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.”

Quick Quote

“Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” 

“A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch” – AOD pgs. 10-11.

Like Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan before him and Nicholas Carr well after him, Postman suggests that the mediums with which we interact restructure the way we think (though, in fairness, it isn't a necessary point for him; see pg. 27). Furthermore, those things we encounter daily present a picture about reality or a worldview which is rarely met with critical engagement. So to bring up the example from my last post: what idea of the world, or less generally, what idea of American political theory is presented when policy is discussed in 140-word Tweet? I think that our President’s Twitter presence is meant to communicate more about our President than it is to disseminate information, but what is the communicative effect on the millions of followers who read political theory accommodated for the Twitter-verse?[1]

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[1] It should go without saying that I am in no way appraising the politics of our President. He is a product of our culture and found himself in a technological turning point that almost demanded he broadcast himself on YouTube and have a Twitter account. At this point I’m still just interested in the form/content discussion. 

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Part 1

A lot of conversations among the laity about digital media and their cultural consequences seem to inevitably reference the prophet-like Neil Postman and his seminal work, Amusing Ourselves to Death (AOD). I have read scholars in both the academic and popular arenas whose works borrow substantially (and explicitly) from Postman. As I continue to work through AOD I can see why Postman is continually referenced, but I also see a need for a bit of nuance that involves more than simply updating and reapplying Postman’s principles for digital 

mediums/technologies and cultures as they exist 25 years after AOD was published.

Postman begins his work by suggesting that Las Vegas is the living metaphor for the United States. We are an entertainment-obsessed culture that demands that all forms of information be disseminated through entertaining mediums. Television provided a means by which everyone with a television (or an inviting neighbor who had one) a chance to see the presidential debates. Apparently this is the first time that politics could be corrupted by an entertainment-oriented medium (as if pamphlets and speeches could not reduce the serious business of politics to a silly spectacle). Because everything and everybody has embraced this entertainment model, Postman suggests that Americans (in particular) are on the verge of 

amusing themselves to death.

An important point that Postman makes, and one that I think demands some thought as we interact with new media in today’s culture, is how forms determine and limit content. He argues that smoke signals, for example, aren’t equipped to communicate philosophy – “its form excludes the content” (7). He also suggests that since most political discourse happens on television that political philosophy (which isn’t amenable to digital media) takes a back seat to a candidate’s appearance since the language of television is largely visual and not typographical.

While Postman can sound like script-favoring luddite at times, I do wonder how much thought goes into our current uses of technology and how they alter or supplement a message simply by design. What is the rhetorical effect that a campaign speech has when it is broadcast on YouTube as opposed to printed in a political pamphlet or newspaper? Since Postman makes mention of it, what are the chances of an overweight politician becoming President now as opposed to when Taft ran for office? It seems that mediums necessarily act rhetorically insofar as they shift emphases (which they accomplish by design). A news story on television is often told with the reporter on scene and the oral “text” of the story provides a background narrative for the images which rule the day in a visual medium. The same story told on NPR or in the New York Times is going to necessarily rely less on images because of their limitations.

As I continue to think about new media and the growing world of social networks I think it is important to look at the forms these technologies take and content that users fill them with. Should we simply take a pragmatic stance on the form/content discussion or is there an ethical component to our technology usage? I often wonder how appropriate a space like Facebook is for serious conversations when it is designed to be in constant flux and indiscriminately mixes news with Farmville scores. Is Twitter going to be the next space for formal policy debates? President Obama[‘s social media staff] has weighed in on political issues in less than 140 words before, but in that case does the content match the form? Is that even a question that needs to be asked? I think it is.