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 internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. 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.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Interrogating the Internet, Part Three: Information
In spite of all the mean things I said about e-commerce in my last post, there is a notable exception to the Internet-as-giant-money-machine routine. Wikipedia is a free website, a vast and successful experiment in crowd-sourcing, and a remarkable human accomplishment. While the site still requires money to run, it is the rare enormous non-profit enterprise run truly for the good of mankind, and not for the good of some one man.
Wikipedia is the height of information on the Internet, but it is not the hub, nor is it perfect. Like any source of information, it is constantly in flux, a battleground for ideology and interpretation. That scholars often scoff Wikipedia does not make it less valuable, but it does indicate that, especially when highly specialized knowledge is involved, the site might be just as guilty of perpetuating myths or, at least, subtly flawed characterizations of information as it is deserving of praise for striving to make anything and everything available to the curious. Of course, while the debate continues over Wikipedia's overall fidelity compared to traditional encyclopedias, there is no question that it is more comprehensive and more-userfriendly. The "wiki" has spread far beyond wikipedia.org, and for good reason: behind the specific information presented on the site, there's a process for how to present information that has proven extremely effective.
As I said above, however, Wikipedia is not the hub of information on the Internet, because Google is. Whereas Wikipedia is a non-profit organization dedicated primarily to providing articles on any and every piece of information available, Google is a for-profit, publicly traded search engine that, some time ago, began to reach far beyond search. Google's success in part owes to the fact that, when the search engine battleground was still densely populated, Google chose to separate out "sponsored results" from organic ones, giving users the opportunity to make their own decision, rather than being forced towards some marketing campaign by a page worth of disguised but paid-for search results. Google, internally, put this kind of decision under a broader heading: "don't be evil."
I won't venture into the question of whether Google has become evil, whether it has maintained it's plucky start-up idealism as it has become a publicly traded corporation, slowly but surely taking its place as one of the most successful companies - and certainly the most successful brand - in the world. Rather, I want wrap up this post by talking about where information fits in the picture of the Internet, in light of the two organizations discussed here.
Can information ever be unbiased? Probably not. Any historical event, for example, will have dozens of different interpretations, even at the time that it occurred. How much more so twenty years later, or a hundred, or a thousand? What, then, can a provider of information do? Wikipedia strives for an unbiased account, where possible, but its crowd-sourced mechanism for doing so is susceptible to the tyranny of the masses. On the other hand, the expert - who pens the Brittanica entry, for example - is liable to skew information in favor of his own perspective, ignoring competing theories or interpretations, even if he does so subconsciously. Especially troubling is not just interpretation, but hierarchy: not just what happened, but how important any given event - or other piece of information - is might also be debatable, and the cause or result of bias.
The Internet does nothing to change the conundrums of information, it merely makes them more pronounced. Wikipedia, to my mind, has as good an approach as can be expected: tap into the knowledge of the masses, edit carefully and vigilantly, strive for a lack of bias even when impossible. As a source for answers to factual questions, there is no better resource in the history of mankind.
Google's approach, meanwhile, is more complex. As a search engine, it is not actually designed to provide the user information. Rather, Google connects users with websites, websites which may contain information, but may (and usually do) also contain advertisements, interpretations, arguments, and other kinds of networks. Google takes minimal responsibility for what you find on the other end of your search, and rightfully so, but it bears remembering that the output part of the search enginge experience is not merely fallible, but often malicious as well.
We might say the same about Wikipedia, of course, if in a different way, because we might say the same about information as a whole. What the Internet does, I would argue, is that it elevates information by making it so sublimely accessible. That we can answer almost any question about history, etymology, science, mathematics, sports, weather, or just about anything else almost instantly has made us almost too comfortable with information. So much of our web-based learning, thanks to Wikipedia and Google, is the transmission and acquisition of information that we might not be doing so well on the critical thinking, interpretation, and creativity side of the equation.
Not that those things don't exist. Indeed, I have no evidence to suggest that we, as a society or as a world, are any less creative or critical now than we ever have been. Rather, my point is that, from my own experience, easy availability of information can inspire a kind of intellectual laziness that is far from fatal, but is troubling nonetheless. Where we should see an opportunity to do more and better critical thinking thanks to the Internet, all-too-often we're satisfied merely to link from one piece of information to the next, as if connections alone comprised analysis. Society wide, it seems to me that we're more interested in saying what a text (for example) reminds us of or what it resembles than we are in what it means, as if meaning were just another piece of networked information.
What does the Internet do, then? It makes information readily available to anyone and everyone. What doesn't it do? It doesn't assess the validity and uncover the biases of that information, it doesn't interpret it, and it doesn't create meaning. None of that is troubling, in itself, because those tasks are - to some extend - the exclusive right of the mind. Rather, what is troubling is that it is so easy to believe that the Internet does assess validity and bias, does interpret, and does create meaning, and, indeed, that it does so better than we can. Combined, especially, with the obvious but secret fact that the Internet is moved by money, first and foremost, and there is a strong incentive for information to be a commodity, for interpretation and meaning to be bought and sold.
Wikipedia is the height of information on the Internet, but it is not the hub, nor is it perfect. Like any source of information, it is constantly in flux, a battleground for ideology and interpretation. That scholars often scoff Wikipedia does not make it less valuable, but it does indicate that, especially when highly specialized knowledge is involved, the site might be just as guilty of perpetuating myths or, at least, subtly flawed characterizations of information as it is deserving of praise for striving to make anything and everything available to the curious. Of course, while the debate continues over Wikipedia's overall fidelity compared to traditional encyclopedias, there is no question that it is more comprehensive and more-userfriendly. The "wiki" has spread far beyond wikipedia.org, and for good reason: behind the specific information presented on the site, there's a process for how to present information that has proven extremely effective.
As I said above, however, Wikipedia is not the hub of information on the Internet, because Google is. Whereas Wikipedia is a non-profit organization dedicated primarily to providing articles on any and every piece of information available, Google is a for-profit, publicly traded search engine that, some time ago, began to reach far beyond search. Google's success in part owes to the fact that, when the search engine battleground was still densely populated, Google chose to separate out "sponsored results" from organic ones, giving users the opportunity to make their own decision, rather than being forced towards some marketing campaign by a page worth of disguised but paid-for search results. Google, internally, put this kind of decision under a broader heading: "don't be evil."
I won't venture into the question of whether Google has become evil, whether it has maintained it's plucky start-up idealism as it has become a publicly traded corporation, slowly but surely taking its place as one of the most successful companies - and certainly the most successful brand - in the world. Rather, I want wrap up this post by talking about where information fits in the picture of the Internet, in light of the two organizations discussed here.
Can information ever be unbiased? Probably not. Any historical event, for example, will have dozens of different interpretations, even at the time that it occurred. How much more so twenty years later, or a hundred, or a thousand? What, then, can a provider of information do? Wikipedia strives for an unbiased account, where possible, but its crowd-sourced mechanism for doing so is susceptible to the tyranny of the masses. On the other hand, the expert - who pens the Brittanica entry, for example - is liable to skew information in favor of his own perspective, ignoring competing theories or interpretations, even if he does so subconsciously. Especially troubling is not just interpretation, but hierarchy: not just what happened, but how important any given event - or other piece of information - is might also be debatable, and the cause or result of bias.
The Internet does nothing to change the conundrums of information, it merely makes them more pronounced. Wikipedia, to my mind, has as good an approach as can be expected: tap into the knowledge of the masses, edit carefully and vigilantly, strive for a lack of bias even when impossible. As a source for answers to factual questions, there is no better resource in the history of mankind.
Google's approach, meanwhile, is more complex. As a search engine, it is not actually designed to provide the user information. Rather, Google connects users with websites, websites which may contain information, but may (and usually do) also contain advertisements, interpretations, arguments, and other kinds of networks. Google takes minimal responsibility for what you find on the other end of your search, and rightfully so, but it bears remembering that the output part of the search enginge experience is not merely fallible, but often malicious as well.
We might say the same about Wikipedia, of course, if in a different way, because we might say the same about information as a whole. What the Internet does, I would argue, is that it elevates information by making it so sublimely accessible. That we can answer almost any question about history, etymology, science, mathematics, sports, weather, or just about anything else almost instantly has made us almost too comfortable with information. So much of our web-based learning, thanks to Wikipedia and Google, is the transmission and acquisition of information that we might not be doing so well on the critical thinking, interpretation, and creativity side of the equation.
Not that those things don't exist. Indeed, I have no evidence to suggest that we, as a society or as a world, are any less creative or critical now than we ever have been. Rather, my point is that, from my own experience, easy availability of information can inspire a kind of intellectual laziness that is far from fatal, but is troubling nonetheless. Where we should see an opportunity to do more and better critical thinking thanks to the Internet, all-too-often we're satisfied merely to link from one piece of information to the next, as if connections alone comprised analysis. Society wide, it seems to me that we're more interested in saying what a text (for example) reminds us of or what it resembles than we are in what it means, as if meaning were just another piece of networked information.
What does the Internet do, then? It makes information readily available to anyone and everyone. What doesn't it do? It doesn't assess the validity and uncover the biases of that information, it doesn't interpret it, and it doesn't create meaning. None of that is troubling, in itself, because those tasks are - to some extend - the exclusive right of the mind. Rather, what is troubling is that it is so easy to believe that the Internet does assess validity and bias, does interpret, and does create meaning, and, indeed, that it does so better than we can. Combined, especially, with the obvious but secret fact that the Internet is moved by money, first and foremost, and there is a strong incentive for information to be a commodity, for interpretation and meaning to be bought and sold.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Interrogating the Internet, Part Two: Commerce
In my last post I introduced a new mini-project, an attempt to gaze into the Internet and to see what it looks like. A cursory glance at web traffic rankings suggests that there are three primary uses of the internet: information, networking, and commerce (or, as I called it in the first post, shopping). My next few posts will address each of those areas, starting with the last of the three: commerce.
Beneath the surface of the Internet is money. Each and every server - and therefore, each and every website, email account, or bit of streaming media - exists somewhere in the real world, if only as little bits of electrical charge on a hard drive somewhere, demanding day-to-day energy usage, maintenance by IT professionals, and the occasional replacement. That the Internet feels "free" because the user experience is so abstracted from the silicon heart of the beast, but in reality it is anything but.
I don't just mean that the user pays his ISP a monthly connection bill. I mean the very fabric of the web is financial, that sites like Google or Facebook are able to operate not because they are popular, but because they are profitable. In the case of those two sites, extreme popularity and profit go hand in hand, of course, because they make so little from any given user that the user barely notices. There are sites, however, with much smaller user bases that are just as profitable because of the nature of their work.
Amazon and eBay are, of course, the two biggest online marketplaces because they understand the capabilities of the Internet better than sites created by traditional stores that had a real presence before the web. Amazon and eBay both thrive by allowing people to connect directly with each other, cutting the middle-man (the bookstore, for example) out of the buying and selling of used merchandise. Where Barnes and Noble is just a bookstore online, Amazon is a whole different kind of beast, a commercial enterprise that simplifies and democratizes commerce. Where Amazon started as a bookseller, primarily, they have been able to branch into just about every area of consumer purchases because they were built not on books (like Barnes and Noble), but rather on a retail process.
Make no mistake, however, about Amazon's motives. As great a company as Amazon is, it is still profit-driven. Stocking, shipping, and selling merchandise from their own warehouses is obviously a priority, given that they put their own results at the top of search results, and encourage consumers to register for Amazon credit cards, use "Super Saver" shipping, and so on.
Moreover, Amazon shares with eBay its primary means of making a profit: taking a small chunk out of every sale that occurs on the site. Given the sheer volume of commerce occurring on these two sites, it's easy to see that the small (around 10%) cuts that the sites take adds up fast.
Even Craigslist - which does not charge a commission - remains financially solvent thanks to a simple business model. According to Forbes.com, Craigslist survives by charging companies ($25, a pittance) to post job listings in the six largest US markets, plus a tiny $10 fee for New York apartment listings. That alone more than covers the cost of operating the site for free in every other category it works in, and in every other city.
The lesson from Craigslist - or even from Amazon and eBay - is that there are a lot of people on the Internet, and it doesn't take much to run the machine. But the machine must run, nonetheless. Google, despite its fundamental role as an information search site, is also a business that absolutely rakes in cash pennies at a time. When you click on that Amazon link from Google, you are greasing the wheels of the corporate Internet machine, because a small part of your Amazon purchase goes to Google, also.
It is hardly surprising that the Internet is commercial, but it's easy to forget. Rare as it is to see people working for free in the real world, it is even more rare to see it online. Indeed, the Internet is, in the end, a kind of abstracted, simplified version of real human interaction, with advertising at the heart of it all. But advertising alone cannot drive any economy unless actual purchases follow, and on the Internet they certainly do. What's more, since increasingly the things we purchase are digital to begin with, profit margins can be much, much higher in the web space. The traditional economic notion that purchase cost is derived, at least in part, from production cost is essentially meaningless online, where a game developer (for example) or a book for the Kindle need only be produced once, and distributed according to what people will pay for it, and not what it is "worth."
Perhaps what a thing is worth is what people will pay for it. That's a bigger economic and philosophical question. Regardless, as sales of digital media increase, the profit margin for each sale approaches something close to 100% (minus the negligible, compared to traditional commerce, increased costs of managing more sales). Scale - often a bugbear in traditional business - is the whole point of online business. The more people buy a product or use a service, the better the company does unequivocally. Does that make the capitalistic competition of the web more robust, or less robust? Is the consumer better off in a digital economy? Are businesses? Are governments? Those are important questions that to my knowledge have not been adequately answered.
Needless to say, the point here is remember that money makes the Internet go round, even more so than the material world. To most people I'm guessing that is no surprise, but it might just give us pause as well move forward and try to understand what the Internet is and does. First and foremost, it's a business, and it does sales. What deeper value we are able to pull out of it may or may not be corrupted by this fact (I truly do not know), but at the least it bears remembering that behind each and every corner of the Internet is the wall of commerce.
Beneath the surface of the Internet is money. Each and every server - and therefore, each and every website, email account, or bit of streaming media - exists somewhere in the real world, if only as little bits of electrical charge on a hard drive somewhere, demanding day-to-day energy usage, maintenance by IT professionals, and the occasional replacement. That the Internet feels "free" because the user experience is so abstracted from the silicon heart of the beast, but in reality it is anything but.
I don't just mean that the user pays his ISP a monthly connection bill. I mean the very fabric of the web is financial, that sites like Google or Facebook are able to operate not because they are popular, but because they are profitable. In the case of those two sites, extreme popularity and profit go hand in hand, of course, because they make so little from any given user that the user barely notices. There are sites, however, with much smaller user bases that are just as profitable because of the nature of their work.
Amazon and eBay are, of course, the two biggest online marketplaces because they understand the capabilities of the Internet better than sites created by traditional stores that had a real presence before the web. Amazon and eBay both thrive by allowing people to connect directly with each other, cutting the middle-man (the bookstore, for example) out of the buying and selling of used merchandise. Where Barnes and Noble is just a bookstore online, Amazon is a whole different kind of beast, a commercial enterprise that simplifies and democratizes commerce. Where Amazon started as a bookseller, primarily, they have been able to branch into just about every area of consumer purchases because they were built not on books (like Barnes and Noble), but rather on a retail process.
Make no mistake, however, about Amazon's motives. As great a company as Amazon is, it is still profit-driven. Stocking, shipping, and selling merchandise from their own warehouses is obviously a priority, given that they put their own results at the top of search results, and encourage consumers to register for Amazon credit cards, use "Super Saver" shipping, and so on.
Moreover, Amazon shares with eBay its primary means of making a profit: taking a small chunk out of every sale that occurs on the site. Given the sheer volume of commerce occurring on these two sites, it's easy to see that the small (around 10%) cuts that the sites take adds up fast.
Even Craigslist - which does not charge a commission - remains financially solvent thanks to a simple business model. According to Forbes.com, Craigslist survives by charging companies ($25, a pittance) to post job listings in the six largest US markets, plus a tiny $10 fee for New York apartment listings. That alone more than covers the cost of operating the site for free in every other category it works in, and in every other city.
The lesson from Craigslist - or even from Amazon and eBay - is that there are a lot of people on the Internet, and it doesn't take much to run the machine. But the machine must run, nonetheless. Google, despite its fundamental role as an information search site, is also a business that absolutely rakes in cash pennies at a time. When you click on that Amazon link from Google, you are greasing the wheels of the corporate Internet machine, because a small part of your Amazon purchase goes to Google, also.
It is hardly surprising that the Internet is commercial, but it's easy to forget. Rare as it is to see people working for free in the real world, it is even more rare to see it online. Indeed, the Internet is, in the end, a kind of abstracted, simplified version of real human interaction, with advertising at the heart of it all. But advertising alone cannot drive any economy unless actual purchases follow, and on the Internet they certainly do. What's more, since increasingly the things we purchase are digital to begin with, profit margins can be much, much higher in the web space. The traditional economic notion that purchase cost is derived, at least in part, from production cost is essentially meaningless online, where a game developer (for example) or a book for the Kindle need only be produced once, and distributed according to what people will pay for it, and not what it is "worth."
Perhaps what a thing is worth is what people will pay for it. That's a bigger economic and philosophical question. Regardless, as sales of digital media increase, the profit margin for each sale approaches something close to 100% (minus the negligible, compared to traditional commerce, increased costs of managing more sales). Scale - often a bugbear in traditional business - is the whole point of online business. The more people buy a product or use a service, the better the company does unequivocally. Does that make the capitalistic competition of the web more robust, or less robust? Is the consumer better off in a digital economy? Are businesses? Are governments? Those are important questions that to my knowledge have not been adequately answered.
Needless to say, the point here is remember that money makes the Internet go round, even more so than the material world. To most people I'm guessing that is no surprise, but it might just give us pause as well move forward and try to understand what the Internet is and does. First and foremost, it's a business, and it does sales. What deeper value we are able to pull out of it may or may not be corrupted by this fact (I truly do not know), but at the least it bears remembering that behind each and every corner of the Internet is the wall of commerce.
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?
Sunday, April 4, 2010
It's Springtime in Baseball Land
Tonight is the opening of the 2010 Major League Baseball regular season. The powers that be have decreed that, this year, the Red Sox and Yankees will face off as a prelude to the opening games of the puny rest of the teams in the league tomorrow. I suspect this decision was made because the Red Sox and Yankees don't get enough exposure, but I could be wrong.
The game is on as I write - though probably not as you read - and I am streaming it live to my computer on ESPN360.com (soon to be "ESPN 3"). I have already made the plunge and purchased MLB.tv for the season, meaning I'll be able to follow the Rockies while I'm here in California and after I return to Hawaii. Since this game in nationally televised, however, the game is blacked out on MLB.tv, but fortunately ESPN is one of the few broadcast companies out there understands that the Internet is a great place to expand, rather than restrict, access to content.
Which leads me to the subject of this post: three questions (and my answers) to keep in mind while you watch your favorite team start off its season.
1) What role does the Internet play in baseball broadcasting, and what role should it play?
Major League Baseball was and remains ahead of the curve in terms of Internet broadcasting with the release of MLB.tv a few years ago. The NFL and the NBA have not adopted meaningful online broadcasting, unlike baseball, largely because so much of their TV income comes from national broadcasts instead of local ones. Baseball, as a sport with occasional national broadcasts, but predominately local TV stations that cover most of each team's games, is a prime sport for league-wide online broadcasting.
Unfortunately, MLB is way behind the curve in terms of actually making content available. The steep price of MLB.tv is understandable, given access to any and every broadcast during the season, but what makes no sense is MLB's proprietary attitude towards highlights and replays. Where the NBA is happy to parade its best players making great plays on YouTube, MLB systematically hunts down any unauthorized publishing of its content. The result, of course, is that MLB is losing a lot of exposure online - and not just among Americans - from which it could otherwise benefit.
The other problem with MLB's attitude towards the Internet is its backwards and confusing blackout rules. MLB.tv customers cannot watch live national broadcasts online - which makes sense given the investment ESPN and Fox put into those broadcasts - but neither can they watch local broadcasts if they are in the territory of the team who's broadcast they are trying to watch. That is troublesome enough, but what is truly infuriating is the nonsensical delineation of "territories." As a student in New Mexico, I never invested in MLB.tv because my Rockies were considered a "local" team in Santa Fe, despite being broadcast on TV only on Sundays. What's more, the Diamondbacks were also a local team, despite never being on TV. So a Diamondbacks fan living in Santa Fe could never watch his team live without buying a dish and the expensive MLB package thereon. In some parts of country the problem is worse; there are parts of the midwest (think Iowa) where as many as FIVE teams are blacked out. Yikes. Way to put the fan first.
Update: here's a take on the issue at "biz of baseball"
2) Why are baseball games so long, and how can they be shorter?
Baseball catches a lot of heat for having long games (which wouldn't be a problem if they all started mid-day on Sunday like in the NFL, instead of at 7 pm). This is especially true of nationally televised games, which have a tendency to run 4+ hours. Ever since TV, MLB has been fighting a losing battle with game length, but usually on the wrong fronts.
MLB's solutions to long games usually involve things like limiting the number of pick-offs or mound visits, and actually enforcing existing rules about how long a pitcher has to throw the next pitch. What MLB never really discusses is the incredibly long and unnecessary commercial breaks that do more to lengthen the game than anything else. During the playoffs, for example, it is not uncommon to see both teams wait in the dugout between innings for two minutes while the commercials run, before finally taking the field so they can finish their warmups in time to start the inning after the next two minutes of commercials run. Even during pitching changes - if the weather is cold - some players will leave field and wait in the dugout for play to resume.
Ignoring commercial break length when talking about baseball game length strikes me as a bit like ignoring military spending when talking about the US debt: it's the dishonest result of corrupted priorities. If baseball really wants to shorten games, they'll find a way to limit the length of commercial breaks. If they can't stand the lost income, then they'll just have to deal with how long games go, because they're not about to speed up the game itself.
As an aside on that issue, a great many people are opposed to including instant replay in baseball because of the increase in game time it would entail. This seems a bit questionable for a few reasons, the first of which being the strange notion I have that its more important to get calls right than it is to keep the game a few seconds shorter. The other problem, though, is that there's no indication that instant replay needs to make the game any longer. For one thing, it would shorten arguments - which can go on for quite a while - and for another, there's no need to copy the convoluted NFL replay system. Just do something more like the NBA on buzzer-beaters; take 15 seconds and check. No trouble, hardly any time, and better calls.
3) Is there parity in baseball, and does it matter?
Parity is something of a buzz-word in the sports world these days. Everyone wants parity, the NFL and the NBA are champions of the notion that every team can compete every year thanks to their salary caps and free agency systems. There is, however, no real indication that those leagues have any more parity than MLB does. The turn-around time from bad to good can be faster in other sports than in baseball (because developing good players takes a long time, and developing good players, on some level, is essential to success, even through trades), but that doesn't mean it happens. Baseball has the Pirates and Royals, who have been bad for over a decade, but the NFL has the Lions, the NBA the Knicks. What's more, while baseball certainly does have perennial powerhouses, when was the last time a season started when you honestly didn't expect the Patriots and Colts to be in the playoffs? Or the Lakers?
Parity, moreover, might be overrated. European soccer is notorious for not having parity, and no one seems to complain. That Manchester United, Arsenal, and Chelsea duke it out every year in the Premiership doesn't stop fans of Wigan Athletic or Tottenham from cheering on their teams.
Regardless of the desirability of parity, it's not clear that a salary cap would create it. Salary caps tend not to cause a fair distribution of talent, so much as ensure that well-run teams will dominate poorly-run ones - a fact that is true in any sports league. Salary caps, as I've argued before, also tend to allow big-market, rich teams to spend even more money on player development, scouting, and other expenses, which increases their competitive advantage. Look at the Lakers, who operate under the same cap as all other NBA teams, but dominate anyway because they can spend so much more on non-player expenses.
More than anything, though, salary caps move money away from players and towards owners. As egregious as baseball salaries are (and aren't NFL and NBA salaries just as extreme?), a salary cap would only allow already wealthy owners to increase profits. Would it really make us feel better if the Steinbrenners got to - were forced to - keep A-Rod's $250 million?
----------------------------------
There you have it, not the gushy "hope springs eternal" stuff that kicks off the season on many sites, but so it goes. Of course, come tomorrow afternoon (while I'm working on my Master's project proposal), I'll be tuning in and watching the Rockies start off their season, all full of gushy hopes springing eternal, because it is, after all, springtime in baseball land.
The game is on as I write - though probably not as you read - and I am streaming it live to my computer on ESPN360.com (soon to be "ESPN 3"). I have already made the plunge and purchased MLB.tv for the season, meaning I'll be able to follow the Rockies while I'm here in California and after I return to Hawaii. Since this game in nationally televised, however, the game is blacked out on MLB.tv, but fortunately ESPN is one of the few broadcast companies out there understands that the Internet is a great place to expand, rather than restrict, access to content.
Which leads me to the subject of this post: three questions (and my answers) to keep in mind while you watch your favorite team start off its season.
1) What role does the Internet play in baseball broadcasting, and what role should it play?
Major League Baseball was and remains ahead of the curve in terms of Internet broadcasting with the release of MLB.tv a few years ago. The NFL and the NBA have not adopted meaningful online broadcasting, unlike baseball, largely because so much of their TV income comes from national broadcasts instead of local ones. Baseball, as a sport with occasional national broadcasts, but predominately local TV stations that cover most of each team's games, is a prime sport for league-wide online broadcasting.
Unfortunately, MLB is way behind the curve in terms of actually making content available. The steep price of MLB.tv is understandable, given access to any and every broadcast during the season, but what makes no sense is MLB's proprietary attitude towards highlights and replays. Where the NBA is happy to parade its best players making great plays on YouTube, MLB systematically hunts down any unauthorized publishing of its content. The result, of course, is that MLB is losing a lot of exposure online - and not just among Americans - from which it could otherwise benefit.
The other problem with MLB's attitude towards the Internet is its backwards and confusing blackout rules. MLB.tv customers cannot watch live national broadcasts online - which makes sense given the investment ESPN and Fox put into those broadcasts - but neither can they watch local broadcasts if they are in the territory of the team who's broadcast they are trying to watch. That is troublesome enough, but what is truly infuriating is the nonsensical delineation of "territories." As a student in New Mexico, I never invested in MLB.tv because my Rockies were considered a "local" team in Santa Fe, despite being broadcast on TV only on Sundays. What's more, the Diamondbacks were also a local team, despite never being on TV. So a Diamondbacks fan living in Santa Fe could never watch his team live without buying a dish and the expensive MLB package thereon. In some parts of country the problem is worse; there are parts of the midwest (think Iowa) where as many as FIVE teams are blacked out. Yikes. Way to put the fan first.
Update: here's a take on the issue at "biz of baseball"
2) Why are baseball games so long, and how can they be shorter?
Baseball catches a lot of heat for having long games (which wouldn't be a problem if they all started mid-day on Sunday like in the NFL, instead of at 7 pm). This is especially true of nationally televised games, which have a tendency to run 4+ hours. Ever since TV, MLB has been fighting a losing battle with game length, but usually on the wrong fronts.
MLB's solutions to long games usually involve things like limiting the number of pick-offs or mound visits, and actually enforcing existing rules about how long a pitcher has to throw the next pitch. What MLB never really discusses is the incredibly long and unnecessary commercial breaks that do more to lengthen the game than anything else. During the playoffs, for example, it is not uncommon to see both teams wait in the dugout between innings for two minutes while the commercials run, before finally taking the field so they can finish their warmups in time to start the inning after the next two minutes of commercials run. Even during pitching changes - if the weather is cold - some players will leave field and wait in the dugout for play to resume.
Ignoring commercial break length when talking about baseball game length strikes me as a bit like ignoring military spending when talking about the US debt: it's the dishonest result of corrupted priorities. If baseball really wants to shorten games, they'll find a way to limit the length of commercial breaks. If they can't stand the lost income, then they'll just have to deal with how long games go, because they're not about to speed up the game itself.
As an aside on that issue, a great many people are opposed to including instant replay in baseball because of the increase in game time it would entail. This seems a bit questionable for a few reasons, the first of which being the strange notion I have that its more important to get calls right than it is to keep the game a few seconds shorter. The other problem, though, is that there's no indication that instant replay needs to make the game any longer. For one thing, it would shorten arguments - which can go on for quite a while - and for another, there's no need to copy the convoluted NFL replay system. Just do something more like the NBA on buzzer-beaters; take 15 seconds and check. No trouble, hardly any time, and better calls.
3) Is there parity in baseball, and does it matter?
Parity is something of a buzz-word in the sports world these days. Everyone wants parity, the NFL and the NBA are champions of the notion that every team can compete every year thanks to their salary caps and free agency systems. There is, however, no real indication that those leagues have any more parity than MLB does. The turn-around time from bad to good can be faster in other sports than in baseball (because developing good players takes a long time, and developing good players, on some level, is essential to success, even through trades), but that doesn't mean it happens. Baseball has the Pirates and Royals, who have been bad for over a decade, but the NFL has the Lions, the NBA the Knicks. What's more, while baseball certainly does have perennial powerhouses, when was the last time a season started when you honestly didn't expect the Patriots and Colts to be in the playoffs? Or the Lakers?
Parity, moreover, might be overrated. European soccer is notorious for not having parity, and no one seems to complain. That Manchester United, Arsenal, and Chelsea duke it out every year in the Premiership doesn't stop fans of Wigan Athletic or Tottenham from cheering on their teams.
Regardless of the desirability of parity, it's not clear that a salary cap would create it. Salary caps tend not to cause a fair distribution of talent, so much as ensure that well-run teams will dominate poorly-run ones - a fact that is true in any sports league. Salary caps, as I've argued before, also tend to allow big-market, rich teams to spend even more money on player development, scouting, and other expenses, which increases their competitive advantage. Look at the Lakers, who operate under the same cap as all other NBA teams, but dominate anyway because they can spend so much more on non-player expenses.
More than anything, though, salary caps move money away from players and towards owners. As egregious as baseball salaries are (and aren't NFL and NBA salaries just as extreme?), a salary cap would only allow already wealthy owners to increase profits. Would it really make us feel better if the Steinbrenners got to - were forced to - keep A-Rod's $250 million?
----------------------------------
There you have it, not the gushy "hope springs eternal" stuff that kicks off the season on many sites, but so it goes. Of course, come tomorrow afternoon (while I'm working on my Master's project proposal), I'll be tuning in and watching the Rockies start off their season, all full of gushy hopes springing eternal, because it is, after all, springtime in baseball land.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Sports, Writing, and the Internet (or, Why I Love Joe Posnanski)
The role of athletic competition in our society and culture is, simply put, staggering. Throughout history, a great many societies could probably say that athletics were important to them - the Greek Olympics, for example, point to an athletic aesthetic - but rarely has a culture been so sports-centric as ours is. That perhaps is a sign of stagnation in "high" culture. After all, what athlete attends the opera? But I'm hesitant to put a value on it. Sometimes a baseball game is just as moving as a symphony, after all, albeit in a completely different way.
Nothing demonstrates the importance of sports to our culture, however, quite like the subculture of writing about sports that surrounds it. There is not nearly so much writing about music, or writing about education, or even writing about politics as there is writing about sports. Sports are at the heart of what we confront every day on the television, in the newspaper, on the radio, and on the Internet. The "sports section" of yesteryear - back when newspapers were king - betrays import, but more important is the frequency with which "sports section" stories bled onto the front page, into the news.
Of course, that would never have been possible without sports writers. I won't pretend to know anything about the history or culture of sports writers. I'm sure that people have been writing about sports for as long as sports have been going on (or at least as long as writing has been going on, since sports likely came first).* What's interesting to me is not the whole history, but the transformation that the Internet has pioneered.
*Indeed, there's some interesting "sports writing" in Homer's Iliad, during the funeral games held for Patroclus. As I recall, they're mostly about who won what by how much, and who cheated, and who died in the process of the competition. Replace "died" with "got injured," and you've covered the majority of topics in modern sports writing.
While I'm certain something similar is happening in other sports, I'll talk mostly about baseball, because it's what I know best. Baseball writing, in the last few years, has become increasingly decentralized. This is incredibly problematic for organizations like the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA), which was built as an exclusive club of newspaper men who (mostly) covered baseball across the country. These days, with newspapers dying, many of the best writers are to be found lurking in the corners of the Internet. They aren't paid by a large news corporation, and they may not even be professional writers at all.
All of that would hardly pose much a problem, but in baseball, awards are decided by - you guessed it - the BBWAA. Ironically, a great many current BBWAA writers don't even follow baseball anymore, and so when Hall of Fame voting time comes around, they simply submit blank ballots on the principle that "damn kids and their hip hop" don't deserve to be enshrined alongside Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Meanwhile, there are literally hundreds of excellent writers - usually a handful for each team - following baseball in excruciating detail, and writing about it with style and insight.
Not all of these writers are stat-freaks, or champions of the sabermetric revolution.* You'll notice, in my links section, a site called "Fangraphs" and a site called "Pitchers and Poets." Fangraphs is a site of stat-freaks (with occasional Proust references), where Pitchers and Poets says, on their banner, "Fangraphs this ain't." Both are excellent, both speak to the essence of what baseball is, and why it remains such an important part of our culture. Both, however, are completely different.
* The role of changing statistics in baseball I've touched on before, but may write a more detailed post about later. For now, I want to mention that I am a firm believer that modern statistics like wOBA, VORP, WAR, UZR, and the like do not detract from the sport at all, from any perspective. Not only can we understand baseball players better and appreciate their value with greater precision, we can still tell the same stories of greatness, only with a different language.
The argument that new statistics ruin baseball is wrought with fallacy, but perhaps nothing is sillier than the "anti-stat" guy's support of RBI, a statistic. Replacing poor statistics with good ones is does not ruin baseball.
Before the Internet, you were unlikely to run into such variety. There was a fairly formulaic way of writing about baseball, which led to a fairly formulaic understanding of the sport among general audiences. Bill James broke down the door, but it was the Internet that brought the masses - like myself - to a better understanding of what these new fangled statistics are, and how they work. But, more than that, the Internet has also proved a sounding board for the poets among baseball writers. And, what's more even than that, sometimes that stat-freaks and the poets are the same people.
Joe Posnanski, who I have perhaps mentioned before, is one of those people who straddles the line between stat-freak and poet. He is certainly no mathematician, and certainly no Shakespeare, but there is a frankness about his writing that led one of his readers to once comment, "Joe, I wish you wrote everything I read."
What's so fascinating to me about Posnanski, however, is not his writing style or tremendous, award winning skill, but rather the place he occupies in this new culture of sports writing on the Internet, and the place that culture occupies in our broader culture. Joe is prolific, personal, and probing. Though he writes for a number of sources at the moment - most notably Sports Illustrated - I expect a great many of his readers read only his blog, which he writes in his free time, for fun.
That's the odd place that Joe occupies culturally, because while he is far from alone - there are, as I said, hundreds of excellent baseball writers who write in their spare time, for fun - Joe is a professional sports writer who also keeps a blog for fun. One might cynically argue that this is simply an excellent publicity move, that it helps him sell books and SI sell magazines, but something tells me the time he puts into his mammoth posts doesn't quite pay off on the monetary end.
But it does pay off in a different sense, and that's where culture write large comes in. Joe's blog so often tries to understand the human side of these strange cultural icons we make out of athletes. He's not deconstructing or criticizing what might come across as a strange, backwards culture, nor does he elevate it in the style of hyperbolic apotheosis so many sports writers are prone to adopt. No, Joe's writing places sports squarely where they are - whether they belong there or not - thereby reminding us why and how much we love the moment of tension between the release of a pitch and a swing, whilst keeping us ever-conscious of our own silly fandom.
Posnanski aside, the existence of that kind of writing - writing that deepens sports, making it culturally significant without making it so ESPN-sensationalist that it overcomes all else... Maybe that kind of writing has always existed. But the Internet means that you and I can read blogs by guys in Kansas and Boston and Tampa, blogs that might be better than the best our own newspapers have to offer. And what's more, it gives us access not just to those credentialed, "expert" writers, but also to the amateurs who, it turns out, might be mathematicians or economists or poets looking at baseball, which is infinitely more interesting than a baseball person studying his navel.
I guess the point is that sports writing is still writing, and that good writing is easier to find now than ever before, if only you're willing to look.
Nothing demonstrates the importance of sports to our culture, however, quite like the subculture of writing about sports that surrounds it. There is not nearly so much writing about music, or writing about education, or even writing about politics as there is writing about sports. Sports are at the heart of what we confront every day on the television, in the newspaper, on the radio, and on the Internet. The "sports section" of yesteryear - back when newspapers were king - betrays import, but more important is the frequency with which "sports section" stories bled onto the front page, into the news.
Of course, that would never have been possible without sports writers. I won't pretend to know anything about the history or culture of sports writers. I'm sure that people have been writing about sports for as long as sports have been going on (or at least as long as writing has been going on, since sports likely came first).* What's interesting to me is not the whole history, but the transformation that the Internet has pioneered.
*Indeed, there's some interesting "sports writing" in Homer's Iliad, during the funeral games held for Patroclus. As I recall, they're mostly about who won what by how much, and who cheated, and who died in the process of the competition. Replace "died" with "got injured," and you've covered the majority of topics in modern sports writing.
While I'm certain something similar is happening in other sports, I'll talk mostly about baseball, because it's what I know best. Baseball writing, in the last few years, has become increasingly decentralized. This is incredibly problematic for organizations like the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA), which was built as an exclusive club of newspaper men who (mostly) covered baseball across the country. These days, with newspapers dying, many of the best writers are to be found lurking in the corners of the Internet. They aren't paid by a large news corporation, and they may not even be professional writers at all.
All of that would hardly pose much a problem, but in baseball, awards are decided by - you guessed it - the BBWAA. Ironically, a great many current BBWAA writers don't even follow baseball anymore, and so when Hall of Fame voting time comes around, they simply submit blank ballots on the principle that "damn kids and their hip hop" don't deserve to be enshrined alongside Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Meanwhile, there are literally hundreds of excellent writers - usually a handful for each team - following baseball in excruciating detail, and writing about it with style and insight.
Not all of these writers are stat-freaks, or champions of the sabermetric revolution.* You'll notice, in my links section, a site called "Fangraphs" and a site called "Pitchers and Poets." Fangraphs is a site of stat-freaks (with occasional Proust references), where Pitchers and Poets says, on their banner, "Fangraphs this ain't." Both are excellent, both speak to the essence of what baseball is, and why it remains such an important part of our culture. Both, however, are completely different.
* The role of changing statistics in baseball I've touched on before, but may write a more detailed post about later. For now, I want to mention that I am a firm believer that modern statistics like wOBA, VORP, WAR, UZR, and the like do not detract from the sport at all, from any perspective. Not only can we understand baseball players better and appreciate their value with greater precision, we can still tell the same stories of greatness, only with a different language.
The argument that new statistics ruin baseball is wrought with fallacy, but perhaps nothing is sillier than the "anti-stat" guy's support of RBI, a statistic. Replacing poor statistics with good ones is does not ruin baseball.
Before the Internet, you were unlikely to run into such variety. There was a fairly formulaic way of writing about baseball, which led to a fairly formulaic understanding of the sport among general audiences. Bill James broke down the door, but it was the Internet that brought the masses - like myself - to a better understanding of what these new fangled statistics are, and how they work. But, more than that, the Internet has also proved a sounding board for the poets among baseball writers. And, what's more even than that, sometimes that stat-freaks and the poets are the same people.
Joe Posnanski, who I have perhaps mentioned before, is one of those people who straddles the line between stat-freak and poet. He is certainly no mathematician, and certainly no Shakespeare, but there is a frankness about his writing that led one of his readers to once comment, "Joe, I wish you wrote everything I read."
What's so fascinating to me about Posnanski, however, is not his writing style or tremendous, award winning skill, but rather the place he occupies in this new culture of sports writing on the Internet, and the place that culture occupies in our broader culture. Joe is prolific, personal, and probing. Though he writes for a number of sources at the moment - most notably Sports Illustrated - I expect a great many of his readers read only his blog, which he writes in his free time, for fun.
That's the odd place that Joe occupies culturally, because while he is far from alone - there are, as I said, hundreds of excellent baseball writers who write in their spare time, for fun - Joe is a professional sports writer who also keeps a blog for fun. One might cynically argue that this is simply an excellent publicity move, that it helps him sell books and SI sell magazines, but something tells me the time he puts into his mammoth posts doesn't quite pay off on the monetary end.
But it does pay off in a different sense, and that's where culture write large comes in. Joe's blog so often tries to understand the human side of these strange cultural icons we make out of athletes. He's not deconstructing or criticizing what might come across as a strange, backwards culture, nor does he elevate it in the style of hyperbolic apotheosis so many sports writers are prone to adopt. No, Joe's writing places sports squarely where they are - whether they belong there or not - thereby reminding us why and how much we love the moment of tension between the release of a pitch and a swing, whilst keeping us ever-conscious of our own silly fandom.
Posnanski aside, the existence of that kind of writing - writing that deepens sports, making it culturally significant without making it so ESPN-sensationalist that it overcomes all else... Maybe that kind of writing has always existed. But the Internet means that you and I can read blogs by guys in Kansas and Boston and Tampa, blogs that might be better than the best our own newspapers have to offer. And what's more, it gives us access not just to those credentialed, "expert" writers, but also to the amateurs who, it turns out, might be mathematicians or economists or poets looking at baseball, which is infinitely more interesting than a baseball person studying his navel.
I guess the point is that sports writing is still writing, and that good writing is easier to find now than ever before, if only you're willing to look.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Storytelling and the Digital Age
I've been thinking a lot about stories recently. What is a story? Why do we love them so much? Does it matter if a story is true? What does it mean for a story to be true, anyway? Some of those questions are at the heart of doing research in the Social Sciences (like Education), but they are also important in the way that we live day-to-day, and the way we communicate with others.
These questions are at the forefront of The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, which I am currently rereading. The story itself is blissfully inconsequential, full of absurdity and drama, humor and even a little sarcasm. That makes it enjoyable to read, but it's not the kind of book that warrants dissection. No, it's basically a children's adventure, meant to be read aloud, meant to be immersive and silly. But it is punctuated by another story: Goldman's narrative about hearing the story as a child, trying to pass it on to his own child (a son, which he does not have), and finding that he needed to abridge the original. This story is as fictitious as the story about Buttercup and Westley, but it is so believable that myriad forums and websites have discussions about whether or not it is actually true. Was there a Morgenstern (the supposed author of the original story)? Is The Princess Bride really based on true events? How could Goldman simply invent this incredibly elaborate and utterly conceivable back story, and why would he?
Mixed in with this background story is a thin layer of truth. Goldman was married at the time he was writing The Princess Bride, and it was born as a story to tell his daughters, and he did end up getting divorced from his wife (as the background story suggests is likely). He even includes a few parenthetical stories in the various introductions - and there are many - that say "this is a true story," to set them apart.
Why does Goldman tell the story this way? I won't pretend to be able to get into his head, nor will I try. Rather, I wonder why we tell stories at all. I know that they are enjoyable, and engaging, and immersive. I know that most people love to imagine different worlds, to take on different identities and to play with the possibilities those worlds and identities propose. So much learning happens, indeed, from the ability to imagine oneself as someone else, to take on a new identity. So much happiness comes from the ability to imagine a better world, or at least a different one. Perhaps that is why the Waldorf schools emphasize myth and imagination so much.
Learning and fun aren't the only reasons here, though. There's also the story teller, who is not always seeking to teach. Perhaps he is always seeking to entertain, but with what tools, and why? Is there a desire for self-expression, no matter how fictitious the story ends up being? Is there a pride in invention? Is there a sense of community the storyteller becomes a part of?
I think of Homer, and the story of Achilles. So much of that story must have been false, but it didn't matter anymore. It was a story that captured what it was to be a Greek, what it was to be a man, to struggle with the knowledge of your own mortality, to be great and finite all at once. It was also a story of clashing steel and spears and gruesome deaths made poetry. All of those things we find in our modern stories - whether they be movies or books or the innovative blog posts at Cardboard Gods or just a series of pictures. I would argue that some video games are build to tell stories, too, some obviously so - Mass Effect, The Witcher, God of War - some not as overtly, but in a way, more deeply - Fall from Heaven, Europa Universalis, Out of the Park Baseball, PeaceMaker. Stories come in so many forms, with such variety in authorship, reality, and audience.
What was the Iliad to Homer? Who was it for? His audience has turned out to be thousands of years worth of Westerners, even though his audience was originally just groups of interested men and their children who they desired to grow up warriors. Was it for Homer, too? And was his audience also an author? That is the modern trend, where blogs are replacing the page, and interactive games are replacing the TV screen, and people are connected with each other almost always, and having conversations. Authorship and audience are becoming the same thing, and yet, that doesn't seem so strange. It's certainly not a return of what stories used to be, but it is a moving forward that simultaneously looks back. "The human voice is making a comeback," a Professor here at Stanford told me. She's right, and while the story is once again becoming central to what it means to communicate, to think, and to learn, it is a very different kind of story that we are beginning to see. Let me tell a little story, to give a little perspective before the end of this post.
The original movies were just films of a stage play. There was no zooming, no panning, no cut-scenes or splicing or, really, editing of any kind. The movie was shot from beginning to end, because it was just another medium to capture and distribute a whole methodology of storytelling that already existed (and had existed for millenia). It wasn't until much later that film makers distanced themselves from their theatrical roots, and began to take advantage of their ability to mix in music, to cut from one actor to another, to take things out of order (consider an extreme version of this: Memento). Eventually, film makers imagined things that it would have been impossible not only to do without film, but even to imagine without film. Technology is often like that.
The kinds of stories, the kind of communication and co-authorship, the kinds of interactive games computers and the internet make possible are only now starting to become apparent. For a long time, computers have been used to do what we always did before, just faster. Even the name - computer - suggests that it does little except perform mathematical operations. Stories, however, that would have been unimaginable before the internet are now starting to crop up. Games are allowing for stories to be told in a way that was inconceivable not twenty years ago. Authorship is becoming collaborative at a level unseen in history. And the effect is probably going to be greater than what anyone anticipates. The internet is one of the most world-changing inventions of human history, not because of what it has done, but because of what it is yet to do.
I cannot say what exactly will change, and how, and to what degree. But through it all there will be language - of one kind or another - and stories, and self-expression, and communication. Indeed, these things are becoming more and more prominent. Those who bemoan the death of reading fail to recognize that, in many ways, more people are reading more often than ever before. They're just reading blogs and tweets and text messages and facebook walls. That may not be satisfying to we bibliophiles, who cling to the printed page, but it shows a profound potential for art and beauty and good writing even in the digital age. What that writing is, and will be, what stories will be told, who knows? Regardless, the future of reading and writing - the future of stories - is an exciting one.
These questions are at the forefront of The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, which I am currently rereading. The story itself is blissfully inconsequential, full of absurdity and drama, humor and even a little sarcasm. That makes it enjoyable to read, but it's not the kind of book that warrants dissection. No, it's basically a children's adventure, meant to be read aloud, meant to be immersive and silly. But it is punctuated by another story: Goldman's narrative about hearing the story as a child, trying to pass it on to his own child (a son, which he does not have), and finding that he needed to abridge the original. This story is as fictitious as the story about Buttercup and Westley, but it is so believable that myriad forums and websites have discussions about whether or not it is actually true. Was there a Morgenstern (the supposed author of the original story)? Is The Princess Bride really based on true events? How could Goldman simply invent this incredibly elaborate and utterly conceivable back story, and why would he?
Mixed in with this background story is a thin layer of truth. Goldman was married at the time he was writing The Princess Bride, and it was born as a story to tell his daughters, and he did end up getting divorced from his wife (as the background story suggests is likely). He even includes a few parenthetical stories in the various introductions - and there are many - that say "this is a true story," to set them apart.
Why does Goldman tell the story this way? I won't pretend to be able to get into his head, nor will I try. Rather, I wonder why we tell stories at all. I know that they are enjoyable, and engaging, and immersive. I know that most people love to imagine different worlds, to take on different identities and to play with the possibilities those worlds and identities propose. So much learning happens, indeed, from the ability to imagine oneself as someone else, to take on a new identity. So much happiness comes from the ability to imagine a better world, or at least a different one. Perhaps that is why the Waldorf schools emphasize myth and imagination so much.
Learning and fun aren't the only reasons here, though. There's also the story teller, who is not always seeking to teach. Perhaps he is always seeking to entertain, but with what tools, and why? Is there a desire for self-expression, no matter how fictitious the story ends up being? Is there a pride in invention? Is there a sense of community the storyteller becomes a part of?
I think of Homer, and the story of Achilles. So much of that story must have been false, but it didn't matter anymore. It was a story that captured what it was to be a Greek, what it was to be a man, to struggle with the knowledge of your own mortality, to be great and finite all at once. It was also a story of clashing steel and spears and gruesome deaths made poetry. All of those things we find in our modern stories - whether they be movies or books or the innovative blog posts at Cardboard Gods or just a series of pictures. I would argue that some video games are build to tell stories, too, some obviously so - Mass Effect, The Witcher, God of War - some not as overtly, but in a way, more deeply - Fall from Heaven, Europa Universalis, Out of the Park Baseball, PeaceMaker. Stories come in so many forms, with such variety in authorship, reality, and audience.
What was the Iliad to Homer? Who was it for? His audience has turned out to be thousands of years worth of Westerners, even though his audience was originally just groups of interested men and their children who they desired to grow up warriors. Was it for Homer, too? And was his audience also an author? That is the modern trend, where blogs are replacing the page, and interactive games are replacing the TV screen, and people are connected with each other almost always, and having conversations. Authorship and audience are becoming the same thing, and yet, that doesn't seem so strange. It's certainly not a return of what stories used to be, but it is a moving forward that simultaneously looks back. "The human voice is making a comeback," a Professor here at Stanford told me. She's right, and while the story is once again becoming central to what it means to communicate, to think, and to learn, it is a very different kind of story that we are beginning to see. Let me tell a little story, to give a little perspective before the end of this post.
The original movies were just films of a stage play. There was no zooming, no panning, no cut-scenes or splicing or, really, editing of any kind. The movie was shot from beginning to end, because it was just another medium to capture and distribute a whole methodology of storytelling that already existed (and had existed for millenia). It wasn't until much later that film makers distanced themselves from their theatrical roots, and began to take advantage of their ability to mix in music, to cut from one actor to another, to take things out of order (consider an extreme version of this: Memento). Eventually, film makers imagined things that it would have been impossible not only to do without film, but even to imagine without film. Technology is often like that.
The kinds of stories, the kind of communication and co-authorship, the kinds of interactive games computers and the internet make possible are only now starting to become apparent. For a long time, computers have been used to do what we always did before, just faster. Even the name - computer - suggests that it does little except perform mathematical operations. Stories, however, that would have been unimaginable before the internet are now starting to crop up. Games are allowing for stories to be told in a way that was inconceivable not twenty years ago. Authorship is becoming collaborative at a level unseen in history. And the effect is probably going to be greater than what anyone anticipates. The internet is one of the most world-changing inventions of human history, not because of what it has done, but because of what it is yet to do.
I cannot say what exactly will change, and how, and to what degree. But through it all there will be language - of one kind or another - and stories, and self-expression, and communication. Indeed, these things are becoming more and more prominent. Those who bemoan the death of reading fail to recognize that, in many ways, more people are reading more often than ever before. They're just reading blogs and tweets and text messages and facebook walls. That may not be satisfying to we bibliophiles, who cling to the printed page, but it shows a profound potential for art and beauty and good writing even in the digital age. What that writing is, and will be, what stories will be told, who knows? Regardless, the future of reading and writing - the future of stories - is an exciting one.
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