There's an important distinction between attention and recognition, though I think we easily confuse them in speech and in practice. We seek attention when we want recognition, some sense of our worth or integrity to others. Attention is a necessary prerequisite for recognition, but doesn't always lead to a feeling of having been recognized. My main fear about social media is that is becoming harder to translate attention into recognition without their aid. Increasingly, attention that isn't in some way mediated seems inert, if not unsettling and creepy.
I have this feeling that people are going to become more and more wary of direct face-to-face attention because it will seem like it's wasted on them if it's not mediated, not captured somehow in social networks where it has measurable value. I imagine this playing out as a kind of fear of intimacy as it was once experienced -- private unsharable moments that will seem creepier and creepier because no one else can bear witness to their significance, translate them into social distinction. Recognition within private unmediated spaces will be unsought after, the "real you" won't be there but elsewhere, in the networks.
I have an essay up at the New Inquiry about artist Laurel Nakadate, whose work is, I think, about this emerging condition -- about becoming increasingly unavailable to attention in the moment, wholly ensconced by self-consciousness. Receiving attention in real time can't confirm anything about how you want to feel about yourself; it becomes a portal to a deeper loneliness -- the way out seems to be to mediate the experience, watch it later, transmute it into something else. In short, we are losing the ability to feel recognized in the moment, which strands us further and further away from fully inhabiting our bodies in the present. We are always elsewhere, in the cloud.
Showing posts with label attention economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label attention economy. Show all posts
Friday, August 19, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Inventing Attention (16 March 2011)
"Needing to Be Noticed: Understanding the Market in an Attention Economy," a paper (pdf) by Anthony Olcott of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, raises some interesting questions about the idea of an attention economy, some of which I would rephrase in a more quasi-Foucauldian vein. Olcott wants to know how to measure the return on investment for attention spent, so that individuals could determine how to invest attention rather than merely expend it. But I wonder if our awareness of attention as a quantity to spend is the problem, burdening us with a kind of reflexivity that cannibalizes our experience of being engrossed in an activity.
Some other, related questions: Is attention a currency, a good, or both simultaneously? Is our attention manufactured, produced, by the goods that demand it? In other words, does entertainment produce attention as a fungible quantity in our understanding as well as then absorb that quantity? More broadly, does the discourse about the so-called attention economy structure our attention as currency? Attention is not something we can ever accumulate or store, so to think of it as currency is misleading. It seems more like a product, something that marketers purchase from entertainment media. Attention is not ours to spend; it's instead a state of being that makes us sellable.
Olcott brings up the received wisdom that our sense of the scarcity of our attention is a product of the sudden information surfeit, which has made us aware of how little time we have for the information we want to consume, or -- the same thing -- the elasticity of our curiosity when information becomes cheap. Olcott has even attempted to quantify this: "the flow of information clamoring for attention has been increasing at somewhere between 30 and 60 percent per year for the past two decades, while our ability to absorb information has been growing at only about 5 percent per year (and that primarily through our growing tendency to multitask, or do several things superficially rather than one or two things deeply)."
Our perceived flow of information is, of course, a matter of the effectiveness of the filters in place for us. Many of the filters earlier generations took for granted, the ones imposed by the absence of real-time communications and efficient transmission and storage, have now been eradicated by the advent of internet and digital media. Analog media imposed stringent limits on what amount of information was transmissible and storable. As Olcott puts it, "When technology made the threshold of entry into communication high, the amount of attention relative to the amount of information to which it could be paid was relatively large." That made the limits of our media-consumption time irrelevant. But now the analog limits are gone. We become aware of time as a problem, our attention as bounded, limited -- and then in its palpable scarcity, we realize more fully its potential to be alienated as a commodity. That is, we become aware of its value, and we want that value to be convertible into other forms of value (as capitalism trains us to expect).
Relative to the automatic filtering imposed by those analog limits, the ones we are forced to impose on ourselves seem arbitrary. They require self-discipline; they seem theoretically optional, perpetually negotiable. The open-endedness makes us feel the information flow as "overload" -- it is never simply settled as what it is, and requires continual decisionmaking from us, continual reaffirmation of the filters we've chosen. My RSS feed demands more from me than a newspaper, because I'm responsible at a meta level for what information it brings me; before, my decisionmaking would end with the decision to buy a paper. Now I have to tell myself I have enough, even as the culture tells me that in general, too much is never enough, and "winning" is having more. As a result, I start to feel cheated by time because I can't amass more of it. I become alienated from it rather inhabiting it, which makes me feel bored in the midst of too many options. The sense of overload is a failure of our focus rather than the fault of information itself or the various media. Calling it "attention" in the contemporary sense and economizing it doesn't repair focus so much as redefine it as a shorter span, as inherently fickle and ephemeral.
Brokering my own attention span is my attempt to reassert control. I will spend my attention wisely and get the most out of it by investing it wisely in things that will "reward" it. But I fear that expecting to profit from paying attention is a mistake, a kind of category error. Attention seems to me binary -- it is engaged or it isn't; it isn't amenable to qualitative evalution. If we start assessing the quality of our attention, we get pulled out of what we were paying attention to, and pay attention to attention to some degree, becoming strategic with it, kicking off a reflexive spiral that leads only to further insecurity and disappointment. Attention is never profitable enough, never sufficient.
It seems to me that serendipity is a better attention-management strategy, a more appropriate way to deal with those times when we can no longer focus and become suddenly aware that we need to direct our attention somewhere.
Some other, related questions: Is attention a currency, a good, or both simultaneously? Is our attention manufactured, produced, by the goods that demand it? In other words, does entertainment produce attention as a fungible quantity in our understanding as well as then absorb that quantity? More broadly, does the discourse about the so-called attention economy structure our attention as currency? Attention is not something we can ever accumulate or store, so to think of it as currency is misleading. It seems more like a product, something that marketers purchase from entertainment media. Attention is not ours to spend; it's instead a state of being that makes us sellable.
Olcott brings up the received wisdom that our sense of the scarcity of our attention is a product of the sudden information surfeit, which has made us aware of how little time we have for the information we want to consume, or -- the same thing -- the elasticity of our curiosity when information becomes cheap. Olcott has even attempted to quantify this: "the flow of information clamoring for attention has been increasing at somewhere between 30 and 60 percent per year for the past two decades, while our ability to absorb information has been growing at only about 5 percent per year (and that primarily through our growing tendency to multitask, or do several things superficially rather than one or two things deeply)."
Our perceived flow of information is, of course, a matter of the effectiveness of the filters in place for us. Many of the filters earlier generations took for granted, the ones imposed by the absence of real-time communications and efficient transmission and storage, have now been eradicated by the advent of internet and digital media. Analog media imposed stringent limits on what amount of information was transmissible and storable. As Olcott puts it, "When technology made the threshold of entry into communication high, the amount of attention relative to the amount of information to which it could be paid was relatively large." That made the limits of our media-consumption time irrelevant. But now the analog limits are gone. We become aware of time as a problem, our attention as bounded, limited -- and then in its palpable scarcity, we realize more fully its potential to be alienated as a commodity. That is, we become aware of its value, and we want that value to be convertible into other forms of value (as capitalism trains us to expect).
Relative to the automatic filtering imposed by those analog limits, the ones we are forced to impose on ourselves seem arbitrary. They require self-discipline; they seem theoretically optional, perpetually negotiable. The open-endedness makes us feel the information flow as "overload" -- it is never simply settled as what it is, and requires continual decisionmaking from us, continual reaffirmation of the filters we've chosen. My RSS feed demands more from me than a newspaper, because I'm responsible at a meta level for what information it brings me; before, my decisionmaking would end with the decision to buy a paper. Now I have to tell myself I have enough, even as the culture tells me that in general, too much is never enough, and "winning" is having more. As a result, I start to feel cheated by time because I can't amass more of it. I become alienated from it rather inhabiting it, which makes me feel bored in the midst of too many options. The sense of overload is a failure of our focus rather than the fault of information itself or the various media. Calling it "attention" in the contemporary sense and economizing it doesn't repair focus so much as redefine it as a shorter span, as inherently fickle and ephemeral.
Brokering my own attention span is my attempt to reassert control. I will spend my attention wisely and get the most out of it by investing it wisely in things that will "reward" it. But I fear that expecting to profit from paying attention is a mistake, a kind of category error. Attention seems to me binary -- it is engaged or it isn't; it isn't amenable to qualitative evalution. If we start assessing the quality of our attention, we get pulled out of what we were paying attention to, and pay attention to attention to some degree, becoming strategic with it, kicking off a reflexive spiral that leads only to further insecurity and disappointment. Attention is never profitable enough, never sufficient.
It seems to me that serendipity is a better attention-management strategy, a more appropriate way to deal with those times when we can no longer focus and become suddenly aware that we need to direct our attention somewhere.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Shelter from the attention storm (14 Jan 2011)
Pretty much all of my reservations about Facebook are implicit in the first two sentences of this post at The Next Web about how Facebook chooses the stuff for your home page (via the Browser): "The race is on for Facebook likes. Every brand, small business and individual around the world is looking for them." Notice how casually individual is lumped in with brand and small business. We are rapidly reached the stage where such a governing metaphor for the self -- as a small branded firm whose purpose is profit -- will be hegemonic. Forget liberty; individualism now means primarily having a distinctive brand. A look at any random Facebook profile suggests that we already seem to take this notion of identity for granted and would likely be hard-pressed to understand individuality in any other way. The article basically outlines strategies to boost the salience of your updates so more people will see them.
That this personal-branding perspective has become so ubiquitous seems to suggest the power of Facebook as a medium to reorient the focus of our self-presentation as a matter of soliciting "likes" or other digital responses of recognition. The human need for recognition is of course nothing new, but what is new is that social media allows our identity to persist in the marketplace for recognition at all times. Because our profile is always accessible and permeable to comments and such, we are never free from wondering whether someone is paying attention to us, approving. We get no respite from the availability of praise or notice, which makes nearly every moment a frantic online scramble to find the evidence of that recognition -- did anyone e-mail? Have my Twitter posts been retweeted? Who has responded to my status update? Have my likes triggered a like cascade among my network? The article notes that "if a user visits your page or comments on your posts, you will have a higher affinity score," meaning their content will show up more -- so you can scrutinize your home page and try to decode it in terms of who has and hasn't been checking you out.
The default is virtual presence, and that presence haunts our actual selves, promising more than we can possibly derive from our minuscule place in space-time. What's lost is the shelter we once inherently had from being on, the limits of technology affording us the solace of true disconnection. Now disconnection is almost entirely a state of mind, requiring a Buddhist's will of renunciation. It's only willpower that is keeping our eyes unglued to screens, looking for ourselves on them.
That this personal-branding perspective has become so ubiquitous seems to suggest the power of Facebook as a medium to reorient the focus of our self-presentation as a matter of soliciting "likes" or other digital responses of recognition. The human need for recognition is of course nothing new, but what is new is that social media allows our identity to persist in the marketplace for recognition at all times. Because our profile is always accessible and permeable to comments and such, we are never free from wondering whether someone is paying attention to us, approving. We get no respite from the availability of praise or notice, which makes nearly every moment a frantic online scramble to find the evidence of that recognition -- did anyone e-mail? Have my Twitter posts been retweeted? Who has responded to my status update? Have my likes triggered a like cascade among my network? The article notes that "if a user visits your page or comments on your posts, you will have a higher affinity score," meaning their content will show up more -- so you can scrutinize your home page and try to decode it in terms of who has and hasn't been checking you out.
The default is virtual presence, and that presence haunts our actual selves, promising more than we can possibly derive from our minuscule place in space-time. What's lost is the shelter we once inherently had from being on, the limits of technology affording us the solace of true disconnection. Now disconnection is almost entirely a state of mind, requiring a Buddhist's will of renunciation. It's only willpower that is keeping our eyes unglued to screens, looking for ourselves on them.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Paying Attention (22 Nov 2010)
Nicholas Carr is not happy about this NYT Magazine column by Virginia Heffernan about the "attention-span myth." Heffernan contends that technology critics like Carr err in imagining that something like an attention span exists.
Carr responds by insisting that attentiveness in fact exists and takes different forms (not merely "long" or "short"), and these forms and their prevalence are affected by technological context.
The problem with reckoning with attention problems is not that it is ineffable but that it doesn't correspond with an economic model that has us spending and replenishing some quantifiable supply of it. But the metaphors built into an "attention span" or "paying attention" or the "attention economy" imagine a scarce resource rather than a quality of consciousness, a mindfulness. It may be that the notion of an attention economy is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, bringing into being the problems its posits through the way it frames experience. It may not be constructive to regard attention as scarce or something that can be wasted and let those conceptions govern our relation to our consciousness. The metaphor of how we exert control over our focus may be more applicable, more politically useful in imagining an alternative to the utility-maximizing neoliberal self. The goal would then be not to maximize the amount of stuff we can pay attention to but instead an awareness that much of what nips at us is beneath our attention.
The problem with the attention-span discourse is that it’s founded on the phantom idea of an attention span. A healthy “attention span” becomes just another ineffable quality to remember having, to believe you’ve lost, to worry about your kids lacking, to blame the culture for destroying. Who needs it?Apparently Heffernan regards the pathologizing of short-attention spans as a disciplinary ruse to stifle children's creativity and discourage the artistic temperament. There should be no normative correction of the ability to pay attention; distraction is only a different form of attention, or attention paid to things society disapproves of. Distraction is a refusal to pay attention to things you are supposed to in order to be conformed. The inability to concentrate, then, is the triumph of the human spirit and its refusal to submit. If you feel like you have a hard time concentrating, it's just a lame excuse for procrastinating, a disguised form of nostalgia for a personal epoch of total focus that never really existed. Technology has nothing to do with it, because there is no "it".
Carr responds by insisting that attentiveness in fact exists and takes different forms (not merely "long" or "short"), and these forms and their prevalence are affected by technological context.
One can, for instance, be attentive to rapid-paced changes in the environment, a form of attentiveness characterized by quick, deliberate shifts in focus.... There is a very different form of attentiveness that involves filtering out, or ignoring, environmental stimuli in order to focus steadily on one thing - reading a long book, say, or repairing a watch. Our capacity for this kind of sustained attention is being eroded, I argue, by the streams of enticing info-bits pouring out of our networked gadgets. There are also differing degrees of control that we wield over our attention.I agree with that; perhpas the way to split the difference and avoid the semantic arguments is to say that technology has certainly changed the sorts of things we want to give our attention to. I would add that built into consumerism is an incentive to make sure people scatter their attention as wide as possible on the greatest number of things and experiences, all of which have now been successfully packaged (often thanks to technological change) as exchangeable commodities. When a person's attention is fixed on a certain specific activity, it registers as lost opportunities to make sales -- one for each infinitely divisible moment that passed in which the person could have been distracted, could have consciously shifted attention, but didn't. That's why unlike Heffernan, I see concentration rather than distraction as an act of cultural resistance.
The problem with reckoning with attention problems is not that it is ineffable but that it doesn't correspond with an economic model that has us spending and replenishing some quantifiable supply of it. But the metaphors built into an "attention span" or "paying attention" or the "attention economy" imagine a scarce resource rather than a quality of consciousness, a mindfulness. It may be that the notion of an attention economy is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, bringing into being the problems its posits through the way it frames experience. It may not be constructive to regard attention as scarce or something that can be wasted and let those conceptions govern our relation to our consciousness. The metaphor of how we exert control over our focus may be more applicable, more politically useful in imagining an alternative to the utility-maximizing neoliberal self. The goal would then be not to maximize the amount of stuff we can pay attention to but instead an awareness that much of what nips at us is beneath our attention.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
The iPad As Escape Pod (30 April 2010)
I agree with much of this critique of the iPad by Jeff Jarvis:
But Jarvis assumes (as I often tend to) that people inherently dislike being an audience, that they are all chafing at their lack of input and control over the culture industries. It may be an erroneous assumption, one derived directly from the ideology of creativity that holds that there is an eager artist in all of us waiting to be released if only the System wasn't stymieing us all.
If anything, the System is forcing us to create and "share" more than ever before, and it can be exhausting. Our consumption has never been regarded as more productive, and our everyday lives have never been subjected to so much pressure to be interesting, broadcastable, repeatable, symbolically significant, trend-setting, and so on. This is what immaterial-labor theory (which I have a tendency to yammer on about) tries to articulate, how the boundary between work and leisure has been eroded and our everyday-life practices are being harvested as a form of work -- our friendships, our preferences, our leisure activities are all being expropriated and commercialized, made operative as marketing data. Being immersed in Web 2.0 functionality is basically all about harvesting our immaterial labor, quantifying our quality of life and making it into information that can be circulated as a kind of currency in "the attention economy."
The iPad, regardless of what other dark portents it harbors, seems positioned as a device that allows us to escape from productive consumption. It promises to let us just consume again, in a sealed-off environment. Being in front of a computer or on a laptop immerses us in many temptations, amny of which are work-related. It may be the conduit by which work reaches us, with emails, etc. So the iPad is supposed to be a haven from that -- a device that denies us the temptation of multitasking and "liberates" us to concentrate on entertaining ourselves with good-old professionally made culture-industry content.
Jarvis complains about this escape:
The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn’t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them.That seems clearly true. Media wants us to pay for content, and the iPad is engineered for that purpose. Everything about the gadget flows from that basic idea. Just follow the money.
But Jarvis assumes (as I often tend to) that people inherently dislike being an audience, that they are all chafing at their lack of input and control over the culture industries. It may be an erroneous assumption, one derived directly from the ideology of creativity that holds that there is an eager artist in all of us waiting to be released if only the System wasn't stymieing us all.
If anything, the System is forcing us to create and "share" more than ever before, and it can be exhausting. Our consumption has never been regarded as more productive, and our everyday lives have never been subjected to so much pressure to be interesting, broadcastable, repeatable, symbolically significant, trend-setting, and so on. This is what immaterial-labor theory (which I have a tendency to yammer on about) tries to articulate, how the boundary between work and leisure has been eroded and our everyday-life practices are being harvested as a form of work -- our friendships, our preferences, our leisure activities are all being expropriated and commercialized, made operative as marketing data. Being immersed in Web 2.0 functionality is basically all about harvesting our immaterial labor, quantifying our quality of life and making it into information that can be circulated as a kind of currency in "the attention economy."
The iPad, regardless of what other dark portents it harbors, seems positioned as a device that allows us to escape from productive consumption. It promises to let us just consume again, in a sealed-off environment. Being in front of a computer or on a laptop immerses us in many temptations, amny of which are work-related. It may be the conduit by which work reaches us, with emails, etc. So the iPad is supposed to be a haven from that -- a device that denies us the temptation of multitasking and "liberates" us to concentrate on entertaining ourselves with good-old professionally made culture-industry content.
Jarvis complains about this escape:
That’s what we keep hearing about the iPad as the justification for all its purposeful limitations: it’s meant for consumption, we’re told, not creation. We also hear, as in David Pogue’s review, that this is our grandma’s computer. That cant is inherently snobbish and insulting. It assumes grandma has nothing to say. But after 15 years of the web, we know she does. I’ve long said that the remote control, cable box, and VCR gave us control of the consumption of media; the internet gave us control of its creation. Pew says that a third of us create web content. But all of us comment on content, whether through email or across a Denny’s table. At one level or another, we all spread, react, remix, or create. Just not on the iPad.But I don't think it is snobbish and insulting at all to imagine that people don't want to be on call at all times to be sharing their consumption habits or to be making them productive for someone else. I don't think the limitations built in the iPad make Apple saintly or make their flacks into truth-sayers. I still kind of think people who buy into the iPad hype are suckers -- but I am wondering if I should temper that. The question the iPad controversy evokes is whether one can enjoy what is available on the open internet without consenting to a kind of self-exploitation. Are there better ways to avoid immaterial laboring (if it is even something worth avoiding -- should we be seizing upon immaterial labor as a means for toppling the existing relations of production?) than retreating to Apple's hermetically sealed universe? What are they? The iPad is clearly a conservative, retrograde device in its implementation, but is it trying to roll back a revolution we have reason to reject? I don't think the iPad can give us our ability to concentrate back, but it should make us wonder why so many people seem to think that they should be paying a premium to have the ability restored to them.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Overfollowing on Twitter (19 Aug 2009)
Just a few days after having my first experience with Twitter and "real-time search" that could be remotely characterized as useful, I'm reading in this Mark Gimein essay at the Big Money that Twitter is doomed.
But the genius of Twitter as a potential business is that it turns ordinary people into media companies. It lets us subject our conversations to Nielsen-like ratings, to regard our communications as a product conveying our personal brand. Then we can crunch the numerical data Twitter supplies to tweak our brand, and see what works to improve the numbers, which serve as proxy for our relevance and reach and, by extension, our right to feel important. Then these numbers can be used to sell ads as well -- we can indicate to advertisers what sort of demographic we have in our followers, making it a new way to monetize our friendships, following the inroads Facebook has made in that department. In the process, we become a product, a package of manipulatable content.
Gimein's critique has nothing to do with decrying that process of reification. He's more concerned with effective filtering. I think real-time search makes the following/followed concept meaningless to practical information gathering -- the followers number is all about status and ersatz influence measurement, not communication in any conventional sense. Twitter is less about disseminating information than it is about subjects trying to make themselves feel more real, ontologically speaking, in a increasingly mediated world.
Gimein's argument almost incidentally indicates how fragile the illusion of self-branding is -- we can fixate all we want on the numbers and the illusion of control that gives us over how popular and influential we can become, but that number is ultimately misleading. Gimein relates an anecdote of having one of his posts pushed on Google's corporate Twitter feed, which has a million followers -- it brought his own post a few hundred hits. That's telling -- the click-through percentage probably diminishes the larger the recommending pool is (niche aggregators are going to be more inherently trustworthy to its followers). But also telling is the way Gimein is willing to subject himself with no apparent hesitation to the sort of analysis usually reserved for online advertising.
Anyway, Twitter foments the fantasy of our vast influence, our endless relevance to everyone, and enlists more or less meaningless numbers to sustain it. Following people and being followed doesn't signify any kind of commitment, any reciprocal responsibility -- it's just an effortless way to give and receive empty recognition. It's a devalued currency, hyperinflated. But we can use that number nonetheless as a focal point, a kind of mandala for our self-worship.
The quantification disguises the emptiness of the social relations it is supposedly counting, an operation that reiterates the kind of instrumental rationality that characterizes the neoliberalism colonizing more and more of everyday life. Despite its early promise as a social-planning tool, Twittering is becoming a self-referential operation; we project things that make us feel important and pretend that it is for the benefit of unseen (and, in fact, often indifferent) others. We get a simulacrum of civic participation minus the trouble of other people and reciprocity and responsibility. We can buy followers for our Twitter feed and then forget in the midst of our fantasy how self-defeating that is.
The irony of Twitter is that even as it becomes more pervasive, it is in danger of very quickly becoming markedly less useful. Twitter is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. Not because of its problems keeping up with traffic—those are solvable—but because the volume of material that Twitter unleashes now puts impossible demands on its users' time and attention. The problem, in a nutshell, is information overload. The more Twitter grows and the more feeds Twitterers follow, the harder it gets to mine it for what is truly useful and engaging. Even as Twitter reaches a peak in the cultural cred cycle, it's time to start asking how it can be saved from itself.The problem, in Gimein's view, is that users are too profligate in who they follow, making the concept meaningless -- the number of followers one has is no indication of the amount of people who are actually reading what you have to say, even when it comes in telegraphic blasts. This line of reasoning suggests how Twitter works to quantize communication, making the numbers in the audience more important than what's said. Of course, that has always been true of ratings-driven media, but it hasn't been true for our conversations.
But the genius of Twitter as a potential business is that it turns ordinary people into media companies. It lets us subject our conversations to Nielsen-like ratings, to regard our communications as a product conveying our personal brand. Then we can crunch the numerical data Twitter supplies to tweak our brand, and see what works to improve the numbers, which serve as proxy for our relevance and reach and, by extension, our right to feel important. Then these numbers can be used to sell ads as well -- we can indicate to advertisers what sort of demographic we have in our followers, making it a new way to monetize our friendships, following the inroads Facebook has made in that department. In the process, we become a product, a package of manipulatable content.
Gimein's critique has nothing to do with decrying that process of reification. He's more concerned with effective filtering. I think real-time search makes the following/followed concept meaningless to practical information gathering -- the followers number is all about status and ersatz influence measurement, not communication in any conventional sense. Twitter is less about disseminating information than it is about subjects trying to make themselves feel more real, ontologically speaking, in a increasingly mediated world.
Gimein's argument almost incidentally indicates how fragile the illusion of self-branding is -- we can fixate all we want on the numbers and the illusion of control that gives us over how popular and influential we can become, but that number is ultimately misleading. Gimein relates an anecdote of having one of his posts pushed on Google's corporate Twitter feed, which has a million followers -- it brought his own post a few hundred hits. That's telling -- the click-through percentage probably diminishes the larger the recommending pool is (niche aggregators are going to be more inherently trustworthy to its followers). But also telling is the way Gimein is willing to subject himself with no apparent hesitation to the sort of analysis usually reserved for online advertising.
Anyway, Twitter foments the fantasy of our vast influence, our endless relevance to everyone, and enlists more or less meaningless numbers to sustain it. Following people and being followed doesn't signify any kind of commitment, any reciprocal responsibility -- it's just an effortless way to give and receive empty recognition. It's a devalued currency, hyperinflated. But we can use that number nonetheless as a focal point, a kind of mandala for our self-worship.
The quantification disguises the emptiness of the social relations it is supposedly counting, an operation that reiterates the kind of instrumental rationality that characterizes the neoliberalism colonizing more and more of everyday life. Despite its early promise as a social-planning tool, Twittering is becoming a self-referential operation; we project things that make us feel important and pretend that it is for the benefit of unseen (and, in fact, often indifferent) others. We get a simulacrum of civic participation minus the trouble of other people and reciprocity and responsibility. We can buy followers for our Twitter feed and then forget in the midst of our fantasy how self-defeating that is.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Slowing down (2 July 2009)
Complaining about the technologically mediated acceleration of life and the loss of the time for contemplation has become a lot like crying wolf. From what I gather, people seem to be sick of hearing it -- as a meme it had its moment several months ago. Even though I've beaten that drum many times, I find myself thinking: Okay. Concentrating is hard, but then when hasn't it been? There are a surfeit of distractions; I get it. But it's not like I am going to go on an information fast and spend my free time meditating. I'm not going to dismantle my RSS feed and devote an hour a night instead to reading a single poem. Those seem like idealistic, nostalgic fantasies about the "life of the mind," which in practice would most likely amount to a refusal to engage with life as it is actually being lived. For example, I very much wish I was in a world without Twitter and maybe even without telephones, but that doesn't mean it's imperative that I live as if it were so. Down that road lies the technological equivalent of veganism, wherein everyone in my life would need to adapt to my fussy, righteous rules about which ubiquitous behaviors were permissible in my little world.
Still, though David Bollier's account of an April 2009 lecture (probably based on this paper, pdf) by media studies professor David Levy has its share of neo-Thoreauvianism in it, it nevertheless raises some points worth considering. The main gist is this: "The digital communications apparatus has transformed our consciousness in some unwholesome ways. It privileges thinking that is rapid, productive and short-term, and crowds out deeper, more deliberative modes of thinking and relationships." I have said the same sort of thing lots of times, but, as Levy asks, what actually constitutes the difference between "productive" thought and "deliberative" thought? I tend to think of the former as data processing -- tagging mp3 files, for instance -- and the latter as analytical inquiry, but it may not be so easy to distinguish the two. The mental modes tend to flow into one another. Working through menial mental tasks sometimes allows for inspiration to break through -- and after all, what is one supposed to be doing with one's mind when it is taking its time to deliberate? The "information overload" critique sometimes centers on the idea of slowing down the mind. But the mind is always moving, thinking one thought after another; the problem with the internet is that it gives it too many places to go all at once, has the potential to gratify too many idle curiosities. Bollier suggests that "We are sabotaging those inner capacities of consciousness that we need to be present to others and ourselves." But the dream that Levy attributes to Vannevar Bush seems a more apt description of what we've tried to do. "Bush’s intention was clear: by automating the routine aspects of thinking, such as search and selection, he hoped to free up researchers’ time to think more deeply and creatively." It's just that the two functions can't be separated; the way in which we think about things doesn't have degrees. It's holistic; we require routine tasks to fire our creativity, and creativity can often become routinized.
It's important to distinguish between having information at our disposal and lacking the discipline to make contemplative use of it. Often the two are implicitly elided, as if too much information automatically leads to frivolous surfing through it. Bollier writes, "Fast-time activities absolutely crowd out slow-time alternatives. The now eclipses the timeless. And we are becoming diminished creatures in the process." I don't quite understand this. We have to live in the now, because we are not "timeless." We die. And the problem with information overload doesn't lie with the activities and the media so much as they do with the approach we take to them, the ideology about information consumption we have internalized in the course of mastering these new technologies. We think they are supposed to make our lives convenient, and we measure that in terms of time efficiency. If we do many different things in the same span of time we once were forced to do only a few things -- if on the train we can read 17 books simultaneously on a Kindle rather than one -- than we are "winning." The pressure to consume more is not inherent to the technology or in some new perception of time, but is instead inherent to consumer capitalism, which fetishizes quantity. As Levy points out, the roots of this are in the "production problem" -- how to keep making more stuff if people are already sated and don't have the time to consume more. The solution: manufacture new wants and speed up consumption. So the consumerist imperative probably led us to develop many of these technologies. But still, we should be careful not to blame the tools for the kind of people we have become. (If Twitter went out of business tomorrow, many people's discourse would still remain superficial and inane.) If we have ceased to be able to love, it is not because we lack the leisure or are too distracted. It is because we have learned to privilege different sorts of experience, are rewarded for different sorts of accomplishments.
So the call for "an 'information environmentalism' to help educate people about the myriad and aggressive forms of mental pollution afflicting our lives" seems misguided. The "mental pollution" is an effect, not a cause, of our loss of contemplative peace. That is, our mental lives are not degraded by information but by a pervasive cultural attitude about it, that treats ideas as things to be collected and/or consumed.
ADDENDUM: Ben Casnocha's review of Tyler Cowen's new book presents a far more cogent critique of the "attention crisis" hullabaloo then what I've provided above.
Still, though David Bollier's account of an April 2009 lecture (probably based on this paper, pdf) by media studies professor David Levy has its share of neo-Thoreauvianism in it, it nevertheless raises some points worth considering. The main gist is this: "The digital communications apparatus has transformed our consciousness in some unwholesome ways. It privileges thinking that is rapid, productive and short-term, and crowds out deeper, more deliberative modes of thinking and relationships." I have said the same sort of thing lots of times, but, as Levy asks, what actually constitutes the difference between "productive" thought and "deliberative" thought? I tend to think of the former as data processing -- tagging mp3 files, for instance -- and the latter as analytical inquiry, but it may not be so easy to distinguish the two. The mental modes tend to flow into one another. Working through menial mental tasks sometimes allows for inspiration to break through -- and after all, what is one supposed to be doing with one's mind when it is taking its time to deliberate? The "information overload" critique sometimes centers on the idea of slowing down the mind. But the mind is always moving, thinking one thought after another; the problem with the internet is that it gives it too many places to go all at once, has the potential to gratify too many idle curiosities. Bollier suggests that "We are sabotaging those inner capacities of consciousness that we need to be present to others and ourselves." But the dream that Levy attributes to Vannevar Bush seems a more apt description of what we've tried to do. "Bush’s intention was clear: by automating the routine aspects of thinking, such as search and selection, he hoped to free up researchers’ time to think more deeply and creatively." It's just that the two functions can't be separated; the way in which we think about things doesn't have degrees. It's holistic; we require routine tasks to fire our creativity, and creativity can often become routinized.
It's important to distinguish between having information at our disposal and lacking the discipline to make contemplative use of it. Often the two are implicitly elided, as if too much information automatically leads to frivolous surfing through it. Bollier writes, "Fast-time activities absolutely crowd out slow-time alternatives. The now eclipses the timeless. And we are becoming diminished creatures in the process." I don't quite understand this. We have to live in the now, because we are not "timeless." We die. And the problem with information overload doesn't lie with the activities and the media so much as they do with the approach we take to them, the ideology about information consumption we have internalized in the course of mastering these new technologies. We think they are supposed to make our lives convenient, and we measure that in terms of time efficiency. If we do many different things in the same span of time we once were forced to do only a few things -- if on the train we can read 17 books simultaneously on a Kindle rather than one -- than we are "winning." The pressure to consume more is not inherent to the technology or in some new perception of time, but is instead inherent to consumer capitalism, which fetishizes quantity. As Levy points out, the roots of this are in the "production problem" -- how to keep making more stuff if people are already sated and don't have the time to consume more. The solution: manufacture new wants and speed up consumption. So the consumerist imperative probably led us to develop many of these technologies. But still, we should be careful not to blame the tools for the kind of people we have become. (If Twitter went out of business tomorrow, many people's discourse would still remain superficial and inane.) If we have ceased to be able to love, it is not because we lack the leisure or are too distracted. It is because we have learned to privilege different sorts of experience, are rewarded for different sorts of accomplishments.
So the call for "an 'information environmentalism' to help educate people about the myriad and aggressive forms of mental pollution afflicting our lives" seems misguided. The "mental pollution" is an effect, not a cause, of our loss of contemplative peace. That is, our mental lives are not degraded by information but by a pervasive cultural attitude about it, that treats ideas as things to be collected and/or consumed.
ADDENDUM: Ben Casnocha's review of Tyler Cowen's new book presents a far more cogent critique of the "attention crisis" hullabaloo then what I've provided above.
We have always had distractions. We have never had long attention spans. We have never had a golden age where our minds could freely concentrate on one thing and spawn a million complex and nuanced thoughts. Cowen reminds us that charges to the contrary have been made at the birth of every new cultural medium throughout history. Moreover, the technologies that are supposedly turning our brain into mush are very much within our control. The difference between the new distractions (a flickering TV in the kitchen) and age-old ones (crying infant) is that the TV can be turned off, whereas the crying infant cannot.He also notes the way in which chaos and "un-focus" can lead us to breakthrough insights. Though I don't remember agreeing with much of Sam Anderson's New York magazine essay in praise of distraction, this point that Casnocha highlights seems apropos: "We ought to consider the possibility that attention may not be only reflective or reactive, that thinking may not only be deep or shallow, or focus only deployed either on task or off. There might be a synthesis that amounts to what Anderson calls 'mindful distraction.' " That's what I was struggling to express above: thinking is thinking; subjecting it to binary categorizations does injustice to how it actually works and leads to unnecessary and useless prescriptions for how to provoke thinking of a certain type.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
The end of autonomous curiosity (25 June 2009)
Reading this Wired article by Fred Vogelstein about the supposed war between Facebook and Google that's coming, I found myself becoming increasingly irritated and skeptical. Though actually, truth be told, I turned against the article in the second paragraph:
And the idea that people want to rely entirely on their friends for information is a little strange too. Consider this insane statement: "For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline." The nice thing about the internet is that it allows us to connect to a broader context than the little world of our friends. Why would anyone want to retract that? Yes, the need to filter information becomes more and more paramount, but Google's algorithms are useful precisely because they are not parochial. I'll take the "the cold mathematics of a Google search" over the limited scope of the people I know who are into time-killing on the internet. So I reject utterly the emotional logic of this: "Want to see what some anonymous schmuck thought about the Battlestar Galactica finale? Check out Google. Want to see what your friends had to say? Try Facebook Search." If I care what my friends think, I'll ask them; I won't stalk them over it on the internet. And lots of people I don't know who comment on culture are not "schmucks." They are critics. "Why settle for articles about the Chrysler bankruptcy that the Google News algorithm recommends when you can read what your friends suggest?" Because lots of people out there are far more informed than my friends are about the subject, and my friends are likely to all share the same bias.
Built into this social-search idea as well is this annoying presumption that no one can generate an interest in something without a friend already being interested in it. Whatever happened to autonomous curiosity? Isn't that the essence of "surfing" the web, anyway? Maybe I'm weird, but my "social graph," as Zuckerberg likes to call his customers' co-opted personal lives, is not my primary source of information. Often, the internet itself is, via a variety of blogs, news feeds, and yes, Google searches. The "social graph" is more a primary source for what is being gossiped about; it would be terrible if that constituted the horizons of what I learned about the world. But then, I'm a nitwit who can't figure out the point of Twitter, so take my opinion for what it's worth. I haven't made the leap to making personal, private queries of my friends in a public commercial forum. I guess I am perhaps different from a lot of people in that I am generally less interested in the minutia of my friends lives than what is happening in the world at large. I spend next to no time on Facebook, but an absurd amount of time reading econoblogs. (This reflects my disdain for human-interest stories in the newspaper -- as well as crime logs and such -- and my preference for the Financial Times.)
Vogelstein acknowledges that Facebook's business plan ultimately involves collecting personal data to sell targeted ads, and that its customers are intensely creeped out by this particular use of the "social graph." Facebook promises users a safe place to conduct social business, but that safety feels violated when the information exchanged is sold to marketers. Google makes no such implied promise to its users, so it can seem less intrusive when it, say, mines people's emails for keywords to serve ads. Ultimately, Facebook doesn't really do anything but aggregate information; it's only leverage on users is the data it has collected on them. Then it holds that data hostage and hopes users are too lazy to recreate the network elsewhere. Once a platform is devised that allows the contours of one's social network to become portable, Facebook is finished. My money is on Google for that.
Originally Google had considered acquiring Facebook—a prospect that held no interest for Facebook's executives—but an investment was another enticing option, aligning the Internet's two most important companies. Facebook was more than a fast-growing social network. It was, potentially, an enormous source of personal data. Internet users behaved differently on Facebook than anywhere else online: They used their real names, connected with their real friends, linked to their real email addresses, and shared their real thoughts, tastes, and news. Google, on the other hand, knew relatively little about most of its users other than their search histories and some browsing activity.Never mind that the "a prospect that held no interest for Facebook's executives" aside seems like a suck-up (like much of the article, in fact). I don't see why you'd minimize the marketing significance of "search histories and some browsing activity" and act like that was nothing. That seems like a pretty good way to get at what a specific person is interested in, certainly more reliable than what one tells friends. Data can hardly get more personal and granular. On Facebook, users have every interest in lying or exaggerating about their preferences to signal various commitments and so on. They are hardly sharing their "real thoughts and tastes" in every instance. But when they do Google searches, they actually are interested in getting the information; there is not point of pretense. So having that record of what actually gets searched allows Google to spy much further into the individual user's psyche. That seems for more "real," for marketers' purposes, than the fact that Facebook functions as a database for all that other "real" information. Facebook is a performative space; the Google search window is not.
And the idea that people want to rely entirely on their friends for information is a little strange too. Consider this insane statement: "For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline." The nice thing about the internet is that it allows us to connect to a broader context than the little world of our friends. Why would anyone want to retract that? Yes, the need to filter information becomes more and more paramount, but Google's algorithms are useful precisely because they are not parochial. I'll take the "the cold mathematics of a Google search" over the limited scope of the people I know who are into time-killing on the internet. So I reject utterly the emotional logic of this: "Want to see what some anonymous schmuck thought about the Battlestar Galactica finale? Check out Google. Want to see what your friends had to say? Try Facebook Search." If I care what my friends think, I'll ask them; I won't stalk them over it on the internet. And lots of people I don't know who comment on culture are not "schmucks." They are critics. "Why settle for articles about the Chrysler bankruptcy that the Google News algorithm recommends when you can read what your friends suggest?" Because lots of people out there are far more informed than my friends are about the subject, and my friends are likely to all share the same bias.
Built into this social-search idea as well is this annoying presumption that no one can generate an interest in something without a friend already being interested in it. Whatever happened to autonomous curiosity? Isn't that the essence of "surfing" the web, anyway? Maybe I'm weird, but my "social graph," as Zuckerberg likes to call his customers' co-opted personal lives, is not my primary source of information. Often, the internet itself is, via a variety of blogs, news feeds, and yes, Google searches. The "social graph" is more a primary source for what is being gossiped about; it would be terrible if that constituted the horizons of what I learned about the world. But then, I'm a nitwit who can't figure out the point of Twitter, so take my opinion for what it's worth. I haven't made the leap to making personal, private queries of my friends in a public commercial forum. I guess I am perhaps different from a lot of people in that I am generally less interested in the minutia of my friends lives than what is happening in the world at large. I spend next to no time on Facebook, but an absurd amount of time reading econoblogs. (This reflects my disdain for human-interest stories in the newspaper -- as well as crime logs and such -- and my preference for the Financial Times.)
Vogelstein acknowledges that Facebook's business plan ultimately involves collecting personal data to sell targeted ads, and that its customers are intensely creeped out by this particular use of the "social graph." Facebook promises users a safe place to conduct social business, but that safety feels violated when the information exchanged is sold to marketers. Google makes no such implied promise to its users, so it can seem less intrusive when it, say, mines people's emails for keywords to serve ads. Ultimately, Facebook doesn't really do anything but aggregate information; it's only leverage on users is the data it has collected on them. Then it holds that data hostage and hopes users are too lazy to recreate the network elsewhere. Once a platform is devised that allows the contours of one's social network to become portable, Facebook is finished. My money is on Google for that.
Digital anarchy (17 June 2009)
Generation Bubble reports on the UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities and its most recent manifesto, which proposes an aggressive assault on intellectual property: the digital humanists movement "believes that copyright and IP standards must be freed from the stranglehold of Capital, including the capital possessed by heirs who live parasitically off of the achievements of their deceased predecessors." Thus, the manifesto proposes we "pirate and pervert materials by the likes of Disney on such a massive scale that the IP bosses will have to sue your entire neighborhood, school, or country" and "practice digital anarchy by creatively undermining copyright, mashing up media, recutting images, tracks, and texts." By these lights, Girl Talk is not a lame DJ but a Trotskyist firebrand leading the revolution from his laptop mixing board, one mashup salvo at a time. The manifesto regards media miscegenation as an inherent expression of freedom rather than a perhaps lamentable indication of the trap we are in, at a few stages removed from original creation, doomed to fabricate our material culture from shopworn digital remnants.
The manifesto suggests that eradicating intellectual property will lead to more cooperative intellectual labor, mediated by internet-distributed open-source software tools, while facilitating the "reinvention of the solitary, 'eccentric,' even hermetic work carried out by lone individuals both inside and outside the academy". That sounds somewhat sinister -- fomenting an effort to re-educate decadent individualists, perhaps through some rigorous self-criticism and a few self-denunciation sessions, and make them into better-functioning members of the collective, content to have their anonymous contributions to the new society recognized through its success at maintaining total control.
One need not be especially cynical to question the utopianism the manifesto trades in. Intellectual property is not merely some conspiracy cooked up by Capital but a flawed expression of the individual's pursuit for social recognition, which under capitalism is expressed through wages, salary, or payment of some kind or other. Perhaps we are to believe that in the future everyone will be content to disappear into the mass, to be mashed-up in the grand sociocultural remix to end all remixes, but I doubt it; the would-be technoutopians out there also seem to be those most highly networked, those who are most plugged in to the contemporary means of publicity. And it is not like academics in the humanities eschew recognition; their reputational squabbles seem to matter more to them than any aspect of their scholarly contributions.
So doing away with IP, society's current mode of administering recognition, serves only to alienate the creators the manifesto's writers seek to liberate. What must be found is a way to replace IP with a different system for doling out that recognition -- the attention economy's currency. Generation Bubble points out IP's enforcement problems, which have the tendency to invalidate the concept's moral grounding.
The manifesto suggests that eradicating intellectual property will lead to more cooperative intellectual labor, mediated by internet-distributed open-source software tools, while facilitating the "reinvention of the solitary, 'eccentric,' even hermetic work carried out by lone individuals both inside and outside the academy". That sounds somewhat sinister -- fomenting an effort to re-educate decadent individualists, perhaps through some rigorous self-criticism and a few self-denunciation sessions, and make them into better-functioning members of the collective, content to have their anonymous contributions to the new society recognized through its success at maintaining total control.
One need not be especially cynical to question the utopianism the manifesto trades in. Intellectual property is not merely some conspiracy cooked up by Capital but a flawed expression of the individual's pursuit for social recognition, which under capitalism is expressed through wages, salary, or payment of some kind or other. Perhaps we are to believe that in the future everyone will be content to disappear into the mass, to be mashed-up in the grand sociocultural remix to end all remixes, but I doubt it; the would-be technoutopians out there also seem to be those most highly networked, those who are most plugged in to the contemporary means of publicity. And it is not like academics in the humanities eschew recognition; their reputational squabbles seem to matter more to them than any aspect of their scholarly contributions.
So doing away with IP, society's current mode of administering recognition, serves only to alienate the creators the manifesto's writers seek to liberate. What must be found is a way to replace IP with a different system for doling out that recognition -- the attention economy's currency. Generation Bubble points out IP's enforcement problems, which have the tendency to invalidate the concept's moral grounding.
The age of virtual reproduction, where the costs associated with making cultural artifacts have in many cases become negligible (just about anyone can, with a little bit of know-how, record studio quality music on a desktop, for instance), has engendered an unprecedented situation. Gatekeepers of intellectual property now appear as veritable dogs in the manger. Each time they encode a sound-file to prohibit its copying, or each time they install crippleware on an electronic device to inhibit its full functionality, they betray the fact that scarcity is now more a matter of insistence than fact.That's well put. But the fact that scarcity is is always going to seem poorly manufactured suggests that we'll move on to a different tack: encouraging the deluge and enhancing the value of reliable editor and filters. In such a world, an individual's reputation for discernment will become even more valuable, and the economy within which they exist more hierarchical.
Working for free (5 June 2009)
Barron YoungSmith's post at the New Republic's blog about Craigslist suggests that the site's founders are motivated by "libertarian ideology" rather than profit -- a surprising conclusion if you believe that libertarianism is all about unfettered markets and the triumph of the will and the cash nexus as the expression of the freedom of choice. Conceived instead as deinstitutionalization, libertarianism means dismantling the barriers between people wanting to make small-scale exchanges. YoungSmith quotes Mark Gimein, who summed up the Craigslist philosophy in this Big Money article: "Bad things don't come from what two individuals decide to do together. They come from the institutions that stand between them." (If this was the essence of libertarianism, you'd think they would come out in full force for rescinding the legal personhood status of corporations. Maybe some are.) Such a position implies that caveat emptor should be the only law of the land, which is great if you believe that exchanges always take place with both parties on equal footing (or if you believe a Lewis Hyde-style gift economy is coming right around the corner). But this isn't the case -- asymmetrical information is more the rule than the exception, and economic institutions exist in part to combat that, to illuminate otherwise black or gray markets, to make contract enforcement possible and to allow trust to ultimately flourish. It's not clear whether newspapers were ever a significant institution in this regard however; they just had a de facto monopoly of local information distribution that has since been broken by the internet.
Anyway, YoungSmith's post prompted two interesting responses about the phenomenon of working for free (whether in the name of some quasi-utopian ideology or not). Kevin Drum suggests the limits to what people will do for free are not set by how dull the work is but by how many people are necessary to complete it:
Of course, if we are cut off from social recognition, we rely on cash payment to serve as its proxy, as these research findings published in Nature suggest:
Matt Yglesias seems to be arguing along the same lines:
Anyway, YoungSmith's post prompted two interesting responses about the phenomenon of working for free (whether in the name of some quasi-utopian ideology or not). Kevin Drum suggests the limits to what people will do for free are not set by how dull the work is but by how many people are necessary to complete it:
Sure, some things are just more fun than others, and thus more likely to attract people to do them for free. But just as important is: how many people does it take? Once something gets to the point where it only takes a person or three to do it, then there's a pretty good chance that someone, somewhere will start offering it for free. Even if it's something that most sane people think is boring as hell, there's almost bound to be at least one person who's obsessed by it. Like classified advertising.Behind this theory, I think, is that endeavors requiring fewer people allow those few to make all the salient decisions and claim all the glory for the accomplishments, which goes a long way toward compensating them for not getting paid. When we are cogs in a large machine, we need to be paid to feel recognized, because our individual contribution is lost in the elaborate division of labor and our autonomy is similarly circumscribed. But having control over how the work is done and knowing one is responsible for the final product in its entirety makes work palpably meaningful, which is its own reward, fulfilling a basic aspect of what it means to be human. What Drum is highlighting is the possibility of a return to the ideals of handicraft -- of work not organized and integrated by capital -- only digitally mediated. From this perspective, the internet takes what are urban populations in the real world and scatters them into an archipelago of workers in small-scale groupings who can nonetheless participate economically on a global scale. Small groups of individuals working more or less voluntarily on projects would ideally permit the social benefits of cooperation to flourish without them being made over "as a free gift to capital," as Marx puts it. So when we work for free online, our main goal may be to express our freedom from capital, for at least a little while, and experience the restorative essence of performing socially useful work for its own sake. It could be that it's inherently delightful in the midst of late capitalism to discover a social need that can be fulfilled without capital's intervention. So it doesn't take an obsessive freak to fulfill some seemingly dull function, just an anarcho-syndicalist.
Of course, if we are cut off from social recognition, we rely on cash payment to serve as its proxy, as these research findings published in Nature suggest:
Handling or even contemplating money can relieve both physical pain and the distress of social rejection, according to a study by Chinese and American psychologists. But remembering cash one has spent intensifies both types of hurt. The findings suggest that the mere thought of having money makes people feel physically stronger and less dependent on the approval of others to satisfy their needs. "Money activates a general sense of confidence, strength, and efficacy," the researchers propose.Bu couldn't it be that money functions as a consolation for social isolation, which it then reinforces by supplying the illusion of strength and efficacy?
Matt Yglesias seems to be arguing along the same lines:
profit-maximization is not a natural form of human behavior. I think it’s best understood as a very idiosyncratic kind of pursuit. It happens to be one that’s economically rewarded because with money to invest tend to want to invest it with would-be profit-maximizers. Thus, in fields of endeavor where the ability to raise large sums of capital on reasonable terms is a huge advantage, a profit-maximization impulse winds up being a huge advantage.In other words the profit motive is a product of capitalism, and not what inspires it. And having to think in that economically rationalistic way, far from being natural to humans, may actually be fatiguing and confining. When capital is not necessary to the enterprise, other motives spring to the fore -- the need for recognition being primary among them. Yglesias explains:
The startup costs of a decent website are pretty small in the scheme of things. And there are lots of people and institutions—academics looking to bring their research to a wider public, think tanks and advocacy organizations looking to influence the public debate, corporations like Google looking to express their views on policy debates, students trying to get an edge in the job market, authors hoping to promote a book—with perfectly good incentives to run websites that don’t aspire to maximize profits."Free competition" turns out to be a way to use the profit motive to inhibit free expression. Ideas aren't typically or necessarily manufactured in accordance with the dominant modes of production (though arguably capitalism aspires to make it so that only the ideas manufactured corporately -- by the entertainment industry, say, or the for-profit press -- are recognized as valid). Capital is not necessary to think. So ideas don't necessarily need to circulate in the ways capitalism requires. The exchange of ideas relies on a different sort of economy, of influence and notoriety. Capitalist society presumes that influence is only meaningful insofar as it can be converted into capital, but perhaps we are now beginning to see signs that money and intellectual influence could possibly move apart again. Perhaps this will only empower the advertising industry even further, as they will have to squawk louder to help paid content drowned out the alternatives.
Costs of free (15 May 2009)
Will attention replace money as the medium of exchange? Is this even possible? Or does attention always have to ultimately be monetized at some point for that illusion to be tenable? A related question: can attention be monetized without infringing on one's rights?
3 Quarks Daily links to this article in the Liberal by William Davies about the potential trade-off between free goods and political freedom. We may be placated by free goods while our behavior is circumscribed and our liberty curtailed. For instance, a municipality might offer free Wi-Fi but also institute traffic-light cameras and monitor what you do while you are online taking advantage of that free deal. This sort of thing is already going on in Europe:
Also, cash is an anonymous means for acquiring goods, whereas the putatively free means of acquisition involve offering data that can be used to track the consumer. Cash prevented the consumer from being judged -- everyone's money was green, so to speak. But the sort of relationships sanctified by "free goods" entail a different arrangement: "Anonymity is replaced by new digitally constituted bonds, as consumers are locked into more enduring relationships with producers. Yet these are not the bonds of some halcyon pre-market community, but something new, with new forms of judgement about which customers are to be included or excluded." Some people are worth giving free things to, in the promise of exploiting the relationship down the road. Others are just mooches. And "free" is a way of disguising the real method of payment, whatever that may be. It obfuscates the exchange relation; some may even be duping into thinking it’s a gift relation.
Perhaps more insidious is the possibility that the "free" provider eliminates the competition and thereby inhibits the freedom of choice in the marketplace: As Davies explains, detailing the Friedmanite argument, "prices prohibit those who can’t afford them, but the price system is guaranteed to preserve some element of choice, even for the poor." In other words, monopoly power can be consolidated by offering a "free" product that is actually subsidized indirectly by consumers, usually through their attention being brokered to advertisers. Of course, if you believe the Hayek/Friedman case, prices are necessary to coordinate information across a complex and otherwise unmanageable economic system. If goods masquerade as free, then only those with access to what they truly cost will have access to the vital economic information -- the economic as a whole will grow thereby more inefficient or will come to be dominated by fewer and fewer players. Of course, it would make perfect sense that technology would ultimately function that way, allowing those with small advantages in information to lever that discrepancy up and seize more power. If you can remove the possibility of using price as a competitive weapon, than you've gone a long way toward protecting a perpetual monopoly.
I'm not so cynical as to preclude the possibility of gifts, to argue that there is always something self-interested at the root of every exchange. But for companies this is so -- they aren't capable of altruism. Only social relations can spawn gift exchanges. But the intensification of the degree to which society is mediated by technology is eradicating those social relations, replacing them with exchanges that conform to the market model. (I'm thinking of Facebook's culture of reciprocity.) At that point the idea of "gifts" itself is threatened, in danger of being masked by loss-leader pseudogifts.
3 Quarks Daily links to this article in the Liberal by William Davies about the potential trade-off between free goods and political freedom. We may be placated by free goods while our behavior is circumscribed and our liberty curtailed. For instance, a municipality might offer free Wi-Fi but also institute traffic-light cameras and monitor what you do while you are online taking advantage of that free deal. This sort of thing is already going on in Europe:
It emerged last year that certain British internet service providers were partnering with a company called Phorm to analyse their customer’s online behaviour and help personalise advertising without the user’s consent.We can become mesmerized by the price of goods and lose sight of the other values at stake -- it's the same fallacy that leads Americans to sacrifice time for money, to commute 4 hours a day in exchange for the ability to own a big house.
Also, cash is an anonymous means for acquiring goods, whereas the putatively free means of acquisition involve offering data that can be used to track the consumer. Cash prevented the consumer from being judged -- everyone's money was green, so to speak. But the sort of relationships sanctified by "free goods" entail a different arrangement: "Anonymity is replaced by new digitally constituted bonds, as consumers are locked into more enduring relationships with producers. Yet these are not the bonds of some halcyon pre-market community, but something new, with new forms of judgement about which customers are to be included or excluded." Some people are worth giving free things to, in the promise of exploiting the relationship down the road. Others are just mooches. And "free" is a way of disguising the real method of payment, whatever that may be. It obfuscates the exchange relation; some may even be duping into thinking it’s a gift relation.
Perhaps more insidious is the possibility that the "free" provider eliminates the competition and thereby inhibits the freedom of choice in the marketplace: As Davies explains, detailing the Friedmanite argument, "prices prohibit those who can’t afford them, but the price system is guaranteed to preserve some element of choice, even for the poor." In other words, monopoly power can be consolidated by offering a "free" product that is actually subsidized indirectly by consumers, usually through their attention being brokered to advertisers. Of course, if you believe the Hayek/Friedman case, prices are necessary to coordinate information across a complex and otherwise unmanageable economic system. If goods masquerade as free, then only those with access to what they truly cost will have access to the vital economic information -- the economic as a whole will grow thereby more inefficient or will come to be dominated by fewer and fewer players. Of course, it would make perfect sense that technology would ultimately function that way, allowing those with small advantages in information to lever that discrepancy up and seize more power. If you can remove the possibility of using price as a competitive weapon, than you've gone a long way toward protecting a perpetual monopoly.
I'm not so cynical as to preclude the possibility of gifts, to argue that there is always something self-interested at the root of every exchange. But for companies this is so -- they aren't capable of altruism. Only social relations can spawn gift exchanges. But the intensification of the degree to which society is mediated by technology is eradicating those social relations, replacing them with exchanges that conform to the market model. (I'm thinking of Facebook's culture of reciprocity.) At that point the idea of "gifts" itself is threatened, in danger of being masked by loss-leader pseudogifts.
Thinking man's filter (12 May 2009)
Peter Suderman's contribution to the "Is Google making us stupid" debate has already attracted some attention. Suderman's contention is that anytime access to all the information on the internet is making us smart in a different way -- rather than signaling intelligence by having facts memorized, we demonstrate intelligence by knowing where to find information online. The internet becomes collective memory, and intelligence is a factor of who has the best system for accessing that memory. Hence, as he titles his post, "your brain is an index."
Books taught us to think like they do — as tools for storing extensive knowledge. Now the web teaches us to think like it does — as a tool for recall and connection. We won’t be so good at memorizing everything there is to know about a particular small-bore topic, but we’ll be a lot better at knowing what there is to be known about the broader category the topic fits into, and what other information might provide insight and context.He may be right about this, but that is exactly what people are afraid of. Suderman's focus on memory and data retrieval seems to ignore the aspects of intelligence that involve synthesizing ideas and making argumentative leaps, and more to the point, that involve hanging with an intricate and long-winded argument and understanding how it works and what its weaknesses are. The fear that critics of internet-mediated consciousness have is that we'll lose the ability to formulate these critiques because we will have regressed into the habit of searching for what has already been said and latching on to whatever superficial information ebbs up from that search. As Kevin Drum, who yearns to be sympathetic with Suderman, is forced to point out,
Understanding 'broader categories' — the context into which individual pieces of knowledge fit — requires you to read books. Full stop.... Kids who grow up on the internet may be great at looking up odd bits of information quickly, but my experience is that they often suck at figuring out what that information means and what conclusions it's reasonable to draw from it. That's because they don't know the context. They don't know the rest of the story. And that's because they don't read enough books.Matt Yglesias wonders why Drum picks on the internet and fetishizes the book as a mode of learning, though Suderman himself seems to grant Drum's point, following up his post with links to some reference books. But the deeper question has to do with whether the mountains of data now available to us inhibits thought or enables it, or has no particular effect on the quality of thought. It's great to be able to look up specific information and get it quickly -- to be able to pull up texts and search them for half-remembered phrases, for example. But chasing down information online tends to generate a centrifugal force that takes one out of the orbit of the original inquiry. The promise of more and different and enticing stimuli is always there, and our battle against distraction seems always to become more difficult. I'm not sure if the opportunity for distraction makes it inevitable, or if that's just me. Maybe I need to try meditation.
Attention grabber (4 May 2009)
At Salon, Laura Miller reviews Winifred Gallagher's Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, a book about why we find it difficult to concentrate. Miller points out how technology has made it easy for us to distract ourselves with a continual flow of mini-activities, which constantly rewards the novelty-craving part of our brain at the expense of the part of our consciousness that likes to be absorbed in things, achieve flow. We find ourselves becoming the functional equivalent of that guy who is always scanning the room looking for someone more important to talk to and who never has a real conversation or listens to anything anyone is saying. We are always made aware of the alternatives that are slipping away, of the imperative to consume as much as possible within the limits of the time we have to devote to entertaining ourselves. The pressure of what we are passing up becomes intolerable, clouding over the activities we would like to wholeheartedly choose. Miller laments, "In many cases, the thing we wish we would do is not only more interesting but ultimately more fun than the things we do instead, and yet it seems to require a Herculean effort to make ourselves do it."
Rather than make this effort, it seems we try to compensate by indulging alternative ideals: convenience for its own sake; quantity of experience over nebulous qualitative experience; competitive consumption and early adopterhood -- various measurable efficiencies that allow us to belief we are prospering in the attention economy, regardless of harried we may feel by the pace. Or, as Miller notes, we can attempt to use technology against itself, as a filter to block out options, to restrict our freedom, to limit the range of our responsiveness. This is one way to understand the success of Twitter, which synthesizes both approaches -- it's a binge-purge technology whose arbitrary restrictions seem to be simplifying the media onslaught while actually authorizing it accelerating our gluttonous information intake.
Gallagher's book endorses the idea that we are what we pay attention to, so it offers methods for us to seize control over our attention span. But the implication that something other than our own will directs our attention, that it is some wayward entity with prerogatives of its own, is a bit troubling metaphysically. It leaves us subject to "the machinations of late capitalism," as Miller puts it (and I probably would have put it that way if she hadn't), the firms that know how to exploit weakness in how our brain works to grab our attention and fix it on things we would have been perfectly happy ignoring. It also negates for us the possibility of what Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey" calls "unremembered pleasures":
Rather than make this effort, it seems we try to compensate by indulging alternative ideals: convenience for its own sake; quantity of experience over nebulous qualitative experience; competitive consumption and early adopterhood -- various measurable efficiencies that allow us to belief we are prospering in the attention economy, regardless of harried we may feel by the pace. Or, as Miller notes, we can attempt to use technology against itself, as a filter to block out options, to restrict our freedom, to limit the range of our responsiveness. This is one way to understand the success of Twitter, which synthesizes both approaches -- it's a binge-purge technology whose arbitrary restrictions seem to be simplifying the media onslaught while actually authorizing it accelerating our gluttonous information intake.
Gallagher's book endorses the idea that we are what we pay attention to, so it offers methods for us to seize control over our attention span. But the implication that something other than our own will directs our attention, that it is some wayward entity with prerogatives of its own, is a bit troubling metaphysically. It leaves us subject to "the machinations of late capitalism," as Miller puts it (and I probably would have put it that way if she hadn't), the firms that know how to exploit weakness in how our brain works to grab our attention and fix it on things we would have been perfectly happy ignoring. It also negates for us the possibility of what Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey" calls "unremembered pleasures":
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the dinThose lines are open to all sorts of interpretations, but I've always understood them to suggest that we are more than the sum of our sensory impressions, of the stuff we have paid attention to and collected in the treasure house of our memory. Instead it's what we do, and the unself-conscious grace with which we do it that fills our contemplative moments -- the moments we are systematically banishing from our lives now -- with the spirit of self-satisfaction. The anxiety of identity gets suspended, and there isn't room for the feeling of missing out on something. Rather there is a sense of completeness that comes with giving up on keeping score -- a recognition that our souls are too immeasurable for that.
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Defending the authenticity quest (23 April 2009)
The pursuit of authenticity frequently takes a beating on this blog because it seems to me the operating ideology of marketing and the moral underpinning of consumerism. Accumulating things is supposed to reveal to us something that doesn't really exist -- a unique self we can attenuate and express only through a well-curated set of products. Often, my temptation, abetted by reading a lot of continental philosophy, is to dismiss the notion of authenticity altogether as a fantasy about finding a transcendental signified. The fundamental insecurity of our being, the provisional nature of subjectivity, ends up being eternally ripe for exploitation in the absence of a stable social structure that assigns identity and fixes it. This is to say, the crisis of identity derives from the terrible responsibility that comes out of the ideal of liberty, which in turn prompts some to seek to "escape from freedom" and so on. But I'm never completely comfortable with this position -- I'm hesitant to advocate a return to feudalism or a return of religiously defined social roles (as Bell seems to in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism). And saying we should revel in the "free play" of provisional identities seems Pollyannaish.
A society in which its members perpetually reinvent themselves seems utterly unstable; with no grounds for mores of interpersonal trust, it would rely entirely on institutional contract enforcement. Such a world wouldn't be all that different from the late-capitalist one that's always being complained about -- a hedonistic world of atomistic individuals with no responsibility to anything but the self, which can be constructed around any set of values willed into being for only how long it seems desirable. The instrumental exploitation of others for personal ends is limited only by the law, that is only the calculated likelihood of being caught. In this Foreign Policy article, Leo Panitch quotes Marx on a related point, how capitalism engenders isolation by eroding other ties -- the ties made possible by an identity that transcends economic roles: Marx
So it seems worth preserving the social requirement of a stable identity, as this seems to promise an escape from the mechanistic rationalism and self-centered atomism of capitalist society -- it makes the potential for a broader role for collective action seem plausible, whereas the unstable, provisional identity allows for the ideological refashioning of social isolation as personal convenience. But how to anchor identity without relying on the crutches of consumerism -- how to prevent the search for self from becoming an all-consuming project that then negates the collective action it was supposed to make possible? Philosopher Charles Taylor, in his 1991 book The Ethics of Authenticity -- a book I discovered serendipitously at the library when checking out Bell's book -- attempts to defend what he terms the authenticity ideal, the premise that the meaning of life is to discover one's unique self. He traces the ideal's roots not only to individualistic capitalism but to 17th century philosophy and its postulates about the moral sense, the idea that within us is a guiding moral light that we must strive to discover and obey in our pursuit of the good. Later philosophers would dispense with some of the spiritual aspects of this and highlight the notion of a personal inner truth that it is our duty to discover if we hope to experience true fulfillment: "each of us has an original way of being human," as Taylor summarizes it. "This gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me." So much for species being; this view (which incidentally fit well with the atomization required for industrial capitalism) negates the notion of inherent and common human nature, paving the way for a metaphysical sanction for the division of labor.
Taylor seeks to salvage this by resituating the pursuit of authenticity within a social-determined field of relevance. His point is that we can't determine our authentic being arbitrarily -- the points aren't which we develop our uniqueness have to be recognized as being socially relevant (this is akin to the idea of value deriving from "socially necessary labor" in Marx). "Things take on importance against a background of intelligibility," Taylor asserts, a "horizon of significance" that options for self-definition must exceed. People can't simply decide that something is self-defining simply because they chose it -- simply because the choice is autonomous or proves one's autonomy. Taylor argues in effect that you can't simply wear a corny old T-shirt you found in a thrift store or in your parents attic and pronounce yourself self-actualized, because no one else has a reason to care about the claim to difference you have thereby staked out.
This is what the ongoing war against hipsters is about -- about refusing to legitimate the claims to socially relevant meaning that the youth-culture entrepreneurs are always trying to get us to buy into. Bell cites this type of struggle as the fundamental social problem -- "The interplay of modernism as a mode developed by serious artists [he means abstract expressionists, mainly], the institutionalization of those played-out forms by the "cultural mass" [read, "hipsters" -- those with an economic stake in mastering cultural trends and making sure they continue to cycle], and the hedonism as a way of life promoted by the marketing system of business, constitutes the cultural contradiction of capitalism.... But the social order lacks either a culture that is a symbolic expression of any vitality or a moral impulse that is a motivational or binding force" -- that is, he argues contemporary society lacks the shared "horizon of significance" that Taylor theorizes that makes self-definition possible. Hence, anomie, solipsism, nihilism and the rest of it. Taylor argues,
That seems like a recipe for conformity, if oppositional modes to the hegemonic culture are ruled out as inauthentic. Taylor doesn't necessarily want to argue that position (Bell arguably does), but he does want to undermine the formation of "trivial" identities -- what stands out so much in hipster culture. The existence of these identities, and the fact that some attempt to legitimize them, points to a societal defect.
Taylor ultimately sees in this sort of subjectivism what he calls radical anthropocentrism -- humans refusing to accede to natural limits; everything is given for our instrumental use. (This would seem to suggest environmentalism as a solution to hipsterism. That seems to be what is happening now, but it fights the reactionary effort to reduce green practices to attempts to seem cool.)
For Taylor, what is pivotal in the pursuit of authenticity is social recognition. Recognition, taken for granted in periods with a rigid social hierarchy, becomes legible as a problem when the hierarchy breaks down. "The thing about inwardly derived, personal, original identity is that it doesn't enjoy this recognition a priori," Taylor writes. "It has to win it through exchange, and it can fail." The word choice here seems important -- "winning" identity through "exchange." That resembles the paradigmatic arrangement of capitalism -- trading commodities in order to realize an advantage. Capitalism, in breaking down the social hierarchy that assigned identity and made the circulation of social recognition inherent and unproblematic, generates a mode of recognition that mirrors how it functions generally. We're back to the brink of "necessary consumerism" -- we need a ongoing series of exchanges to establish our sense of ourselves.
They need not be economic exchanges -- they could be gifts (see Lewis Hyde on that). But the opportunities to shop to sate this need for self-defining exchanges (which renders the other person's actions in the operation pretty predictable and "convenient") are ubiquitous and alluring. (It may explain why I start to feel uncomfortable when I find myself somewhere without 24-hour stores. My self is threatening to become unmoored.) This is another way of articulating Bell's "cultural contradiction" -- capitalism makes possible the freedom/problem/goal of self-definition and it shunts us into its preferred solution, consumerism, which seems to abrogate self-definition and empty out the very concept of authenticity that made capitalism seem ethically worthwhile in the first place.
Anyway, this post seems a bit tautological -- I hope there was something worthwhile in it along the way.
A society in which its members perpetually reinvent themselves seems utterly unstable; with no grounds for mores of interpersonal trust, it would rely entirely on institutional contract enforcement. Such a world wouldn't be all that different from the late-capitalist one that's always being complained about -- a hedonistic world of atomistic individuals with no responsibility to anything but the self, which can be constructed around any set of values willed into being for only how long it seems desirable. The instrumental exploitation of others for personal ends is limited only by the law, that is only the calculated likelihood of being caught. In this Foreign Policy article, Leo Panitch quotes Marx on a related point, how capitalism engenders isolation by eroding other ties -- the ties made possible by an identity that transcends economic roles: Marx
knew very well that capitalism, by its nature, breeds and fosters social isolation. Such a system, he wrote, "leaves no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.' " Indeed, capitalism leaves societies mired "in the icy water of egotistical calculation." The resulting social isolation creates passivity in the face of personal crises, from factory layoffs to home foreclosures. So, too, does this isolation impede communities of active, informed citizens from coming together to take up radical alternatives to capitalism.
So it seems worth preserving the social requirement of a stable identity, as this seems to promise an escape from the mechanistic rationalism and self-centered atomism of capitalist society -- it makes the potential for a broader role for collective action seem plausible, whereas the unstable, provisional identity allows for the ideological refashioning of social isolation as personal convenience. But how to anchor identity without relying on the crutches of consumerism -- how to prevent the search for self from becoming an all-consuming project that then negates the collective action it was supposed to make possible? Philosopher Charles Taylor, in his 1991 book The Ethics of Authenticity -- a book I discovered serendipitously at the library when checking out Bell's book -- attempts to defend what he terms the authenticity ideal, the premise that the meaning of life is to discover one's unique self. He traces the ideal's roots not only to individualistic capitalism but to 17th century philosophy and its postulates about the moral sense, the idea that within us is a guiding moral light that we must strive to discover and obey in our pursuit of the good. Later philosophers would dispense with some of the spiritual aspects of this and highlight the notion of a personal inner truth that it is our duty to discover if we hope to experience true fulfillment: "each of us has an original way of being human," as Taylor summarizes it. "This gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me." So much for species being; this view (which incidentally fit well with the atomization required for industrial capitalism) negates the notion of inherent and common human nature, paving the way for a metaphysical sanction for the division of labor.
Taylor seeks to salvage this by resituating the pursuit of authenticity within a social-determined field of relevance. His point is that we can't determine our authentic being arbitrarily -- the points aren't which we develop our uniqueness have to be recognized as being socially relevant (this is akin to the idea of value deriving from "socially necessary labor" in Marx). "Things take on importance against a background of intelligibility," Taylor asserts, a "horizon of significance" that options for self-definition must exceed. People can't simply decide that something is self-defining simply because they chose it -- simply because the choice is autonomous or proves one's autonomy. Taylor argues in effect that you can't simply wear a corny old T-shirt you found in a thrift store or in your parents attic and pronounce yourself self-actualized, because no one else has a reason to care about the claim to difference you have thereby staked out.
This is what the ongoing war against hipsters is about -- about refusing to legitimate the claims to socially relevant meaning that the youth-culture entrepreneurs are always trying to get us to buy into. Bell cites this type of struggle as the fundamental social problem -- "The interplay of modernism as a mode developed by serious artists [he means abstract expressionists, mainly], the institutionalization of those played-out forms by the "cultural mass" [read, "hipsters" -- those with an economic stake in mastering cultural trends and making sure they continue to cycle], and the hedonism as a way of life promoted by the marketing system of business, constitutes the cultural contradiction of capitalism.... But the social order lacks either a culture that is a symbolic expression of any vitality or a moral impulse that is a motivational or binding force" -- that is, he argues contemporary society lacks the shared "horizon of significance" that Taylor theorizes that makes self-definition possible. Hence, anomie, solipsism, nihilism and the rest of it. Taylor argues,
The agent seeking significance in life, trying to define herself meaningfully, has to exist in a horizon of important questions. That is what is self-defeating in modes of contemporary culture that concentrate on self-fulfillment in opposition to the demands of society, or nature, which shut out history and the bonds of solidarity. These self-centered 'narcissistic' forms are indeed shallow and trivialized...but this is not because they belong to the culture of authenticity. Rather it is because they fly in the face of its requirements.... Authenticity is not the enemy of demands than emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.
That seems like a recipe for conformity, if oppositional modes to the hegemonic culture are ruled out as inauthentic. Taylor doesn't necessarily want to argue that position (Bell arguably does), but he does want to undermine the formation of "trivial" identities -- what stands out so much in hipster culture. The existence of these identities, and the fact that some attempt to legitimize them, points to a societal defect.
Taylor ultimately sees in this sort of subjectivism what he calls radical anthropocentrism -- humans refusing to accede to natural limits; everything is given for our instrumental use. (This would seem to suggest environmentalism as a solution to hipsterism. That seems to be what is happening now, but it fights the reactionary effort to reduce green practices to attempts to seem cool.)
For Taylor, what is pivotal in the pursuit of authenticity is social recognition. Recognition, taken for granted in periods with a rigid social hierarchy, becomes legible as a problem when the hierarchy breaks down. "The thing about inwardly derived, personal, original identity is that it doesn't enjoy this recognition a priori," Taylor writes. "It has to win it through exchange, and it can fail." The word choice here seems important -- "winning" identity through "exchange." That resembles the paradigmatic arrangement of capitalism -- trading commodities in order to realize an advantage. Capitalism, in breaking down the social hierarchy that assigned identity and made the circulation of social recognition inherent and unproblematic, generates a mode of recognition that mirrors how it functions generally. We're back to the brink of "necessary consumerism" -- we need a ongoing series of exchanges to establish our sense of ourselves.
They need not be economic exchanges -- they could be gifts (see Lewis Hyde on that). But the opportunities to shop to sate this need for self-defining exchanges (which renders the other person's actions in the operation pretty predictable and "convenient") are ubiquitous and alluring. (It may explain why I start to feel uncomfortable when I find myself somewhere without 24-hour stores. My self is threatening to become unmoored.) This is another way of articulating Bell's "cultural contradiction" -- capitalism makes possible the freedom/problem/goal of self-definition and it shunts us into its preferred solution, consumerism, which seems to abrogate self-definition and empty out the very concept of authenticity that made capitalism seem ethically worthwhile in the first place.
Anyway, this post seems a bit tautological -- I hope there was something worthwhile in it along the way.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Memeification (26 March 2009)
Ordinarily I confine my Hipster Runoff commentary to this blog, but this post, an apparent reaction to the environment of desperation at South by Southwest, thick with media consultants and other assorted douchey brand-management types, warrants further attention. It's an elaborate recognition of the fact that bands don't have to worry about making music so much anymore; they need to generate internet memes.
Carles augments his argument about memeification with several charts, parodies of the sorts of things marketing gurus presumably present during actual conferences at SxSW. He diagrams, for instance, the "music memeosphere" and details it with this account of the cultural food chain:
As with virtually everything on Hipster Runoff, it's hard to tell the degree to which Carles is joking, or even whether that determination would have any meaning. He's basically guilty of everything he mocks, making his blog a sort of self-consuming artifact. It points two mirrors at one another and records the infinite regress: a blog worth blogging about. Memes as memes. Consequently, there is nothing exaggerated about what he reports here -- this really is a pretty accurate portrait of the "music-meme economy." It lacks only the oozing cynicism.
In its way, Carles's discourse is far more performative than anything Derrida ever managed. I'm wondering, though, if Carles's style of discourse, the mode of proceeding by tautology and negating irony by both fully indulging it and entirely rejecting it simultaneously, is the only creditable form of discourse for addressing the contemporary cultural scene. It captures perfectly how every phenomenon is already processed and accepted as a strategy, and the possibility of appreciating any given thing in earnest is always already in quotation marks, without the presumption of there even being a reason.
In our modern world, 99% of ‘bands’ could be defined as groups of people who created a myspace page and uploaded 1.5 songs. These people have no vision of the modern landscape, and do not understand what it takes to grow into a ‘band worth following.’ While the ‘live performance’ is eventually a critical element in a band’s rise to prominence, there is a game which can be played on the internet to achieve success.If Twitter is the hot medium, in other words, than content producers of all stripes must change their output to accommodate it. People need to be able to "follow" what they are doing without having to devote more than an instant of their time. Relative to memes, songs are cumbersome. And music has never determined which bands are important to know about -- instead there are certain bands whose names circulate as currency with no regard to their music. This has always been the case. I've found that the best thing about not trying to be up-to-date with pop music is that I've lost touch entirely with those sorts of bands; I know there are such bands as MGMT and Grizzly Bear but feel no need to find out what they sound like or confirm that they suck just as much as I expect them to. I've moved on to a different status hierarchy, I guess. But memeification, as Carles, the proprietor of Hipster Runoff, depicts it, is a good way of conceptualizing how the shifts in the music hierarchy have accelerated, asymptotically approaching realtime, where memes would be instantly outdated the moment they are broadcast online.
Your band must invade the Perception Economy. Your Band must no longer be a band. Your band must be a meme. A Meme Which Generates subMemes. These memes must be compelling, intriguing, and interesting enough for people to ‘follow’ or at least think that you are ‘worth following.’
Carles augments his argument about memeification with several charts, parodies of the sorts of things marketing gurus presumably present during actual conferences at SxSW. He diagrams, for instance, the "music memeosphere" and details it with this account of the cultural food chain:
* BAND GENERATED MEMES - These are units of information which are generated by the bands themselves. Bands with more creativity and personality tend to create the best memes. However, bands have been successful being ‘cryptic’ and ‘weird’ in recent years. The bigger your band is, the less you have to do to create a gimmicky meme that people want to follow. The MP3 is pretty important, but not always as important for certain bands.
* THE TASTEMAKING MEME AGGREGATING & CONTENT FILTERING SERVICE INDUSTRY - These have replaced magazines and the radio as the optimal sources for music. These services & openly-biased news/meme sources are meant to build trust with consumers. Whether it is an algorithm to filter new music, a team of bros who love music writing about new bands, or just some bitter ass hole who ‘couldn’t make it as a band’ and decided to ‘cultivate influence’ any way he can, these are all providing a service to consumers. They all work together. While it may seem that they are covering ‘different niches’, they all sort of balance eachother out.
* MUSIC MAGAZINES AND RADIO - These make modern people feel sad and constraint. These put a bottle neck on consumer individuality, feeling like they only see a ‘limited snapshot’ of what is available. Minimal ‘personal relationship building’ means less authenticity and less trust. When a band is viewed as ‘relevant’ from these sources, people who like them are either ’stupid’, ‘just want to fit in’, or ‘ironically like the band/artist.’
* REGULAR PEOPLE/CONSUMERS - These are consumers like you or me. We want to listen to music and populate our iPods for different reasons. Some people enjoy ‘hunting for music.’ Others just get it from friends. Humans are at the tail end of the meme trail, but they do create a demand for memes which can sometimes force a band to exhaust their presence.
As with virtually everything on Hipster Runoff, it's hard to tell the degree to which Carles is joking, or even whether that determination would have any meaning. He's basically guilty of everything he mocks, making his blog a sort of self-consuming artifact. It points two mirrors at one another and records the infinite regress: a blog worth blogging about. Memes as memes. Consequently, there is nothing exaggerated about what he reports here -- this really is a pretty accurate portrait of the "music-meme economy." It lacks only the oozing cynicism.
In its way, Carles's discourse is far more performative than anything Derrida ever managed. I'm wondering, though, if Carles's style of discourse, the mode of proceeding by tautology and negating irony by both fully indulging it and entirely rejecting it simultaneously, is the only creditable form of discourse for addressing the contemporary cultural scene. It captures perfectly how every phenomenon is already processed and accepted as a strategy, and the possibility of appreciating any given thing in earnest is always already in quotation marks, without the presumption of there even being a reason.
Friday, July 15, 2011
"Projects for paying attention to attention" (26 Jan 2009)
PSFK linked to this post by Russell Davies, in which he explains his strategy to make himself actually pay attention to what he listens to:
That said, my arbitrary listening approach has to do with waging a campaign to play every song I have on my iPod at least once. It's a Sisyphean task and a bit joyless too. It certainly isn't what I want music in my life for -- to be the arbitrary yardstick for how much entertainment-industry product I've compelled myself to consume.
Anyway, this makes me wonder if we really have in fact entered into the so-called attention economy -- the idea that our most precious currency is the attention we pay to something, since so much is freely offered and the competition amongst marketers for our eyeballs has never been fiercer. We do have a limited amount of time in which to concentrate our attention on things, but these limitations have not translated into a clear hierarchy of where to focus. Instead, we seem more bewildered than ever by all the possibilities, and we become more and more whimsical without necessarily wanting to. The need to pay attention to attention suggests that our culture has been too successful in promoting distractions; it may be that we can no longer tell distractions apart from things we want to be interested in. Distraction has become the common denominator of all leisure experiences; the only alternative is basically work, socially constructed as joyless.
(Bonus: My 15-song all-A playlist, judging by iTunes play count:
1. Abba, "Bang-a-boomerang"
2. AC/DC, "Dog Eat Dog"
3. Addrisi Brothers, "Time to Love"
4. Al Kooper, "Be Yourself (Be Real)"
5. Andrew Bird, "Fake Palindromes"
6. Alice Cooper, "Under My Wheels"
7. the Arrows, "Toughen Up"
8. Allman Brothers, "Don't Keep Me Wonderin' "
9. Asha Bhosle, "Ankhen Meri Maikhana"
10. Andy Kim, "Shoot 'em Up Baby"
11. Angry Samoans, "Lights Out"
12. The Association, "It'll Take a Little Time"
13. Aerovons, "World of You"
14. A.C. Newman, "Battle for Straight Time"
15. Allen Toussaint, "Electricity")
unless I trick myself into paying attention to music that I either just revert to tried and trusted favourites or let all sorts of new stuff drift by me an in ambient haze. Not really listening.I'm sympathetic to the desperate feeling of being overwhelmed by all the music that's accessible to us, but I'm not sure that setting up arbitrary limits is the best solution. Ideally, there would be something at least semi-organic about how we pursue pleasure and pay attention. Is that the impasse we have reached, where we have to force ourselves to pay attention to the things we intended to do for fun? Maybe the "ambient haze" he worries about is actually preferable -- the best we can do nowadays. (And maybe that explains why people like Animal Collective -- and it's even in the A's!)
So I thought I'd try a 26 week experiment; listening to a new letter every week. Just to see what I notice. This is week A.
Projects for paying attention to attention. Those seem interesting now.
That said, my arbitrary listening approach has to do with waging a campaign to play every song I have on my iPod at least once. It's a Sisyphean task and a bit joyless too. It certainly isn't what I want music in my life for -- to be the arbitrary yardstick for how much entertainment-industry product I've compelled myself to consume.
Anyway, this makes me wonder if we really have in fact entered into the so-called attention economy -- the idea that our most precious currency is the attention we pay to something, since so much is freely offered and the competition amongst marketers for our eyeballs has never been fiercer. We do have a limited amount of time in which to concentrate our attention on things, but these limitations have not translated into a clear hierarchy of where to focus. Instead, we seem more bewildered than ever by all the possibilities, and we become more and more whimsical without necessarily wanting to. The need to pay attention to attention suggests that our culture has been too successful in promoting distractions; it may be that we can no longer tell distractions apart from things we want to be interested in. Distraction has become the common denominator of all leisure experiences; the only alternative is basically work, socially constructed as joyless.
(Bonus: My 15-song all-A playlist, judging by iTunes play count:
1. Abba, "Bang-a-boomerang"
2. AC/DC, "Dog Eat Dog"
3. Addrisi Brothers, "Time to Love"
4. Al Kooper, "Be Yourself (Be Real)"
5. Andrew Bird, "Fake Palindromes"
6. Alice Cooper, "Under My Wheels"
7. the Arrows, "Toughen Up"
8. Allman Brothers, "Don't Keep Me Wonderin' "
9. Asha Bhosle, "Ankhen Meri Maikhana"
10. Andy Kim, "Shoot 'em Up Baby"
11. Angry Samoans, "Lights Out"
12. The Association, "It'll Take a Little Time"
13. Aerovons, "World of You"
14. A.C. Newman, "Battle for Straight Time"
15. Allen Toussaint, "Electricity")
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Ubiquitous measurement (3 Oct 2008)
On his blog a few weeks ago, Kevin Kelly celebrates what I complained about in this recent column: the growing ability to monitor and measure everything. I argued that fashioning databases of ourselves reduces our capacity for selfhood and enslaves us to quantitative ways of evaluating our experiences; Kelly, however, sees all this "metering" as an opportunity to create shareholder value.
It's true that you can't profit from what you can't measure. But it still seems short-sighted to celebrate everything being metered, and to promote the incursion of measurement further into the private lives of individuals, as if they are being measured for their own benefit. It's instead the final obliteration of idea that any part of life takes place outside of the commercial nexus. To this vision of the future, everything of any significance, any piece of self-knowledge or self-enhancement will come filtered through the valves and gauges of the commercial machine. Outside of that, we don't actually exist; unmeasured we are ghosts. It won't be impossible to be a ghost in this future, but it will be a difficult choice to stick to; it will be hard to be content with merely haunting the lives of others, who will most likely not have made the same choice, since the blandishments of the measured life are not negligible.
What are these blandishments? Kelly points to the "freeconomy" our data streams support: "Cheaply metering data, in fact, is what propels the free economy. Metering is a type of attention. Products and services will be given away in exchange for the meta data about their use. Data about the free is now more valuable than the free thing itself." On the surface that sounds like nonsense: If the thing is free, than it has no economic value to anyone. But the stuff is not truly free. Kelly continually labels goods and services as "free" even when the payment is being extracted as surveillance: "I can get free email, free storage, free photo manipulation tools, free genealogical sharing, free phone service, free twittering, free .. well almost free anything ... knowing that the hosts are monitoring (metering) my usage." Being watched is the cost, and for most people it is negligible, because they are online exhibitionists. (Social networking, as I was trying to argue here, invites us all to become online exhibitionists, an attractive appeal because the public forum -- where our behavior can be "metered" -- is the primary place to establish our selfhood, which, in a mediated world, derives from being observed and judged.) But nonetheless it can be very costly, as the information is used to construct filters around us, affecting the choice architecture we confront and subtly changing just what it is that we are "free" to do, online and elsewhere. The more data we generated, the more we become confined by the preferences it predicts for us. The field in which we can discover spontaneity, or experience serendipity, shrinks. Perhaps in the future we will look back and see that these qualities were worth surrendering, that spontaneity was overrated. But chances are that the impossibility of spontaneity will make the promise of spontaneity a very powerful marketing tool.
Of course, there is the alternate possibility that the avalanche of data will create a new field for accidental discoveries and serendipitous linkages. If metering is as recursive as Kelly predicts, with metering itself being metered, and so on, the infinite flow of information will become even more unmanageable. With an infinite pool to draw from, "usefulness" and meaning can be extracted with the same arbitrarity that allows astrology to derive useful information from the stars. It requires only a clever manipulator of data to proclaim a significance to a pattern in the miasma. Rhetorical skill trumps statistical analysis when there are always more and more statistics to draw from and present as truth. Objective truth recedes even further from access as the data tide rises. The more data there is, the easier it is to lose sight of the correlations that truly signify -- whatever that means. As Kelly himself notes, "The skills to parse and divine meaningful patterns out of this new environment will become paramount and eagerly sought. Those who control the gateways to this metered information will be kings." "Divine" is an apt choice of words. But controlling the gateway will be less important than having the unscrupulous facility to manipulate the information that is flowing. This is the mettle from which kings of the information age are made -- demagoguery.
Measuring everything merely intensifies the need for trustworthy filters, which makes the service Google provides more necessary. "Google and web 2.0 companies realize this," Kelly writes of the looming information treasure trove. "They meter everything they can because the data about things is more valuable than the thing itself." At face value, this can't be true. Metadata is derivative of the "thing"; without the thing that people are primarily interested in knowing about, there is no metadata from which to extract value. It's like arguing that the credit-default-swap market can continue to expand without any underlying loans to insure. (Arguably the credit crisis exploded in part because investors lost sight of the relevance of those underlying loans to those swaps and began trading CDS contracts as though they were independent assets.)
Measuring everything is clearly valuable to Google, but not necessarily for us, who are interested in things in themselves and not profiting from ways to label and sort them. The value of metering is ultimately parasitical.
In fact, the obsession with metadata compromises our ability to enjoy the thing itself, sidetracking us into a preoccupation with quantitative aspects of our consuming experience rather than qualitative ones. The metadata is always other than the thing itself, but it makes it easier to think we’ve processed the thing itself without investing the time to experience it directly. Because so much more stuff is being thrust at us in digitized form, we begin to see our attention as a limited resource that should be budgeted to stretch it the farthest, which means applying it to derivatives (which can aggregate and condense information about many things) instead of things themselves and allow us to process more stuff superficially, with a sense of satisfaction that we have allowed our mind to touch on more things. We become maximizers, and as Barry Schwartz explained in The Paradox of Choice, this can be debilitating.
Our attention doesn't need budgeting as long as it is fully engaged. Being engaged, truly and thoroughly, is all we reasonably should require of ourselves; consuming more stuff for the sake of quantity itself is fruitless; we're always left with a feeling that we should have consumed more. Ubiquitous measurement serves only to intensify that feeling.
In the long run, there is nothing that cannot be made more valuable by metering it. (And in this recursive world, even metering is not too cheap to meter, so metering the meters is a good strategy as well.) We are rapidly inventing new sensors to cheaply, accurately, and continuously measure all things in all dimensions: geo-graphical location, speed, consumption, health, fitness, repairablity, connection, performance, rest, charge, and a million other vectors.
It's true that you can't profit from what you can't measure. But it still seems short-sighted to celebrate everything being metered, and to promote the incursion of measurement further into the private lives of individuals, as if they are being measured for their own benefit. It's instead the final obliteration of idea that any part of life takes place outside of the commercial nexus. To this vision of the future, everything of any significance, any piece of self-knowledge or self-enhancement will come filtered through the valves and gauges of the commercial machine. Outside of that, we don't actually exist; unmeasured we are ghosts. It won't be impossible to be a ghost in this future, but it will be a difficult choice to stick to; it will be hard to be content with merely haunting the lives of others, who will most likely not have made the same choice, since the blandishments of the measured life are not negligible.
What are these blandishments? Kelly points to the "freeconomy" our data streams support: "Cheaply metering data, in fact, is what propels the free economy. Metering is a type of attention. Products and services will be given away in exchange for the meta data about their use. Data about the free is now more valuable than the free thing itself." On the surface that sounds like nonsense: If the thing is free, than it has no economic value to anyone. But the stuff is not truly free. Kelly continually labels goods and services as "free" even when the payment is being extracted as surveillance: "I can get free email, free storage, free photo manipulation tools, free genealogical sharing, free phone service, free twittering, free .. well almost free anything ... knowing that the hosts are monitoring (metering) my usage." Being watched is the cost, and for most people it is negligible, because they are online exhibitionists. (Social networking, as I was trying to argue here, invites us all to become online exhibitionists, an attractive appeal because the public forum -- where our behavior can be "metered" -- is the primary place to establish our selfhood, which, in a mediated world, derives from being observed and judged.) But nonetheless it can be very costly, as the information is used to construct filters around us, affecting the choice architecture we confront and subtly changing just what it is that we are "free" to do, online and elsewhere. The more data we generated, the more we become confined by the preferences it predicts for us. The field in which we can discover spontaneity, or experience serendipity, shrinks. Perhaps in the future we will look back and see that these qualities were worth surrendering, that spontaneity was overrated. But chances are that the impossibility of spontaneity will make the promise of spontaneity a very powerful marketing tool.
Of course, there is the alternate possibility that the avalanche of data will create a new field for accidental discoveries and serendipitous linkages. If metering is as recursive as Kelly predicts, with metering itself being metered, and so on, the infinite flow of information will become even more unmanageable. With an infinite pool to draw from, "usefulness" and meaning can be extracted with the same arbitrarity that allows astrology to derive useful information from the stars. It requires only a clever manipulator of data to proclaim a significance to a pattern in the miasma. Rhetorical skill trumps statistical analysis when there are always more and more statistics to draw from and present as truth. Objective truth recedes even further from access as the data tide rises. The more data there is, the easier it is to lose sight of the correlations that truly signify -- whatever that means. As Kelly himself notes, "The skills to parse and divine meaningful patterns out of this new environment will become paramount and eagerly sought. Those who control the gateways to this metered information will be kings." "Divine" is an apt choice of words. But controlling the gateway will be less important than having the unscrupulous facility to manipulate the information that is flowing. This is the mettle from which kings of the information age are made -- demagoguery.
Measuring everything merely intensifies the need for trustworthy filters, which makes the service Google provides more necessary. "Google and web 2.0 companies realize this," Kelly writes of the looming information treasure trove. "They meter everything they can because the data about things is more valuable than the thing itself." At face value, this can't be true. Metadata is derivative of the "thing"; without the thing that people are primarily interested in knowing about, there is no metadata from which to extract value. It's like arguing that the credit-default-swap market can continue to expand without any underlying loans to insure. (Arguably the credit crisis exploded in part because investors lost sight of the relevance of those underlying loans to those swaps and began trading CDS contracts as though they were independent assets.)
Measuring everything is clearly valuable to Google, but not necessarily for us, who are interested in things in themselves and not profiting from ways to label and sort them. The value of metering is ultimately parasitical.
In fact, the obsession with metadata compromises our ability to enjoy the thing itself, sidetracking us into a preoccupation with quantitative aspects of our consuming experience rather than qualitative ones. The metadata is always other than the thing itself, but it makes it easier to think we’ve processed the thing itself without investing the time to experience it directly. Because so much more stuff is being thrust at us in digitized form, we begin to see our attention as a limited resource that should be budgeted to stretch it the farthest, which means applying it to derivatives (which can aggregate and condense information about many things) instead of things themselves and allow us to process more stuff superficially, with a sense of satisfaction that we have allowed our mind to touch on more things. We become maximizers, and as Barry Schwartz explained in The Paradox of Choice, this can be debilitating.
Our attention doesn't need budgeting as long as it is fully engaged. Being engaged, truly and thoroughly, is all we reasonably should require of ourselves; consuming more stuff for the sake of quantity itself is fruitless; we're always left with a feeling that we should have consumed more. Ubiquitous measurement serves only to intensify that feeling.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Harmful efficiencies (12 August 2008)
Noting a recent study by James A. Evans that suggests research conducted in the era of online publications has become shallower, Nicholas Carr makes this interesting point:
Carr pins the blame on the internet for fostering this move, but it seems to be a trend that consumerist innovations always have tended to reinforce. Consumerism relies on greater throughput of experience, to assure perpetual growth. This means that a corresponding ideological shift necessary to persuade us that this acceleration in consumption is pleasurable. Hence, the marketing and media industries symbiotic fusion in our culture. Media transforms experiences, even thought itself -- the ability to probe deeply into research questions, for example -- into atomized products suitable for the logistical processing that has expanded the markets for other goods. At the same time it disperses this process to individuals as a model for how they should conceptualize their own experience. We learn that this reification of thought and experience is actually "convenience" or "efficiency" and therefore inherently good, as it will allows us to have (that is, after ideological distortion, to be and to do) more. And more is better less. Duh, everyone knows that.
When the efficiency ethic moves from the realm of goods production to the realm of intellectual exploration, as it is doing with the Net, we shouldn't be surprised to find a narrowing rather than a broadening of the field of study. Search engines, after all, are popularity engines that concentrate attention rather than expanding it, and, as Evans notes, efficiency amplifies our native laziness.That's efficiently expressed.
Carr pins the blame on the internet for fostering this move, but it seems to be a trend that consumerist innovations always have tended to reinforce. Consumerism relies on greater throughput of experience, to assure perpetual growth. This means that a corresponding ideological shift necessary to persuade us that this acceleration in consumption is pleasurable. Hence, the marketing and media industries symbiotic fusion in our culture. Media transforms experiences, even thought itself -- the ability to probe deeply into research questions, for example -- into atomized products suitable for the logistical processing that has expanded the markets for other goods. At the same time it disperses this process to individuals as a model for how they should conceptualize their own experience. We learn that this reification of thought and experience is actually "convenience" or "efficiency" and therefore inherently good, as it will allows us to have (that is, after ideological distortion, to be and to do) more. And more is better less. Duh, everyone knows that.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
The time cost of free goods (20 June 2008)
If goods become free, but consumption takes time, we may find ourselves in danger of being overwhelmed with things we have acquired that are demanding the time to be used. This hidden time cost of seemingly free things is easy to overlook, because we don't customarily think of goods costing us anything but money. But internet distribution is changing the economics of cultural consumption, unleashing the attention economy, and forcing us to consider how we budget our limited time for information intake. In The Harried Leisure Class, Staffan Linder suggests that we will stop collecting information and consume more ignorantly instead in an effort to cram more consumption into our days, buying first and asking questions later, if ever. We buy goods based on whatever information came to us, via ads or advice, rather than expend precious consumption time doing our own research.
But isn't it Google that is supposedly "making us stupid," as Nicolas Carr argues in this Atlantic piece? Though Google is in some ways the ultimate research tool, reducing the time necessary to find information (hence the end of pointless arguments about factual things at family meals; now we just look things up), it also gives us information without much context, without our having to make the effort to organize our investigations. It also gives us way too much information, more or less indiscriminately -- our searches aren't always particularly refined. And Carr's point is that it changes how we read: Citing developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, he writes,
I think about this sometimes when I'm editing, honing text and deleting words and tightening prose and resolving ambiguities and misleading phrasings so that it may be more easily processed by readers. I'm helping them read it faster so they will understand it more quickly, but at a much more superficial level. As Carr writes, "Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed."
Linder argues that as we become squeezed for consumption time, we'll consume more expensive things over cheaper things when possible to make use of more goods on a total-cost basis. But when the cost of goods is zero, what happens then? As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of "free" stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we'll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we've managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we've set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged. The leisure and unparalleled bounty of a virtually unlimited access to culture ends up being an endless source of further stress, as we feel compelled to take it all in. Nothing sinks in as we try to rush through it all, and our rushing does nothing to keep us from falling further behind -- often when I attempt to tackle the unread posts in my RSS reader, I end up finding new feeds to add, and so on, and I end up further behind than when I started. It's hard enough for me to delete a feed from Google reader; it's even harder to get rid of unneeded stuff I've taken physical possession of, even if it was free to begin with, even if I can remember vividly fishing it out of a pile of garbage on my walk home from the subway. (Sometimes that little self-aggrandizing narrative makes it harder. Such stuff plays into my fantasy of myself as some kind of shrewd scavenger, beating the "system" by living off its cast-off crap -- I tend to forget that the deluded hippies in the Manson family had the same dream.)
One way of coping with the problem of being overwhelmed with free stuff is to voluntarily impose prices, a kind of Pigovian tax that internalizes the time costs of consumption. Steve Randy Waldman, in detailing his idea for a postage system for email, is attacking a related problem -- because emailing is free, there is nothing stopping us from being inundated with unwanted messages, but if the sender was willing to pay, we might take that into account and become willing to read. And if it's a message we wanted, from someone we know, we could refund the postage.
I often feel like I'm strung between two conflicting ideologies, and outmoded one oriented toward getting as much as you can, and a new one oriented toward navigating an endless tide of information. They are basically two different ways of looking at how to anchor one's identity, with the side effect of structuring how we consume. The epitome of the old way was to become a collector, to see yourself in stuff; the new ideology points us toward seeking fame, to see ourselves reflected back in the shimmering pool of digitized information.
But isn't it Google that is supposedly "making us stupid," as Nicolas Carr argues in this Atlantic piece? Though Google is in some ways the ultimate research tool, reducing the time necessary to find information (hence the end of pointless arguments about factual things at family meals; now we just look things up), it also gives us information without much context, without our having to make the effort to organize our investigations. It also gives us way too much information, more or less indiscriminately -- our searches aren't always particularly refined. And Carr's point is that it changes how we read: Citing developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, he writes,
the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.The advantage reaped by the speed with which we can acquire information is negated by the sheer amount that comes back at us. And the ease at which we get this plenitude tempts us into the shallow, efficiency-oriented pseudo-reading that Carr is concerned about. The time we have to read is limited, and we have so much more to read, that inevitably we start to select the easier stuff to read so we can feel like we are sucking down more of it.
I think about this sometimes when I'm editing, honing text and deleting words and tightening prose and resolving ambiguities and misleading phrasings so that it may be more easily processed by readers. I'm helping them read it faster so they will understand it more quickly, but at a much more superficial level. As Carr writes, "Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed."
Linder argues that as we become squeezed for consumption time, we'll consume more expensive things over cheaper things when possible to make use of more goods on a total-cost basis. But when the cost of goods is zero, what happens then? As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of "free" stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we'll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we've managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we've set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged. The leisure and unparalleled bounty of a virtually unlimited access to culture ends up being an endless source of further stress, as we feel compelled to take it all in. Nothing sinks in as we try to rush through it all, and our rushing does nothing to keep us from falling further behind -- often when I attempt to tackle the unread posts in my RSS reader, I end up finding new feeds to add, and so on, and I end up further behind than when I started. It's hard enough for me to delete a feed from Google reader; it's even harder to get rid of unneeded stuff I've taken physical possession of, even if it was free to begin with, even if I can remember vividly fishing it out of a pile of garbage on my walk home from the subway. (Sometimes that little self-aggrandizing narrative makes it harder. Such stuff plays into my fantasy of myself as some kind of shrewd scavenger, beating the "system" by living off its cast-off crap -- I tend to forget that the deluded hippies in the Manson family had the same dream.)
One way of coping with the problem of being overwhelmed with free stuff is to voluntarily impose prices, a kind of Pigovian tax that internalizes the time costs of consumption. Steve Randy Waldman, in detailing his idea for a postage system for email, is attacking a related problem -- because emailing is free, there is nothing stopping us from being inundated with unwanted messages, but if the sender was willing to pay, we might take that into account and become willing to read. And if it's a message we wanted, from someone we know, we could refund the postage.
The receiver of the mail would set the postage rate and get the money. That is, you do not pay a postal service for delivering mail (that's free in the internet age), you pay the recipient for the burden your correspondence places upon her attention.... It would serve as a guarantee of nonabusiveness, but would rarely be paid. Therefore, people could set their postage rates fairly high without losing mail they care about.But what about when we abuse ourselves, say, by signing up for Rapidshare and downloading every album posted on an mp3 blog? It's hard to imagine volunteering to pay for something you know you can get for free, but then we risk making everything we have accumulated worthless from the sheer inability to find anything or decide among things.
I often feel like I'm strung between two conflicting ideologies, and outmoded one oriented toward getting as much as you can, and a new one oriented toward navigating an endless tide of information. They are basically two different ways of looking at how to anchor one's identity, with the side effect of structuring how we consume. The epitome of the old way was to become a collector, to see yourself in stuff; the new ideology points us toward seeking fame, to see ourselves reflected back in the shimmering pool of digitized information.
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