While writing a response to this comment on my last post, I decided I might as well just make my response into a new post. Heres' the comment:
Interesting post, Paul, and I was glad to finally read your conclusion to such an ambitious project. I also have quite a lot of doubts about the quality of human interaction over the internet, but that said, I'm not sure I totally followed your arguments.
You wrote that cynics "would point out that, in the long history of mankind (and especially in the last 300 years), almost every human interaction can be characterized according to political economy." Though your obviously sincere belief in the benefit of actual human communication seems on one hand to separate you from the cynics as you characterize them, but then you say quite categorically "It is undoubtedly the case that there is no online service which actively promotes communication in the sense I've talked about it above." You argue that all the best social sites do is to actively promote networking without standing too much in the way of communication. But I ask, why must the two be mutually exclusive? Moreover, if you truly believe that the real empathy necessary to true dialogue exists, then why must networking always be slave to the selfish inclinations of the political economy? What if the networking is for the purpose of solving a larger problem?
On the same note, you say "it is clear to me that communication...has been largely ignored, harried, or even battled against by the political economy of the last 300 or so years." The past 300 years more so than any other time in human history? How so? It seems to me that true dialogue has forever been a harried, ignored phenomenon happening most often in secret or on the unimportant fringes of this or that power. Has the overwhelming increase in availability to education and information (putting aside debates over the quality of the two) not helped at all? Have all those benefits been so outweighed by modernity's correlated evils? I guess I would have to say that despite all the very pertinent and important evils you've pointed out in these posts, I think the past 300 years have been a net positive in terms of dialogue.
Finally, you twice picked out the number 300 years. What has been so especially bad about the past three centuries in your opinion?
Phew! Sorry for the lengthy comment! Keep up the good work.
P.S. Ok final question, I swear: where do thoughtful comments on blogs stand in the networking v. communication discussion?
And here's my response:
Thanks again for the thoughtful comment DC. I'll do my best to address some of it briefly.
On your first set of questions, I'm not sure whether communication and networking have to be mutually exclusive, per se. I do think, however, that networking has a kind of addictive effect, simplifying our view of interaction to the point that communication becomes undesirable because of how much more effort it is than merely "poking" people and writing on their walls. It doesn't necessarily actively discourage communication, on a small scale, but on a large scale, while it increases the number of contacts we make, it might decrease the depth of those contacts.
You do make a good point about the problem-solving potential of networks. The ability to connect to people with disparate abilities and specialties allows us to more easily put together teams of problem solvers than any time in the past. There's no question that the Internet's ability to help us find things, people, knowledge, and so on is a boon to all people.
You're right that dialogue has always been harried, of course, and largely ignored society wide. However, despite its myriad corruptions, the intellectual and academic world used to hold dialogue in much higher esteem than it is now. There's no question that the scene has changed in the ways you describe (better access to information and more widespread education) in the modern world, but I guess I would argue that dialogue is a process, and not an outcome, and that in our modern world we're in the stranglehold of outcomes. That is, while there are way more "smart" people, who know more about more things, and who are specialized experts in their fields, I think the proportion of educated men and women who are generalists and process-oriented enough to talk about actual ideas and not just the jargon-infused specialized knowledge of their discipline is woefully small. To my mind, the web encourages, rather than discourages, that kind of (what I consider) intellectually deadly specialization.
That's not to say specialization doesn't work. It does. It drives technological progress, it leads to multi-disciplinary teams of problem solvers, and so on. It's just, having been on such teams, seen such progress, there's a distinct lack of real communication, a failure to ask why we do what we do, or what kind of progress is really desirable. Increasingly it seems to me that we're not only afraid, but maybe even incapable of having that conversation.
As for 300 years, it's partially an arbitrary number. More than anything, I'm pointing to the inception of a modern capitalistic-economy and the coming of romanticism, which ultimately lead to the myopic, every-man's-truth-unto-himself philosophy of post-modernism. I also wanted to encompass the industrial revolution, because it was the time in which the philosophy of "progress" became so powerful. But, again, I could just have easily picked out another time, because the actual past is not nearly so broken into discrete eras as our narrative of it is.
As for your ps, that's a good question to which I don't really have an answer. I often ask myself "why do I write this blog?" Passionate as I am about dialogue, there's little question that I'm as trapped by the medium as writers have been throughout history. The written word can't respond to a question,* to paraphrase Plato, even if I can respond post-facto. Though there is tremendous value in writing, reading, responding, and so on, I don't know if it's fully a dialogue, in that we're stuck exchanging declarative and/or interrogative monologues.
* At a certain point, of course, I might as well critique the shortcomings of books as Plato does. Really, the lesson is, with any technology (like books) there are benefits, which we usually champion, and drawbacks, which we too easily ignore. Unfortunately, in addition to this optimism, we often fail to ask questions like "why do we need this?" or "how should we best use it?"
Then again, much as I prefer dialogue, the alternative is for you and I not to communicate in any form, since you're halfway around the world from where I am if I'm not mistaken. But I think there's an analogy to be made with distance education here. Yes, it's better than nothing, but that doesn't mean we should rest on our proverbial laurels and say "oh how great a thing is the Internet!" I'd instead challenge you, myself, and any other thinking person to think bigger: how might we make the Internet a venue for communication and dialogue?
It's that last question that inspired this series of posts, and I think it's a sticky and difficult question, because it's not so simple as "what kind of website" could accomplish that goal. And really, I'm talking about the effort to bring real dialogue online - to code it into some experience, and not merely to make it possible or to not make it impossible - requires confronting the commercial, informational, and networked aspects of the Internet experience.
Showing posts with label communication. Show all posts
Showing posts with label communication. Show all posts
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Interrogating the Internet, Part Four (and Conclusion): Networking
Let's get all the chips on the table. Networking is the purpose of this series. Or, more accurately, the distinction between networking and communication. You see, in the early days of the web I feel like there was a rampant philosophical debate about the value of this new technology. What would dominate the web, the question went, information or communication? In one camp firmly sat Google and Yahoo, the early bastions of information search. In the other camp sat AOL and, to a lesser degree, Microsoft (with MSN and Hotmail leading the charge), services that connected people through instant messaging and email.
In the years that have followed it has become clear that the Internet had room - perhaps infinite room - for both communication and information, along with the added and not-totally-unexpected third wheel of commerce. In my last few posts, I've talked - in broad and inexpert strokes - about commerce and information. Because we are increasingly natives of the digital landscape, I felt it was worthwhile to point out the obvious, to challenge us to remember aspects of the Internet that we now take for granted or ignore. For example, information on the web is rarely unbiased, even when it strives to be, and is sometimes wildly inaccurate. At the very least, search engines do little or nothing to filter results for reliability or accuracy, rather choosing to filter based on more arcane algorithmic criteria like "relevance" as determined by computational linguistics or, more simply, the criteria of the dollar.
That money underpins everything on the Internet, even free networking services like Facebook or Twitter, is another important reminder. Increasingly we feel entitled, I suspect, to the long range (in time and space) contact that social networking has made possible. That the services are "free" only increases our sense of entitlement. But they are not free, no less than a phone, a radio, or a television is. That does not, in itself, corrupt said services any less than charging for a book corrupts the book, but corruption is not the point. The point is that we forget too easily that Facebook is not just a website, but a company trying to make a profit. For day-to-day use, that may not impact us much, but it has implications for a philosophical discussion of the platform.
Before we venture too far down that road, however, let's return to communication and networking. What do I mean by each of those words, and why have I gone to pains to distinguish between them? I'll start with networking, since it's the easier of the two to capture.
By "networking," I mean making connections. When two people network, they try to assess each other's position, and contribute resources - intellectual, physical, or otherwise - to each other in an effort to be of mutual use in the effort to meet emotional, psychological, physical, or professional needs. Networking is, in short, a kind of poking at each other and shoving stuff (whether tangible or intangible) in each other's direction. Building a network, then, is about creating a vast web of people to whom one can go for such assistance, and from whom one expects requests of a similar nature.
The beauty of the Internet - as opposed to previous incarnations of the same concept, all the way down to bartering at the local swap meet - is that it makes the whole thing both asynchronous and distributed. Asynchrony is important because the exchange between one node on a network and another need not be simultaneous, so I might borrow emotional support from a friend or borrow a potentially useful business contact from a mentor without needing to engage in immediate payback. Granted, this asynchrony of networked exchange is not unique to the Internet, as the phrase "I owe you one" indicates, but it is particularly strong on the web because no face-to-face meeting is even necessary. "I owe you one" is built into the structure, rather than something that has to be said after an arrangement has been reached.
That networks are distributed on the Internet is by far the more revolutionary and vital of its differences with traditional networks. What I mean by "distributed" is simply this: it is not important that the person who "owes you one" be the person who pays you (metaphorically) back. In a sufficiently advanced network redundancies abound. "You and Connor have 82 friends in common." If you, then, help out Connor by connecting him with a potential employer, it is not fully necessary, in a world where networks are distributed, asynchronous, and - a third important piece that warrants mention, if not discussion - instantaneous, for Connor to provide a similar service to you. It is taken as granted that he might, and maybe even will try to do so, but when you have needs that become paramount, you will not seek Connor on the basis of him owing you, but rather only if he is the member of your network most able to help you.
As a result, in a distributed network, there is ample commerce, but it is not always direct. A cynic would point out that, in the long history of mankind (and especially in the last 300 years), almost every human interaction can be characterized according to political economy. The debits and credits of that political economy are what made up the networks of the past. That cynic, then, in order to understand the Internet and the kind of networking that the web has created, would have to decentralize the political economy, shifting it away from the exchange of capital (be it fiscal, emotional, spiritual, or whatever) from one person to another and towards a new model where exchange remains individualized, but the reserves, so to speak, are more communal.
Despite that shift from individual to community, however, the Internet is far from socialist or communist. It is innately capitalist, innately concerned with individualism and personal gain. Modern networking is in some sense the epitome of the capitalistic notion of the "invisible hand," where each person looking out for himself allows things to work out for the good of everyone, where the rising tide does, indeed, lift all boats.
Wither communication, in that picture? Before I can answer that, I need to distinguish communication from networking. Communication, as I imagine it, is an actual exchange of ideas, an effort not merely to assess the material or emotional needs of oneself and one's interlocutor, but to actually understand the spirit and mind of that person. Communication is what happens when neither party in a conversation is looking out for his own advancement or the advancement of the other, but rather the shared effort of the two people is dialogue: a talking, thinking, and reasoning through difficult questions about meaning, purpose, and truth. A modern cynic will say that such a conversation is not possible, because we're all too myopic and too self-absorbed to achieve the level of objectivity necessary for such a conversation to occur. Moreover, said modernist (or, really, post-modernist) will argue that never in history have such conversation occurred; they have only seemed to do so because of the narrowness of the perspectives of those culturally hegemonic (or, at least, culturally isolated) societies in which conversations are said to have happened.
I suppose, on some level, the capacity for real empathy and, thereby, true dialogue is an article of faith. Once convinced that such a thing does not exist, it is impossible to be persuaded otherwise, because the opinion itself precludes any evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, I believe firmly that such communication can and does happen. Indeed, while this blog is hardly dialogic, in that I write all of these posts by myself, at its heart is the belief in ideas and communication, despite my doubts that such is possible over the Internet.
Which leads me to the end point of this series of posts. Twitter and Facebook are two of the most successful and revolutionary services on the Internet. We might also lump in email, skype, Linkedin, or any of a number of other networking services. Regardless, however, we will be talking about networking. It is undoubtedly the case that there is no online service which actively promotes communication in the sense I've talked about it above. My question is, is there any service that does not, actually, actively prevent communication, in favor of networking? What's more, is it possibly the case that some networking services begin to trick us into believing that we are communicating when we are actually networking?
Those are questions to which I do not have answers, even if I pose them rhetorically (as if I do have answers). Regardless, it is clear to me that communication - or, we might also say, learning (a connection that might require a whole post to itself) - have been largely ignored, harried, or even battled against by the political economy of the last 300 or so years. That dialogue has held on - if only in a few places - is a testament to how important it is to actual human progress. That it has not yet, to my knowledge, broken through in the digital world is a testament to how powerful the myopic impulse for networking (we might as well say, for personal gain) is.
I leave with an analogy. Networking is not merely with people, but with ideas. Increasingly, we are concerned with what ideas link to other ideas. While there is evidence that learning happens largely through making connections, and that building networks of thoughts and definitions and concepts is an important part of thinking critically, I wonder when we synthesize. Building a network - of people or ideas - does not seem innately good or bad, any less than a blueprint or a scaffold for a building is innately functional. Rather, the question is what do we do with that network. If we merely connect ideas (or people) to each other, but never bore into them, try to discern their meaning and import, try to improve ourselves and our world, what good is that network? It is as if we have made a blueprint for a building but have never actually built it, instead going from room to imaginary room, thinking about how we might decorate them, instead of how we might live in them.
In the years that have followed it has become clear that the Internet had room - perhaps infinite room - for both communication and information, along with the added and not-totally-unexpected third wheel of commerce. In my last few posts, I've talked - in broad and inexpert strokes - about commerce and information. Because we are increasingly natives of the digital landscape, I felt it was worthwhile to point out the obvious, to challenge us to remember aspects of the Internet that we now take for granted or ignore. For example, information on the web is rarely unbiased, even when it strives to be, and is sometimes wildly inaccurate. At the very least, search engines do little or nothing to filter results for reliability or accuracy, rather choosing to filter based on more arcane algorithmic criteria like "relevance" as determined by computational linguistics or, more simply, the criteria of the dollar.
That money underpins everything on the Internet, even free networking services like Facebook or Twitter, is another important reminder. Increasingly we feel entitled, I suspect, to the long range (in time and space) contact that social networking has made possible. That the services are "free" only increases our sense of entitlement. But they are not free, no less than a phone, a radio, or a television is. That does not, in itself, corrupt said services any less than charging for a book corrupts the book, but corruption is not the point. The point is that we forget too easily that Facebook is not just a website, but a company trying to make a profit. For day-to-day use, that may not impact us much, but it has implications for a philosophical discussion of the platform.
Before we venture too far down that road, however, let's return to communication and networking. What do I mean by each of those words, and why have I gone to pains to distinguish between them? I'll start with networking, since it's the easier of the two to capture.
By "networking," I mean making connections. When two people network, they try to assess each other's position, and contribute resources - intellectual, physical, or otherwise - to each other in an effort to be of mutual use in the effort to meet emotional, psychological, physical, or professional needs. Networking is, in short, a kind of poking at each other and shoving stuff (whether tangible or intangible) in each other's direction. Building a network, then, is about creating a vast web of people to whom one can go for such assistance, and from whom one expects requests of a similar nature.
The beauty of the Internet - as opposed to previous incarnations of the same concept, all the way down to bartering at the local swap meet - is that it makes the whole thing both asynchronous and distributed. Asynchrony is important because the exchange between one node on a network and another need not be simultaneous, so I might borrow emotional support from a friend or borrow a potentially useful business contact from a mentor without needing to engage in immediate payback. Granted, this asynchrony of networked exchange is not unique to the Internet, as the phrase "I owe you one" indicates, but it is particularly strong on the web because no face-to-face meeting is even necessary. "I owe you one" is built into the structure, rather than something that has to be said after an arrangement has been reached.
That networks are distributed on the Internet is by far the more revolutionary and vital of its differences with traditional networks. What I mean by "distributed" is simply this: it is not important that the person who "owes you one" be the person who pays you (metaphorically) back. In a sufficiently advanced network redundancies abound. "You and Connor have 82 friends in common." If you, then, help out Connor by connecting him with a potential employer, it is not fully necessary, in a world where networks are distributed, asynchronous, and - a third important piece that warrants mention, if not discussion - instantaneous, for Connor to provide a similar service to you. It is taken as granted that he might, and maybe even will try to do so, but when you have needs that become paramount, you will not seek Connor on the basis of him owing you, but rather only if he is the member of your network most able to help you.
As a result, in a distributed network, there is ample commerce, but it is not always direct. A cynic would point out that, in the long history of mankind (and especially in the last 300 years), almost every human interaction can be characterized according to political economy. The debits and credits of that political economy are what made up the networks of the past. That cynic, then, in order to understand the Internet and the kind of networking that the web has created, would have to decentralize the political economy, shifting it away from the exchange of capital (be it fiscal, emotional, spiritual, or whatever) from one person to another and towards a new model where exchange remains individualized, but the reserves, so to speak, are more communal.
Despite that shift from individual to community, however, the Internet is far from socialist or communist. It is innately capitalist, innately concerned with individualism and personal gain. Modern networking is in some sense the epitome of the capitalistic notion of the "invisible hand," where each person looking out for himself allows things to work out for the good of everyone, where the rising tide does, indeed, lift all boats.
Wither communication, in that picture? Before I can answer that, I need to distinguish communication from networking. Communication, as I imagine it, is an actual exchange of ideas, an effort not merely to assess the material or emotional needs of oneself and one's interlocutor, but to actually understand the spirit and mind of that person. Communication is what happens when neither party in a conversation is looking out for his own advancement or the advancement of the other, but rather the shared effort of the two people is dialogue: a talking, thinking, and reasoning through difficult questions about meaning, purpose, and truth. A modern cynic will say that such a conversation is not possible, because we're all too myopic and too self-absorbed to achieve the level of objectivity necessary for such a conversation to occur. Moreover, said modernist (or, really, post-modernist) will argue that never in history have such conversation occurred; they have only seemed to do so because of the narrowness of the perspectives of those culturally hegemonic (or, at least, culturally isolated) societies in which conversations are said to have happened.
I suppose, on some level, the capacity for real empathy and, thereby, true dialogue is an article of faith. Once convinced that such a thing does not exist, it is impossible to be persuaded otherwise, because the opinion itself precludes any evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, I believe firmly that such communication can and does happen. Indeed, while this blog is hardly dialogic, in that I write all of these posts by myself, at its heart is the belief in ideas and communication, despite my doubts that such is possible over the Internet.
Which leads me to the end point of this series of posts. Twitter and Facebook are two of the most successful and revolutionary services on the Internet. We might also lump in email, skype, Linkedin, or any of a number of other networking services. Regardless, however, we will be talking about networking. It is undoubtedly the case that there is no online service which actively promotes communication in the sense I've talked about it above. My question is, is there any service that does not, actually, actively prevent communication, in favor of networking? What's more, is it possibly the case that some networking services begin to trick us into believing that we are communicating when we are actually networking?
Those are questions to which I do not have answers, even if I pose them rhetorically (as if I do have answers). Regardless, it is clear to me that communication - or, we might also say, learning (a connection that might require a whole post to itself) - have been largely ignored, harried, or even battled against by the political economy of the last 300 or so years. That dialogue has held on - if only in a few places - is a testament to how important it is to actual human progress. That it has not yet, to my knowledge, broken through in the digital world is a testament to how powerful the myopic impulse for networking (we might as well say, for personal gain) is.
I leave with an analogy. Networking is not merely with people, but with ideas. Increasingly, we are concerned with what ideas link to other ideas. While there is evidence that learning happens largely through making connections, and that building networks of thoughts and definitions and concepts is an important part of thinking critically, I wonder when we synthesize. Building a network - of people or ideas - does not seem innately good or bad, any less than a blueprint or a scaffold for a building is innately functional. Rather, the question is what do we do with that network. If we merely connect ideas (or people) to each other, but never bore into them, try to discern their meaning and import, try to improve ourselves and our world, what good is that network? It is as if we have made a blueprint for a building but have never actually built it, instead going from room to imaginary room, thinking about how we might decorate them, instead of how we might live in them.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
What It Is, What It Isn't, What It Does, What It Doesn't: Interrogating the Internet, Part One
What, really, is the Internet all about?
That's probably not a great question, since, hey, we all use the Internet all the time for all kinds of things. Part of the point is that it's not really about anything, it's just there. The digital world is a part of our lives in much the way that eating, or, if it's not quite at that level, making insurance payments is.
Looking at the most visited - according this list to Quantcast.com - there are a few focal points of our web-lives. There are three primary categories that jump out to me:
1) Information
2) Networking
3) Shopping
If human experience is richer than these three things, it's not reflected in our Internet usage. Almost every top-50 website fits into one or more of these three categories.* I could go through the entire list, but I think each of those categories has a site or two that capture the essence. You can probably guess what those sites are, but I'll go ahead and tell you anyway.
* The exceptions are interesting (all rankings at time of writing, by the way). A part of me thinks that microsoft.com at 11 and adobe.com at 22 are none-of-the-above, though information kind of works. Microsoft's presence on the list owes to Windows, of course, and Adobe's to Flash. GoDaddy.com checks in at 31, despite being a kind of meta-website. In some sense it fits under networking, in some sense shopping, but really it's just a web-hosting site. It's place this high - way above any other hosting service, owes to their aggressive Danica Patrick advertising campaign. Monster.com is kind of reverse shopping, at 34. Pandora rates 36th, the first website explicitly designed around artistic purposes, even if it also has a financial goal as well. There are a few others further down, but you get the idea.
The top information site (and top overall site) is, of course, Google. Quantcast estimates approximately 150 million users per day. Google, however, as a search engine, is not an information provider so much as, well, a search engine. The other end of the information spectrum is the 7th most visited site on the Internet, Wikipedia. At over 70 million daily users, Wikipedia may be outstripped by other search sites like MSN and Yahoo, but is the most visited pure information site on the web.
The top networking sites, of course, are Facebook and Twitter. Youtube has an argument, as well, but it straddles the line between information and networking a bit too much for it to really count as either, to my mind. Moreover, Youtube is less a networking or informational destination than a hosting service for videos hosted or linked to from Twitter and Facebook or found on Google. That it is a part of Google only goes to show. Anyway, Facebook attracts about 140 million users a day, Twitter nearly 100 million.
Shopping is the least robust of these three categories, with Amazon's 70 million users and eBay's 60 million falling well short of Facebook, even when combined.
Now none of that is likely to be news to you, but I wanted to get the numbers on the table as a kind of primer for the picture I want to paint. I've been trying to grapple with the questions in the lamentably verbose title of this post, lately. What, really, is the Internet? What does it do? Is there, maybe, a way that we're using - or, more to the point, failing to use - it that might be particularly good. And I don't mean good, as in useful, I mean good, as in good. For all the talk about the meritocracy of the web, about the role of Twitter in revolutions, about the educational opportunities afforded by technology, I can't help but wonder whether there's an untapped potential, a chance to do more than make the things we do easier, a chance to actually make the world better?
There's an argument to be made - and a good one, I think - that it has done exactly that, and not just because is it difficult to separate "easier" from "better." Even so, there's something missing, something essential to real human progress. You see, despite the presence of the Internet, there's still so much social injustice, so much corruption and greed, so many profound and profoundly dangerous flaws in human society. It is not, of course, possible for technology to address the bits of human nature that make us cruel, ignorant, or both, but that doesn't mean that we people who believe in trying to create a better world ought not to use whatever tools are at our disposal.
With that in mind, I want to talk about these categories of our digital lives, in my next few posts. What do each of them represent in us, why are they so important, and what potential is there for something better. I am leery of this project exactly because it requires me to take a moral stand, to say that certain actions or ways of thinking might be morally superior to others. That's always a slippery slope, because it can be hard to separate real, fundamental morality from cultural and societal norms. Nevertheless, without any moral compass, without a vision for a better world in which "better" actually has meaning, what's really the point of anything at all?
In any case, I don't presume to have answers, here, but part of my sense of "good" is that it has more to do with the way in which we do things than what we do. That is, I may not know what the right thing to do is, but if I act out of compassion, empathy, and a desire both for the joy of myself and others, it doesn't really matter whether I do the "right" thing by some social, cultural, or religious standard. What matters to me is the intentionality, not the action (really, this is just a repackaging of my preference for process over outcome).
Before we launch into actually looking at the biggest, best, most popular, most successful sites on the Internet, then, as we try to understand what it is that they are and aren't, and what it is that they do and don't do, I want to bring up two points as a wrap to this introduction. First, I've chosen "networking" over "communication" for a reason that I'll discuss more when I write on those sites. Suffice to say, I'm not convinced that communication actually does happen on the Internet. Or, if it does, it does so in spite of, and not because of, the web-based services that currently exist.
Secondly, I want to make a point about intentionality on the part of designers of extremely successful websites. There is no question that the entrepreneurs that founded Facebook and Google had good intentions. There is also no question that they were a part of a system where the purpose of any product is not the betterment of mankind, but profit. Were they motivated by money? Are they now? Does it even matter? Those are questions I won't try to answer now, but I do want to share a true parable, that may not totally make sense now, but hopefully will be helpful in my next few posts.
Back when I was a music assistant at St. John's, we would make the students in the class write a Gregorian chant. That sounds more complicated than it is, because what it really means is "write a melody." So students wrote melodies. The problem is, students wrote melodies that didn't follow the rules of chant. Rather, their melodies followed the rules of tonal harmony. They would begin with a tonic, they would move to a subdominant, they would reach a tension point on a dominant, and they would return to the tonic. Of course, the melodies didn't really do this, because they were melodies, but were you to write a harmony to those students' melodies, it would, almost always, be a I-IV-V-I chord progression.
What is interesting is not that this happens - after all, each and every one of us has heard thousands of I-IV-V-I progressions in our lives - but that it happened most with the people who didn't know the language of tonal harmony. Completely non-musical (even tone-deaf) students would write perfectly prim and proper tonal harmonic melodies. It was stunning.
The analogy, then, I'll phrase as a question. What happens when young entrepreneurial people who don't know the language of business, but are trying to create a service based upon the perceived needs of people (and not their own desire for fame or profit, at least not first and foremost) actually go and build those services? What, actually, ends up being the purpose of those projects?
That's probably not a great question, since, hey, we all use the Internet all the time for all kinds of things. Part of the point is that it's not really about anything, it's just there. The digital world is a part of our lives in much the way that eating, or, if it's not quite at that level, making insurance payments is.
Looking at the most visited - according this list to Quantcast.com - there are a few focal points of our web-lives. There are three primary categories that jump out to me:
1) Information
2) Networking
3) Shopping
If human experience is richer than these three things, it's not reflected in our Internet usage. Almost every top-50 website fits into one or more of these three categories.* I could go through the entire list, but I think each of those categories has a site or two that capture the essence. You can probably guess what those sites are, but I'll go ahead and tell you anyway.
* The exceptions are interesting (all rankings at time of writing, by the way). A part of me thinks that microsoft.com at 11 and adobe.com at 22 are none-of-the-above, though information kind of works. Microsoft's presence on the list owes to Windows, of course, and Adobe's to Flash. GoDaddy.com checks in at 31, despite being a kind of meta-website. In some sense it fits under networking, in some sense shopping, but really it's just a web-hosting site. It's place this high - way above any other hosting service, owes to their aggressive Danica Patrick advertising campaign. Monster.com is kind of reverse shopping, at 34. Pandora rates 36th, the first website explicitly designed around artistic purposes, even if it also has a financial goal as well. There are a few others further down, but you get the idea.
The top information site (and top overall site) is, of course, Google. Quantcast estimates approximately 150 million users per day. Google, however, as a search engine, is not an information provider so much as, well, a search engine. The other end of the information spectrum is the 7th most visited site on the Internet, Wikipedia. At over 70 million daily users, Wikipedia may be outstripped by other search sites like MSN and Yahoo, but is the most visited pure information site on the web.
The top networking sites, of course, are Facebook and Twitter. Youtube has an argument, as well, but it straddles the line between information and networking a bit too much for it to really count as either, to my mind. Moreover, Youtube is less a networking or informational destination than a hosting service for videos hosted or linked to from Twitter and Facebook or found on Google. That it is a part of Google only goes to show. Anyway, Facebook attracts about 140 million users a day, Twitter nearly 100 million.
Shopping is the least robust of these three categories, with Amazon's 70 million users and eBay's 60 million falling well short of Facebook, even when combined.
Now none of that is likely to be news to you, but I wanted to get the numbers on the table as a kind of primer for the picture I want to paint. I've been trying to grapple with the questions in the lamentably verbose title of this post, lately. What, really, is the Internet? What does it do? Is there, maybe, a way that we're using - or, more to the point, failing to use - it that might be particularly good. And I don't mean good, as in useful, I mean good, as in good. For all the talk about the meritocracy of the web, about the role of Twitter in revolutions, about the educational opportunities afforded by technology, I can't help but wonder whether there's an untapped potential, a chance to do more than make the things we do easier, a chance to actually make the world better?
There's an argument to be made - and a good one, I think - that it has done exactly that, and not just because is it difficult to separate "easier" from "better." Even so, there's something missing, something essential to real human progress. You see, despite the presence of the Internet, there's still so much social injustice, so much corruption and greed, so many profound and profoundly dangerous flaws in human society. It is not, of course, possible for technology to address the bits of human nature that make us cruel, ignorant, or both, but that doesn't mean that we people who believe in trying to create a better world ought not to use whatever tools are at our disposal.
With that in mind, I want to talk about these categories of our digital lives, in my next few posts. What do each of them represent in us, why are they so important, and what potential is there for something better. I am leery of this project exactly because it requires me to take a moral stand, to say that certain actions or ways of thinking might be morally superior to others. That's always a slippery slope, because it can be hard to separate real, fundamental morality from cultural and societal norms. Nevertheless, without any moral compass, without a vision for a better world in which "better" actually has meaning, what's really the point of anything at all?
In any case, I don't presume to have answers, here, but part of my sense of "good" is that it has more to do with the way in which we do things than what we do. That is, I may not know what the right thing to do is, but if I act out of compassion, empathy, and a desire both for the joy of myself and others, it doesn't really matter whether I do the "right" thing by some social, cultural, or religious standard. What matters to me is the intentionality, not the action (really, this is just a repackaging of my preference for process over outcome).
Before we launch into actually looking at the biggest, best, most popular, most successful sites on the Internet, then, as we try to understand what it is that they are and aren't, and what it is that they do and don't do, I want to bring up two points as a wrap to this introduction. First, I've chosen "networking" over "communication" for a reason that I'll discuss more when I write on those sites. Suffice to say, I'm not convinced that communication actually does happen on the Internet. Or, if it does, it does so in spite of, and not because of, the web-based services that currently exist.
Secondly, I want to make a point about intentionality on the part of designers of extremely successful websites. There is no question that the entrepreneurs that founded Facebook and Google had good intentions. There is also no question that they were a part of a system where the purpose of any product is not the betterment of mankind, but profit. Were they motivated by money? Are they now? Does it even matter? Those are questions I won't try to answer now, but I do want to share a true parable, that may not totally make sense now, but hopefully will be helpful in my next few posts.
Back when I was a music assistant at St. John's, we would make the students in the class write a Gregorian chant. That sounds more complicated than it is, because what it really means is "write a melody." So students wrote melodies. The problem is, students wrote melodies that didn't follow the rules of chant. Rather, their melodies followed the rules of tonal harmony. They would begin with a tonic, they would move to a subdominant, they would reach a tension point on a dominant, and they would return to the tonic. Of course, the melodies didn't really do this, because they were melodies, but were you to write a harmony to those students' melodies, it would, almost always, be a I-IV-V-I chord progression.
What is interesting is not that this happens - after all, each and every one of us has heard thousands of I-IV-V-I progressions in our lives - but that it happened most with the people who didn't know the language of tonal harmony. Completely non-musical (even tone-deaf) students would write perfectly prim and proper tonal harmonic melodies. It was stunning.
The analogy, then, I'll phrase as a question. What happens when young entrepreneurial people who don't know the language of business, but are trying to create a service based upon the perceived needs of people (and not their own desire for fame or profit, at least not first and foremost) actually go and build those services? What, actually, ends up being the purpose of those projects?
Monday, April 18, 2011
The Language of Degree and Kind in Baseball and Life
This post is also available - with pictures and dancing bears - at Pitchers and Poets. I lied about the bears.
When we construct our little narratives to explain the strange things we see every day, we tend to lump our world into broad categories. Actions are "good" or "bad," "smart" or "dumb." People are "tall" or "short," "happy" or "sad." Sporting events are "entertaining" or "boring." Politicians are "liberal" or "conservative." And so on, a veritable smörgåsbord* of quotated and contrary descriptors. Here at Nicht Diese Tone, of course, we think this stuff is all hogwash. Most of the time, when you're confronted with a duality, it's very probable that you're oversimplifying things. While that oversimplification may be a real time saver - indeed, our ability to do so with such verve and expertise might very well be a key part of our relative evolutionary success - it can also be extremely dangerous.
* Much to my surprise and pleasure, my spell check added the umlaut and the circle thingy over the a.
Much as I'd love to illustrate the point with something profound and socially meaningful, my April-addled mind can't help but turn to baseball as a perfect locus for the issue. The advantage of baseball over things like, say, politics or morality are numerous. The chief reasons, however, are only two: 1) baseball is far less contentious than politics or morality* and 2) baseball is much, much, much easier to quantify, which will help to illustrate the point.
* This is not, strictly speaking, true, as the recent Dodgers-fan led assault against a Giants fan - leaving the man in a coma - attests. Nevertheless, it's much easier for most of us to put aside our sporting-related differences than our political ones.
In particular I want to look at the beloved home of my beloved (and, as of this writing, 12-3) Colorado Rockies, the notorious Coors Field. Coors Field is, in our dualistic narratives, a "hitter's haven." It's a miraculous spa where batting averages go to recover and ERAs go to die, a slugger's wet dream and a scrappy, replacement-level slap hitter's salvation. Otherwise insignificant careers have been forged (Neifi Perez, Juan Pierre), mediocre major leaguers have been saved (Preston Wilson, Kurt Manwaring), over-the-hill sluggers reborn (Jason Giambi), stars made into superstars (Todd Helton, Larry Walker), and aspiring pitchers wrecked (Mike Hampton, Denny Neagle, Pedro Astacio, Daryl Kile, Bret Saberhagen, Greg Harris, and on and on) by its thin air and its cavernous outfield. In the popular narrative of Coors Field, it is an almost mystical place, one man's Heaven and another's Hell, a Miltonian paradox.
Until the advent - and advent is exactly the right word - of the capital-H Humidor, playing at Coors Field was like stepping into a video game. Every decent hitter would hit .350 and slug 40 or 50 homers, as if controlled by some over-obsessive teenager on his X-Box. It was so easy, scores were routinely closer to football (or even basketball) proportions than proper baseball ones.
The Humidor, of course, changed all of that, transforming Coors Field from Bichette's Paradiso to the upper echelons of Purgatorio instead.* No longer a panacea for ailing bats, it became, instead, a kind of minor boost along the lines of many other so-called hitter's parks. Suddenly pitchers with mediocre stuff like Jason Jennings and Jeff Francis could throw complete game shutouts, and Rockies 8-hole hitters stopped hitting above .300. The narrative transformed, enough that Coors Field and Humidor became opposing watchwords, simultaneously an excuse to disparage Rockies hitters for their advantages and mock pitchers for their crude, cigar-inspired handicap.
* I will not apologize for the Dante reference, even though it is also a terrible pun.
Undoubtedly you can tell what I'm going to say, but I'll say it anyway. It's all a bunch of sensationalist nonsense. Because we like to explain the world through clean, discrete, and ultimately meaningless categories Coors Field is painted as a "hitter's park." And it is. The problem is, it's only a marginally better place to hit than anywhere else in baseball. It is, by degree, a better environment for hitters than, say, the Ballpark at Arlington or Fenway Park, but we have created a narrative where it is fundamentally different in kind. Coors Field is a magical place in that narrative, even if its (post-humidor) Park Factor of roughly 115 means that only 15% more runs are scored there than the average stadium (let alone other good hitter's parks).*
* The pre-humidor PF for Coors was, again roughly, 125. Big? Yes. Infinite? Not quite.
This "difference in kind" thinking is responsible for the hullabaloo about the Rockies cheating by storing some balls in the humidor, while keeping others in the dry mountain air in case of late-inning emergency. The difference between the pre-humidor 25% increase in runs and the post-humidor 15% increase in runs is, of course, only 10%. Since, even at Coors, most teams average less than one run an inning, the difference between using the non-humidor balls and the humidor balls in the final inning of a game comes out to somewhere around one extra Rockies run every month (which, we can assume, would lead to maybe one extra win over the course of the entire season). That's a real difference in degree, of course, but that's not the narrative we hold dear.
Instead, as last season drew to a close, the Rockies were accused of cheating, their successes at home pinned on a vast late-inning conspiracy. With humidorized baseballs, the story went, the Rockies were a normal baseball team, capable of scoring runs, yes, but also capable of striking out, hitting into double plays, and regularly stranding runners who reached third with no one out. Bring out non-humidor balls, however, and the Rockies became unstoppable, a force not merely capable of destroying even the best of pitchers, but indeed destined to overcome any deficit, no matter how large. To this way of thinking, the difference between the humidor and non-humidor baseballs was not 10% more runs, but rather "win" instead of "loss." The whole picture became about differences in kind (wins and losses) instead of differences in degree (15% more runs than average and 25% more).
The same, of course, is true about pre-humidor Coors. That Park Factor of 125 is big. Really big. Big enough that the Rockies routinely had one of the worst offenses in Major League Baseball during the early 2000s, and yet were mistakenly believed to have one of the best. But, even with a Park Factor that large, the difference remains one of degree and not kind. While the cumulative effect of a PF of 125 leads to the kind of mis-evaluation that makes Neifi Perez look like an actual Major League baseball player, that is only because the baseball season is 162 games long, and because the actual difference between Albert Pujols and, say, Aaron Miles is much, much, much, much smaller than we usually believe.* Another way of reading, then, that Park Factor of 125 is this: teams that would score 4 runs a game elsewhere scored 5 at Coors. Suddenly that doesn't seem nearly so insane as the narrative of "hitter's paradise" made it sound.
* While Pujols certainly hits more homers than scrappy middle infielders, and by a long shot, his unreal career high in Wins Above Replacement is 10.9. That's epically, historically great. It's also 11 wins out of 162 games, or about 6.8% of the season. I'll let you decide: difference in kind, or difference in degree?
Once our narratives have been constructed, we reinforce them with the stainless steel of confirmation bias. When the Mets come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Shea Stadium (or their new digs, Citi Field), we think of it as a great comeback. When the Rockies come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Coors, we think of it as Coors Field up to its old tricks. A 12-11 slugfest at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is the result of bad outings from both teams' pitching staffs. A 12-11 slugfest at Coors Field is the result of the absurd ballpark. The special category of "Coors Field" explains and is the cause of all offense in the Mile High City, while elsewhere it's just normal baseball.
Now don't get me wrong, and allow me to reiterate my point one more time. Coors Field does matter. It used to inflate scoring by 25%, and now inflates scoring by 15%. The Rockies, on the whole, will come from behind to win in the bottom of the ninth more often than other teams. But only very, very slightly more often. The difference is one of degree: the Rockies will score 23 late inning runs for every 20 that a comparable offensive team scores, thanks to playing at Coors. The problem is, our narratives, our categories, our confirmation biases all conspire to make every single run we see at Coors a product of the park, and not of the million other things that go on in a baseball game.
But wait, I'm not done yet. We can apply the same logic to steroids (gasp). While there may be a categorical difference between Barry Bonds, All Time Home Run Champion and Barry Bonds, Great Hitter, we tend to forget that we don't even know exactly how many extra home runs Bonds hit because he used steroids. And we can't know. What's more, we don't know who else benefited, and to what degree. What we do know, however, is that the easiest thing to do is to look at the picture and to discount any player who had a peak season during the "steroid era" as a "cheater," whose whole body of offensive work is attributable exclusively to his steroid use. Rather than imagining that steroids help a player become X% better, we see steroids as being the difference between "good" and "bad," or "great" and "good." We can't even begin to suppose, in our absolutist narrative, that Bonds may well have hit 700+ home runs even without steroids. No, every single home run he mashed is tainted, cheap, unfair. They categorically, absolutely, definitively do not count.
Is that right, though? My answer is no. Of course the steroids issue is a big deal precisely because we do not and cannot know exactly what the effect is, but to imagine that the effect is categorical instead of incremental is absurd. Even if players hit twice as many home runs because of steroids, they didn't hit infinitely times as many. And I think that would be easier to accept if our categories hadn't also been violated. Barry Bonds is not merely a guy who hit X% more homers, but rather is the Home Run King, both in terms of career and single season jacks. Those categories carry far more weight for us than numbers do.
To return to where we started, there's a good reason we think in categories instead of increments, kind instead of degree. It helps us survive. It's better to assume that the unusual ripple in the tall grass we see is dangerous (it might be a tiger) than to assume that said ripple is only marginally more pronounced than usual. In nature, nuance leads to destruction. That's no excuse to turn away from more nuanced thinking, however. If anything, it's an exhortation towards the opposite. That we like to see things as either categorically good or categorically bad makes us easy to persuade and, as a result, hoodwink. If, for example, a politician speaks eloquently to our absolutist moral sensibilities, we're quick to cast our vote in his favor. In the process, we forget that the difference between him and his opposition might not be categorical, but rather incremental, that there are perhaps a range of (non-linear) possible solutions to any given problem instead of two diametrically opposite ones.
The narrative of absolute, dichotomous categories is an extremely dangerous one exactly because it is beautiful. Coors Field as "hitter's haven," human beings as fundamentally good (or bad, as the debate goes), politicians as liberal or conservative, such characterizations make it easier to think, easier to live, easier to write. Poetry may owe itself to complexity, but on some level it also owes itself to simplicity: without a sense of Good and Evil, Joy and Misery, how do we understand No Second Troy? Without the narrative of great plays or bad ones, how do we appreciate an unrepeatable Tulowitzki play in the hole?* The possibility that the narrative value of categories is ultimately empty - of a kind of brute, practical use, but devoid of substantial, metaphysical meaning - is what drives the anti-statistics crowd of baseball fans mad. The reliance upon and manipulation of categories is what makes so many religions so powerful, and - along with hefty doses of confirmation bias - it is what makes Fox News and MSNBC so persuasive to so many Americans.
* Another little pun for which I will not apologize.
Ah, there I go breaking my own rules. You see, I too am talking in categories, in differences in kind instead of degree. The notion of diametric opposites, the need for clear categories like Good and Bad cannot be, if we are to challenge it, innately and fundamentally Bad. To say so would undermine the argument. The problem is, every single word we read is a category, every single idea a kind of absolute. We can deconstruct and deconstruct, and then reconstruct and reconstruct, and what we'll end up with is words that stand for something, some category. Words that can never be truly specific, for true specificity would require a new word every second, every thought, every sentence. Communication, as much as miscommunication, is built on categories.
So what is there to do? Uncomfortable though it may be, I believe it remains useful to deconstruct, to analyze, to see where differences of kind actually are differences in degree, even though every difference is, in the end, actually both. To my mind, we do not need to destroy the narratives of politics, religion, morality, or, most importantly (of course), baseball. We need, instead, to dive into them, to see where they come from and why, and then to reconstruct them in some new form so that we can once again communicate. Analysis and synthesis stand together, it turns out. Like any set of supposed opposites, they actually are more alike than disparate. Is there an endpoint to all of this analyzing and synthesizing, a point at which narrative and myth turn into Truth? Maybe, but probably not. Instead, it seems to me that the very act of trying to understand, of insisting upon being a learner, an asker of questions, a thinker, a skeptic (though we might also insist on being ignorant, a provider of answers, allowed to zone out, and a believer) is at the heart of what it is to be human.
When we construct our little narratives to explain the strange things we see every day, we tend to lump our world into broad categories. Actions are "good" or "bad," "smart" or "dumb." People are "tall" or "short," "happy" or "sad." Sporting events are "entertaining" or "boring." Politicians are "liberal" or "conservative." And so on, a veritable smörgåsbord* of quotated and contrary descriptors. Here at Nicht Diese Tone, of course, we think this stuff is all hogwash. Most of the time, when you're confronted with a duality, it's very probable that you're oversimplifying things. While that oversimplification may be a real time saver - indeed, our ability to do so with such verve and expertise might very well be a key part of our relative evolutionary success - it can also be extremely dangerous.
* Much to my surprise and pleasure, my spell check added the umlaut and the circle thingy over the a.
Much as I'd love to illustrate the point with something profound and socially meaningful, my April-addled mind can't help but turn to baseball as a perfect locus for the issue. The advantage of baseball over things like, say, politics or morality are numerous. The chief reasons, however, are only two: 1) baseball is far less contentious than politics or morality* and 2) baseball is much, much, much easier to quantify, which will help to illustrate the point.
* This is not, strictly speaking, true, as the recent Dodgers-fan led assault against a Giants fan - leaving the man in a coma - attests. Nevertheless, it's much easier for most of us to put aside our sporting-related differences than our political ones.
In particular I want to look at the beloved home of my beloved (and, as of this writing, 12-3) Colorado Rockies, the notorious Coors Field. Coors Field is, in our dualistic narratives, a "hitter's haven." It's a miraculous spa where batting averages go to recover and ERAs go to die, a slugger's wet dream and a scrappy, replacement-level slap hitter's salvation. Otherwise insignificant careers have been forged (Neifi Perez, Juan Pierre), mediocre major leaguers have been saved (Preston Wilson, Kurt Manwaring), over-the-hill sluggers reborn (Jason Giambi), stars made into superstars (Todd Helton, Larry Walker), and aspiring pitchers wrecked (Mike Hampton, Denny Neagle, Pedro Astacio, Daryl Kile, Bret Saberhagen, Greg Harris, and on and on) by its thin air and its cavernous outfield. In the popular narrative of Coors Field, it is an almost mystical place, one man's Heaven and another's Hell, a Miltonian paradox.
Until the advent - and advent is exactly the right word - of the capital-H Humidor, playing at Coors Field was like stepping into a video game. Every decent hitter would hit .350 and slug 40 or 50 homers, as if controlled by some over-obsessive teenager on his X-Box. It was so easy, scores were routinely closer to football (or even basketball) proportions than proper baseball ones.
The Humidor, of course, changed all of that, transforming Coors Field from Bichette's Paradiso to the upper echelons of Purgatorio instead.* No longer a panacea for ailing bats, it became, instead, a kind of minor boost along the lines of many other so-called hitter's parks. Suddenly pitchers with mediocre stuff like Jason Jennings and Jeff Francis could throw complete game shutouts, and Rockies 8-hole hitters stopped hitting above .300. The narrative transformed, enough that Coors Field and Humidor became opposing watchwords, simultaneously an excuse to disparage Rockies hitters for their advantages and mock pitchers for their crude, cigar-inspired handicap.
* I will not apologize for the Dante reference, even though it is also a terrible pun.
Undoubtedly you can tell what I'm going to say, but I'll say it anyway. It's all a bunch of sensationalist nonsense. Because we like to explain the world through clean, discrete, and ultimately meaningless categories Coors Field is painted as a "hitter's park." And it is. The problem is, it's only a marginally better place to hit than anywhere else in baseball. It is, by degree, a better environment for hitters than, say, the Ballpark at Arlington or Fenway Park, but we have created a narrative where it is fundamentally different in kind. Coors Field is a magical place in that narrative, even if its (post-humidor) Park Factor of roughly 115 means that only 15% more runs are scored there than the average stadium (let alone other good hitter's parks).*
* The pre-humidor PF for Coors was, again roughly, 125. Big? Yes. Infinite? Not quite.
This "difference in kind" thinking is responsible for the hullabaloo about the Rockies cheating by storing some balls in the humidor, while keeping others in the dry mountain air in case of late-inning emergency. The difference between the pre-humidor 25% increase in runs and the post-humidor 15% increase in runs is, of course, only 10%. Since, even at Coors, most teams average less than one run an inning, the difference between using the non-humidor balls and the humidor balls in the final inning of a game comes out to somewhere around one extra Rockies run every month (which, we can assume, would lead to maybe one extra win over the course of the entire season). That's a real difference in degree, of course, but that's not the narrative we hold dear.
Instead, as last season drew to a close, the Rockies were accused of cheating, their successes at home pinned on a vast late-inning conspiracy. With humidorized baseballs, the story went, the Rockies were a normal baseball team, capable of scoring runs, yes, but also capable of striking out, hitting into double plays, and regularly stranding runners who reached third with no one out. Bring out non-humidor balls, however, and the Rockies became unstoppable, a force not merely capable of destroying even the best of pitchers, but indeed destined to overcome any deficit, no matter how large. To this way of thinking, the difference between the humidor and non-humidor baseballs was not 10% more runs, but rather "win" instead of "loss." The whole picture became about differences in kind (wins and losses) instead of differences in degree (15% more runs than average and 25% more).
The same, of course, is true about pre-humidor Coors. That Park Factor of 125 is big. Really big. Big enough that the Rockies routinely had one of the worst offenses in Major League Baseball during the early 2000s, and yet were mistakenly believed to have one of the best. But, even with a Park Factor that large, the difference remains one of degree and not kind. While the cumulative effect of a PF of 125 leads to the kind of mis-evaluation that makes Neifi Perez look like an actual Major League baseball player, that is only because the baseball season is 162 games long, and because the actual difference between Albert Pujols and, say, Aaron Miles is much, much, much, much smaller than we usually believe.* Another way of reading, then, that Park Factor of 125 is this: teams that would score 4 runs a game elsewhere scored 5 at Coors. Suddenly that doesn't seem nearly so insane as the narrative of "hitter's paradise" made it sound.
* While Pujols certainly hits more homers than scrappy middle infielders, and by a long shot, his unreal career high in Wins Above Replacement is 10.9. That's epically, historically great. It's also 11 wins out of 162 games, or about 6.8% of the season. I'll let you decide: difference in kind, or difference in degree?
Once our narratives have been constructed, we reinforce them with the stainless steel of confirmation bias. When the Mets come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Shea Stadium (or their new digs, Citi Field), we think of it as a great comeback. When the Rockies come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Coors, we think of it as Coors Field up to its old tricks. A 12-11 slugfest at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is the result of bad outings from both teams' pitching staffs. A 12-11 slugfest at Coors Field is the result of the absurd ballpark. The special category of "Coors Field" explains and is the cause of all offense in the Mile High City, while elsewhere it's just normal baseball.
Now don't get me wrong, and allow me to reiterate my point one more time. Coors Field does matter. It used to inflate scoring by 25%, and now inflates scoring by 15%. The Rockies, on the whole, will come from behind to win in the bottom of the ninth more often than other teams. But only very, very slightly more often. The difference is one of degree: the Rockies will score 23 late inning runs for every 20 that a comparable offensive team scores, thanks to playing at Coors. The problem is, our narratives, our categories, our confirmation biases all conspire to make every single run we see at Coors a product of the park, and not of the million other things that go on in a baseball game.
But wait, I'm not done yet. We can apply the same logic to steroids (gasp). While there may be a categorical difference between Barry Bonds, All Time Home Run Champion and Barry Bonds, Great Hitter, we tend to forget that we don't even know exactly how many extra home runs Bonds hit because he used steroids. And we can't know. What's more, we don't know who else benefited, and to what degree. What we do know, however, is that the easiest thing to do is to look at the picture and to discount any player who had a peak season during the "steroid era" as a "cheater," whose whole body of offensive work is attributable exclusively to his steroid use. Rather than imagining that steroids help a player become X% better, we see steroids as being the difference between "good" and "bad," or "great" and "good." We can't even begin to suppose, in our absolutist narrative, that Bonds may well have hit 700+ home runs even without steroids. No, every single home run he mashed is tainted, cheap, unfair. They categorically, absolutely, definitively do not count.
Is that right, though? My answer is no. Of course the steroids issue is a big deal precisely because we do not and cannot know exactly what the effect is, but to imagine that the effect is categorical instead of incremental is absurd. Even if players hit twice as many home runs because of steroids, they didn't hit infinitely times as many. And I think that would be easier to accept if our categories hadn't also been violated. Barry Bonds is not merely a guy who hit X% more homers, but rather is the Home Run King, both in terms of career and single season jacks. Those categories carry far more weight for us than numbers do.
To return to where we started, there's a good reason we think in categories instead of increments, kind instead of degree. It helps us survive. It's better to assume that the unusual ripple in the tall grass we see is dangerous (it might be a tiger) than to assume that said ripple is only marginally more pronounced than usual. In nature, nuance leads to destruction. That's no excuse to turn away from more nuanced thinking, however. If anything, it's an exhortation towards the opposite. That we like to see things as either categorically good or categorically bad makes us easy to persuade and, as a result, hoodwink. If, for example, a politician speaks eloquently to our absolutist moral sensibilities, we're quick to cast our vote in his favor. In the process, we forget that the difference between him and his opposition might not be categorical, but rather incremental, that there are perhaps a range of (non-linear) possible solutions to any given problem instead of two diametrically opposite ones.
The narrative of absolute, dichotomous categories is an extremely dangerous one exactly because it is beautiful. Coors Field as "hitter's haven," human beings as fundamentally good (or bad, as the debate goes), politicians as liberal or conservative, such characterizations make it easier to think, easier to live, easier to write. Poetry may owe itself to complexity, but on some level it also owes itself to simplicity: without a sense of Good and Evil, Joy and Misery, how do we understand No Second Troy? Without the narrative of great plays or bad ones, how do we appreciate an unrepeatable Tulowitzki play in the hole?* The possibility that the narrative value of categories is ultimately empty - of a kind of brute, practical use, but devoid of substantial, metaphysical meaning - is what drives the anti-statistics crowd of baseball fans mad. The reliance upon and manipulation of categories is what makes so many religions so powerful, and - along with hefty doses of confirmation bias - it is what makes Fox News and MSNBC so persuasive to so many Americans.
* Another little pun for which I will not apologize.
Ah, there I go breaking my own rules. You see, I too am talking in categories, in differences in kind instead of degree. The notion of diametric opposites, the need for clear categories like Good and Bad cannot be, if we are to challenge it, innately and fundamentally Bad. To say so would undermine the argument. The problem is, every single word we read is a category, every single idea a kind of absolute. We can deconstruct and deconstruct, and then reconstruct and reconstruct, and what we'll end up with is words that stand for something, some category. Words that can never be truly specific, for true specificity would require a new word every second, every thought, every sentence. Communication, as much as miscommunication, is built on categories.
So what is there to do? Uncomfortable though it may be, I believe it remains useful to deconstruct, to analyze, to see where differences of kind actually are differences in degree, even though every difference is, in the end, actually both. To my mind, we do not need to destroy the narratives of politics, religion, morality, or, most importantly (of course), baseball. We need, instead, to dive into them, to see where they come from and why, and then to reconstruct them in some new form so that we can once again communicate. Analysis and synthesis stand together, it turns out. Like any set of supposed opposites, they actually are more alike than disparate. Is there an endpoint to all of this analyzing and synthesizing, a point at which narrative and myth turn into Truth? Maybe, but probably not. Instead, it seems to me that the very act of trying to understand, of insisting upon being a learner, an asker of questions, a thinker, a skeptic (though we might also insist on being ignorant, a provider of answers, allowed to zone out, and a believer) is at the heart of what it is to be human.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
On Facebook
I don't have a Facebook account.
I know, that's impossible, right? I'm a technology-savvy, blog-friendly, twenty-something in 2010 (almost 2011) who doesn't use the biggest social networking site in the world? And not just that, Facebook is the second most visited site on the entire Internet, behind only Google. How is it possible that yours truly doesn't even have an account?
In some ways my refusal to join Facebook is merely stubbornness. I didn't get one before, and I haven't had one yet, and I don't see any need to create one now. In other words, it's just an irrational computation of habit, a perception that the barriers to entry - while undeniably low - are still too high to be worth the investment. That is, I don't want to spend the half-hour or whatever to set the thing up.
That, however, is not the real reason. Stubbornness is sufficient to prevent me from even raising the question most of the time, but it is not enough to really keep me away. No, the real reason I don't have a Facebook account is because I don't believe that I would benefit from Facebook. Far from it, I feel as though Facebook lowers, rather than raises, quality of life. Now don't get me wrong. I don't mean to insinuate the same is true for you or your 1,000 Facebook friends. I mean that I, personally, would benefit very little from having a Facebook account.
It is true that I have few close friends, and that I don't tend to make many vague, Christmas Card acquaintances either. I'm a natural introvert, and while I don't dislike people by any stretch, I don't have this burning need to stay in touch with everyone I meet. Facebook, I believe, is designed to satisfy that very burning need, to excuse you for forgetting and ignoring people - which you would do anyway - simply because you are their "friend," and therefore you have "stayed in touch." For my part - and I don't think I'm alone here - I don't see any benefit from having a network of 1,000 emigos (as Joe Posnanski calls them) that I am reminded of constantly, without any meaningful change in my actual relationships with those people. It just sounds like extra work and stress.
Of course, there's more to Facebook than accumulating lists of friends. There's the whole status update and wall posting. That part is so successful that Twitter abstracted it, made it into its own service, and is now the 11th most visited site on the Internet.
This communication-focused part of Facebook I find more entertaining, but ultimately empty. While there are many witty tweets, Facebook statuses, comments on pictures, and so on in the Facebook world, there are also plenty of the same in real conversations. I don't feel as though I'm missing out on a vast trove of humor or wisdom by not following people on Twitter, or being linked in to their Facebook pages. And, what's more, by the nature of the services, most Twitter users or Facebook users are intensely personal without even a hint of trying to bridge the paradox that makes good writing worth reading: being personal while still being impersonal and, perhaps, universal.
Is that too much to ask from a Tweet or from a Facebook wall post? That it be a piece of good writing? I think so. It is probably impossible, in 140 characters (or, in the case of Facebook, in a few sentences of indeterminate length), to say much of anything really worth saying. Oh, sure, you can be witty, and you can maybe even be profound, but what makes the great quotations of, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson so great is not the quotations themselves, but the process of getting to them, the explanations and context that go with them.
Writing that does not explain itself leaves so much up to the reader that it encourages a kind of bland myopia. Either we get it, and agree, or don't, and disagree and disregard. Conversations die when there's no nuance in the exchange, no subtlety, no persuasion or explanation. Facebook lets us retreat away from people we don't like so we can surround ourselves with groups of similar-thinking compatriots. It lets us speak in sound bytes, in malformed or unformed thoughts that are reinforced by the agreement of the vast networks of friends we collect.
The result is conversation without purpose, without direction, without empathy. Over the Internet, the kind of networking Facebook does may be practical, but it is not, it seems to me, human. There is no substitute for sitting with your interlocutor and having a real conversation, because you have to acknowledge, when you speak in person, the other speaker's humanity. You have to take them seriously, because they aren't just a vague collection of images and statuses. You have to strive to understand, to agree. Or, at least, you should do all of those things. One of the problems with the cheapening of conversation that the Internet allows is that it might also cheapen our real-life interactions.
Don't get me wrong, though. I love the Internet. I believe that modern technology can improve quality of life immensely. I just don't think that Facebook and Twitter really unlock the potential of a networked world. Rather, they are just the same kind of stuff we've always engaged in as a society - backbiting, refusing to think critically, paying lip service to our "friends," general myopia - streamlined and made more efficient and widespread. I believe, however, that there are also things the Internet can do that actually do connect people, that allow for real conversations where there never have been real conversations before, that encourage critical thinking and information sharing and so on.
It might very well be that Facebook and Twitter and social networks in general can be a gateway to that kind of thinking. It might be that Joe South gets exposed to Mike Northwest via Facebook and they hash our their cultural differences. But I don't think that happens very often. Nevertheless, the model is not impossible, the question is how can the Internet really connect people, instead of just superficially connecting people? I suspect the answer has something to do with understanding technology as an aide and not as life itself.
Which is why, above all, I don't use Facebook. I've seen too many people let Facebook friendship stand in for real friendship, let a digital world replace a real world. That's not what makes technology great, that's what makes it dangerous, and few people can resist the allure. I don't use Facebook not because of the flaws in Facebook, but because of my own flaws, because I believe that I would lose touch with reality. I only wish more people made the same decision.
I know, that's impossible, right? I'm a technology-savvy, blog-friendly, twenty-something in 2010 (almost 2011) who doesn't use the biggest social networking site in the world? And not just that, Facebook is the second most visited site on the entire Internet, behind only Google. How is it possible that yours truly doesn't even have an account?
In some ways my refusal to join Facebook is merely stubbornness. I didn't get one before, and I haven't had one yet, and I don't see any need to create one now. In other words, it's just an irrational computation of habit, a perception that the barriers to entry - while undeniably low - are still too high to be worth the investment. That is, I don't want to spend the half-hour or whatever to set the thing up.
That, however, is not the real reason. Stubbornness is sufficient to prevent me from even raising the question most of the time, but it is not enough to really keep me away. No, the real reason I don't have a Facebook account is because I don't believe that I would benefit from Facebook. Far from it, I feel as though Facebook lowers, rather than raises, quality of life. Now don't get me wrong. I don't mean to insinuate the same is true for you or your 1,000 Facebook friends. I mean that I, personally, would benefit very little from having a Facebook account.
It is true that I have few close friends, and that I don't tend to make many vague, Christmas Card acquaintances either. I'm a natural introvert, and while I don't dislike people by any stretch, I don't have this burning need to stay in touch with everyone I meet. Facebook, I believe, is designed to satisfy that very burning need, to excuse you for forgetting and ignoring people - which you would do anyway - simply because you are their "friend," and therefore you have "stayed in touch." For my part - and I don't think I'm alone here - I don't see any benefit from having a network of 1,000 emigos (as Joe Posnanski calls them) that I am reminded of constantly, without any meaningful change in my actual relationships with those people. It just sounds like extra work and stress.
Of course, there's more to Facebook than accumulating lists of friends. There's the whole status update and wall posting. That part is so successful that Twitter abstracted it, made it into its own service, and is now the 11th most visited site on the Internet.
This communication-focused part of Facebook I find more entertaining, but ultimately empty. While there are many witty tweets, Facebook statuses, comments on pictures, and so on in the Facebook world, there are also plenty of the same in real conversations. I don't feel as though I'm missing out on a vast trove of humor or wisdom by not following people on Twitter, or being linked in to their Facebook pages. And, what's more, by the nature of the services, most Twitter users or Facebook users are intensely personal without even a hint of trying to bridge the paradox that makes good writing worth reading: being personal while still being impersonal and, perhaps, universal.
Is that too much to ask from a Tweet or from a Facebook wall post? That it be a piece of good writing? I think so. It is probably impossible, in 140 characters (or, in the case of Facebook, in a few sentences of indeterminate length), to say much of anything really worth saying. Oh, sure, you can be witty, and you can maybe even be profound, but what makes the great quotations of, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson so great is not the quotations themselves, but the process of getting to them, the explanations and context that go with them.
Writing that does not explain itself leaves so much up to the reader that it encourages a kind of bland myopia. Either we get it, and agree, or don't, and disagree and disregard. Conversations die when there's no nuance in the exchange, no subtlety, no persuasion or explanation. Facebook lets us retreat away from people we don't like so we can surround ourselves with groups of similar-thinking compatriots. It lets us speak in sound bytes, in malformed or unformed thoughts that are reinforced by the agreement of the vast networks of friends we collect.
The result is conversation without purpose, without direction, without empathy. Over the Internet, the kind of networking Facebook does may be practical, but it is not, it seems to me, human. There is no substitute for sitting with your interlocutor and having a real conversation, because you have to acknowledge, when you speak in person, the other speaker's humanity. You have to take them seriously, because they aren't just a vague collection of images and statuses. You have to strive to understand, to agree. Or, at least, you should do all of those things. One of the problems with the cheapening of conversation that the Internet allows is that it might also cheapen our real-life interactions.
Don't get me wrong, though. I love the Internet. I believe that modern technology can improve quality of life immensely. I just don't think that Facebook and Twitter really unlock the potential of a networked world. Rather, they are just the same kind of stuff we've always engaged in as a society - backbiting, refusing to think critically, paying lip service to our "friends," general myopia - streamlined and made more efficient and widespread. I believe, however, that there are also things the Internet can do that actually do connect people, that allow for real conversations where there never have been real conversations before, that encourage critical thinking and information sharing and so on.
It might very well be that Facebook and Twitter and social networks in general can be a gateway to that kind of thinking. It might be that Joe South gets exposed to Mike Northwest via Facebook and they hash our their cultural differences. But I don't think that happens very often. Nevertheless, the model is not impossible, the question is how can the Internet really connect people, instead of just superficially connecting people? I suspect the answer has something to do with understanding technology as an aide and not as life itself.
Which is why, above all, I don't use Facebook. I've seen too many people let Facebook friendship stand in for real friendship, let a digital world replace a real world. That's not what makes technology great, that's what makes it dangerous, and few people can resist the allure. I don't use Facebook not because of the flaws in Facebook, but because of my own flaws, because I believe that I would lose touch with reality. I only wish more people made the same decision.
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