated publics? If so, is fuller access to that social space priming future The Simple Life stars? I’m being purposely hyperbolic and exaggerating boyd’s metaphor – but there do seem to be some inconsistencies within this kind of argument. I’m interested in these questions as well as exploring the various arenas from which friction is being removed, to what extent, and to what end.

Many of my concerns and conclusions are highly speculative and reactionary, but if it makes for good fiction then it makes for a few good blog posts.

That is the kind of reasoning you can expect in the posts to come. Prepare yourself.

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[1]. danah boyd, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life,” in MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning: Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume, ed. David Buckingham (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 22.

[2]. Ibid., 22-23.

[3]. Ibid., 22.

[4]. Ibid., 19.

Sherry Turkle: Alone Together

If I had more time it would be fun to cover Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. I actually found it to be the most convincing piece that I read which fell on the less optimistic side of the technology/social media spectrum. The structure reminded me a lot of the danah boyd piece that we read in RWS511 where she based her conclusions and analysis about MySpace (and Facebook, by implication) on her interviews and data collected from teenagers. Turkle's data is more up to date and she roots her analysis in these interviews and the themes that she sees in the data. This makes her work far less speculative than Postman, and I think more convincing than Carr. Some of her points seem redundant (not unlike boyd's article, though boyd was writing at the beginning of the social media revolution), but she does offer a lot of interesting insights into how teenagers approach social media and what their expectations are of their community and technology. Absent from a lot from a lot of other discussions are low-tech new media like phone conversations and how teenagers feel about that form of communication - in short, it is too transparent and demands too much effort from the users. 


I found the book really interesting and a very fast read; I highly recommend it. She has done an independent TED talk which introduces a lot of the main concepts and will give you some idea as to whether or not you are interested in her work.

Quick Video: Nancy Baym

Here is a pretty good interview with Nancy Baym from last year. It serves as a great summary of her book and is definitely worth a watch - especially for the rhetorically minded as she discusses audience, content, and rhetorical spaces (if not exactly in those terms). 

Nancy Baym and The Digital Age: A Brief Overview

In framing the debate over digital media and their influences on users, Nancy Baym describes the more pessimistic side as Determinists:

The tendency is to think about new technologies deterministically, asking what they do to us, and whether that is good or bad. Thus we see concerns that mediated communication damages our ability to have face to face conversations, degrades language, undermines our connections to our communities and families, and replaces meaningful relationships with shallow substitutions... Determinism can be recognized from its causal construction. The media are positioned as cause, the people are positioned as changed. (Personal Connections in the Digital Age, pg. 150-51)

Even the most casual readers of this blog should recognize that Postman and Carr would fit very nicely into this "Deterministic" caste. Baym's strength throughout her book is not that she outright denies these claims, but that she carefully shifts the emphasis by asking different questions. She makes this shift most explicit at the end of her book:

To ask whether mediated communication is as good as unmediated interaction, or whether online relationships are as good as unmediated relationships, is to miss the point. It is not a question of either/or, of one versus the other. It's a question of who's communicating, for what purposes, in what contexts, and what their expectations are. There are circumstances in which mediated interaction is preferable to face to face interaction, circumstances in which it is worse, and others when it's interchangeable. (pg. 153)

In some ways Baym, like Postman, also casts the discussion in terms of form and content, but she is far more accepting of different kinds of content. She asks important rhetorical questions in order to see what form would be most appropriate - an experience I had recently when I wanted to wish my father-in-law a happy birthday: text (my preference), email, or phone call. Purpose and expectations required that I make a phone call, but in other contexts with different expectations - the purpose being the same - I could appropriately wish someone a happy birthday on Facebook.

Baym rightly describes technology as mirroring our culture and simply allowing us to do what we would otherwise want to do more easily - shaping us along the way (e.g., she says digital media are "developed and deployed in social and cultural contexts" pg. 153). She denies that technology could cause any kind of revolution in and of itself (a very different sentiment than Postman, according to whom the revolution had already arrived). In the end she sees our relatively quick appropriation of digital media for socially-oriented purposes as evidence that we will not lose interpersonal relationships, identity, and community in the ever-changing digital age.

This last bit of optimism could sound a bit like the technological Marxism that Postman brings up at the close of his book, but I think Baym makes some important arguments that make this conclusion sound less speculative than "progress for progress's sake." All in all, I recommend Baym's book as a good interlocutor among the more negative voices of Postman and Carr. 

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Part 4

This will be my last treatment of Postman, and the following quote does well to leave the reader with a clear idea of Postman's concerns. Whether you agree with him or not, Postman goes out with a bang:

To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple... Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for the absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement. (AOD, pg 157-58)

Since finishing Postman's work, I've also read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, and Nancy Baym's Personal Connections in the Digital Age. In one way or another these books seem to rely on Postman, even if not explicitly. I've intentionally left The Shallows out of these discussions because while  it was certainly more developed and, in my opinion, less speculative - it nevertheless seemed to be a sophisticated update to AOD.[1]

On the other hand, Baym relies on commentators like Postman (and Walter Ong along with their contemporary counterparts like Carr) as opposing voices in the debate. While I think she is generally very moderate in her appraisal of digital media and its influence on relationships, she does come out in stark opposition to what I've recorded here from Postman.

I will offer a quote or two in the future to briefly orient the interested reader to Baym's position, especially in relationship to Postman, since I've spent so much time here covering his perspective.

I've really enjoyed Amusing Ourselves to Death. It helped me formulate better questions about digital media and gave me some important framework through which I was better able to understand the history of the debate around new media - especially as I read Carr. Postman gives a lot of credit to the prophetic power of Aldous Huxely (who suggested that technology would turn the enemy from a suspicious thug to a smiling entertainer), but I think regardless of where we fall in the debate it is safe to say that Postman was ahead of his time in a lot of important ways as well.

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[1] We've also talked about Carr's article in RWS511, so much of the discussion would seem redundant. 

More Resistance to Frictionless Sharing

I posted a few initial, negative responses to frictionless sharing before, and now Molly Wood at CNET shares her thoughts. A lot of what she says is in the same vein as what Farhad Manjoo had to say about this kind of sharing ruining taste, but the article is definitely worth a read. Here's an excerpt: 

Sharing and recommendation shouldn't be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing--we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems.

Where Is This World Headed (and how do I ask that visually)?

It would be easy to call Postman and others like him a bit paranoid when they talk about the decline of text and a steady progression to an entirely visual/audio-oriented culture. In Postman's case, that was an assumption he made on the way to concluding what that kind of culture that produces and some have questioned that presupposition. Some have suggested, and I think rightly to an extent, that increased presence on social media sites has brought about an increase in student-produced composition. Young people are texting, emailing, chatting, and updating statuses so often that the bulk of their discourse happens via text and no longer orally. Postman may not be happy about the genre, length, or sophistication of such compositions, but it would be hard to argue that even the most avid users of social media aren't text dependent.

Are you ready for it? BUT. Present text-dependence hardly indicates where the minds behind digital media want us to end up. Engadgetrecently covered a technology conference and posted on some remarks made by the CEO of Dreamworks (of course, I'd be more excited about this idea if it were Pixar leading the charge). Their full post:

Is the internet on the cusp of a post-text era? Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg certainly thinks so. Speaking at the Techonomy conference in Tucson yesterday, Katzenberg confirmed that his company is already working on expanding 3D animation to the realm of social media, as part of a collaboration with Intel. As Technology Review reports, the two companies have been working on the project for the better part of four years, developing 12-core chips and software capable of delivering real-time photographic animation. Katzenberg didn't offer many details beyond that, but seemed confident that his company's new technology could radically alter the way users share and engage with online content by transcending the boundaries of traditional text. "Text is a learned process but what we do [at Dreamworks] is intuitive and instinctual and you do it from the moment you are born," he said, "We're trying to see if we can move many of these things we can do today in text but moving up to video and audio... with sight and sound." The exec went on to cite Apple's Siri personal assistant as proof that this transition is already underway: "Whether we do it or somebody else does it, we will move from a text world into a audio visual one." Intriguing claims, to be sure, but we'll know more next year, when Dreamworks' new campaign gets underway.

This "post-text" world has already found some footing in social media with an increased use of YouTube and sites like DailyBooth, where you are encouraged to join in on "one big conversation about your life, through pictures." Text-based status updates and messages now give way to personal snapshots and a steady stream of uploaded images. I first heard of DailyBooth in Devin Friedman's excellent The Viral Mewhich he wrote for GQ at the end of last year. It is still one of the most interesting reads on social media and where it is heading. Coincidently, it is also where I first encountered the idea of frictionless experiences which I will be writing about more extensively soon. The article is well worth a read.

For my requisite video, I'd like to share one of my favorites from Stephen Fry - not just because of the words, but the interplay between text and images. 

Quick Quote

Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplisitic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves. (pg. 141)

In a lot of ways this statement serves as Postman’s thesis and I would call it somewhat naïve if it weren’t written 36 years ago. There are plenty of genres on television that lend themselves to complex, substantive information (as I’ve suggested before), and I’ve heard “Previously on Mad Men” far too many times to grant that all television is nonhistorical and noncontextual, but at the same time I can’t help but apply this critique, even if only in part, to tools like Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps Facebook will, at some point in the future, be able to mediate different genres like television does now (though I doubt Twitter will ever effectively mediate political debates, class lectures, and the like). If anything, my critiques of Postman and appreciation for so much of what is good about television has made me tread a bit more tentatively in my criticisms of Facebook – although I still think many of my concerns are still legitimate.

This is not to say that Postman doesn’t raise some important points. I still think more thought could be put into the form/content discussions (or, at the most basic level, that these conversations should happen). Nicholas Carr has offered an updated critique in the vein of Postman with his book, The Shallows, and I think where there are points of intersection between Postman and Carr, Postman’s questions still merit answers.

Now for a bit of (ironic) fun: Pixar animations could stand as the biggest objection to many of Postman’s concerns about important cultural conversations taking place through digital mediums – especially when they so vividly paint (and implicitly critique) a Postman/Huxleyan hybrid future. I should also note that this video will have even more relevance when I talk about frictionless experiences later. 

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Part 3

The second half of Postman’s work is rather uneven with his stronger chapters acting as bookends to what I expected to be a more constructive collection of essays. His opening chapter entitled Now… This talked about televised news and the changing nature of journalism in the digital age. I’ve covered this chapter elsewhere in conjunction with some contemporary discussions on networked journalism and I think Postman is at his most prophetic in this chapter.

The next few chapters fall pretty flat. He takes on televised religion and politics in turn by basically applying his general critiques in the first half of his book to more concrete phenomena, but the chapters are so generic that they are virtually interchangeable and I don’t think they do much to add to his argument.[1] In fact, I think there are some problems in his chapter on politics in particular.

Postman argues that the dominant metaphor for American political discourse is the television commercial (pg. 126). His critique, as anyone reading the book or my blog should anticipate, is twofold: commercials are too short to mediate any serious talking-points (much less initiate community-wide conversations), and that since commercials are image-based they are unable to make claims. Technically, he argues that claims must be made through language:

More precisely, it must take the form of a proposition, for that is the universe of discourse from which such words as “true” and “false” come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then the application of empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the other instruments of reason are impotent… By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. (pgs. 127-128)

Since the commercial is the controlling metaphor for political discourse, this non-refutable nature of television advertisements also applies to the realm of American politics.

I’m not naïve enough to argue that elections are won on reason alone. I grew up during MTV’s relatively successful Rock the Vote campaigns and vividly remember the question that resonated the most with young voters during Bill Clinton’s run for office: boxers or briefs? President Obama made excellent use of YouTube in his campaign, and the most powerful artifact from his run was the “Hope Poster.” And, of course, George W. Bush turned the 9/11 lapel pin into a portable monument that has shaped the picture of patriotism in the U.S. Even pop-culture is in on the joke (just watch the opening 60 seconds and pardon me for using television to make, or at least supplement, an argument):

But any student of rhetoric should object to some of Postman’s conclusions. Images can’t make claims? Pathos isn’t a legitimate form of (reasonable!) argument? In what strikes me as a glaring counterexample, Postman (just one page later) talks about a politician who used a commercial to “project himself as a man of experience, virtue and piety,” all of which seem to be refutable claims. What is the difference between “project” and “claim” or “argue”?

In the end, my problem with Postman (as I’ve written before) is that most of his objections could be answered by insisting on teaching people how to read images. Increased visuality requires a shift in educational emphases (a point that he fails to acknowledge in his chapter on education, and instead makes the argument again television contains no arguments, just narratives; pg. 148). If a class like RWS 744 existed at a high school level, would televised arguments be as subversive as Postman suggests? One of my favorite quotes is from William Blake and I think it is appropriate here:

This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you look with, and not through, the eye.  

We need to concern ourselves with teaching people to look “through the eye” otherwise Postman’s critiques are, in general, fitting.

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[1] If I were, for a moment, to put on my confessional protestant and seminary graduate hat I would recommend that all mainline evangelicals read Shuffle off to Bethlehem as it serves as a relevant critique of American Christianity’s obsession with celebrity and their appropriation of entertainment  models. 

Quick Pic

Early Backlash to Frictionless Sharing

I wrote about Zuckerberg's desire for "frictionless sharing" a couple days ago. As it turns out, people do want a little friction in their lives... for now, at least. A few articles for your consideration:


- Spotify changed their settings to allow for private listening.


- Unlike other news outlets, The New York Times isn't on board with frictionless sharing.


- There are even some advocacy groups asking for government intervention.

A Quick Observation

Another one to categorize under 'digression.' 


I was flipping through some channels tonight and came across an advertisement for a new ABC show. The advertisement used a number of snippets from various media outlets that would offer TV reviews (e.g., People, EW.com, etc.), but it also had some comments from Twitter users (but they were presented the same way regardless of the source). I assumed that the Twitter users were associated with some better known critic site but then I visited @JJJbaybay's Twitter feed to find out that he is a regular student with no discernible credentials that would warrant interspersing his review among "legitimate" ones. I have nothing against Mr. Johnson, I'm simply searching for a reason for his inclusion in this television ad and neither his profile nor his 66 followers offer any explanation (also, he was one of three or four Twitter users, but his was the most memorable name of the bunch and they went by quickly). 


It is one thing to incorporate social media in areas that aren't traditional sites for social media (e.g., primetime news, newspaper journalism, politics, movie/tv reviews, etc.), but I think it is a bit weird that anyone with a Twitter account and a concurring opinion can me counted as equals among established entertainment outlets. Social media gives everyone with internet access a voice, and that kind of empowerment can be a really good thing - but should all those voices speak as loudly on all subjects?


The internet has already created a place where WebMD has become a legitimate substitute for a doctor and Wikipedia is the primary source of information; in other words, it has subverted traditional notions of authority. Obviously WebMD and Wikipedia offer more important information (and are therefore more strictly moderated) than a TV review snippet - but I'm still worried that at some point all that a person will need to be considered a legitimate authority in certain areas is an internet presence, and with more people signing up for social media sites everyday, that seems a scary prospect. 

A Rambling Digression about the New Facebook

I’m working on a few new blog posts but I’ve been sidetracked by the new Facebook updates. Last week (as soon as Google+ went public) Facebook revamped their News Feed, profiles, and more. I’ll let Naomi explain it:

There have been a lot of responses and I am tempted to reserve any judgment until later in the semester once I have more readings under my belt, but I wanted to post something as a way to bookmark an article that I found interesting over at Slate. So the following post will be pretty rough, but I’m taking advantage of the medium and using it as an extension of my memory. You’ve been warned.

Farhad Manjoo responds to the changes Facebook has undergone and, more specifically, the philosophy behind the changes – which was explicitly spelled out by Mark Zuckerberg at the recent F8 Conference. Below is the introduction to the F8 keynote which combines comedy and information through Zuckerberg impersonator, Andy Samberg.

In a moment of actual information-transmission, the pseudo-Zuckerberg says that the more people share on Facebook, the closer people get to your authentic identity. As Manjoo reports, Zuckerberg’s goal is “frictionless” sharing:

What he means is that I don't have to bother with the "friction" of choosing to tell you that I like something. On Facebook, now, merely experiencing something is enough to trigger sharing. Once I sign up for Spotify's Facebook app, my consent is assumed: When I listen, I share. The same goes for the many other apps that Facebook's partners are launching. When I watch something on Netflix or Hulu, when I read something on the Daily, or when I play a game like Words With Friends, Facebook will tell my friends. Everyone I know on Facebook will now have a running log of my life.

After getting feedback from users, Zuckerberg created a specific place (the Ticker) for updates that are more trivial – so as to encourage people to share information they might otherwise deem unnecessary. Manjoo suggests that this kind of indiscriminate sharing ruins taste.

For as much as he's invested in sharing, though, Zuckerberg seems clueless about the motivation behind the act. Why do you share a story, video, or photo? Because you want your friends to see it. And why do you want your friends to see it? Because you think they'll get a kick out of it. I know this sounds obvious, but it's somehow eluded Zuckerberg that sharing is fundamentally about choosing. You experience a huge number of things every day, but you choose to tell your friends about only a fraction of them, because most of what you do isn't worth mentioning…
…I welcome any method that makes it easier for people to share stuff. If you like this article, you should Like this article. And even if you hate this article, you should Like this article (add a comment telling your friends why I'm a moron). But if you're just reading this article—if you have no strong feelings about it either way, and if you suspect that your friends will consider it just another bit of noise in their already noisy world—please, do everyone a favor and don't say anything about it all.

First of all, I think that Manjoo is rather generous in explaining why people share what they share. Not that users don’t share things because they think their friends will like it, but in a digital space where you can manipulate your identity with the click of a button, I think the primary reason that people share things is so that their friends will like them (or, better: the them that they have constructed). I, for example, will happily share that I like all kinds of indie-bands that my friends like – and I do – but I will not share my guilty-pleasure-love for all things Katy Perry. The internet does not need to know about that information beyond what one would glean rather easily from my YouTube viewing history. Good thing nobody reads this blog.

In any case, it seems to me that Zuckerberg is probably right in saying that the more we share about ourselves the more our online identity will mirror our “authentic” identity in the real world. But I wonder if that is what we want as people-knowers or peoples-known. To some extent we are always on guard – sharing bits of ourselves while hiding others even when we are with those who “know us best.” Do any of us want others to know us authentically? I realize I’m taking a rather pessimistic route here, and maybe I’m alone in my concern, but I know myself pretty well and I’m not crazy about other people having that kind of insight. Also the only things that can be frictionlessly shared at this point are internet activities – which will just widen the space within which we create identities. If I know my friends know what I do on the internet I’ll have a browser dedicated to searching and sharing the kind of webpages I want to share, and another dedicated to Katy Perry. All the world is a stage and our identities are performative constructions - Frictionless sharing might make that performance difference, but we'll do what we have to to keep the show moving. 

Regardless, frictionless sharing goes further in shaping relationship expectations: I should be sharing more and interested in what others are sharing regardless of its relative importance.

Interestingly, while the new design lets me ignore certain types of people (through “lists”), and choose what is important (out of what Facebook deems important, mind you), the Ticker – that conveyer of all things unimportant – doesn’t discriminate in that way. That means that now I have to be subjected to the most trivial of updates from the most trivial of friends; at least before the Ticker I could choose whose trivial updates I am subjected to.

So I want to quickly end with Manjoo’s last statement (quoted above). Don’t we have enough “noise” to deal with already without having to siphon through those frictionlessly shared items? It seems to me that frictionless sharing is not frictionlessly received. In other words, it seems to me that I often am forced to interact with people’s updates more than they are, under this sharing model. For example: if an old middle school friend that I haven’t interacted more than accepting their Facebook friendship is listening to Spotify in the background of their card game – every song that is played for the next four hours is shared on my Ticker. This trivial friend’s trivial updates are being broadcast without any effort on their part, and yet I am confronted with it no matter where I go within Facebook – and I’m supposed to care.

There is more that I could and want to say – but the lack of structure demonstrated so far is driving me nuts. So I’m done for now and will continue my regularly scheduled blog topics soon. 

((perhaps I should have let Michael Scott address this question from the beginning))

Quick Quote (and some clips)

Television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. – AOD pg. 16

Television’s conversations promote incoherence and triviality… the phrase ‘serious television’ is a contradiction in terms. – AOD pg. 80

[[Before a short response I offer two qualifications. The first is from Postman who acknowledges some benefits of television in its power to persuade people of righteous causes where rational argument might lack influence (17). The second qualification is my own: while I am going to argue that Postman is off base in his understanding of television as a medium his points are nearly identical to criticisms of Facebook that I have made elsewhere. I intend to get to Facebook as a rhetorical space at some point in the future, but I want to acknowledge similarities in the two situations up front (and I hope to distinguish my argument from his in important ways later on).]]

While I agree that television can present itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations, I also think it is often said carrier as well as being, in itself, a cultural conversation. This goes back to the point I made toward the end of the last post – technology is bound up in culture as a product that is shaped by and reshapes its viewer. The popularity of television generally among various demographics and different shows’ performances both popularly and critically are the stuff of cultural conversations. Obviously television provides a unique space wherein different shows can present their own reality and important metaphors unfold within those realities, according to the inner logic of each show (or genre). Why is it that Huxley’s “Brave New World” can seriously speak prophetically to issues of status, identity, technology, and community within our own culture but a television show that attempts to accomplish the same thing would be deemed trivial? Certainly both mediums can accommodate a wide variety of genres[1] – why must everything that is on television be relegated to entertainment? And why can’t important cultural conversations be entertaining (much like Huxley’s work)?

As a bit of a television fiend, I would be remiss if I didn’t offer some examples of television taking itself seriously and having important cultural conversations:

This powerful clip from Mad Men won't embed, but it is definitely worth clicking over to. 

And perhaps a couple of examples of television taking itself less seriously but still raising important cultural issues (if even through absurdity):

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[1] Of course there is a difference between a mediums ability to accommodate and its conduciveness to a particular genre. Postman would say that accommodation is irrelevant, but then what makes books different? This goes back to my last post – we simply need to be equipped with the skills necessary to interact with television more critically and then what objections remain? We can go back over printed text? That’s what DVRs are for!

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Part 2

The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned… which is a way of saying that the ‘truth’ is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant. – AOD, pgs. 22-23

Postman moves his argument into the realm of epistemology in his discussion of cultural truth-telling and preferred mediums. Basically, truth-telling takes many modes and cultures determine which modes are more reliable. Postman suggests that some forms are better than others and thus have an overall positive effect on a culture. He claims that, already in his day, “television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life [and] that we are getting sillier by the minute” (24). Later he says that this epistemology is not only “inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist” (27).

In the next few chapters that close Part 1 of AOD, Postman makes many claims that I’d like to address if only briefly, but the primary claim that he sets out to support in the rest of his book is found in the above quotes. In order to demonstrate the superiority of a print-based epistemology outlines the many tools necessary for (critical) reading, and takes the reader through a short (and largely misleading) tour of early America.

His delineation of all the tools required to read and comprehend any print-based text is too long to post (but the interested reader can refer to pages 25-26) – and this is done rather purposely. He basically describes all of the skills that a person employs – most of which are achieved unconsciously – to accomplish what we might call critical reading. Some of these skills include ignoring the aesthetics of the printed letters to recognize their symbolic function (i.e., on must be able to read “I’ll” and not resort to marveling at all the straight lines), as well as “knowing the difference between a joke and an argument” (26). In fairness, these are rather absurd examples in a list of otherwise legitimate actions, but they are included in order to compile a dauntingly long list in order to make an argument by implication: the medium of television is not conducive to this level of scrutiny, and since it requires less interaction and skill it makes for a weaker epistemology. The implicit argument is made more explicit in Part 2, so I’ll deal with it in his terms later, but doesn’t this have more to do with an underdeveloped concept of television as a specific genre that requires a different (though similar) set of tools for a careful reading? In the growing field of visual rhetoric scholars have argued that images (both still and moving) have a language and syntax and are, indeed, argumentative.[1] I will grant, of course, that television is often a more persuasive medium than print and it probably has a lot to do with a lack of critical interaction. Not every printed text receives or requires a critical reading, and print is an older technology about which people have had time to develop critical, analytical tools – similar to the ones which are continuing to be developed for visual rhetoric.[2]

Postman then moves to American history. The early settlers and the next few generations are given a rather romanticized treatment as Postman walks through publication and speech practices in early America. The point he seems to communicate is that the print-based culture of early America lent itself to higher literacy rates (though he admits that’s a difficult statistic to pin down), more analytical discussion, better grammar, and longer attention spans. I won’t respond to much of what he argues because a lot of it strikes me as silly. To favor an older form of language because of its complexity is sociolinguistically untenable. Language changes but remains rule-governed – to favor an older language variation because of its syntactical complexity can only be motivated by a conservatism that restricts language in ways that it cannot be restricted.

I will close this post with two, overly-brief responses to a couple of Postman’s examples. He holds up the Great Awakening as an oratorical event which succeeded largely because the preachers used “printable” speech and it encouraged literacy through intelligent debate (see pgs. 42 and 54). Having spent a significant amount of time looking at the Great Awakening – as a historical event as well as the culture in which it unfolded and the practices and theologies of its major players – I can only say that Postman is hilariously and irresponsibly off the mark. Charles Finney in particular took advantage of the anti-intellectual spirit running rampant in America at the time to win people over through staged spectacles, embellished visuals, and often-incoherent speech.[3]

Finally, Postman recalls a 7 hour debate (which was apparently shorter than most) between Lincoln and Douglas wherein the audience was encouraged to eat between speeches to come back refreshed. According to Postman, several hour long speeches were commonplace at this point in America’s history which leads him to ask: “What kind of audience[s were] these?” (44). It seems to me that these were the types of audiences who would eventually invent telegraphs, radios, televisions and the like – perhaps in an effort to make presidential debates more palatable. Remember that these technologies spring up from cultures and don’t autonomously act upon them – a point which Postman acknowledges but doesn’t address (79).

Andrew Fletcher was a Scottish politician and writer who lived from 1655-1716. He lived and worked in print-based culture when he wrote the following:

Let me write the songs of a nation; I don’t care who writes its laws.

It is interesting to me that Postman so romanticizes the pre-television, post-printing press era as preeminently literate and paradigmatically reasonable when others recognized existing mediums which bypassed peoples’ literacy and reason and made for effective persuasion.  

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[1] Postman denies both of these claims explicitly on pages 50 and 72. I would recommend Anthony Blair’s “The Possibility and Actuality of Visual Arguments,” and James Monaco’s “The Language of Film: Signs and Syntax.”

[2] In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my fellow graduate students are required to include a section on visual rhetoric when they teach undergraduate Rhetoric and Writing Studies courses. This generation of students is being taught to interact with various forms of texts at a critical level.

[3] I refer the interested reader to Nathan Hatch’s “The Democratization of AmericanChristianity.”