socmed

The Last Texts of the Gutenberg Era

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Andrey Mir:

The Viral Editor, a human-based mechanism of relevance, structured the blogosphere of the 2000s. Blogs followed the old rules of literature and journalism. Essentially the last texts of the Gutenberg era, many blog posts ran a few hundred words, requiring creative effort and logical organization on the part of the writer. They were also distributed by humans. Users themselves shared the links to blog posts they liked. Other users could see an important blog post only if they followed the blog or if their friends delivered it to them. Reading a post was always and everywhere a human decision, made with no algorithmic involvement. Comments and hyperlinks rendered certain blog posts popular and therefore of significance.

If the number of journalists in the history of the news media can be estimated roughly at 1 million, the blogosphere era saw tens of millions of people enter the fray. Unlike journalists, bloggers typically were not institutionally affiliated and were not burdened by editorial policies or restrained by media owners and advertisers. By 2014, Tumblr was hosting 172 million blogs, and WordPress another 75 million. But the ecosystem had already changed. If the 2000s were the decade of the blogosphere, the 2010s were the decade of social media. The blogosphere continued to exist, but bloggers started using social-media platforms for distributing their blog content. In 2010, according to a survey by Technorati, 78 percent of bloggers used Twitter and 87 percent used Facebook.

The blogosphere was run by humans; social media are run by algorithms. The transition from human to algorithmic mechanisms of relevance unfolded in an instant. And it coincided with an explosion in authorship: while the number of bloggers reached a few hundred million, the number of social-media users has now hit 4.7 billion—more than half of humankind.

The shift from the blogosphere to social media transformed the way people exchange information online. The transition was not only from Blogger and LiveJournal to Facebook and Twitter but also from the written word to digital speech.

At the most fundamental level, blogs are written text. A blog post is a personal diary entry, and writing one takes time. As the Soviet paleoanthropologist Boris Porshnev once noted, thought and speech require the inhibition of natural reflexes. The need to formulate thoughts and sentences mediates our gut reactions. This makes humans slowpokes compared with animals, but it also facilitates deliberation and cooperation, conferring evolutionary benefits. Writing is the highest form of this reaction delay: a literate culture may delay its response to events for days, months, or years, but the deliberation and cooperation that literacy engenders allowed humans as a species to thrive and transform the planet.

Social media have reversed this process. Seeking to extract more of their users’ time and engagement, social-media platforms have made digital reactions almost as instantaneous as physiological reflexes. The Internet completed the transfer of our reactions into virtual space, reducing the transaction costs for sharing them with others.

I take this as confirmation that it isn’t just my rose-colored imagination — the web really was more interesting before social media, before human decision-making was replaced by algorithms.

A Penny For Your Silence

By in socmed, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Ed West:

They benefited from the mystery of celebrity, living in that golden age when we didn’t know what famous people thought about the world. Remember that time, before social media, when we weren’t aware that most of the musicians from our youth were complete cranks, who wouldn’t put a vaccine inside them because of some YouTube video they’d seen, despite spending most of the 80s and 90s shoving coke up their nose and God knows what.

What a lost Eden that was. Now, sadly, we have Twitter, which has given us so many insights into the workings of famous peoples’ minds.

I don’t go in much for nostalgia, but this is one case where I wholeheartedly agree that things were better in the past, even the relatively recent past, when reticence was much more common. Sure, even in the 90s, Oprah and her talk-show epigones were creating the atmosphere for today’s climate of exhibitionist oversharing — as I said, there never has been a golden age. But it was also a time when a popular musician like Mark Sandman could manage to opt out:

After earning a BA in political science from UMass Boston, he spent a period of time traveling — at one point working on a giant fishing boat out in the state of Washington. Details like that about his personal life and his past were hard to come by. There were things he just wouldn’t talk about on the record. And in the age of the confessional talk-show interview, I grew to respect that. “I like to keep the personal personal,” is how he once put it. “I try to be a pretty private person.” He wasn’t trying to hide anything, except perhaps his age, because he was older than your average rock-and-roll star. In fact, the only time I ever pissed him off was backstage at the Conan O’Brien show in 1995, when after listening to him tell me about a Rolling Stone reporter’s desperate efforts to find out his age I joked that I was going to dig up his Newton North high-school yearbook.

Only twenty-eight years ago, it was still possible to keep something like that a secret from prying journalists! And yet, it seems like a lost world.

The Great Recluse

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang, socmed No Comments

The highest ideal of Chinese thought is therefore a man who does not have to escape from human society and human life in order to preserve his original, happy nature. He is only a second-rate recluse, still slave to his environment, who has to escape from the cities and live away in the mountains in solitude. “The Great Recluse is the city recluse,” because he has sufficient mastery over himself not to be afraid of his surroundings. He is therefore the Great Monk (the kaoseng) who returns to human society and eats pork and drinks wine and mixes with women, without detriment to his own soul.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Kathleen Stock:

For many users, informational exchange is only the incidental pretext to more important things like self-aggrandisement, covert attacks on imagined enemies, and consolidation of social power. In terms of psychological richness, then, Twitter-watching offers a panoply of fascinating characters to rival anything Dickens, Austen, or Eliot could come up with. There are aggressors advertising victimhood; grifters advertising blogs about anti-grifting; fragile souls being grandiose; cruel people preaching kindness. There is also an absolute tsunami of empty sentimentality over other people’s pets, partners, and kids — dead, nearly dead, or just plain cute. The Taoist-style challenge for the observer is simply to notice these things as they are, rather than to get caught up emotionally or wilfully in any of them. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. It’s also pointless judging anybody else for what, after all, are just human traits to which we are nearly all subject. And that’s hard too.

John Gray said, in reference to Richard Dawkins-style evangelical atheism, that it is a curious sort of “humanist” who disdains one of the most enduring and important activities in human life. That sort of “humanism” is more like idealism and its Janus-face misanthropy, the latter of which is revealed when the masses fail to live up to the standards you’ve set for them. As an armchair foolosopher, I’ve always been concerned with the corrosive effects of social media, but I also recognize the futility of wishing that human beings would renounce the petty pleasures of gossiping, boasting, bullying, and attention-seeking in favor of quiet contemplation. And so, like Yutang and Stock, I aim to simply notice the great human drama without getting caught up in it. Perhaps even now, the Henry James of the social media age is compiling notes for his masterpiece, only after which will people say, ah, so there was art to be found there after all.

Never Again Is What You Swore the Time Before

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Ian Bogost:

If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.

A mere decade ago, hack writers for hack publications were suggesting that anyone who wasn’t on social media was suspicious, creepy, possibly worth investigating. Ten years and 180 degrees later, and now they want to make even casual users into pariahs. Leaving aside the highly-dubious idea that any of these pathetic junkies are actually going to quit, it just goes to show that trends will come and go, but the crusading Puritan spirit that animates so many American enthusiasms remains as vibrant as ever. Busybodies, man. Forever pursuing and pawing us with their dirty institutions, trying to constrain us to join their desperate oddfellow societies. Swive ’em all.

Mental Microbes

By in foolosophy, socmed, the geist of the zeit No Comments

But how is one to keep free from those mental microbes that worm-eat people’s brains—those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms and infectious Doctrines that we catch from what seem the most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with germs; they breathe creeds and convictions on you as soon as they open their mouths. Books and newspapers are simply creeping with them—the monthly Reviews seem to have room for little else. Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his way; how shall he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations, and novel schemes of Salvation? Can he ever be sure that he won’t be suddenly struck down by the fever of Funeral or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with a new Sex Theory?

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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Twitter gives you a telephone version of the news, where people take facts reported by journalists, which then gets spun and argued about, and soon there are not only the facts, but they are interspersed with discussions about the narrative, then a narrative about the narrative, and a narrative about the narrative about the narrative. The search for information gets diluted by gossip, dunking, theory building with regards to the motivations of rival tribes, and petty feuds and arguments. The vast majority of “takes” on the news are lazy nonsense put together by people who would, if they actually had the focus and patience to have anything worth saying, communicate their views in a more substantive format.

…It’s amazing to me the extent to which my group chats center around what’s on Twitter, and how much we’re pretending to be sophisticated observers of current events as an excuse to act like little girls. In a typical discussion, someone will send the latest clueless Jason Stanley tweet, and we’ll all laugh about what a goofball he is. Then there will be a Yglesias one, and people will be like “oh he gets it but can only go so far. har har har.” Andrew Sullivan is a nice guy we all have fond memories of reading but too naïve to understand the need to ban Critical Race Theory. There will be the latest Rufo or LibsofTikTok outrage, although these are actually useful because it’s good to know how deranged major institutions are getting, and Rufo is the rare right-wing social media personality who translates his celebrity into policy action. And of course there’s always the black academic who has devoted her life to studying blackness and the texture of her hair crying about how someone looked at her funny and this is the new slavery. Someone has been banned from Twitter, and everyone cries about American conservatives and so-called “dissidents” being the most wronged and oppressed human beings who have ever walked the face of the earth.

None of this strikes me as healthy.

— Richard Hanania

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I really hate having to be a devil’s advocate for social media in general, or Twitter in particular, but so be it. Let’s be clear: the “Twitter” that most people complain like this about is pop culture/current events Twitter, which is heavily dominated by journalists and pundits, both professional and amateur. The complainers aren’t wrong, obviously. Journalists and pundits are generally unpleasant, stupid people. But it’s a big world out there, and there are lots of interesting people with interesting thoughts who just happen to communicate some of them on Twitter. If you don’t want to pay attention to the demented screamers and feces-flingers in the political zoo, there’s accounts that focus entirely on language. Or art and architecture. Or medieval manuscripts. Or Generation-X nostalgia. Or gardening. Or countless other niche interests. As with most things, you tend to get out of social media what you put in. How does that old joke go…?

Anyway, to answer Pearsall Smith’s question, I don’t think it’s healthy to avoid all contact with those “creeds and convictions.” You need to develop your immunity by mingling with the crowd to some extent. Oh, come on, get over yourself. How arrogant is it to think that your age is uniquely deranged and uncouth? “Nothing human is alien to me,” remember? I’m no delicate hypochondriac; I want to know all about the new enthusiasms and infectious doctrines!

Never Gonna Give You Up

By in juxtapositions, socmed, the geist of the zeit No Comments

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Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

The Arbitrary Will of an Eccentric Owner

By in buried alive, socmed No Comments

Andrey Mir:

So here is the promised piece of advice to Musk: require a character minimum for tweets. The fundamental feature of Twitter is its limit of 280 characters for a post. Brevity was considered a virtue for a writer in the print era, but on Twitter, brevity has nothing to do with a sender’s virtue. Quite the opposite: short tweets tend to be short on rationality. In this medium, brevity is a business gimmick that makes the news feed faster and easier to engage with. What is needed to reverse radically this feature of social media is an opposite limit: tweets must not be shorter than 280 characters. A quantum of media must become time-consuming again, inhibiting responses via a technical delay into which thoughts, not emotions, might be squeezed. Alternatively, Twitter could prioritize longer posts, or give perks to users authoring thoughtful content.

This would encourage an unthinkable outcome for social media: requiring a user to think about what to write. And that renders it extraordinarily unlikely. After initial hype, such rules would undermine engagement, which lies at the core of Twitter’s business model. It could accelerate the takeover of non-textual media, such as TikTok. But solutions that slow down social media engagement cannot be driven by market imperatives. A source for such solutions, though, might be the arbitrary will of an eccentric owner—one who does not care much about the platform as a business and whose ambitions are peculiar enough to include sending humans to Mars.

I agree with Kevin Williamson that a good version with Twitter would not be Twitter, and that the problem with the platform is nothing more, or less, than good old human nature. I also agree with Alan Jacobs that Musk could be a hero by simply nuking the entire site from orbit. But mostly, I’m just amused that, once again, the solution to the ills of social media is to reinvent the blog under a different name (or simply turn Twitter into Reddit). Why were we expelled from the Garden of Blogging to begin with? There’s a loose parody of the Book of Genesis, based on the last two decades of the social web, just waiting to be written by someone more creative than me.

Dusty Mummies

By in media/propaganda, socmed, the geist of the zeit No Comments

I did not know that Antonio García Martínez had a Substack, but he does, and he interviewed Martin Gurri on it last year, and as with all things Gurri, it’s a good read:

Human knowledge is much more limited than we like to admit. To shape the flux of events into a story that will persuade the public, therefore, the elites must control the means of communication. When that control slips, the elite class lapses into a state of crisis. Every major transformation in information technology has brought in train widespread chaos and disruption, often accompanied by bloodshed, as the old elites – wedded to obsolete forms of communication – were chased up their castle towers and heaved out the window. The most disruptive innovation of this nature was surely the printing press. It inspired revolutions in religion, politics, and science.

At the present time, we are in the first stages of a gigantic transformation from the industrial mode of information and communication to something that doesn’t even have a name yet. It’s an extinction event for the narratives. The ideal of representative democracy is in trouble, for example, and the institutions around that ideal will have to be reformed if they wish to retain any sort of legitimacy. But every possible ideology that might challenge representative democracy is even more discredited. Putting aside old threats like fascism or Marxism-Leninism, which are museum relics, there is no great cry among the global public for the “Chinese model” or Putinism, and Islamism seems to have sputtered out.

The causes, I repeat, are structural, and not dependent on the creativity of the elites. Today, even George Washington and FDR would be roasted alive over the fires of social media. Not surprisingly, the people in charge of running things are terrified of saying anything at all – it might come back to bite them. In a Darwinian sense, they are selected for the ability to use words that have no meaning.

The sterility of the ruling class in the production of meaning, in turn, has paradoxical consequences. Crude and incoherent versions of worn-out ideals like socialism and nationalism briefly regain currency, and are said to be the next big thing: amid the panicked babble of the elites, we watch these rough dreams slouch towards Bethlehem to be born again. But there is no second coming. History has never sponsored reruns of dead ideals, even as sitcoms. The appeal to the corpses of once-powerful ideologies itself is evidence of our exhausted powers of explanation, and these dusty mummies, dragged up by the swirl of surface effects, will almost certainly be swept away in the great transformation.

It’s Not the Way It Used to Be. People Ain’t the Way They Used to Be

By in juxtapositions, revillaging, socmed, the madness of crowds 6 Comments

Many moons ago, I realized that by the time I learn enough about a big “news” story to realize I don’t care, the story turns out to be BS anyway. And so it is with the tale of Ellie Kemper, the actress and comedian from The Office and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, who was branded a “KKK Queen” this week.

Why? Because people started tweeting a rumor, based on a misunderstanding about some debutante ball in St. Louis that Kemper attended as a teenager over 20 years ago, and Twitter put it on their “What’s happening” sidebar of trending topics. It turns out that the claim is complete garbage and Kemper has never had anything to do with the Klan, but mere facts won’t do her or anyone else much good in 2021 America. The mob is always hungry for blood, and Kemper is this week’s special.

Once somebody decides to go after you on social media, there’s nothing you can do to defend yourself. Defying the mob is framed in the press as “doubling down,” and groveling for forgiveness just emboldens your tormentors. Kafka was an amateur, man.

There’s an entire media ecosystem devoted to whipping up these fake outrages for clicks. Why go after Ellie Kemper? Why not go after Ellie Kemper. Or you, or me, or anybody. We can be cancelled at any moment, for any reason or no reason at all.

If you’ve got enough money, all you can do is hide out until the mob moves on to another target. But if you can’t afford to just disappear for days or weeks or months… shrug emoji!

This sort of crap generates traffic for Twitter, which is why they amplify it. They know there’s a mob with torches and pitchforks at the ready, just waiting to be pointed toward the next victim. And Jack Dorsey sits on his billions and watches what he’s done.

With great power comes great irresponsibility.

— Jim Treacher

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Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.”

Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath. “I can’t run at all. You’ll have to go ahead and I’ll catch up with you.”

The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

— Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery“

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