Twitter As Scoreboard, As Anomie (7 April 2011)

The Browser, an aggregator that pretty much dictates my online reading at this point, linked to this essay by Keith Lee about Twitter as gamification in action:

The Twitter system encourages following, re-tweeting and the like because it functions as a scoring system for the ego of the user. So it’s really no surprise that Twitter is generally viewed as a sort of “Happysphere” – it’s innate to the functioning of the system. Users encourage other users as part of the positive feedback loop in order to increase their own engagement statistics and push up their number of Re-Tweets, followers, etc. So despite that nothing is actually being accomplished, it generates a feeling of accomplishment.

I agree with that in principle, but my feelings are complicated by the fact that I found the link to this article on Twitter (and then promptly retweeted it). On Twitter, one can find useful information because users are incentivized to provide it, but playing on those incentives means reinforcing petty ego-scorekeeping and recessive reflexivity among those users. So is it a net win or a loss for society?

Gamification reminds me of the "hedonic treadmill," a trope in critiques of consumerism: the point is that consumers never actually achieve satisfaction through consumerism even though that is often what ideology (or "common sense") leads us to expect; instead we perpetually chase novelty and status, which turns ordinary goods into positional goods -- bearers not of utility but distinction or symbolic meaning, emblems of the scarcity pursued when sustenance is taken for granted. As Baudrillard's early work argues repeatedly, consumerism as a system turns our market behavior into an inescapable language that more or less speaks us as we speak it. It prompts us to leave use value behind and adopt an attitude of perpetual scarcity -- we don't have enough status, or we don't have enough attention to give, or we don't receive enough attention, or we don't have enough time, etc. The scoreboard mentality (which I wrote about in this 2004 column about competitive thrift-store shopping, and again in this response to an article about "shopping hackers") sustains this feeling of scarcity, inverts it, allows us to harness it as motivation.

It seems like gamification can quickly become a disguise for anomie, a ruse to make the hedonic treadmill livable. In a recent post, Will Davies cited this passage from Durkheim's Suicide, which offers a grim definition of anomie:

Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture. It has been claimed, indeed, that human activity naturally aspires beyond assignable limits and sets itself unattainable goals. But how can such an undetermined state be any more reconciled with the conditions of mental life than with the demands of physical life? All man's pleasure in acting, moving and exerting himself implies the sense that his efforts are not in vain and that by walking he has advanced. However, one does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or -- which is the same thing -- when his goal is infinity. Since the distance between us and it is always the same, whatever road we take, we might as well have made the motions without progress from the spot. Even our glances behind and our feeling of pride at the distance covered can cause only deceptive satisfaction, since the remaining distance is not proportionately reduced. To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.

Using Twitter may also condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness, for similar reasons. If we inject ourselves into the infinite pool of information with the hubristic notion that we will help organize it all, we're doomed, as our contributions only add to the muddle, to the heap of notions to be processed. If we think we are going to keep up with all the feeds worth following, we're doomed too. And precisely because we know that Twitter is often useful, we're lured into diving into the whirlpool.

A Theory of Communicative Twittering (30 Jan 2010)

I think it's safe to say we can finally all throw out our two-volume edition of The Theory of Communicative Action, as Jürgen Habermas is now Twittering, and finally -- finally -- anything worth knowing that he has to say will be properly distilled to a few pithy sentences.

Some will interpret Habermas's use of Twitter as an endorsement of the medium -- I can't tell if that's what Tyler Cowen means to imply by linking the appearance of a Habermas feed with Habermas's notion of an "ideal speech situation." I was coincidentally reading a paper called "Uniting Critical Theory and Public Policy to Create the Reflexively Defiant Consumer, " by Ozanne and Murray, which offered this explanation of the ideal speech situation:

Habermas reasoned that as we enter into dialogue with others, we anticipate that (a) others will speak so that we can understand them (i.e. the norm of comprehensibility), (b) they will communicate their true intentions (i.e. the norm of sincerity), (c) they will communicate based on a shared normative context (i.e. the norm of legitimacy), and (d) they will speak the truth (i.e. the norm of truthfulness).

If these norms are met, we can communicate without "distortion," as long as there is "general symmetry" in the ability "to select and employ speech acts."

Do Twitter's arbitrary limitations help accomplish the norms and general symmetry? It seems they do the opposite, that they serve as an alibi for distortions, using technology (and the convenience-minded brevity it inspires us to chase, in a fruitless quest to always consume more) as an excuse to drift further from the ideal situation. Though it puts anyone with steady internet access on equal terms with regard to broadcasting their messages and gathering those willing to be counted as reading those messages, and it provides an ostensibly public and broadly accessibly place in which a conversation among equals can occur. But that comes at the cost of truncating thought and curtailing its deliberative component -- the point is to concentrate one's expression or make it copious. It seems designed to reduce comprehensibility, sincerity, truthfulness in favor of the legitimacy that comes from publicity itself, from participating in a real-time expression of the zeitgeist and knowing your post may be come up a real-time search for the au courant meme or hashtag. It redirects expression toward the goal of promoting one's own timeliness. It quantifies one's sense of being relevant, and offers new ways to express existing hierarchies that subvert democratic ideals. In short, the Twitter medium is not a window through ideology; it is ideology.

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.

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.

Chitchat and tittle-tattle (24 June 2009)

Here's something suited to Nicholas Carr's Realtime Chronicles, from a chapter near the end of New Grub Street. Failed author and up-and-coming literary agent Whelpdale presents his idea for a new journal to his friend, the cynical hack journalist Milvain and his sister.

'I want to find a capitalist,' he said, 'who will get possession of that paper Chat, and transform it according to an idea I have in my head. The thing is doing very indifferently, but I am convinced it might be made splendid property, with a few changes in the way of conducting it.'

'The paper is rubbish,' remarked Jasper, 'and the kind of rubbish -- oddly enough -- which doesn't attract people.'

'Precisely, but the rubbish is capable of being made a very valuable article, if it were only handled properly. I have talked to the people about it again and again, but I can't get them to believe what I say. Now just listen to my notion. In the first place, I should slightly alter the name; only slightly, but that little alteration would in itself have an enormous effect. Instead of Chat I should call it Chit-Chat!'

Jasper exploded with mirth.

'That's brilliant!' he cried. 'A stroke of genius!'

'Are you serious? Or are you making fun of me? I believe it is a stroke of genius. Chat doesn't attract anyone, but Chit-Chat would sell like hot cakes, as they say in America. I know I am right; laugh as you will.'

'On the same principle,' cried Jasper, 'if The Tatler were changed to Tittle-Tattle, its circulation would be trebled.'

Whelpdale smote his knee in delight.

'An admirable idea! Many a true word uttered in joke, and this is an instance! Tittle- Tattle -- a magnificent title; the very thing to catch the multitude.'

Dora was joining in the merriment, and for a minute or two nothing but bursts of laughter could be heard.

'Now do let me go on,' implored the man of projects, when the noise subsided. 'That's only one change, though a most important one. What I next propose is this: -- I know you will laugh again, but I will demonstrate to you that I am right. No article in the paper is to measure more than two inches in length, and every inch must be broken into at least two paragraphs.'

'Superb!'

'But you are joking, Mr Whelpdale!' exclaimed Dora.

'No, I am perfectly serious. Let me explain my principle. I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated; that is to say, the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains and on 'buses and trams. As a rule they care for no newspapers except the Sunday ones; what they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information -- bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can't sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat.'

Jasper had begun to listen seriously.

'There's something in this, Whelpdale,' he remarked.

'Ha! I have caught you?' cried the other delightedly. 'Of course there's something in it?'

'But ----' began Dora, and checked herself.

'You were going to say ----' Whelpdale bent towards her with deference.

'Surely these poor, silly people oughtn't to be encouraged in their weakness.'

Whelpdale's countenance fell. He looked ashamed of himself. But Jasper came speedily to the rescue.

'That's twaddle, Dora. Fools will be fools to the world's end. Answer a fool according to his folly; supply a simpleton with the reading he craves, if it will put money in your pocket. You have discouraged poor Whelpdale in one of the most notable projects of modern times.'

'I shall think no more of it,' said Whelpdale, gravely. 'You are right, Miss Dora.'

Again Jasper burst into merriment. His sister reddened, and looked uncomfortable. She began to speak timidly:

'You said this was for reading in trains and 'buses?'

Whelpdale caught at hope.

'Yes. And really, you know, it may be better at such times to read chit-chat than to be altogether vacant, or to talk unprofitably. I am not sure; I bow to your opinion unreservedly.'

'So long as they only read the paper at such times,' said Dora, still hesitating. 'One knows by experience that one really can't fix one's attention in travelling; even an article in a newspaper is often too long.'

'Exactly! And if you find it so, what must be the case with the mass of untaught people, the quarter-educated? It might encourage in some of them a taste for reading -- don't you think?'

'It might,' assented Dora, musingly. 'And in that case you would be doing good!'

'Distinct good!'

They smiled joyfully at each other. Then Whelpdale turned to Jasper:

'You are convinced that there is something in this?'

'Seriously, I think there is. It would all depend on the skill of the fellows who put the thing together every week. There ought always to be one strongly sensational item -- we won't call it article. For instance, you might display on a placard: "What the Queen eats!" or "How Gladstone's collars are made!" -- things of that kind.'

'To be sure, to be sure. And then, you know,' added Whelpdale, glancing anxiously at Dora, 'when people had been attracted by these devices, they would find a few things that were really profitable. We would give nicely written little accounts of exemplary careers, of heroic deeds, and so on. Of course nothing whatever that could be really demoralising -- cela va sans dire.'

So Gissing was onto the idea for USA Today, the free Metro papers, and Twitter all at once, and anticipated the attention-span critique of modern reading habits. Technophiles would point to this probably and argue that it shows that critiques have ever complained thus, and have always been irrelevant alarmists. But I think it shows the inherent tendency of technology toward co-opting our ability to think, which after all can be such an enormous burden to us.

Twittering the revolution (10 April 2009)

This post (via 3QD) from Josh Tucker reminds that my reaction to new media like Twitter is often pretty parochial. I tend to imagine only Americans using it, and then only the sort of urban Americans who are invested in being part of the tech cognoscenti, the sort of people who need to crowdsource their afterparty plans. Tucker points out that Twitter works effectively as a low-cost walkie-talkie server for oppressed people/guerrilla groups organizing social protests.

The events unfolding in Moldova, however, suggest that internet-based social networking tools that were not even present during the original colored revolutions, such as Facebook and especially Twitter, may also be able to play a very valuable role in allowing even loosely organized opposition networks to coordinate protest activity. To the extent that a constant stream of Twitter posts increases any individual’s confidence that there will be more protestors in the street at a particular place at a particular point in time, it should also serve to lower the perceived costs of participation to potential protestors.

Foucault's Facebook (18 March 2009)

This Gawker item about the Facebook redesign offers a useful phrase for thinking about Twitterification generally: We are expected to be, or become, "omnivorous consumers of momentary trivia." Not only that, but we are expected to produce that trivia ceaselessly and eagerly. This calls to mind Foucault's ideas about power exercising itself not as repression -- that is, as forbidding us to speak or to act in certain ways -- but as permission, as a kind of broad encouragement to speak (albeit through discourses that constitute our identities along certain prescribed lines). Our participation lets power work through us, which we can experience as being exciting -- as being part of the action; we are all under surveillance, but we understand that emotionally as "Hey, we're all celebrities!" Foucault calls it "control by stimulation." This is why people seem to feel compelled to use Twitter. We want to participate, want to be counted, want to count.

I assume someone out there is working on a dissertation (or has at least posted a really incisive blog entry -- maybe among these) that does a Foucaldian analysis of social media (which I would be eager to read actually) -- it fits so well with his predictions of a panoptic society. We are spying on each other (that's certainly how it feels when someone tags me in a high school photo), and confessing ourselves to everybody else (in hourly 140-character broadcasts), and mistaking it all for entertainment consumption, ordinary leisure activities.

Social media tends to be understood as a kind of freedom to express ourselves in a new way; interactivity liberates us from one-way communication and affords us the opportunity to speak and participate. But this "freedom" can function as a kind of compulsion, as part of what Baudrillard et al. called the "fun morality." Foucault insisted that power is both decentralized (not a matter of some authority telling you what you must do) and productive (it allows more things to have a kind of social being, not fewer; creates more data, not less). In an interview in Power/Knowledge, he says, "What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse." Various modern technologies have brought about what he calls "a new economy of power" that allows "the effects of power to circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted, adapted, and 'individualized' throughout the entire social body." In other words, there is no way to sneak around power because we are basically bathing in it, breathing it in and out at all times. Twitter-style discourse is the latest instance of a social discourse that functions this way, reinforcing the compulsion to confess. The "effects of power" Foucault is talking about, I think, is a matter of our being available -- power makes us available to various social institutions so that are efforts can be harvested and our behavior channeled accordingly without our even conceiving of resistance.

Microaudiences (25 Feb 2009)

I wasn't entirely satisfied with the point I was trying to make at the end of the previous post. My dissatisfaction ties in with my thinking about Ryan Avent's point in this post responding to criticism of Richard Florida's recent Atlantic article about the future of the "creative class." Avent is puzzled by the objection to fashion-oriented innovation, regarding them as cultural goods, and concludes that "Cultural goods aren’t just a nice by-product of a modern economy. They’re the very justification for it." In other words, the reason we care at all about economic growth is to expand the quality of life, which is expressed through the ability for we in the ordinary classes to afford the ever more innovative and creative commodities made by the creative class. Avent writes, "Efficient technologies are nice, in no small part, because they allow us to cheaply or sustainably use electronics, either to work more productively (in order to spend on those frou-frout consumption goods) or to directly consume entertainment (like television or video games, which contain disturbingly high levels of frou-frou design, music, and narrative)."

I don't agree with this assessment of the effects of technology. In my view, technology seems to accelerate the rate at which we consume (while affecting the personality changes to facilitate this acceleration) so that the cycle of exchange can spin more rapidly, allowing producers to realize profit at a faster rate. Technology is like financial leverage, only on the variable of time. Without any malice, with nothing but the best intentions of bringing something new and captivating into the world, the "creative class" aids this acceleration by fueling the fashion cycle and shortening it to accommodate more trends, more memes, more retro recoveries, more design accoutrements, more obsolescence. The creative class are by definition artists who have bent their talents to commercial purposes; thus, the cultural goods they produce tend not to satisfy "real" wants in those who consume them; instead the consumption of these goods may be a defensive measure to preserve one's place on the cool continuum, to signal one's ability to keep up or keep ahead. Even if real pleasure is derived from these cultural goods, it often comes compromised -- the pleasure is imbued with positionality; it is often the pleasure of knowing more than others, of social superiority, which can mask itself in aesthetics. The relation between the creative-class cultural good producer and the consumer is not analogous to the relation between artist and audience. The latter is gratuitous; the former serves an ineluctable socioeconomic purpose.

Another problem with the creative class is that they are making cultural goods that are designed to in part supplant the creativity of the people who consume them; they abet the idea that sheer ownership of tastefully curated goods is an expression of creativity, taking us off the hook for actually doing anything more, for actually realizing our own creativity through more elaborate activity, through meaningful work undertaken seriously and ultimately geared toward adding to society's aesthetic wealth. But currently, the creative class monopolizes that process, and the ideology of cool, urban living being central to its productivity helps preserve that monopoly.

Now, to the point I was trying to make yesterday. The internet, originally, was heralded as a medium that could threaten the creative class's monopoly, undermine the networks they thrive in and open up creative and rewarding social production to a much broader swathe of society. If you buy into a Marxian utopian vision, this is ultimately what socialism is about -- overcoming the division of labor so that each person can realize their full potentialities in socially necessary and recognized work. The distinction between creative work and drudgery would be effaced. We all would have the opportunity for meaningful work and for society, in some way, to recognize our creative efforts -- wages would in essence be replaced by this creative fulfillment and recognition. This is utopian, of course, but if a "progressive" movement means anything, the end of alienation is what it would be progressing toward.

Paradoxically, we all need a sympathetic community within which to realize our individuality. Isolated, we are ciphers, even to ourselves; only as a social being do we know ourselves and become aware of how we are fulfilling our capabilities. Consumerism functions primarily by isolating us, offering us products for our self-realization in lieu of that community. These ultimately fail, leaving us with a sense that our identities are unstable, tenuous. Our connection to the community that buoys us is obscured.

If we are all to be creative and be recognized for it, we need an audience attuned to our own idiosyncratic creative production, which would thrive in a more or less pure form since it wouldn't need to be commercially viable or compete economically with other creations. The internet seems to be the technological development that could facilitate these microaudiences, and the proselytizers of the various forms of social media seem to have this in mind in their encomiums. Our social networks can potentially become the infrastructure for these the appreciative microaudiences, who will celebrate our pure expressions of our creative self (presuming these expressions can be transmitted digitally). We could be famous to fifteen people instead of for fifteen minutes. (Someone else must have used that line before.)

But therein lies the problem -- the very notion of fame. If we pursue fame as it is currently constituted in any way, our practice devolves into the familiar forms of reification, alienation, profit maximization. We replace the pleasure of the activity of work in itself with fantasies about the outcome, the rewards we imagine we'll reap in measurable notoriety. Hence, social networks don't make for microaudiences then; they seem to function like any other consumer product that caters to our fantasy life -- in this case, the fantasy serviced is that of our being celebrities like the stars in whose lives we participate vicariously through gossip and well-attenuated entertainment product. Now we can emulate them in a subtler way, by trying to maximize our social reach by amassing friends or followers and imagining they are hanging on our every update.

Of course we disavow such fantasy overtly, but it's there, fueling the drive to inform on ourselves in Twitter posts. The internet hasn't only fostered microaudiences; alongside that possibility has sprung up its neutralizing antithesis, the impossible dream of a mass audience for everyone, for ourselves. Pursuing that dream nullifies the benefits that might come from a nurturing microaudience; it is a return to isolation, a retreat into vicarious fantasy rather than a shoring up of our presence in a community. To chase that mass audience, one must adopt the commercial and entrepreneurial strategies of honing in on the common denominator. With that we are back in the realm of the creative class, and its commercial yardsticks and its competitive prerogative, its defense of its fiefdom of cool, defined as the latest novelty others can be seen chasing. To dissolve the creative class into a universal creativity, the tyranny of "cool" -- fashion as a mass-market business; trendspotting as an entrepreneurial vocation; friendship as a quantitative measure; influence as and end in itself -- must be abolished.

Telesociality (24 Feb 2009)

I've mentioned here before that Twitter seems like the perfect advertising medium; it distills all communication to the level of the slogan, making advertising messages fit right in among the messages from our friends and "followers". For Twitter to make any sense, one has to use it constantly -- so it supplies the eyeballs advertisers are after. And since it is liable to be integrated with social media, the stream of ads can be hyperpersonalized so that we end up reading them rather than filtering them out. If you think ads are just useful and timely information about how to satisfy our wants, you are probably relishing this future; if you think that ads make up an insecurity-generating discourse designed to obscure our desires from ourselves, this future is somewhat less appealing.

Anyway, I was surprised to find how many people in the ad business hate it. (But then, any right-thinking person in the ad business generally hates themselves as well.) Consider this post, by ad consultant George Parker. Or this one, titled "Twitter This You Douchenozzles!"

And, via this AdPulp post, these posts by ad exec Bob Hoffman. They are full of extremely entertaining bile and skepticism regarding the transformational potential of Twitter ("It's how the narcissistic keep in touch with the feckless") and social media generally, which he recognizes are "inherently anti-social". Noting the idiocy of Twestivals, at which the attendees "didn't have the social skills to say hello and instead communicated with each other at the event via Twitter," Hoffman argues that social media

are telesocial. The prefix 'tele' means 'happening at a distance' -- as in television, telegram, telecommunications. Social media are pseudo-personal interactions happening at a distance.

This seems a bit self-evident; really what he is saying is that social media is a form of telecommunication, not a superior replacement for it. The big innovation in this new mode of telecommunication is that it does away with real-time reciprocity.

Hoffman argues that Twitter allows you an ersatz sense of belonging:

I've always loved the promise implicit in the magazine Us.
Who is Us?
Brad and Jen and Angelique and Paris and Oprah and Brit and You. Yes, you! You are part of one big connected group of celebrities. Don't think you're special or important? Think you're a pathetic loser? Nonsense! You're one of Us! Come over here and let me give you a hug. Oh, and while you're here, that'll be 4 dollars, please.
Twitter is digital Us.

That seems right, and it fits in with the way online sociality has destroyed our sense of what makes for a realistic scale for our social being. We feel obliged to try to gain recognition on a global scale rather than a local one, and our expectations for that recognition need not be conditioned by any limitations inherent to our geographic community. That sounds like theoretical gobbledy-gook, so let me try to explain that a different way. The appeal of self-broacdasting identity online, of Twittering and being "followed," is that we can feel like celebrities and imagine the natural audience for our high jinks is the entire world rather than, say, the people who share our household or work with us or live on our block or what have you. This initially seems like a good thing, because it holds out the promise that we can craft communities ideally suited to us online rather than deal with the one we were born into in the physical world. But dealing with the contingencies of that real world may be what allows us to grow into a mature self and set realistic goals and limits and put an end to chronic dissatisfaction and restless yearning for impossibilities. If there were some online/offline balance that was easy to strike, the aggrandizing tendencies of online sociality wouldn't matter so much, only technological developments seem to be pushing in the direction of supplanting real-world socializing with online self-absorption, exploiting the desire for convenience (not having to deal with other people's crap) that is perfectly natural when the local community sets inescapable limits on our selfishness, i.e. when we can't escape a certain amount of dealing wiht other people, but becomes creepy when that limit has been eroded. It's easier to manage friendships online and treat friends as our fans than it is to make the mundane efforts of actually being friends with them -- scheduling time to spend with them and actually being present with them without multitasking.

Twitter and Newspeak (4 Feb 2009)

Yves Smith pauses from financial blogging to explain why she is skeptical of Twitter, which she likens to Orwell's Newspeak. First of all, if you haven't read the appendix to 1984, you should. The principle of Newspeak is to control how people think by emptying out the language they use for thinking. Orwell imagines some of the technical means for this would be to restrict vocabulary and simplify grammar to the point where complex thought cannot be conveyed and unorthodox thought is impossible for want of the words. (It's reminiscent of the alleged house style at Bloomberg, where the word "but" is banned.) Smith quotes this passage (among others): "And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced -- its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing." Twitter, which emulates some of the salient features of Newspeak, is of course perfect for advertising -- if you have to stop to think about what's being said, the persuasion has probably failed. But the most insidious aspect of it is how it encourages us to speak in slogans and catchphrases, to eschew logical exposition of our thoughts for a quick, allusive declaration.

Smith suggests Twitter is a technological means by which we voluntarily adopt Newspeak out of impatience with more complicated modes of discourse. Using herself as an example, she writes,

I notice how the Internet has affected how I read. I have become impatient with longer stories (unless I am on an airplane). I spend most of my time on the Internet, and the vast majority of what I read fits within the browser window. I find that has conditioned my expectations. When confronted with a longer piece (say Sunday New York Times magazine feature or New Yorker length) I find after the first page wondering if it really had to be this long, and often not finishing the piece. Five years ago, I never would have responded this way.
You can't say anything complicated or nuanced in 140 characters. I am sure readers will provide some cute counterexamples, but try explaining Plato's cave in those confines. Can't be done. You might allude to it, but you could not present it to someone who didn't know about it already. And Twitter encourages people to accept a medium that severely constrains communication, and calls a defect a virtue.

I have noticed a similar transformation in myself. It takes me much more effort to concentrate on longer pieces, and I have to print them out to have any chance. In front of a computer, my mind is always considering the alternatives, almost after each sentence I read. Smith points out how this impatience spreads to interpersonal relations:

It's one thing to take calls, check texts tweets, or the news when out and about by yourself. But it has become the norm to take them when meeting with others. That reduces the quality of the interaction and sends a message that the person you are with is merely an option, other options are ever present and must be assessed, maybe exercised.... Twitter feeds that addiction, that false sense of urgency. Most things can wait. Indeed, a lot of things are better off waiting. But we are encouraged to be plugged in, overstimulated all the time, at the expense of higher quality human relations.

Higher quality human relations take work, patience, effort to build trust and reciprocity, but they also seem to be the bedrock of human happiness. It's no wonder that the institutions of consumerism undermine those relations and offer fruitless shortcuts to intimacy that ultimately leave us dependent on technology and products that accelerate our ability to consume in search of personal meaning but never resolve our inner emptiness.

Twitter is supposed to facilitate our relationships by providing "ambient awareness" of the lives of others, but it seems more a way of persuading us to provide a constant stream of information about ourselves to those sureveilling us. In a sense, it ceases to be communication in any conventional sense; instead it reduces communication to the bleeps of a homing beacon. Twitter is a way to become one's own voluntary RFID tag.

Twitter shame (27 Jan 2009)

In Wired, writer Steven Levy admits that when he fails to update Twitter and the other social networks he participates in, he feels guilty. He loves the voyeuristic aspects of these services -- "I'm fascinated by the quirks and preferences my "friends" reveal through comments, status reports, and alerts" -- but feels his pleasure in this requires him to reveal more of his own life. Hence, he posts and inadvertently exposes more than he means to about himself: "Still, no matter how innocuous your individual tweets, the aggregate ends up being the foundation of a scary-deep self-portrait. It's like a psychographic version of strip poker—I'm disrobing, 140 characters at a time."

Twitter boosters claim that it's very natural to get into a flow of sharing, and admittedly it seems as though such sharing could conceivably promote some kind of laudable openness, a communal intimacy never before available to humankind. Or maybe such sharing is a perfected version of earlier forms of communal knowledge -- you can get the small-town recognition without the mean-spiritedness. (Call it participatory surveillance.)

But when I conducted my Twitter experiment I found that I didn't want to share. Mainly, I didn't want to posture. And I didn't really want to follow anybody. (Why would I want more small talk from people?) Nonetheless I wanted to participate. So in my latest attempt to Twitter, I tried to address my reluctance through a series of distancing techniques, writing bogus quotations of what I thought skeptics might say about me or about anyone pontificating recklessly online. Anytime I was filled with self-doubt or thought of a cynical rebuttal to something I had written earlier or had thought about writing, I tried to articulate it as a criticism of someone else and post it to Twitter. Or if I read a really good put-down, I'd appropriate it and modify it to fit my format. But in practice, this quickly threatened to become a "scary-deep self-portrait," a waste of perfectly useful self-loathing. Moreover, I wasn't sure what I was trying to accomplish by this, so I knocked it off. It was "creepy," and it's probably even creepier that I am writing about it here.

Nicholas Carr, in an astute commentary on Levy's article, suggests that when Levy feels weird about sharing, he is experiencing not guilt but shame.

Though he never names it, what Levy is really talking about here is shame. And the shame comes from something deeper than just self-exposure, though that's certainly part of it. There's an arrogance to sharing the details of one's life in public with strangers -- it's the arrogance of power, the assumption that such details somehow deserve to be broadly aired. And as for the people, those strangers, on the receiving end of the disclosures, they suffer, through their desire to hear the details, to hungrily listen in, a kind of debasement.

That pretty much captures how I feel when I am thinking about posting to Twitter: a unsettling mix of arrogance and cravenness. As Carr had suggested in an earlier post, that moment is like self-consciousness squared. And at the same time, brevity becomes the soul of smugness.

I wonder whether those young enough to take social networks for granted experience these feelings, or if they lack the subject position from which to even recognize them, name them, understand that there are alternatives. It may be a meaningless matter for them; they have missed the social opportunity for a certain kind of privacy the same way I was born too late to discover whether I had any natural aptitude with horses. They disappeared from everyday life, and so may privacy as people my age have known it. Still, it seems that with all the tools for projecting our identity online, identity becomes that much more fragile. The apotheosis of social networks seems to be a generalized anomie, millions of people shouting into a deafening wind of discourse, everyone of them friends with all the rest.

Twitter: the ultimate advertising medium (23 Dec 2008)

My personal Twitter experiment has failed miserably. I created an account and tried to post for a while; I even set it up so that I could post messages with my phone. But I discovered I had nothing to say in that forum. I didn't want to share what I was doing with the world, and I didn't have enough witticisms to keep it thriving. It was tiring trying to think aphoristically -- it turns out that most would-be aphorisms require a lot of developmental context to be comprehensible.

But Twitter seems to be slowly penetrating the mainstream, and I've been seeing more posts like this one, from AdPulp, about Twitter's usefulness as an advertising medium, as a perpetual personalized classifieds section. In many ways Twitter suits advertising perfectly -- the whole brevity thing, for one. It allows no room to develop a logical presentation of an idea, so it must work as a notification service or in marketing's preferred mode of illogical association (the paradigm that allows 30-second narratives to be built on the premise that drinking beer yields female attention, for instance). Also there's the way Twitter posts tend to wash over their audience, claiming very little of our attention and concentration but often providing a disproportionate payoff in entertainment. The terms of that wager -- the minimal amount of energy it takes to follow a Twitter feed versus the occasional reward -- makes it easy to keep Twitter humming in the background of one's life. At that point, it becomes an ideal advertising conduit, constantly notifying you of things you might have wanted to know but certainly could have lived without.

The harmony between Twitter and advertising seems so natural; it's surprising it didn't begin as an ad medium. Twitter billed itself as a crypto-blogging platform, which bathed it in Web 2.0 hype and made it seem as though it were about social interaction. This allowed it to develop the scale that would make it attractive to corporate advertisers.

Though it didn't start as an explicit marketing tool, Twitter drew on the ubiquity of advertising discourse, offering us a way to participate in it and seem to master it, harness it for our own ends. It seems to have risen to prominence by allowing its users to craft and broadcast up-to-the-minute advertisements for themselves. The posts bear with them no expectation of literary skill or substance, so no barriers of procrastination prevent us from writing them. By broadcasting your doings in real time, in clipped, urgent language, you can feel like a celebrity and live as though someone is always watching you. This provides the useful illusion of social recognition, an illusion that reciprocal following of other feeds serves to enhance.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum is also failing to Twitter. He points out that Twitter rewards only those users who use it constantly, who integrate it completely into their lives -- another reason why it's so perfect for advertising. The key for adoption is to have it be rewarding enough for users to make that total commitment. In my view, whether one will find it rewarding enough first depends on how much one enjoys pretending to be a celebrity, and then it depends if one embraces the state of permanent distraction. I suspect there is a Zen clarity to it -- one becomes totally riveted to the present, which is condensed to a stream of 140-character moments.

Fomenting narcissism (28 Sept. 2008)

A few weeks ago, a NYT Magazine article prompted me to speculate about the implications of microblogging, but I thought I should at the same time, try to use Twitter in earnest and see what it was really like. At first, I had a really hard time writing anything. I had a strong inclination to lie, basically because I didn't want to be frank about whatever it was that I was doing. Then it struck me to not mention what I was doing but instead transcribe random half-baked thoughts I may have had and use the space constraint Twitter imposes to transform them into gnomic, oracular pronouncements. This was sort of fun for a few days, and I started to get a sense of what might prompt someone to Twitter obsessively. I started to take my half-assed asides seriously. For the day or two that I was into it, I started living my life in search of snappy sentences, and this seemed like a life being lived poetically for about 24 hours, and then it just seemed totally contrived. But before that, I began to believe that I owed a report on my important thoughts to the world, that it was imperative that I share. I had this notion that people were out there eager to have bite-size pieces of my mind, and I was anxious to be consumed this way, as if my ideas were like those little Halloween candy bars. In other words, Twitter started to stoke my egomania (even more than mere blogging already does).

It may be that I don't have a robust enough online network, or enough online-offline confluence to make Twitter work as anything other than a chance for me to try to make pithy, oblique observations. I'm not, for example, going to Twitter my whereabouts in the hopes that someone will find me in the real world, and I am not going to Twitter some personal dilemma I'm confronted with and expect someone out there to suggest solutions. And I am not interested in reading anyone else's Twitters. I have too many blog posts to catch up with as it is, and yes, I know they are short and easily consumable, but it just seemed pointless. I would only be interested in the ones that were cryptic, and then these would take time to decipher that I could be spending reading up on, say, the bailout follies instead.

But the main reason I quit twittering is because it made me feel like a phony; I found myself trying to think of clever ways to describe what I was "doing." Being honest seemed beside the point, and the more I twittered the less representative my posts were of who I actually think I am, and I started to think that some new dangerous personality I could become was starting to manifest. I didn't want to get stuck there.

Anyway, I was reminded of this by this recent study about social networking and narcissism, which found "Narcissism predicted (a) higher levels of social activity in the online community and (b) more self-promoting content in several aspects of the social networking Web pages." The main upshot is that one might be able to indentify narcissists through their online profiles. As one account of the study describes it:

Some researchers in the past have found that personal Web pages are more popular among narcissists, but Campbell said there's no evidence that Facebook users are more narcissistic than others.
"Nearly all of our students use Facebook, and it seems to be a normal part of people's social interactions," Campbell said. "It just turns out that narcissists are using Facebook the same way they use their other relationships – for self promotion with an emphasis on quantity of over quality."
Still, he points out that because narcissists tend to have more contacts on Facebook, any given Facebook user is likely to have an online friend population with a higher proportion of narcissists than in the real world. Right now it's too early to predict if or how the norms of online self-promotion will change, Campbell said, since the study of social networking sites is still in its infancy.

I wonder, though, if maintaining online profiles doesn't foment narcissism. If narcissism is a matter of privileging quantity over quality, then online networks -- which are mainly a means of processing friendships more efficiently and with less spontaneity and more command-and-control through personal press releases on profile pages -- would seem to provide fertile ground for narcissism to bloom. They encourage us to regard the pseudo-reciprocity of frequent updating for the actual commitments of friendship. This seems like the slippery slope to full-blown self-centeredness, in which sharing oneself seems an acceptable substitution for the ability to listen.

By providing the illusion of a world out there waiting for you to upload new photos and provide an urgent update about what you are doing right this instant, it certainly prompts self-aggrandizement. When I was Twittering, the imagined audience prompted me to post when I had nothing to share and encouraged me to invent something. And sometimes I log on to Facebook and feel jealous of all this activity logged there that my "friends" have been engaged in. I wonder if I just started dumping stuff into my Facebook page, it will make me feel more important, more connected, more interesting. I think that making a broadcast makes me register in some indelible way on the universe, and I suddenly have the moment of illusory control over my own fame, my own significance -- and it seems so easy. Just cough up a clever line, or post an ambiguous photo, and just like that, I have (in my own mind, imagining the minds of others) intriguing.

Social networks and microblogging allow us to always have a stage on which to perform our personality successfully, and the allure of making that performance instead of engaging life more directly becomes pretty powerful -- spending time thinking about what to Twittter instead of actually doing things that one might report about.

Broadcasting the self (8 Sept. 2008)

This Sunday, the NYT Magazine had a piece by Clive Thompson about Facebook's news feed feature, which broadcasts a user's profile activity as a stream of syndicated updates to selected people in the user's network. Thompson explains how the feature initially raised privacy concerns, but then users seized upon it as a convenient new form of maintaining intimacy without the nuisance of actual interaction. One could keep up with friends the way one keeps up with blogs in Google Reader -- hurriedly, casually. (This morning I plowed through 100 posts, all of them seemingly about the atrocious unemployment reports and the long-anticipated government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.) He then relates the phenomenon to microblogging services like Twitter and other applications that automatically chronicle and broadcasts one's activities.

The applications -- sometimes with our voluntarily assistance, sometimes not -- do a good job of transforming our life into digital information that is easy to manipulate, heightening our "presence" online and make our shadowy self there seem more concrete. We fix our identity in a forum of public surveillance, to make it seem more authentic, more fixed. The price we pay for this is that identity becomes delineated by the categories most conducive to digital transmission: Twitter epigrams; lists of our favorite bits of culture; short videos of ourselves; etc.

As we generate more data that is captured and rebroadcast, we seem to take on more substance and become more significant -- especially considering the way in which that data is processed to direct targeted advertising appeals and other forms of recognition from our actual friends our way. It's easy to imagine a scenario when the recognition from the ad groups supplants our interest in friends' approval. Marketers can be better than friends because they will pay us -- as the buzz marketing firms already do to spread idle chatter about products. At Mind Hacks, Vaughan Bell posits the possibility that advertisers will find the most popular people within specifically defined networks and pay them to host relevant ads on their profiles.

You could identity the most influential people in the 18-25 age bracket, or the most influential in a small town, or the most influential people that like a certain type of movie. Online networks can then sell advertising space ranked by influence, like Google sells adwords based on popularity. Better still, it gives a quantified way of sponsoring highly selected people. You could be the David Beckham of 18-35 year old salsa fans in your town, sponsored to put the latest Latin sounds on your playlist.

Like celebrities, each of us will have an individual worth to advertisers, a price on our profile, and we will be the commodity that technology companies sell to marketers.

So Facebook and like technologies will allow us to leverage our friends into sponsorships, and our sponsors will perhaps become our real friends, when our former friends perhaps begin to regard us as just an extension (maybe useful, maybe not) of that commercial world. And it's worth nothing too -- "better still," as Bell says -- that we will all be in competition with one another to establish our dominance within networks and secure the ad dollars that end up being pumped into it. Maybe this kind of alpha-dog thing happens automatically, but the incursion of commercial interests will make the competition explicit, introduce the wonders of capitalist "creative destruction" to our social lives, which have heretofore been organized around achieving continuity for our self-concept.

The constant updates, according to the sociologists Thompson consults, supply those interested in tracking us with a simulation of "ambient awareness": "It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye." When conducted via online updates (or phone text messages), it requires persistence to achieve this effect; it works cumulatively: No one message is important, no specific thought communicated is important, but the totality presents a character in the round, and engages us, proponents claim, the same way fiction does. "Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel." If all parties are sharing their streams of data, this would seem to convey the reciprocity we presume is necessary for friendship, but the medium may interfere with that, encouraging us to embark on a kind of vicarious intimacy, an intimacy once removed that allows us to inject the drama and fantasy and daydreaming we can indulge in when lost in a novel.

If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships. Psychologists have long known that people can engage in “parasocial” relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people. Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial — peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.

We basically transform ourselves through the technologies into a form of character-driven light programming. To the friends to whom we broadcast our updates, we become a moment's distraction, a breath of novelty, an entertainment channel. Thompson points out that the "ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some." With this sort of audience out there, we can generate our own Truman Shows with the tool available and then we have the opportunity to check our ratings in terms of the online attention we have generated and then adjust the sort of life we live accordingly. The users that Thompson interviews express a sense of achieving a deeper intimacy with those they track:

The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.”

Perhaps, but what is characterized as "raw" here may merely be the effect of the immediacy of the medium on the same surface that friends always present to one another, and the layer that is now being simulated and broadcast. And parasocial relationships become the template for friendship generally; what was once spontaneous and intimate grows more and more caluclated, contrived to produce certain effects, drive traffic, entice readers, supply the simulacrum of intimacy that the medium enables. The habit of Twitter and other digital updates may change the nature of what we think to offer in friendship while eroding the space that once felt sheltered, the personal realm that was autonomous and spontaneous as opposed to designed and self-consciously elaborated. Thompson offers this grim assessment: "participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world."

One of the Twitterers that Thompson interviews relates that "Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle. I know more about more people than ever before.” That seems a good thing, but Thompson is rightly suspicious about the changes "friendship" must have undergone to enable non-social to suddenly feel comfortable being social. The technology may allow for introverted or indifferent people to be more interested in the lives of other people, but perhaps only because it lets us be voyeurs and fantasists.

Thompson notes that social networks and microblogs allow people to increase their number of "weak ties": "loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently 'friended' them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist." But the weak ties may come at expense of deeper ties, especially because they are more instrumental, more tangibly useful -- a wide network will yield you helpful information to deal with a broken refrigerator, or a sketchy transmission mechanic, or a wireless router problem or what have you. That is information whose worth immediately becomes evident.

The "usefulness" of friendship, though, is more difficult to assess; it doesn't bear being measured, and in fact may perhaps be defined as precisely that which can't be measured. It's not in the number of texts a person has sent you. Not to get too mystical (or mystifying) but friendship is elsewhere, outside the numbers. It is in the friction of real presence, in the accumulation of pregnant moments shared doing nothing specific, simply recognizing the otherness of the person you are with and committing to hold on to that sense and respect it. Thompson finds that some Twitter users experience it as serial meditation: "The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to 'know thyself,' or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness." But perhaps our problem is a surfeit of self-reflection, a morbid preoccupation with knowing ourselves, making identity. Moments with friends may those moments where we are in a deep mode of self-forgetting, and the last thing we will want is Twitter interrupting, bringing us back to ourselves, forcing us to yet again to express our identity at a remove, alienating us from the present moment and urging us to accept, in lieu of the present, the perpetual archive of mediated utterances we've come up with instead of living.

More on the promotional culture (10 June 2008)

Little did I know that when I referred to the emerging "promotional culture" in my post the other day that there was already a book called The Promotional Culture, which was mention in this recent Toronto Star piece by Ryan Bigge about the "mass underground" (via Rob Walker). The premise is that the internet has eroded the former foundations of subcultures -- the obscure information and insider cultural goods that are now immediately accessible for those who are search savvy. I still forget sometimes that nothing in the realm of pop culture is really rare anymore, and that anything I might have wondered about before but never thought I would find is now probably out there: weird albums I'd read about, SCTV sketches I remembered dimly, Situationist experiments in redubbing movies with Marxist dialogue. This stuff was once currency in subcultural circles; I'm not sure if merely knowing about such things and linking to them has any real value for one's underground credibility at this point. Is that a good thing? Or will subcultures disappear without their basis in a certain kind of material scarcity?

Bigge cites Dick Hebdige, author of Subculture: The Meaning of Style, who argues that subcultures allow people to acquire social recognition without securing it at the expense of conformity and subordination. According to Hebdige, "it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched. It is a hiding in the light." Of course, nonconformity itself has been a mainstream value since the 1960s, so that muddles things some; since aggressive individuality is a pervasive value, we are all encouraged to become subcultures of one, to play a double game with ourselves in which we forget the mass-market origins of the things we acquire to project our "unique" identities while relishing in the comfort of partaking of brands and trends that are much, much larger than ourselves.

This same logic plays through things that were formerly underground and exempt. They once supplied a refuge from the pressure of popularity. But if the underground is mass, then subcultures will no longer be content to be sub-anything, and they are subject to same impetus to achieve recognition on a much broader scale and permit participation in something much bigger.

The mass underground distorts the equilibrium suggested by Hebdige's hiding in the light. Because built into the technology and logic of the mass underground is the possibility of blowing up huge. As the title of an October 2006 New Yorker article about YouTube fame suggests, "It Should Happen to You."

The same would seem to apply to social networks, which implicitly pressure users to expand their base and sacrifice quality to quantity. This is the essence of the promotional culture -- the possibility of a large audience (and of measuring one's own success in reaching it through site meters and such) becomes a requirement to pursue it.

For Andrew Wernick, a professor at Trent University, the problem is that our desire for attention and fame is leeching into the creative groundwater. As he writes in his 1991 book Promotional Culture: "When a piece of music, or a newspaper article, or even an academically written book about promotional culture, is fashioned with an eye to how it will promote itself – and, indeed, how it will promote its author and distributor, together with all the other producers these named agencies may be identified with – such goods are affected by this circumstance in every detail of their production."

The internet obviates barriers imposed by natural limits in the world, by where we can be in time and space. Without those barriers, we are likely to overwhelm ourselves and fail to recognize the aggregate harm of something that seems positive in incremental doses. Our ability to pay attention suffers as the amount of attention we have to pay fails to meet even a fraction of the things demanding it. We fail to engage with any one thing because the awareness of all the other things crying out for attention is always so palpable. Inevitably, people will begin to impose on themselves arbitrary limits for how many friends they'll have on Facebook or how many gigs of music they'll have, or they will choose services that impose limits for them: a social network that lets you have only 10 friends. The craving for artificial limits is probably what gives Twitter its devotees.

Could there be an arbitrary limiting system that could restore the potency of formerly underground cultural goods? Could a samizdat system of cultural exchange emerge in the absence of necessity? Bigge argues that "the next subculture or underground movement will not be discovered behind the door of a secret handshake speakeasy somewhere in East Berlin, but in the center of Alexanderplatz; hiding in plain sight, everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously." Perhaps. It's optimistic to think anonymity can trump anomie. But I find myself reminded of the empty promise of the silent rave. I'm afraid that all activities in the public sphere will tend toward technologically enabled narcissism and people will be too preoccupied with their own potential fame to want to sustain close-knit connections of a subculture, weaving together with a select few others so tightly as to block out the isolating glare of the spotlight. Subcultures were a line of defense against a corrosive mainstream culture and ideology that seemed to trivialize things we wanted to care about; now it seems as though few people find the mainstream culture sufficiently dangerous, because it presents itself as fragmented and user-driven. Or perhaps we've succeeded in convincing ourselves that there is nothing at stake in resisting the mainstream except one's own ego, which can be gratified much more comfortably through collaboration.