Closer To The Ideal

Why do people think crime is getting worse?

The year 2009 was a grim one for many Americans, but there was one pleasant surprise amid all the drear: Citizens, though ground down and nerve-racked by the recession, still somehow resisted the urge to rob and kill one another, and they resisted in impressive numbers. Across the country, FBI data show that crime last year fell to lows unseen since the 1960s – part of a long trend that has seen crime fall steeply in the United States since the mid-1990s.

At the same time, however, another change has taken place: a steady rise in the percentage of Americans who believe crime is getting worse. The vast majority of Americans – nearly three-quarters of the population – thought crime got worse in the United States in 2009, according to Gallup’s annual crime attitudes poll. That, too, is part of a running trend. As crime rates have dropped for the past decade, the public belief in worsening crime has steadily grown. The more lawful the country gets, the more lawless we imagine it to be.

I’ve written before about how safe New York City is.

I was just recently in Atlanta. I ran into a woman who seemed to think there was more war in the world now than ever before. I told her what I’ve read, which is that there is less war now than at any other time known to historians. She looked at me like I was crazy.

I am not sure what is going on, but it seems like a lot of the public wants to believe the world is in worse shape than it is. There is, after all, a segment of the population who believes that the threat of Islamic terrorism is the worst threat America has ever faced – as if the Soviet Union, with enough nuclear weapons to end all life on earth, was somehow a joke, something to laugh at.

Are these misperceptions due to Americans dislike of reading history? I get that the economy is bad, but violence everywhere seems contained. Why do people believe otherwise? What reference points do they use?

At some point I’d like to work on one of the dating sites. They seem to often make huge money. Lots of people meet their mates online nowadays. It is clearly one of the main things that people use the Internet for. And some really interesting sociology data comes out of it.

The interesting thing on the OK Cupid site was that the non-normalized responses from men looked as if they’d been normalized into a bell curve – the men thought most women were of average looks, a few women were rated good looking, and a few were rated ugly. Meanwhile the women rated 80% of the men as below average in attractiveness.

Also, GirlsAskGuys is an interesting example of crowd-sourcing brought to the dating world – got a question about the other gender? Ask the crowd.

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.

Darren Hoyt got me thinking about who is online, with his remarks about RSS feeds:

Google Reader’s popularity is surging and the number of people consuming web content via RSS readers has grown overall, but no one’s claiming RSS is a mainstream concept just yet. It’s mostly the geeks and early-adopters who know what it is and what to do with it, thus they don’t need to be sold on whether a blog offers an RSS feed—their feedreader can auto-detect it based on URI anyway… Yet so many theme designers use valuable screen space to display a prominent (and mysterious, to most) orange RSS icon. Non-techy users will either avoid the icon or click it and be taken to a page of XML gobbledygook.

I started to wonder about non-techies and when and if they will ever think it is natural to subscribe to RSS feeds. I wrote this as a comment on Darren’s site:

My mom is in her 70s and over the last 3 years she has become a regular reader of Google News. I set it as the homepage on FireFox and IE on her computer. After I’d set it up, she surprised me by exploring it enough to learn how to customize it. Since she is fluent in French, she told Google News that she wanted news in both English and French. She now gets titles in both languages.

More recently, she’s become a regular reader of DailyKos. For years my brother has sent her links to occasional posts on DailyKos, but only recently has my mom become a regular reader. Assuming she eventually gets interested in other political blogs, I imagine there is an RSS feed reader in her future.

There are young people whose reading habits were shaped during the era of the Web. They’ve grown up getting their news online. And every year they are another year older (eventually they become that demographic that advertisers value most). On the other hand, there are certain paper magazines that have what I’d guess are slightly older audiences. Think of magazines about fishing or boats. The audience for these magazines will, I suspect, be slowly eroded by the generational shift. To me, the conclusion seems to be that eventually whole categories of print-based magazines will be endangered by their online rivals. If this decade saw the maturation of the tools needed to build complex, dynamic websites, the next decade is likely to see large scale shifts in how the public gets its news. RSS feeds seem like an obvious part of that shift.

At the end of the 80s, tech oriented college kids went onling (the internet was available on all campuses, though it wasn’t yet available to the general public). During the 90s, tech-oriented youth went online. Tech-oriented gay teens, in particular, began to find an escape from harrassment online. I’m using the phrase “tech oriented” rather than “affluent” or “college educated” or any other such phrase. danah boyd has written of the difficulties of defining social classes in America. People involved with the tech industry were among the first online, for obvious reasons. During the current decade, the web became an important resource and support for new moms. People with non-majority political viewpoints found the Internet an important place to converse and organize. Professors began to build reputations online (though the majority of professors still don’t have weblogs and the web has not replaced the peer-reviewed process). Law professors started posting essays on their weblogs, a few of which were cited in court cases. A new generation of journalists found they could launch quite successful careers through their weblogs. The news industry was transformed. The gambling industry was also transformed, and to the extent that we can consider the sports industry separately from the news industry, it too was transformed.

Except for the professors and the tech crowd, most of the other groups that went online had in common a sense of isolation. New moms, gay teens, and folks with minority political viewpoints greeted the web as a place where they could finally connect with others. Gamblers too, for different reasons.

Each year that passes sees the web become more central to people’s lives. This decade saw an explosion of online social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook and, for professional contacts, LinkedIn. People nowadays often meet their romantic partners online.

When the economy recovers from the current recession, society’s acceptance of the web will enter a new phase. The early adopters have all adopted the web, and the middle part of society has mostly embraced it too. The late adopters will be increasingly online over the next few years.

Much of the content now online is subsidized by existing offline publications. For instance, the New York Times online is subsidized by the offline version of the paper. My mom is a very great fan of the New York Times. She subscribes to the paper version of it and she loves to read it. Myself and my brothers only read the New York Times online. So, to some extent, older folks like my mom are subsidizing the reading habits of younger people. As the demand for the older, offline product shrinks, the ability of the offline product to subsidize the online product will also shrink. Personally, I think the New York Times will survive for a very long time to come but other publications will disappear. Some very small niche subjects will likely only be able to support online publications. For online publications, the exciting possibility is how much additional revenue will become available to them.

There are many groups that are slow to adopt technology. There are a few groups who feel that technology, by itself, is contrary to their mission or ideology. My experience with iHanuman.com reminded me that there is a great resistance to technology among some who are students of yoga (some yoga instructors insist that sitting in front of a computer is bad for your body and therefore contrary to yoga). My experience with The Second Road has taught me that the recovery community is only slowly moving online. In fact, in many ways the online recovery community resembles where political blogs were about 6 years ago – they all have small audiences, the overall audience is probably growing quickly, especially for younger folks.

I recall a Second Road meeting where someone asked why anyone would go online to seek support. We were discussing young people (under age 25) with a counselor who worked with youth. We wondered, if a 20 year old is at a party and someone pulls out meth, and that 20 year old is trying to stay clean, won’t they simply call someone else in recovery? Don’t all young people have cell phones, and don’t they use them all the time? The counselor corrected us. Most young people have limited cell phone plans. They are constantly having to save their minutes, or they are out of minutes. Also, at a party, it is much more socially acceptable to say “I’ve got to check my email, can I borrow your computer?” than it is to say “I’ve got to call my sponsor, can I borrow a phone?”

Middle class Baby Bomers are now entirely online, and they now organize their social lives around the web almost to the same extent as the younger cohorts do. Most of the big web companies that have so far thrived have been built or lead by Baby Boomers (early adopters, to be sure). Even those Baby Boomers who missed the first wave of the web eventually joined up. I’ve known Baby Boomers who made a lot of money selling things on Ebay or Amazon. I’ve known Baby Boomers who’ve met their current romantic partners on the web.

The groups that haven’t yet moved online are the ones that have so far had some reason to resist computers, or some obstacle keeping them from the Internet. Rural areas, which are only now getting broad band, poor people and older people are major demographics who’ll be moving online during the next few years.

If a technology is truly disruptive, then it will cause the bankruptcy of many large, established firms. Over the last 15 years, since the web did not cause large-scale bankruptcies for large, established firsm, some people began to doubt whether it was truly disruptive. But consider the way that Clayton M. Christensen first defined a disruptive technology:

New performance introduced by a disruptive technology, which typically begins at a lower level of performance, but rapidly improves until it meets the majority of customers’ needs.

It’s possible that the web is only now reaching the point that it becomes truly disruptive. Many people have rejected it up till this point. The way of accessing it has been through a personal computer, which has been expensive and cumbersome. And broadband connections were slow to spread, especially in the US. Perhaps we are only now arriving at the critical moment of ubiquity.

All the remaining groups, all the factions of the population that have so far resisted the Web, or been unable to reach it, are now (over the next 5 years) likely to be brought online by the collapse of offline alternatives. The massive bankruptcy of the old ways of doing things will leave these groups with less and less options. For those groups who wanted to be online but were kept from doing so, more and more options will probably ease their path.

Conclusions: over the next 5 years, one of the biggest opportunities for content sites will be those that aim to directly replace existing paper-based content. Such sites were much hyped and much predicted in the mid 90s, but it turns out those predictions were premature. 13 years later, I believe we’ve arrived at the moment for such predictions to come true. No one person can be aware of all of the possible demographic niches that are now ready for content via the Web. I am aware of a few possibilities, which I’ve mentioned above. I believe now is the right time for a new wave of investment in content sites.