(Gentleman Jack is a good friend who has been having a rough go of his job search and general direction in life. These are his, at times, brilliant, eccentric and esoteric musings. These are The Loxley Files. Hopefully you’ll learn something – or at least have a good laugh.)
So I’m finally writing something. Well, sort of. I had an idea for a book shortly before Christmas, on the plane back from Panama. I jotted down some ideas, mentioned it to some friends, and then let it sit for a while.
To be fair, I did have a lot going on. First Christmas. Then there was New Years. Then I just didn’t do anything for a while. Then I almost got sent to support relief stuff for Haiti (still might – no word just yet). Then I was out of town for a few days; which included, among other things, skiing and possibly a mild concussion, though definitely a nasty scrape above my right eye. They weren’t sure about the concussion – probably because by the time the doctor actually saw me it was 4 hours later; but I digress (what do you want? I recently suffered a head injury).
After sitting around and doing nothing very productive on the computer for a while today, I decided I’d get to work on the book. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s something of a Billy Mumphrey story.
Anyway, now that we’re down here in paragraph four, I think I’ll get to what this post is all about. As a “writer” (I use quotes there because no one pays me, and as I’ve already mentioned I don’t really write that often) I read a lot to gain ideas and information that could be useful in my own writing. But of course, it is easy to fall into the trap where you’ve just got to read this one thing first, then, as soon as you’re done, you’ll totally get down to work on that thing you were going to write. It’s basically just standard procrastination with the twist that you can trick yourself by saying it is theoretically productive.(ed note: I live my life like this! -zs)
Luckily, I have found the perfect formula for overcoming this type of procrastination: read boring books. Recently I finished Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I think it can be best summed up by the following quote on wikipedia:
In 1974, the three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction supportedGravity’s Rainbowfor the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the board overturned this decision, branding the book “unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene.”
I’m not ready to say I hated it (though I may be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome after spending 776 pages with it). But I will say I think a lot of the people who like it are suffering from an “emperor’s new clothes” phenomenon. Maybe I’m just a little slow, or wasn’t paying enough attention, but I have no idea what that book was about. Most of the time it seemed to trip and fall way over the surreal and digressive line into little more than disconnected nonsense.
So anyway, I slogged through that. Then, I knocked out Tracy Morgan’s I Am the New Blackin an afternoon (you really should click that link). It was funny, but what is most striking is his honesty and openness about his life. But as I said that only took an afternoon.
Now I’m on to a book called Oil and the World Order by Svante Karlsson. I borrowed it from a friend several years ago. He got it for a class in college. He made a point of how much he wanted it back because it was going for over $100 used on Amazon. Natually, I’ve kept it ever since. I checked once and found a used copy going for only a couple dollars. At this point I’m pretty confident the price is dictated more by supply than quality. It’s not bad, it’s just really boring. If you’ve read The Prize, which is vastly superior in prose and depth, this book won’t do much for you. Also, I don’t know if it is the author himself, or if perhaps the book was written in another language and translated; but whoever is responsible for the English has a fairly shaky handle on American idioms. For example he constantly refers to the American government (though not specifically to the President or his staff) as “the administration.” That’s just annoying.
On the upside, this book is just under 300 pages, as opposed to Pynchon’s 776. But still, at the moment, the choice between reading and writing is pretty easy.
So now that I’ve said I’m working on a book, hopefully I’ll be shamed into activity. I don’t know what kind of readership I’m getting, but at the very least everyone down at Ghosts of Horatio Alger will be egging me on (ed note: yeah, it’s just me. So, not a lot of help there. -zs). So that’s the end of the post; and no, I am not going to address the fact that writing blog posts instead of a book is an equally unproductive form of procrastination.
There is a lot to digest in Lawrence Lessig’s epic article in The New Republic on the Google Books settlement. What Lessig, essentially, reinforces is that the way in which we think about copyright just isn’t going to work. Eric Schonfeld summarizes it nicely:
By breaking up books into different licensable parts, Lessig fears that we are going to encounter the same problem with books that we do today with film. He gives the example of documentary films which are sometimes nearly impossible to restore or preserve in digital form because the rights to every song and clip of archive footage need to be cleared again. This is an artifact of the types of licensing contracts that became the norm for film, where each constituent part of a work carries its own copyrights into perpetuity, making it more difficult down the road to update into digital form or pass along as a piece of shared culture. Up until now, books for the most part are treated as one single work.
And this isn’t going to work. It’s obviously not working for film, so it’s wrongheaded to assume it will work for books. But the larger picture is what I see as prevalent throughout the emerging digital culture. Yesterday I pointed to Scott Rosenberg’s thoughts on news organization business models. The problem is, people/organizations are reluctant to tear down the old model and start from the ground up.
I don’t know what this path is … but I know what it’s not, and it’s not transposing traditional norms onto digital culture. I do, however, hope to continue to think and learn what the new path may be.
Scott Rosenberg puts his finger on the problem with news organizations’ current approaches to finding a sustainable business model:
Journalists who set out on the Great Business Model Hunt are trying to figure out how to support a newsroom. This is entirely understandable. If you have a great newsroom — and as a lifelong reader I certainly feel that the Times does — then of course you’re going to worry about that around the clock once you realize that your old business model is doomed.
But it’s the wrong question. It’s backwards. The newsrooms of today acquired their size and shape and structure thanks to the business model that supported institutions of their size. The world has changed; that model is vanishing. We shouldn’t be asking “What sort of business can support a newsroom online?” The question is, “What’s the best kind of newsroom that the online business can support?”
I suffer from an occasional and unfortunate myopia where one issue will draw a significant portion of my thought process. Right now that issue is the crisis in Haiti. Sadly, this blog does not garner nearly enough (any?) readers for me to make a significant contribution with a plea for donations. At the same time, I’m not comfortable, nor have the intellectual capacity, to write about something communications related that doesn’t touch on Haiti.
So, two points regarding communications and the crisis:
The first is this twitter list, assembled by Global Voices Managing Director Georgia Popplewel. The list features local Haitians who still have internet access and are detailing the ongoing account of the situation. It’s haunting, surreal, sad and occasionally hopeful. But it also illustrates the importance of a service like Twitter. It’s perfect for a situation because a) unlike blogging it is short, simple, and anyone can instantly update and b) unlike Facebook it is asynchronous, so anyone can follow along without approval from the information originator.
While Twitter in this situation isn’t a source for “news” it’s a great source of information, and has been very useful for on-the-ground understanding of just how devastating this tragedy is (and, unfortunately, will continue to be.
My second note regards the text message efforts of the Red Cross and Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti foundation. By texting “Haiti” to 90999 ($10) or “Yele” to 501501 ($5), people are able to quickly and easily donate to the relief. The fact that Red Cross has raised over $3 million and Yele has had success (can’t find numbers, though I assume it is significantly less, but still effective) proves that this type of SMS digital activism can produce results in the appropriate situation.
I don’t have readers, but if you do come across this, and you do want to donate, Yele, Partners in Health, Haiti Partners, Haiti Emergency Relief Fund, Oxfam and the Red Cross are all good homes for your donations.
Today’s New York Times features the results of a Pew Study on local news, which essentially says that there is less information on local news and that what little info there is laregely (95%) is uncovered by traditional newspapers as opposed to new media/electronic media (ie blogs). Anyone who gives even the smallest iota of attention to the blogs that they read will recognize this, so it shouldn’t come as much of a shock.
What I did find interesting, was the actual information gathering of the traditional local news outlets.
The study found 53 different sources of local news — general-interest newspapers like The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post and their Web sites, several smaller papers in the region, publications devoted to a niche like local business, local television and radio stations, and new online news sites and blogs. Even the reporting done by traditional media was driven mostly by government statements rather than journalists’ own digging, the study found.
On one of the most heavily covered events, proposed cuts to the state budget, the study found that in all media, there were fewer than one-third as many reports as during a similar round of cuts in 1991, despite the presence of more news outlets in the region. (note: my emphasis added)
Now, this isn’t a particular surprise to me. Traditional studies have found -dating back at least to the 80s as far as I am aware – that this passive source of news gathering plays a much bigger role in the information that appears in local news than journalists would have the public believe. But, as more and more local news outlets struggle, cut staff and trim expenses, we very well may see a much bigger shift to source-initiated news.
Such campaigns are not intellectual wars upon erroneous principles, but emotional wars upon errant men: they always revolve around the pursuit of some definite, concrete, fugitive malefactor, or group of malefactors. That is to say, they belong to popular sport rather than to the science of government; the impulse behind them is always far more orgiastic than reflective. For good government in the abstract, the people of the United States seem to have no liking, or, at all events, no passion. It is impossible to get them stirred up over it, or even to make them give serious thought to it. They seem to assume that it is a mere phantasm of theorists, a political will-o’-the-wisp, a utopian dream—wholly uninteresting, and probably full of dangers and tricks. The very discussion of it bores them unspeakably, and those papers which habitually discuss it logically and unemotionally—for example, the New York Evening Post—are diligently avoided by the mob. What the mob thirsts for is not good government in itself, but the merry chase of a definite exponent of bad government. The newspaper that discovers such an exponent—or, more accurately, the newspaper that discovers dramatic and overwhelming evidence against him—has all the material necessary for a reform wave of the highest emotional intensity. All that it need do is to goad the victim into a fight. Once he has formally joined the issue, the people will do the rest. They are always ready for a man-hunt, and their favorite quarry is the man of politics. If no such prey is at hand, they will turn to wealthy debauchees, to fallen Sunday-school superintendents, to money barons, to white-slave traders, to unsedulous chiefs of police. But their first choice is the boss.
H.L. Mencken, The Atlantic Monthly, March, 1914.
Michael Kinsley doesn’t like the flowery prose of modern newspapers:
Once upon a time, this unnecessary stuff was considered an advance over dry news reporting: don’t just tell the story; tell the reader what it means. But providing “context,” as it was known, has become an invitation to hype. In this case, it’s the lowest form of hype—it’s horse-race hype—which actually diminishes a story rather than enhancing it. Surely if this event is such a big, big deal—“sweeping” and “defining” its way into our awareness—then its effect on the next election is one of the less important things about it. There’s an old joke about the provincial newspaper that reports a nuclear attack on the nation’s largest city under the headline “Local Man Dies in NY Nuclear Holocaust.” Something similar happens at the national level, where everything is filtered through politics. (“In what was widely seen as a setback for Democrats just a year before the midterm elections, nuclear bombs yesterday obliterated seven states, five of which voted for President Obama in the last election …”)
I find it very satisfying when my interests come full circle. That is, when separate and seemingly unrelated interests meet and I realize that those interests had a pre-existing relationship that predates my interest in either one separately. Is there a name for this?
How about an example:
I’m not sure when I first heard Vampire Weekend, but I initially found them catchy and vaguely interesting. While prepping for an interview with Director Garth Jennings it came to my attention that he had directed the video for A-Punk, the first single off of their self-titled debut. The video was innovative and, again, catchy. Once Jennings explained to me how he shot the video I had both a larger interest in him and Vampire Weekend. I bought the album, caught their show at the 9:30 Club when they came through DC and anticipate their upcoming release, Contra (which you can listen to now on their MySpace page*). But no, Jennings/VW is not the overlapping coincidence I am talking about. That was predicated by work, and was a more mutual/linear appreciation of one from the other.
Earlier this year I came across Caleb Crain’s blog, Steamboats are Ruining Everything via the controversy over his (harsh?) critique of Alain de Botton’s Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and de Botton’s (seemingly a bit irrational) response on Crain’s blog. Which was amusing, but beside the point. It was simply an entry point to Crain’s writing, which I instantly liked. I began following Crain’s blog and became a very interested reader.
Flash forward to last week. Reading Lizzie Widdicombe’s profile of Vampire Weekend in the New Yorker (sadly, not online; but here’s the abstract) I came across this entry about the genus of lead singer Ezra Koenig’s literary interests:
Caleb Crain, a former adjunct professor at Columbia, taught Koenig in a Mellville class, and read Koenig’s stories; he later became one of the first people to blog about his music. Crain said the stories “read as if Lydia Davis, with her oblique and hermetic sense of humor, were working with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s material.”
That’s … well, that’s something more than a coincidence.
*Shouldn’t MySpace just go ahead and change their tagline to “A place for bands“?
I have a friend from Japan who once described to me the way in which she uses her cell phone to purchase goods from vending machines in her native country. That was pretty much the first time my eyes were open to the power of mobile payments, and it is something in which I take great interest.
Now, it seems mobile payments can take two directions. The first, is a more traditional method that I think gives it an advantage. In this case, physical device is attached to the phone, a credit card is swiped, and bingo bango bongo, purchase made. An example of this is Twitter co-founder and angel-investor Jack Dorsey’s new service, Square. In yesterday’s NY Times, Dorsey explained the service:
The goal is to build another utility like Twitter that will scale to any kind of usage. Anywhere from coffee shops or clothing retail stores, to someone selling their couch on Craigslist, or getting paid back from a friend.
No card or private information, including your e-mail and signature, is ever stored on the phone. As soon as that swipe happens, it’s encrypted with our keys, sent up to our servers and forgotten, so it’s never stored on the actual device. We’re also going to create experiences that you can always expect around Square, like an instant SMS or e-mail receipt, and being able to see a photo of your face when you swipe the card.
Square will no doubt benefit from Dorsey’s standing in the tech world and from the similarity to a users current experience with credit card transactions. But another method is the direct charge of your credit card using your cell phone number. Today’s Mobile Commerce Daily features an interview with Ron Hirson, the co-founder of Boku, a mobile payment service (via FrontlineSMS).
The category where we’re focused, online purchases made using your mobile phone number as a means for payment, will continue to see remarkable uptake.
Depending on the type of purchase, the phone number will either bill directly to a user’s mobile phone bill or in some cases serve as a proxy for additional payment methods such as credit cards and Automated Clearing House (ACH).
This coming year will not be the year for physical world purchases using your mobile phone in the United States via Near Field Communication, as chip-prices, handset turnover and point-of-sale build-out will continue to push the vision of buying a soda with your mobile phone to 2011 or 2012.
While Hirson is probably correct to be cautiously optimistic about growth in 2010, it will be interesting to follow as these two separate platforms develop. The important aspect to remember is consumer fickleness, and finding a product that fits into their conceptions of safety and usability. From a pure convenience perspective, it seems a service such as Boku would have the upper hand. But the similarity in transaction appearance of Square could certainly give it an advantage as well.
On thing I do think is that within a few years we will almost certainly see a rise in the ubiquity of mobile payments, regardless off platform. While consumers will have very real concerns over safety and privacy functions, the arguments are relatively similar to those that consumers had about online payments last decade. Once the industry moves past this hesitance, though, I think we will see a future in which mobile payments are the standard.
Clay Shirky brought wide-spread prominence to “information cascades” with his 2008 book “Here Comes Everybody” (which I “reviewed” here). At its most simplistic, an information cascade occurs when a number of people observing a group participating in an action and decide, independently, to join in. The most often cited example is of a protest or similar action, but it is also similar to the concept of innovation diffusion, which I’ve previously discussed.
Much of the research on cascades occurred before, and therefore out of the context of, the rise in prominence of the internet. Shirky attempts to connect cascades to the internet in his book, citing the example of mid-2000s Belorussian protests. But recently, I’ve seen some examples that indicate that perhaps culture has not developed to the point where the internet is an effective tool for information cascades to create crowds. The first, is noted by Evgeney Morozov in a recent Prospect magazine cover story:
It’s not hard to see how the internet might amplify information cascades and so strengthen the position of activists. The point is made most famously by the American web guru Clay Shirky. He is a darling of the social media world, a consultant for government, corporate and philanthropic bodies, and a source for reporters seeking quotes on how the internet is changing protest. He is also the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet. Shirky adapted Lohmann’s theories for the age of MySpace in his bestseller Here Comes Everybody (2008). The major lesson he drew from Leipzig is that people should “protest in ways that the state was unlikely to interfere with, and distribute evidence of their actions widely.” Why? Protesters are in a win-win situation: “If the state didn’t react, the documentation would serve as evidence that the protesting was safe. If the state did react, then the documentation of the crackdown could be used to spur an international outcry.”
But the truth is often different. In Belarus, most fence-sitters watched the state’s response and, acting rationally, went searching for higher fences. In Iran this year, the famous photograph of Neda Agha-Soltan, murdered in the streets, went viral and became a symbol of the “green revolution.” Whether it encouraged any fence-sitters is much less obvious.
Information cascades often fail to translate into crowds, even without state fear-mongering. Last year’s anti-Farc protests in Colombia—aided by Facebook—attracted huge crowds. But this year’s anti-Chávez protests did not, although they were organised by the same group using the same methods. The aim was for 50m people to rally worldwide but only a few thousand turned up. The same has been true when people have tried to organise protests in Azerbaijan and Russia.
Now, two very important points: He is absolutely correct about Belarus, and Shirky even concedes this point in a follow up to the Prospect piece. Iran, on the other hand, is much less clear. The Ashura events that began just after Christmas. So, Morozov’s points seem to be a coin flip, but he has others as well, as this is one of his much revisited sticking points.
But another event, far less serious, came to my attention and represents a similar inability for information cascades to translate into action or crowds. This is the case of “Ronna and Beverly” a comedy show first optioned by Showtime and then canceled. The shows stars were apparently able to convince Showtime to air the pilot program only, and then initiated a viral/web campaign to round up support for the program, in hopes of striking some sort of long term deal. The ratings numbers for the pilot aren’t in yet (too my knowledge), but the campaign did round up a large amount of celebrity support on Twitter and elsewhere on the web. However, Mashable’s Christina Warren points out that there is dubious precedent for this type of campaign resulting in any particular action.
Although social media and online campaigns have had an impact on many other mediums, television has remained an elusive nut to crack. Campaigns to get followers to tune into television premieres have consistently failed (or failed to sustain themselves after the initial flurry is over) and online-specific campaigns to take a show to the small screen have been equally unsuccessful.
In 2005, Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence — as well as Scrubs and Family Guy writers Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan — created a pilot for what was then The WB network called Nobody’s Watching. The WB declined to pick up the show, but undeterred, the pilot was leaked to YouTube in June 2006.
The show became a YouTube sensation, with coverage across industry magazines, The New York Times and other outlets. In fact, the initial buzz was so strong that there seemed to be promise and confirmation that the show would get picked up by NBC. Despite additional webisodes, plans for a full pickup never actually materialized and the actors and writers all moved on to other projects.
Likewise, when TV veterans Marshall Herkovitz and Edward Zwick’s TV show Quarterlife — which was developed alongside a social networking site of the same name — couldn’t get network pickup in 2007, it aired on YouTube and MySpace instead. Despite relatively high totals for the webisodes, when NBC actually picked up the show in February 2008, the ratings were the worst for that time-period on the network in more than 17 years.
So, what we have is two completely disparate events, but both examples of information cascades. Both are unresolved, so it will be interesting to watch as they unfold for insight into the maturity of the internet as a conduit for crowd building. My own insight is that we probably aren’t just there yet, but if Iran erupts into a full fledged revolt and (to an clearly lesser degree) “Ronna and Beverly” gets picked up by Showtime or another major network, we will have two sturdy examples of this process in action.
