Closer To The Ideal

Here is every blog post ever written:

This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence.

This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.

This sentence claims that there are many people who do not agree with the thesis of the blog post as expressed in the previous sentence. This sentence speculates as to the mental and ethical character of the people mentioned in the previous sentence. This sentence contains a link to the most egregiously ill-argued, intemperate, hateful and ridiculous example of such people the author could find. This sentence is a three-word refutation of the post linked in the previous sentence, the first of which three words is “Um.” This sentence implies that the linked post is in fact typical of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence contains expressions of outrage and disbelief largely expressed in Internet acronyms. This sentence contains a link to an Internet video featuring a cat playing a piano.

This sentence implies that everyone reading has certainly seen the folly of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence reminds the reader that there are a few others who agree. This sentence contains one-word links to other blogs with whom the author seeks to curry favor, offered as examples of those others.

I added these comments to the comment thread of that post:

This comment was only partially written when the poster accidentally submitted it by hitting the

and:

This comment is an attack phrased as a series of questions, allowing the poster to put forward an aura of faux objectivity, though careful readers can clearly see through the pose.

and:

This comment starts off by strongly agreeing with the above blog post, but then goes on to summarize the blog thesis in such a way that it becomes clear the commenter thought the blog author was making exactly the opposite point of that which was actually written.

and:

This comment is written by a well known writer who has a regular column at the New Republic but who feels deeply threatened by the thesis of the above blog post and who is, therefore, posting here anonymously to suggest that the blog author here is utterly wrong and immoral, whereas decent, well meaning people tend to agree with the writers at the New Republic. When it becomes publicly known that this New Republic writer is posting comments using false identities, their career as a writer will suffer a terrible setback, from which they will never recover.

and:

This comment points out that anyone who wants to do anything about the issue described in the above blog post is, paradoxically, a hypocrite, because, for this issue, the laws of unintended consequences work in such strangely ironic ways that, in fact, the best thing we can possibly do about this issue is to do nothing at all.

and:

This comment is posted by a troll who is well known, and utterly hated, by those readers who frequent this blog. The troll comments on every post on this blog.

and:

This comment is made by a regular reader of the blog who hates the troll who just posted the previous comment. The regular reader now begs the owner of this blog to permanently ban the troll forever. The regular reader appeals to the others who post comments on this blog to agree that the troll never contributes anything useful to any conversation on this blog.

and:

This comment expresses outrage that the author of the blog post should be writing about this particular issue, when, in fact, the author of the blog post has never written about the suffering of the people of East Timor, which is clearly a much larger and more important issue, effecting many more people. The poster of this comment suggests that no one will ever take the author seriously, until the author has written about all of those other issues, of which East Timor is only an example, which are clearly more important than the issue raised here.

and:

This comment parses the words of the original post, and parses them again and again and again, using clever rhetorical tricks to falsely “prove” that the words mean something very different than what they first appear to mean. This comment then urges reader not to fall for the innocent, naive impression they may have been left with after first reading the blog post, but rather, to see deeper, and thus understand the hideous, monstrous, secret aims of the author of the blog post.

and:

This comment is written by a hardened veteran of blog comment flame wars but who, hoping to gain the credibility of an objective innocent, claims “This is my very first time posting a comment to a blog.” They then disagree with the blog post and point out that they know of absolutely no one, anywhere, who would agree with the blog post.

and:

This comment is written by someone who clearly arrived on this site after having searched on Google for a term that just happens to appear in the title of the blog post. They then ask “Where can I buy incendiaries?”

Awful and sad. Rogers Cadenhead writes Why Leslie Harpold’s Sites Disappeared. We are often misunderstood by our family, and they often hold a worrisome power to censor us after our deaths.

I sent an email yesterday to Leslie’s niece, asking if it would be possible for some of her friends to reprint her work as a book and web site. Today I heard back. They will not allow anything to be republished. Because I’ve been told that some of her writings might be a sensitive issue for her family, I replied to her niece that if this is indeed the case, those particular works could be excluded from reprint.

This did not go over well.

I was told that it’s none of my business why her family doesn’t want her work republished, which is absolutely true, and that her legacy “is not dependent on websites or books; her legacy is with every person who knew her and loved her.” This is only partially true. Leslie was an early pioneer in the creation of autobiographical content and experimental web design. She left behind thousands of web pages, many of which are as memorable as Possible Scenarios for Heaven from 2003.

Leslie’s family appears to have decided to let her entire body of work disappear and be forgotten completely. The only things that are left online are articles she wrote for other sites, such as The Morning News.

This raises an important question for those of us who create work on the web that we publish ourselves. When heirs decide to bury a web creator’s body of work by shuttering sites and rejecting all republication requests, can anything be done to save the material?

If the heirs of Charles Dickens had decided that his novels were not his legacy, they could have spurned all publishers and let the books fall out of print, but the existing copies would not have vanished entirely. There still would be physical copies of the books to read and some would’ve survived long enough to fall into the public domain.

It is a sad story where one’s career fails after one has died. The worst thing you can do to a pioneer is erase any trace of their innovations. That she had a big impact on a lot of people is obvious from what was written about her, This Is Not a Eulogy

Todd Levin: Leslie was the Internet’s den mother. She adopted me in 1996, after discovering my Web site—perhaps you were familiar with its very memorable URL, http://users.interport.net/~toddl—and presented me with her plan to launch a web zine called Smug. It was to be both a repudiation of the early Web’s Whole Earth Catalog brand of sincerity, and a big Midwestern embrace of everything we hold dear. It was going to be amazing. It was going to change the medium, and maybe even the world.

I thought she was full of shit, and that Smug would never be seen by any eyes other than Leslie’s. I also honestly thought she was using this fictitious zine as counterfeit currency to purchase an online friendship, because I didn’t trust anyone I met on the Internet. But no one else had shown any interest in my writing, and there’s something very intoxicating about someone who wants to create something new and explosive and world-changing, and wants you on her team. So yes, fuck yes. Smug was going to change the world.

…Liz Entman: I knew Leslie only through her writing, which reveals a woman I would very much have liked to meet in person—sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, and deeply, quietly hilarious. Her writing is fresh and very, very good. She wrote an article for us before I came on board that is especially poignant to read now—“How to Write a Thank-You Note”—which seems to reveal her wit, warmth, and humor as much as it explicates a problem of modern etiquette. It is fitting, then, to give thanks here for Leslie and her many gifts. She will be missed.

…Liz Entman: I knew Leslie only through her writing, which reveals a woman I would very much have liked to meet in person—sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, and deeply, quietly hilarious. Her writing is fresh and very, very good. She wrote an article for us before I came on board that is especially poignant to read now—“How to Write a Thank-You Note”—which seems to reveal her wit, warmth, and humor as much as it explicates a problem of modern etiquette. It is fitting, then, to give thanks here for Leslie and her many gifts. She will be missed.

Anil Dash wrote, Leslie Harpold: Always Fearless, Never Smug

If you didn’t know her work, you might fear that someone who owned the domain names fearless.net and smug.com might be a bit, well… prickly. But more than 10 years after Leslie Harpold helped start some of the most clever and intelligent personal sites on the web, and just a few short months after her untimely passing, the lasting impression of Leslie’s life, on and off the web, is of surpassing kindness. And as we look at 10 years of blogging culture this week, her impact and legacy in the world of blogging is well worth revisiting.

The sites that Leslie helped create are legion. There’s The Historical Present, her blog. And Harpold.com (formerly Hoopla.com), which acts as something of a gateway to the rest of Leslie’s legacy on the web. The Smug archives still bear witness to the early experiments in design and writing which Leslie shared with us all. And each year, Leslie shared with us her Advent Calendars, (see 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005) making explicit her desire to give a gift to the entire web.

Clearly, Leslie Harpold had a big impact on the early web, and on the early pioneers of the web. Her life, and work, is now a part of history. It is all together tragic that her family wants to erase her memory, just because they are uncomfortable with some of what she wrote.

Wikipedia’s growth is slowing. But why?

Still, there remain unanswered questions. Could its growth ever halt completely? How big will the site be when the editors decide that the sum of human knowledge is catalogued? Could a new website take Wikipedia’s place by toeing an inclusionist line?

Parc’s research doesn’t give any answers, but Chi has identified one model that Wikipedia’s growth pattern matches. “In my experience, the only thing we’ve seen these growth patterns [in] before is in population growth studies – where there’s some sort of resource constraint that results in this model.” The site, he suggests, is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out. “As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power.”

David Simon writes the single most ludicrous, misguided, uninformed post about the future of the newspapers that I’ve yet seen:

The true audience for this essay narrows necessarily to a pair of notables who have it in their power to save high-end journalism—two newspaper executives who can rescue an imploding industry and thereby achieve an essential civic good for the nation. It’s down to them. The rest of the print journalism world is in slash-and-burn mode, cutting product and then wondering why the product won’t sell, rushing to give away what remains online and wondering further why that content is held by advertisers to be valueless. The mode is full-bore panic. And yet these two individuals, representing as they do the two fundamental institutions that sit astride the profession, still have a card to play, and here’s a shard of good news: it’s the only card that ever really mattered. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Katharine Weymouth, publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post, are at the helms of two organizations trying to find some separate peace with the digital revolution…

Melodramatic. Two brave souls have the power to save the noblest industry on Earth, the 4th estate, they can perform “an essential civic good for the nation”, but only if they act bravely and wisely. It is a good setup for a movie. How is it that Simon got so far out of touch with reality that he doesn’t understand how sentimental and over-heated this is?

Simon is so desperate to save the newspapers, that he wishes they could break the law:

Most of all, I know that here you are being individually asked to consider taking a bold, risk-laden stand for content—that antitrust considerations prohibit the Times and The Post, not to mention Rupert Murdoch or the other owners, from talking this through and acting in concert. Would that every U.S. newspaper publisher could meet in a bathroom somewhere and talk bluntly for fifteen minutes, this would be a hell of a lot easier.

This by itself says a lot about how doomed the newspapers are – that their supporters think the only way to save them is by breaking the law. Having written this paragraph, Simon should then draw the obvious conclusion – that there is no legal way to save the newspapers. But he is deep in denial. He has a strong emotional attachment to the newspapers, so contemplating their demise causes him too much pain – so he escapes into fantasy:

You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future—let’s say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it—both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work.

No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling or pennies-on-the-dollar fees.

I’m familiar with “a miracle might happen” reasoning. I went through a lot of this when my father died: “The doctor says there is no hope, but a miracle might happen.” Of course, now, looking back, I can clearly see I was deluding myself. Simon is at an earlier stage. He has not yet started mourning because he believes the thing he loves can still be saved.

He then indulges a fantasy in which he is someday regarded as a hero (I assume he will someday be embarrassed that he wrote this):

And when the Justice Department lawyers arrive, briefcases in hand, to ask why America’s two national newspapers did these things in concert—resulting in a sea change within newspapering as one regional newspaper after another followed suit in pursuit of fresh, lifesaving revenue—you can answer directly: We never talked. Not a word. We read some rant in the Columbia Journalism Review that made the paywall argument. Blame the messenger.

Especially stupid is his dismissal of the idea that online ad revenue will someday be greater than what it is now:

Clearly, the product still moves. But to what purpose, when more and more readers rightly identify the immediate digitized version as superior, yet pay nothing for that version, and online advertising simply doesn’t deliver enough revenue?

He then makes a ludicrous comparison:

For the first thirty years of its existence as America’s primary entertainment medium, television was—after the initial purchase of the set itself—provided at no cost to viewers, instead subsidized by lucrative ad revenues. The notion of Americans in 1975 being asked to pay a monthly bill for their television consumption would have seemed farcical. Yet in the ensuing thirty years, we have become a nation that shells out $60, $70, or $120 in monthly cable fees; indeed, whole vistas of programming exist free of advertising revenue, subsidized entirely by subscriptions.

So, somehow the fact that Americans are willing to pay money to get more content proves that they are willing to pay money to get less content.

Maybe the most funny thing in his whole essay is where he compares the brave, visionary geniuses who run the television industry with the stupid, crass, profit-obessessed buffoons who run the newspaper industry:

But unlike television, in which industry leaders were constantly reinvesting profits in research and development, where a new technology like cable reception would be contemplated for all its potential and opportunity, the newspapering world was content to send its treasure to Wall Street, appeasing analysts and big-ticket shareholders. There was no reinvestment in programming, no intelligent contemplation of new and transformational circulation models, no thought beyond maximized short-term profit.

Oh, those damn newspaper publishers! Always obsessed with short-term profit! Why can’t they be more like the noble, far-seeing statesmen who run the television industry?

But here is the saddest paragraph of all, the one that truly shows how much Simon is gripped by the past, rather than what is to come:

In the newspaper industry, however, the fledgling efforts of new media to replicate the scope, competence, and consistency of a healthy daily paper have so far yielded little in the way of genuine competition. A blog here, a citizen journalist there, a news Web site getting under way in places where the newspaper is diminished—some of it is quite good, but none of it so far begins to achieve consistently what a vibrant newspaper, staffed with competent, paid beat reporters and editors, once offered. New-media entities are not yet able to truly cover—day after day—the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations. And until new models emerge that are capable of paying reporters and editors to do such work—in effect becoming online newspapers with all the gravitas this implies—they are not going to get us anywhere close to professional journalism’s potential.

David Simon will only respect New Media once New Media is able to replicate what Old Media gives us everyday. And here, possibly, is the one and only thing that Simon and I agree on: New Media will never replicate what Old Media gave us.

This is reality: the newspapers will largely die, and nothing is going to take their place. There will be other forms of media in the future, but they won’t look or act like what the newspapers did.

Here is the only passage in the essay where he correctly notes that the newspapers have been dying for a long time, and the Internet is only speeding a long-term, secular trend:

Last, and perhaps most disastrous, the rot began at the bottom and it didn’t reach the highest rungs of the profession until far too much damage had been done. As early as the mid-1980s, the civic indifference and contempt of product inherent in chain ownership was apparent in many smaller American markets. While this was discussed in some circles, usually as a matter of mild rumination, little was done by the industry to address a dynamic by which men in Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, at the behest of Wall Street, determined what sort of journalism would be practiced in Baltimore, Denver, Hartford, or Dallas. If you happened to labor at a newspaper that was ceding its editorial ambition to the price-per-share, it may have been agony, but if you were at the Times, the Post, The Wall Street Journal, or the Los Angeles Times, you were insulated.

I’ve rarely read an essay where the author’s fear of change was so near the surface, so present in every sentence.

There are at least 2 ways to attack Simon’s ideas. One is offered by Brad Delong, who makes the case that the newspapers are often full of lies and misrepresentation, and so he generally finds his favorite blogs more interesting:

I am 6.5 times as likely to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories in my RSS reader as I am to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories printed by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

To some degree this is the “Daily Me” phenomenon: my RSS reader is now tuned to bring me things written by people I learn from, while the editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times select stories on the basis of… bizarre and incomprehensible algorithms. To some degree this is because this is because the WP and the NYT are pitched at a level far below the one I want to read at, in part because they think their audience is less clued-in than I am (Peter Baker and Helene Cooper; Dan Balz) and in part because their reporters are out of their depth (i.e., Tobin Harshaw). In part this is because they are unprofessional (i.e., Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston not situating their article in its proper context in the journalistic enterprise begun by The One-Percent Doctrine). To some degree this is because their reporters know nothing about how representative their anecdotes are and so have absolutely nothing interesting to say (Michael Wilson and Solomon Moore; Michael Rosenwald)….

But there is a bigger problem: the army of small start-ups that want a piece of the New York Times’s market. Last year I spent $30,000 to start a new political web site. That is, I spent a small sum, and attracted a small audience. But there are thousands of entrepreneurs like me. Collectively, we spend millions each year, trying to establish sites that can take market share from existing newspapers. And every dollar we spend is a torpedo aimed at the old institutions of media.

In the old days, it took millions of dollars to set up a new newspaper. USA Today took 15 years just to break even. The large scale of the needed capital acted as a barrier to entry, and protected the newspapers from competition. Now a new web site can get going for just $100,000 (I’ve previously written about the costs of websites). Nothing can bring back the old days, when the newspapers could generate high margins, safe behind the barriers that kept competition limited. But David Simon doesn’t see this. Consider the static, unchanging nature of the world in which he thinks he’s living in:

Antitrust considerations prohibit the Times and The Post, not to mention Rupert Murdoch or the other owners, from talking this through and acting in concert

See, in Simon’s world, all of the owners of all of the media companies are known, and could be called together to meet, if only it weren’t for antitrust considerations. What Simon doesn’t see is the vast army of entrepreneurs who are just off-stage, waiting for the right conditions, ready to strike.

My world is very different from Simon’s world. Here’s the world that I live in:

1.) Consumers do not want to pay for online content, so if the newspapers put up pay walls, then entrepreneurs like myself will jump up and down with pure joy, and call in all our favors, to put together the funding for new companies to replace the old newspapers.

2.) However, if a miracle happens, and suddenly consumers are willing to pay for online content, then entrepreneurs like myself will jump up and down with pure joy, and call in all our favors, to put together the funding for new companies to replace the old newspapers.

Either way, more funding will continue to be invested in online media ventures, and the endlessly growing supply will drive down everyone’s margins. More so, we are in for a prolonged period of over-supply, which will drive down everyone’s margins very low, so those businesses that were built around the assumption of healthy margins (and that would include the major newspapers) are going to go bankrupt. A prolonged period of very low margins will mean that only those ventures that are built to survive very low margins will, in fact, survive. And, obviously, the web-based ventures, free of the costs of printing plants and distribution networks, sometimes even free of having an office, can get by on some extremely narrow margins.

There are no scenarios in which the newspapers survive.

danah boyd on classroms, meeting, back channels and the generation gap:

My frustration at the anti-computer attitude goes beyond the generational gap of an academic conference. I’ve found that this same attitude tends to be present in many workplace environments. Blackberries and laptops are often frowned upon as distraction devices. As a result, few of my colleagues are in the habit of creating backchannels in business meetings. This drives me absolutely bonkers, especially when we’re talking about conference calls. I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings. While I will fully admit that there are times when the only thing I have to contribute to such dialogue is snark, there are many more times when I really want clarifications, a quick question answered, or the ability to ask someone in the room to put the mic closer to the speaker without interrupting the speaker in the process.

I have become a “bad student.” I can no longer wander an art museum without asking a bazillion questions that the docent doesn’t know or won’t answer or desperately wanting access to information that goes beyond what’s on the brochure (like did you know that Rafael died from having too much sex!?!?!). I can’t pay attention in a lecture without looking up relevant content. And, in my world, every meeting and talk is enhanced through a backchannel of communication.

This isn’t simply a generational issue. In some ways, it’s a matter of approach. Every Wednesday, MSR New England has a guest speaker (if you wanna be notified of the talks, drop me an email). None of my colleagues brings a laptop. I do. And occasionally my interns do (although they often feel like they’re misbehaving when they do so they often don’t… I’m more stubborn than they are). My colleagues interrupt the talk with questions. (One admits that he asks questions because he’s more interested in talking to the speaker than listening… he also asks questions to stay awake.) I find the interruptions to the speaker to be weirdly inappropriate. I much much prefer to ask questions to Twitter, Wikipedia, and IRC/IM. Let the speaker do her/his thing… let me talk with the audience who is present and those who are not but might have thoughtful feedback. When I’m inspired, I ask questions. When I’m not, I zone out, computer or not.

My colleagues aren’t that much older than me but they come from a different set of traditions. They aren’t used to speaking to a room full of blue-glow faces. And they think it’s utterly fascinating that I poll my twitterverse about constructs of fairness while hearing a speaker talk about game theory. Am I learning what the speaker wants me to learn? Perhaps not. But I am learning and thinking and engaging.

I’m 31 years old. I’ve been online since I was a teen. I’ve grown up with this medium and I embrace each new device that brings me closer to being a cyborg. I want information at my fingertips now and always.