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

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.

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.

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 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))