Life As a Stock Photo (5 July 2011)

I reblogged this bad stock photo on tumblr and was set to be content to leave it at that, but I continued to think about it.

As you can see, it's a picture of fake patrons at a bookstore pretending to shop. The Economist's blog picked it up to illustrate a post about Borders' bankruptcy and the loss of book stores as quasi-public space. I assume the photographer used fake people because you would possibly need to get permission clearances from genuine shoppers if the photo was not documentary? (Somebody out there who knows how this works, please let me know. Comment or email at horning at popmatters.com)

One of my many suspicions is that stock photos such as these will be easily replaceable with far more genuine looking photos from social media pages. This seems like a SEO-generated page, but it gets at another question I have:

Stock Photography companies have lost some of their market share in the digital age, but Flickr is not the biggest cause. The creation of digital cameras has resulted in more people taking and sharing pictures as opposed to the old days of film when there were only a select few in the photography business. Also, non-commercial licenses means that businesses can not use those free photos.

So digital cameras make it easy for aspiring photographers to try to enter the business of selling photos; indeed Getty has a partnership with Flickr to try to help amateurs commercialize what they share (and drive labor prices down).

But wouldn't it be just as easy for publications to search a Facebook database for a photo and pay them a nominal fee for the rights to it (and drive the photographer's wages to zero)? Is there anything in Facebook's terms of service that explicitly prevents the company from doing that, given that it asserts ownership rights over the stuff people upload there? Or is there a non-commercial licensing regime that protects you from having your photos appear in contexts where you don't want them? Must users rely on Facebook's good will to keep that from happening?

I already felt that simply by sharing anything on Facebook, it ended up recontextualized in ways I couldn't control or understand and this made me feel inordinately and perpetually defensive. When he quit Facebook, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber noted that "one of the things I like about the Internets is that I can present myself in different ways. This isn’t the result of a lack of integrity – you need to present different ‘selves’ if you want to engage in different kinds of dialogue." That makes perfect sense to me; I think my lack of context control was making me opt out of many potential dialogues altogether. I also feared that all the decontextualized communication was collapsing the boundaries that need to be in place for friendship to thrive. If you start seeing what friends do in their alternate contexts, they can seem less likable, or deceptive, or just not as focused on me as I narcissistically prefer them to be and can pretend they are without any evidence to the contrary. Facebook lets you see your friends consistently at their most preening, posturing, needy, and self-exploiting -- not generally their best sides, but in a Zuckerberg world, their only true side with "integrity."

It would be terrible if Facebook resold images you shared without telling you. But it would be even worse if they offered to cut you in, I think. Social media makes it seem natural and validating that one could consider selling one's snapshots to marketers and publishers so that they could be used for some commercial purpose. Social media invites you to turn your own life into a series of stock photos.

Celebritization and Resistance (26 May 2011)

As I inevitably tend to view social media through the lens of my personal experience, I tend to degender it and talk about it in the asexual terms of corporate branding, with adults pursuing their attentional accumulation and personal affirmations like canny entrepreneurs, deploying a kind of abstracted informational commodity in tweets and updates and links and so on. But clearly the imperative of self-exploitation strikes us all unevenly, and it's conditioned by gender and race and class and social capital and innumerable other things that would be impossible to totalize. Because they quantify attention, social media can make it seem as though it is an abstract commodity, like money, uniform and commensurate, but that masks the the fact the different forms of attention available have different consequences for subjectivity. It's one thing to have, say, your blog post on Spinoza tweeted; quite another to have your picture reblogged on Fuck Yeah Self-Shooters. And it is not as though the sort of attention we can seek is some entirely autonomous choice. What is available, or what we know is possible or attainable, is highly conditioned by where we are already situated.

If there is any commonality among the various snares of the attention economy, it may be in an underlying reflexivity, an awareness of identity as an alienated thing rather than a lived-in spontaneity. Reflexivity introduces absence into any sense of presence, an awareness of audiences not directly accounted for which nonetheless must be played to. Still, the different ways in which we are enticed to seek attention, the different audiences we are brought to suspect are in our reach, require different forms of resistance, different precommitments perhaps. So while I feel myself being sucked into a personal-branding spiral; women face a temptation to sexualized modes of attention-seeking that I don't experience.

So the online objectification and fetishization of young women, the generalized idea of their availability, drives a disproportionate slice of the online attention economy, authenticating a certain kind of attention's value and rooting vicariousness in a subject position that's simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. I imagine it as an alluring opportunity to become money, as fungible and fecund and purposeful as money can be, though it is hard to anticipate what it must be like to be spent. Here's how danah boyd put it in an essay that looks at the attention economy, "celebritization" and its consequences mainly for teenage girls.

Celebrity becomes a correlate to a perfect life -- money, designer clothes, and adulthood. What being a ‘celebrity’ means is discarded; fame is an end to itself with the assumption that fame equals all things awesome despite all the copious examples to the contrary. So teens only hold on to the positive aspects, hoping for the benefits of becoming famous and ignoring the consequences.

boyd is writing in response to this Rolling Stone profile by Sabrina Rubin Erdely of a teenager, Kiki Kannibal, who used MySpace to achieve notoriety but as boyd puts it, "lacked the resources to handle the onslaught and never made it big enough to recoup the ground she lost to weather the fame." Because Kiki uses her sexuality for attention but is not sanctioned through a big-media-supported alibi, she is "under attack."

Rubin Erdley explains why Kiki Kannibal doesn't simply go offline:

She can't go offline. One reason is practical: Kiki has a business to run. But the other reason is more existential: If she were to go offline, her link to the world would disappear. This is a girl with 12,000 Twitter followers whose actual life is empty of real relationships. She's trapped in suburban isolation; outside the bubble of her family, her most meaningful interactions are electronic. In real life, she's lost.

The implication seems to be that her pursuit of celebrity has precluded her ability to generate local ties of affection. Learning how to market oneself online is a different skill from learning how to maintain friendships. boyd suggests that girls get trapped in such dynamics because "fame is a toxic substance," noting that "when the attention is good, it’s really good and it feels really good. And when the attention fades, people can feel lonely and anxious, desperate for more, even if it’s negative attention." I wonder if that isn't pathologizing the desire for celebrity too much, pinning it on personal psychology rather than the structure of the new media form that amplifies these tendencies into potentially destructive compulsions. Social media seem to systematically efface the possibility that the desire for fame might not be universal; they do a poor job of allowing people to calibrate their exposure, which is always theoretically infinite despite whatever temporary barrier privacy settings erect. (Anyone within the network can liberate the private information, which in any event belongs to the social media company, not the user.) In other words, I agree with boyd when she writes, "it’s high time that we start reflecting on the societal values that are getting magnified by them."

Maybe this is a bit hyperbolic, but this Vanity Fair story by Amy Fine Collins about prostitution and human trafficking seems the grim logical extension of what the Rolling Stone story describes. The self-coercion boyd mentions with regard to celebritization is arguably on a continuum (albeit a very, very long one) with the horrors described in the Vanity Fair piece, which would make certain Internet users into the equivalent of johns. A lawyer Fine Collins interviewed for the VF story says, “Johns don’t understand what they’re contributing to. It never occurs to them that the woman who is smiling is being abused. They really don’t know what’s going on—and they don’t care." Internet use sometimes seems to invite that kind of indifference, if the manifold examples of trolling, bullying, voyerurism and generalized deinhibition are any testimony. (The Rolling Stone article is about these tendencies as much as it is about the drive for microcelebrity.) The governing ideology seems to be that all the information online has been voluntarily provided and is thus ultimately fair game, as if there are no gray areas or no shifts in context or no possible regrets on the part of the volunteer that should check a consumer's impulse to enjoy it on whatever level one chooses. Social media's immediacy can make it seem as though this sort of heedless entertainment is an entitlement; the underlying implication is that women are naive if they think otherwise. The consumption of microcelebrity is not governed by the norms of friendship, despite social media's liberal usage of its terminology.

Retracting the Concept of the Individual (17 May 2011)

There seems to be an object lesson in this O'Reilly article by Jen Webb about Openmargin, an iPad application in development that will force users to share their marginalia in one giant shared space. Webb asks the company co-founder, "Is there an option to notate only for personal use (i.e. notes for a class)?" And his response strikes me as deeply troubling:

Joep Kuijper: There are no personal groups. All the readers of one book are the group. Or even more specific: the readers around one sentence are a group. This also means you're not in a dialogue with friends, but with peers you've probably never met before. We think this is the interesting thing about Openmargin. It's an implicit network where the relationships are based on the specifics in a text. And your relationships develop and grow along with your reading habits.

It seems like he deliberately misses the point, or his response has been edited to make him miss the point. Instead the ideology of compulsive sharing is reinscribed. What possible reason could you have for not sharing all your thoughts so random strangers (and Openmargin) can profit from them? That would be unthinkable selfishness, and he won't even entertain that possibility. And that specificity of the context of a particular book (or even sentence, as he notes) makes the sharing, the mandatory dialogue, all the more necessary. Would a note function be useful for one's impromptu half-formed reactions to a text? Maybe, but every note you write on Openmargin must be ready for the world; those are the terms by which they are willing to provide the server space and the facilitating programming. They have learned from Facebook: "Community" is their product, apparently, more than the service itself, since it was so thoroughly eviscerated by capitalism. Now capitalism has come to rehabilitate it on its terms. This is just one example. Capitalism is solving the problem of alienated isolation it created by supplying more capitalism. Which makes one wonder if the contradictions capitalism generates will ever be enough to undermine it.

Rent to Pwn (22 April 2011)

I am all for people buying less stuff and sharing more of their stuff with people. I think it is great when people figure out how to give stuff they are getting rid of to people who want to use it. But I am fairly skeptical of "collaborative consumption," which wants to monetize these impulses in new tech startup companies. A current Fast Company article by Danielle Sacks covers this emerging sector, what Silicon Valley investor types apparently call "underused asset utilization" ventures, which includes car sharing and other co-op-like schemes, peer-to-peer rental services, and eBayish resale sites. There is so much scary dystopian potential in what Sacks reports that I almost choked on the omelet I was eating while reading it (at which point it occurred to me that if I coughed it up, maybe I could re-sell it to a underfed peer).

"Underused asset utilization" strikes me as a far more honest term than "sharing," and it certainly sheds a new light on what Facebook is doing: getting us to conceive of ourselves, our social lives and our identity as "underused" assets to exploit. (My web-surfing history is really too valuable to keep to myself -- and really, how can I monetize my friends? What else are they good for? Are they even my friends if I can't profit from them?) The governing principe with all these ventures is to use the deeper mediation of people's personal lives (through smartphones and social media) to get them to behave even more like little capitalist firms. Consider the way Sharable founder Neal Gorenflo talks about his own life:

One afternoon, after a jog through the parking lot of his Brussels hotel, he quit his job. Since then, Gorenflo has deconstructed every aspect of his personal and working life, "removing all the things that don't add value and concentrating on the things that deliver value." Andrea made the cut -- she's now his wife.

Is there anything more to life than adding value? Not from this point of view. "Sharing" might evokes images of potlatch and competitive altruism, but in the world of underused asset utilization, sharing has nothing to do with gifts and everything to do with efficiency, with bringing rationalized use of capital resources to ever single nook and cranny in one's life, even if you had no intention of being a entrepreneur or a capitalist. The backers of these ventures imagine the purpose of the social web and "connections" is merely to make self-entrepreneurializing easier, near automatic. So when you are about to "underuse" some "asset" in your everyday life, your smartphone can intervene to rent it to someone else (and let some Silicon Valley venture capitalists get their cut). "I'm looking at virtually every resource and finding ways to extract additional value or productivity from it, from food to gardens to skill sharing," says one investor. That sounds awesome, a real recipe for joy. (It reminds me of Marx's "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!")

Gorenflo tells Sacks, "Business has spent centuries making buying really easy. We're just at the beginning of making sharing easy." This had me confused at first, because I don't really get how firms can be capitalist if they are not seeking profits through selling things. This confusion could prompt a person to think that the "sharing economy" is some sort of postcapitalist potentiality -- as when Rachel Botsman, the co-author of a book about "collaborative consumption" declares, "This could be as big as the Industrial Revolution in the way we think about ownership." But these companies are not out to usher in the end fo private-property rights. Botsman says that she realized, ""I just can't help companies sell more stuff," but that doesn't mean that she's looking to decrease the volume of capitalist exchanges or slow the velocity of commerce. It means selling services rather than stuff, brokering the exchange of existing goods between parties, like a pawn shop owner. The for-profit sharing companies are still operating like capitalist companies; only they are now "platforms" that root exploitation deeper into the lives of the independent contractors (i.e. the customers they "serve") they use to generate work product.

The part of the article that struck as most depressing, though, is the development of private "reputation companies" that hope to create a "trust rating" similar to a credit rating based on one's online behavior, the "data exhaust" one's mediatized activity generates.

The challenge that worries everyone in the sharing world, of course, is trust. It's one thing to believe that a knitter on Etsy will mail you that crocheted beret. It's another to let a stranger sleep in your home or borrow your second-most-expensive asset, your car. "Sharing of the kind we're talking about really only works when there's reputation involved," says Freestyle's Felser.... Almost all (including AirBnB) require profiles for both parties and feature a community ratings system. But these ratings would carry far more weight if they traveled with you across the web, so that your eBay reputation helped inform your standing on AirBnB. Startups like TrustCloud would like to become the portable reputation system for the web. The company is building an algorithm to collect (if you choose to opt in) your online "data exhaust" -- the trail you leave as you engage with others on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, commentary-filled sites like TripAdvisor, and beyond -- and calculate your reliability, consistency, and responsiveness. The result would be a contextual badge you'd carry to any website, a trust rating similar to the credit rating you have in the offline world.

By all means, let's automate trust. Who doesn't love the arbitrarity of credit ratings and the way they rob one of a sense of autonomy? Yes! Let's extend that principle more generally, and let computers assign a number to the quality of our ethical character overall, based on how much garbage we look at online! That is a beautiful idea. Who wouldn't "choose to opt in"? (As if opting out won't come to signify having something to hide if, god forbid, these systems catch on -- you already can't really opt out of Facebook and belong socially in the accepted way in the U.S.) Let's let an algorithm score our cultural capital and make that number known so people can more efficiently judge whether it is worth their time to interact with us. Splendid! How efficient will my "sharing" and appropriating become then, when I know who the losers are after a glance at a spreadsheet?

I guess this is why Amazon is constantly pestering me to "rate my transactions" all the time. They can't leave me alone and let me have my book; they want me to volunteer my feelings to grease the wheels of their distribution and rent-extracting mechanisms. I don't want to help build reputations; I want to reserve the trust that my minuscule contribution to this world can build for something better. I don't want to be part of a panopticon that is deemed socially necessary to keep people from cheating one another under a generalized Hobbesean regime of hypercapitalism in which every single gesture and every single thing I think and do is theoretically for sale and is thus a theoretical cheat. Offshoring "reputation management" to private companies seems like a terrible way to build general trust in a society, as does assigning people a numeric rating. These are indications that trust doesn't generally exist, and shouldn't be expected from one another. It's a neighborhood watch society where people are only kept in line through fear, not sympathy.

One of the positive aspects of markets (and possibly the whole point of trust-building between parties) is that they can facilitate anonymous exchange and foster privacy -- granting a modicum of autonomy to getting and spending and owning. What you buy and collect is nobody else's business. But to the sharing czars, it's necessarily everybody's business -- that's where their profit opportunity is, having an itemized list of your stuff. Or even your opinions. In a world where value is primarily created socially at the level of affects and signifiers and brands and so on, privacy makes you into an "underused asset." And Silicon Valley can not let that stand.

Forced connectivity (17 Dec 2010)

I suspect this post by Will Davies about an advertising poster for the city of Birmingham, England, might be a hard sell, and I would probably have just linked to it on Twitter (my feed is @marginalutility -- I would stop pushing it here if had some way of making it appear permanently on this blog somewhere) if I could have found some teaser quote that was fewer than 125 characters. But the post's key passages seemed uncondensable, and that I was even looking to truncate them for the expediency of my Twitter feed is a pretty strong argument against the whole Twitter concept. Alas, I want to share links that I find interesting, but I want to have space to give my reasons for wanting to share it. I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea that simply linking to it, marking it with my personal brand's seal of approval, is sufficient to convey its significance.

Anyway, Davies notices a poster touting Birmingham's interconnectedness ("Discover networking on another level") and how that makes it suitable as a business hub: "200,000 annual conferences and access to over 400 million people by road, rail, and air." These numbers seem a little fishy and grandiose; Davies comments, "Maybe they should have mentioned that Birmingham's telecom networks offer access to basically everyone in the world." But the key point is that these sorts of figures imply a sheer quantitative understanding of networking that has been invalidated by the ways things have progressed since the internet has become ubiquitous in Western business practices.

The confusion lurking within this advert is partly due to a total failure to understand economies of presence, a failure that was not uncommon in the mid-1990s. The notion that knowing or meeting more and more people, of being more and more connected, was somehow advantageous has come to appear rather old-fashioned.

In the early days of the networked information society, getting more connected supplied a competitive advantage, but the ease of connectivity has all but eliminated that. Now virtual presence is taken for granted. Here's how Davies puts it, incidentally making an excellent connection along the way between the person Time named its person of the year, and the runner-up some thought should have been so designated:

We were told that power would consist in having more and more connectivity (so the telecom industry hoped), making charisma and bandwidth the most important forms of productive capital. By this account, the city of Birmingham could have been a contender. Instead, power resides with Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange, individuals with few friends or capabilities, other than to break down whatever norms, rules and institutions used to enable society and communities to cohere (for better or worse).... The only people who definitely gain from more and more connectivity are the sociopathic founders of the networks themselves. Everyone else is caught in various balances between knower and known, follower and followed.

Embedded norms in local communities are made meaningless by omnipresent connectivity; all specific places become anyplace, just another node. Likewise, the local norms about what makes a person seem charismatic -- the situational, improvisational aspects of personal charm -- are everywhere supplanted by what characterizes charisma online, a generic computational matter of how linked one is. Charisma is not necessary to conduct information; its role in making certain information seem more significant is a matter of how one is placed in the hierarchical structure in the network. That is to say, charisma is not something internal to the person -- all those qualities require presence and are becoming more irrelevant -- but something imposed on people by their position in the network. Charisma becomes a strict matter of the numbers one can drive in the quantified universe of social media. That has always been the case with commercial media, but because of social networking, the norms of commercial media have replaced all those local, more idiosyncratic norms and institutions that once served as the field of charisma. That field is disappearing, and we are more or less forced online.

At that point, our being networked serves to reinforce our powerlessness, our communicative servitude: "network connections are not always symmetrical, as twitter has now helpfully made plain: I can 'know' (or 'follow') as many people as I like, but if they don't know me then my 'inclusion' in the great network does not equate to power." By participating in online sociality, we feed our various utterances into a huge sorting mechanism that spits out our place in the hierarchy. Unlike the subtler sorting that takes place in real-life social interaction, the online results, construed in numerical data, seems inarguable and open to less interpretation. And being able to broadcast ourselves certainly doesn't allow for us to transcend that hierarchy and reach some higher democratic vista. It embeds us in hierarchy in a more thorough, more autocratic, more centralized way -- an emplacement untempered by local, temporal circumstances. (Thus I end up feeling like I have to promote my Twitter feed in posts.)

In short, getting everyone connected does not set them free; as the word connected suggests, it leaves us more entangled.

The prophets of networks thought that the greatest loser in the digital age would be the child without a modem. Instead, the greatest losers are those who are being forcibly plugged in, and losing authority and status as a result - state institutions, American embassies, old boy networks, publishers, families, political organisations, MPs and so on. It's not so much that these traditional forms of organisation are left behind by the rise of open access networks and fluid forms of association, it's that they are strategically undermined by them, sometimes to the point of unviability.

The true signifier of power is becoming the freedom to be disconnected, unavailable, without detrimental consequences.

Collaborative consumption (28 Oct 2010)

Over at Generation Bubble I have a review of a business book called What's Mine Is Yours, about what the authors dub collaborative consumption. What they mean by that is things like car-sharing services and Freecycle -- basically ways to use the internet to facilitate peer-to-peer exchange. In part because it was a book geared toward management types, it rubbed me the wrong way, and I ended up at a very skeptical place about the whole idea. I don't think it's a terrible thing to give away your stuff through Freecycle or to use a bike-sharing service, but these are not necessarily things to be particularly proud of either. Ideally these practices would disappear into the fabric of everyday life rather than constitute a "revolution" in retail that entrepreneurs and investors need to bandwagon into ubiquity and that consumers need to trumpet as triumphant proof of their evolution into post-individualist subjects. It just doesn't seem a good idea to have a subjectivity or to form communities that are anchored in shopping practices.

"Engagement Ads" on Facebook (28 Sept 2010)

Brad Stone's Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about Facebook's advertising strategies gets at several different ways that marketing through social media is nefarious. It's moving beyond the already creepy technique of silently scanning your data trail (far more intimate, presumably, in the Facebook realm) and presenting you with ads that it predicts will be relevant to you. Since it has so much more data on you, it can refine its target on you, hit you square between the eyes.

Facebook takes targeting even further. If you recently got engaged and updated your Facebook status to reflect it, you might start seeing ads from jewelers in your hometown. They've likely used Facebook's automated ad system to target recently engaged couples living in the area. If your profile mentions your appreciation for old-school hip-hop, the right local wedding DJ can find you, too.

Those who are looking to be sold to may enjoy this experience, even though giving in to predictive marketing essentially means closing off certain horizons while having them superficially broadened. If you accept that identity has become a matter of consumer practices and what niche we find ourselves in, then you have to accept the conclusion that the data trail we create online can hem us in and trap us, restricting our ability to deniche-ify ourselves. I can imagine a future service that "likes" a bunch of random things and browses through a bunch of random sites on our behalf to throw off the ad targeting -- in the same way those tags you can put in your Gmail email (words like murder and funeral) can shut down the contextual ads. (One could theoretically browse in "private" mode and eschew social media, but then one risks becoming an outcast. All those people who send out invites to things only through Facebook are dragging all their friends into the marketing cesspool, and normalizing the whole sordid process.) But right now, our past history becomes inescapable, shaping the contours of the online experience we can have, which more and more shapes the kind of life experience we can have generally, limiting what we know about, what we do and how we are seen and what we accomplish.

But it gets even more depressing than that. Facebook wants its ad system work (which, by the way, you cannot opt out of no matter how you jigger its byzantine privacy settings) by making one's friends seem like the marketers rather than the companies buying the ad space.

[Facebook] talks up more ephemeral measures such as recall and brand recognition, which it argues can be boosted by social activity that occurs around an ad. Facebook calls its ads "engagement ads," because they ask users to take action: play a video, vote in a poll, RSVP to an event, or just comment or click a button to indicate that they "like" it. The "like" button, which Facebook has gradually attached to just about every piece of content on its site and others across the Web, is intended to convey a general recommendation to a member's friends. So while a great majority of users ignore the great majority of ads on Facebook, the numbers change when, say, an ad for a local restaurant is footnoted by friends' names: ("Jordan, Jen, and 3 other friends like this").

I have a tendency to "share" things in Google Reader when they seem provocative to me, and I suppose that is not that different from "liking" a Nike ad in Facebook. By sharing those posts I think I am trying to extenuate or complicate or further arguments I have written about before that I think anyone who bothers to follow my shared items would also be interested in. But I also have this uncharitable suspicion that people, including me, "like" and "share" things to publicize their gesture of liking and score some general recognition for their good taste. To some degree, they are promoting themselves through these likable things rather than the things in question. This is how social media works to exploit our identity-making process, to extract productive labor out of our ontological insecurity in ways never before possible. The more we construct ourselves in social media (a move becoming more and more necessary), the more we have to rely on liking and sharing as the building blocks of the self, and these building blocks automatically becoming marketing gestures. And the fact that everyone knows they are marketing gestures reflects back on the self we build, commercializing it, opening up to the sort of judgment we reserve for corporations or other strictly profit-seeking entities. That's another way of saying that making a self in social media instrumentalizes it to an unprecedented degree.

Social media generally diminishes what it means to belong to a community. "Likes" for instance are effort-free gestures of faux reciprocity, casually recognizing someone else's sharing, which itself is often automated by the medium itself. As Jodi Dean points out in this post, social networks are "community lite, thin connections, disposable friends (they don't even have to know when you've moved on!)." Facebook is essentially a "consumer space" where the contacts between people are engineered to be convenient and more or less friction free, and without that friction, there is no true possibility of building solidarity or political engagement -- a point Malcolm Gladwell makes in this New Yorker piece. He argues that the "weak ties" of social media are not conducive to activist commitment, which requires the strong ties of true intimacy. Gladwell:

“Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

The increasingly commercial and instrumental world of social networks is not likely to inspire you to die for a cause; you won't risk a police beating in hopes that someone will "like" your sacrifice. And someone who "likes" a Nike ad as well as a protest march is unlikely to inspire to many people either. The "like" draws a demeaning and diminishing equivalence between different orders of experience. This is one of Facebook's chief accomplishments, to reduce all sorts of different aspects of social life to a uniform pap that can be liked or unliked. This makes participation trivial enough that people will market for companies for free, because there's an outside chance someone will think they are cooler for doing it. And participation of this sort seems so ephemeral that it does not dent one's social capital at all; it doesn't cost anything. Social media, as Gladwell points out, offers a

form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.

Activism on social media is indistinguishable from self-promotion and congratulatory participation at a distance. It lowers the bar for that feeling of doing something about some sort of injustice. We all can feel like we're making a difference without looking away from our phone. Individual agency gets supplanted by a collective relay of buck-passing referrals until someone else at some point actually does something about it.

But what depresses me most of all about Facebook's "engagement ads" is how they threaten to shift the modus operandi of advertising practice generally.

Facebook's promise to advertisers isn't to get consumers to buy their products—or really even to get them to click through to their website. Instead, it wants to subtly park the advertiser's brand in the user's consciousness and provoke a purchase down the line. More immediately, it also aims to get you to "like" the brand yourself, which then serves as a sort of all-purpose opt-in, allowing the advertiser to insert future messages into your feed.

The ads are meant to be no different than your friend's status updates -- it's all just social-media content. So there is no separation between the edit and ad sides, as they say in the magazine-publishing business -- no suspicion that there is any conflict of interest or pretense of neutrality or objectivity. So to extent what may be a useless metaphor, our identity, as it's constructed in social media, is not "pure edit" content, it's not objective but can be seen as having been co-opted by the advertising it sponsors. The self consists of the same "content" as the ads; there's no wall between the self doing the "liking" and the stuff "liked". Not surprisingly, Mark Zuckerberg strongly endorses this approach:

Zuckerberg says that ads, just like videos and news links, make it into the main stream of activity only when friends want to share them. "The most important thing for ads is that they work in the same way as everything else on the site," he says.

In other words, ads should by design be indistinguishable from non-ad content; that is, all content should be subject to the suspicion that it is an ad; that is, everything is an ad and why should that even bother you? It's the attention economy, and everything you do is just a ploy for "earning" more attention. Nothing can be for its own sake anymore. Why waste a good marketing opportunity, a chance for engagement? What else are friends for if not to leverage them?

Facebook holdouts (21 Jan 2009)

In a patronizing piece of pseudo-sage advice, Slate tech columnist Fahrad Manjoo tells us to get over ourselves and just join Facebook. Everybody's doing it, and the law of network effects demands that you follow through and get with the program.

Whenever network effects are invoked -- the more people who use something, the better it becomes for all users -- there always seems to be implied coercion. (I'm remembering my father and many others insisting that I must get a cell phone, since they all had them and expected me to be subject to the same perpetual availablility.) Often, as in Manjoo's piece, the coercion manifests as an accusation of snobbery and elitism.

I was reminded of a quote from an Onion story, "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own a Television": "I'm not an elitist. It's just that I'd much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen."
Friends—can I call you friends?—it's time to drop the attitude: There is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook. The site has crossed a threshold—it is now so widely trafficked that it's fast becoming a routine aide to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant.

Ordinary people use antiperspirant and Facebook, therefore you should too, unless you vainly think you are extraordinary. Just as, according to Manjoo, it is now "an affectation not to carry a mobile phone," it has become false and phony not to go along and get along, and maintain a Facebook account, where your self-constructed identity can be made more accessible and public domain, open to penetration by a variety of marketing efforts and data-collection initiatives. Of course, Manjoo insists that the "finely grained privacy controls" allow users to make of Facebook what they want, and insulate themselves as much as they find necessary. Somehow that network of controls, maintained ultimately by the company itself, is in Manjoo's estimation preferable to the ultimate control we can seize for ourselves by simple nonparticipation. But now Facebook is the "Wikipedia of people," (I thought Wikipedia already included people. Hmm) and failing to list ourselves is counterproductive to our own interests. And without "ambient awareness" of our friends, we will lose touch with them -- we'll cease to know them by the standards of friendship that Facebook has ushered in. Manjoo explains the New Friendship this way: "Just as you can sense his mood from the rhythm of his breathing, sighing, and swearing, you can get the broad outlines of his life from short updates, making for a deeper conversation the next time you do meet up."

But why bother meeting at all? Through the magic of ambient awareness, I can have friends on my time, while I'm multitasking. Rather than muster the concentration for a reciprocal exchange with a particular friend, I can blast out an update or a funny picture or my wry commentary on a link. (Kind of like I do on this blog -- hello, friends!) Ambient awareness seems a lot like selective attention, the ideal relationship mode for overcommitted, self-centered people. Facebook allows us to follow one another as though we are all celebrities, to be regarded admiringly from afar. Such admiration requires no direct interaction, just updating. The friend-friend relation is transformed into a celebrity-fan relation, and we flip-flop between those distinct fantasies, enjoying the vicariousness and the voyeurism on one hand, and the egomania on the other. As American Scene contributor Matt Frost puts it, "Facebook is like a breeder reactor of solipsistic fatuity."

Frost's analysis of the difference between blogging and updating Facebook is apropos:

A good blogger lives in constructive fear of two things: writing for everyone, and writing for no one. Recognizing that your boss, your kids, or even your future self will be able to read your work long after you’ve written it should impose some temperance and moderation, while the knowledge that every one of your readers could simply opt out should encourage selectivity and creativity. Facebook, however, smashes both of these healthy constraints to self-expression. The semi-captive audience of all those friends fosters the illusion that somebody cares what you had for breakfast, while the exclusivity of the network implies that your more ill-considered announcements will be charitably received. Reading the status updates of long-lost friends and acquaintances convinced me I’d like them better if they stayed lost for longer.

Ouch. But memory does a much better job of bringing to our minds what we want to think of people we have known than a Facebook page does. Facebook is an assault on memory.

People take pictures of each other (12 July 2007)

A sentence in one of Walker Percy's essays from The Message in the Bottle has had me thinking of this Kinks song: "People take pictures of each other, just to prove that they really existed." It's one of my favorite Kinks songs, partially for the perfect timing of the first snare drum hit in it but mostly for the lyrics, which would be cynical if not for the overriding sadness. (This is how I sometimes see myself.) The verses end with this: "Pictures of things as they used to be, don't show me no more, please." For a song on an album album often accused of reveling in nostalgia, it's a pretty stark sentiment. "The nostalgia is sickening," these lines seem to say, "I've wasted my life being a spectator of myself."

The sentence from the Percy essay comes after a discussion of the dilemma humans are confronted with in the modern era. Because science makes a general case out of all individual cases, and scientific discourse is regarded as the only authentic discourse, people find themselves to be inauthentic, recognized only insofar as they resemble other people. "This is why people in the modern age took photographs by the million: to prove despite their deepest suspicions to the contrary that they were not invisible." This struck me as another way of understanding the overwhelming urge people have to mediate their lives through communication technology -- recording themselves and their impressions in an endless stream of digital photos and blog posts and text messages and so on. The cell phone seems above all a portable self-mediation device, capable of recording anything and reliably putting people at a remove from whatever situation they find themselves in. In that way it works most of all like a security blanket, making sure one is never abandoned to naked reality, forced to really experience what is there and nothing more, with no ability to preserve it or project it in to the future, to put oneself in a position to consume it rather than experience it.

Percy makes a similar argument about tourism, that people surrender their sovereignty over interpreting what they experience in order to be able to consumer their own experience as something packaged, something storeable and fungible -- we may secretly prefer experience as currency rather than something ineffable and irreplaceable. Or as Percy claims, we are made vaguely uneasy by the fact that we are deprived of our own ineffable life experience, but we are powerless (due to our habit of language) from preventing ourselves from commodifying everything. "The consumer is content to receive an experience just as it has been presented to him by theorists and planners," Percy suggests. We consume representations and we remained estranged from things in themselves, and we judge experience in terms of how well its been translated into information -- by what kind of story it would make, by whether others will be jealous, etc. I wonder if there are any alternatives, though.

What is Twitter for? (19 May 2007)

What is the point of Twitter? This is not a rhetorical question; I've just been wondering ever since I read about it, in a surprising number of places -- Wall Street Journal, Wired, Lifehacker, Boing Boing, Marginal Revolution (I think). Is the goal to elevate non-descriptness to an art form (one of my personal mottoes)? Is it an extension of the idea behind happiness research, where you wear a monitor that prompts you to record your hedonic well-being every so often? Is it intended to dignify everyday life as the locus of struggle and praxis? Is it a hymn to concision? Or is it just yet another way to turn the most powerful communication tool humans have yet devised into a mirror?

The point seems to be to encourage self-disclosure by taking away the intimidating open-endedness of the blank page, but do we really need more self-disclosure? Seems like there's far too much of it already. This recent Psychology Today story, "The Decline and Fall of the Private Self," investigates what makes people want to discuss themselves in public, and it airs the usual point that electronic media is disinhibiting (more than a few drinks! the article teases).

But does disinhibition end up meaning exhibitionism? Couldn't it be that full disclosure is a compulsion that we are inhibited from refraining from? That we feel compelled to tell-all and that disinhibition could grant us the freedom to shut up?

Another common explanation for the Web blah-blahing the story touches on is the notion that we have to have media attention to validate our lives -- the idea that, for instance, if you don't have a Facebook page you aren't really in college.

A blog makes your mundane life into an electronic saga that turns you into something more than an anonymous drone in a technological and impersonal world. "You now have a story and perhaps you've even become the focus of other watchers and listeners," says Singer. "You become a character, a speaking part, in the larger theater of society." Even if you're playing the role of the loser—blogging about being unhappy and unattractive—at least you're part of the show.

Sign me up for loser, and make sure it is as public a humilation as possible -- that sounds great, very validating.

Just because there's an audience, that doesn't mean anyone's actually paying attention. And being just an extra is probably worse than being in the audience. How does desperate self-publicity make one less anonymous? Haven't these people seen MySpace? Nothing can be more anonymous than being one voice among many self-involved voices out there (I know; re: this blog); at least in imagination your self-aggrandizing story isn't suffocated by the vast competition. In fact, personal blogs and social networking sites often seem to reinforce the mundaneness of selfhood, the limited and unimaginative options we fall back on -- the size of our networks seems to merely emphasize our ultimate insignficance, as they loom disproportionately over what we can meaningfully process.

Are future generations in fact doomed to grow up with the idea that their internal monologues must be heard in order to be worth listening to themselves. Do they not recognize what they themselves are thinking until assured that someone else can see and comment on it as well? Externalizing our fantasies about our self-importance would seem to actually negate them, refute them -- it's what you would prescribe to someone who was too Walter Mittyish, even. The Psychology Today story suggests as much when it explains how confessing secrets online can be therapeutic and relieve stress.

He's right: Telling secrets has been shown to have a positive effect on the person who's doing the confessing, because keeping them requires a lot of mental work. Wegner has found that actively trying to suppress a thought (like trying not to think about a white bear) actually seems to repeatedly refresh your mental browser and bring it to mind. "It's almost as though there's a little corner of the mind that's looking for the very thing you're trying not to think about," he says. Sharing the secret, though, "unprimes" the information, freeing the mind to focus on other things and breaking the cycle of worry. By recounting their sins and lapses, the AA member and the blogger can unload pesky thoughts and mull more productive ones for the rest of the day.

Maybe so. I'm convinced though that the less I think about myself, the better I am doing. So narrating the minutiae of my worries in unsublimated form would be like a sentence to purgatory for me.