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.

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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

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.