Clive Thompson takes on the “social media is bad for teens” narrative in Don’t Blame Social Media if Your Teen Is Unsocial. He discusses some findings by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd:

What she has found, over and over, is that teenagers would love to socialize face-to-face with their friends. But adult society won’t let them. “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other,” Boyd says. “They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it online.” […]

The result, Boyd discovered, is that today’s teens have neither the time nor the freedom to hang out. So their avid migration to social media is a rational response to a crazy situation. They’d rather socialize F2F, so long as it’s unstructured and away from grown-ups. “I don’t care where,” one told Boyd wistfully, “just not home.”

Thompson and Boyd are joining a growing number of authors who push back against the notion that technology makes us stupid, social media is bad for us, etc. I’m currently making my way through Thompson’s book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. It’s really great so far, and I’ll write a full review when I’m done, but his core argument comes down to this:

What are the central biases of today’s digital tools? There are many, but I see three big ones that have a huge impact on our cognition. First, they allow for prodigious external memory: smartphones, hard drives, cameras, and sensors routinely record more information than any tool before them. We’re shifting from a stance of rarely recording our ideas and the events of our lives to doing it habitually. Second, today’s tools make it easier for us to find connections—between ideas, pictures, people, bits of news—that were previously invisible. Third, they encourage a superfluity of communication and publishing. This last feature has many surprising effects that are often ill understood.

Also consider Jason Feifer’s impassioned rejection of Sherry Turkle’s doom-and-gloom ideas1 in Google Makes You Smarter, Facebook Makes You Happier, Selfies Make You A Better Person:

Turkle imagines that any interaction with technology somehow negates all the time spent doing other things. She also imagines that we must devote ourselves in only one way to every task: At a dinner table, we are only serious and focused on conversation; at a memorial service, we are only mournful. That is not the way we live. It’s never been the way we live. And that’s the beauty of technology, which Turkle cannot see: We can use it for all purposes, to express joy and sadness, to have long conversations or send short texts. We made it. It is us.

I’m coming around to the idea that online connections are as real as “IRL” connections2. We’re just going through a reframing that happens every time a new technology comes along, and that’s ok. I also think we need both sides of the argument — pessimists as well as optimists — to help us work through it all and find our middle ground.

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1. Yes, I know, I’ve written about her stuff quite a bit. It’s time to start looking at the other side of the argument. ↩

2. Also see my post The fetishization of the offline, and a new definition of real. ↩

‘Tis the time for introspection, and this year we all seem to wonder about the future of online publishing — and in particular, what role the personal blog will play going forward. Jason Kottke kicks us off with The blog is dead, long live the blog:

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids. […]

The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like Facebook and Twitter.

Even though I don’t want to believe Jason, his words ring true. And that bugs me, because I really like this site (which I haven’t called a blog for a long time, but hey, semantics). After a few days of overthinking things, Frank Chimero came to the rescue with Homesteading 2014, in which he explains his plans for his own site going forward. The whole thing is worth reading because it’s a great summary of the problem with endless content streams, but here’s the key part:

I’m returning to a personal site, which flips everything on its head. Rather than teasing things apart into silos, I can fuse together different kinds of content. Instead of having fewer sections to attend to distracted and busy individuals, I’ll add more (and hopefully introduce some friction, complexity, and depth) to reward those who want to invest their time. […]

So, I’m doubling down on my personal site in 2014. In light of the noisy, fragmented internet, I want a unified place for myself — the internet version of a quiet, cluttered cottage in the country. I’ll have you over for a visit when it’s finished.

Count me in. The strategy resonates with me, and besides, I don’t want to see the “blog” die.

The VCSO team did a great interview with designer and illustrator Kyle Steed about his recent trip to Israel. I love Kyle’s view that what makes VSCO Cam great is all the ways it’s decidedly not Instagram:

It’s like this, you can’t just slap a b&w filter on a crappy photograph and suddenly it’s Ansel Adams, that’s foolish thinking. But this is where the majority lives I believe, in this make believe world that if they add enough filters and effects to their photo, then they’ll make the “pop” page. Note: Please don’t get me started on the popular page.

And yet another reason why I love the VSCO Grid, there are no likes, comments or other superfluous information that only adds hot air to a photographers headspace. Jerry Maguire said it best: “Fewer clients. Less money.” which could be translated in this case as: “Fewer followers. Less comments.”

Kontra explores a particularly egregious style of “content marketing”-style advertising on CNN’s website in his post “You Might Also Like”. He concludes:

Will these advertorial deceptions and misdirections move from the ad wells around the periphery of the page into the news delivery itself? Will there be product placements within news sentences? What follows that? Is the “mainstream media” management about to capitulate on long-held principles because it’s unable or unwilling to pursue any other strategy but the race to the bottom of the advertising barrel? Is there anything more precious than credibility to a news organization? If not, why is Time Inc. poisoning its own well so nonchalantly?

Contrast CNN’s approach with The Information, an online-only publication that just launched with a price tag of $400/year. Most people believe it won’t work, but I think Hunter Walk makes a good point in $400 for The Information Is About What’s Missing, Not What’s There:

For me the value in The Information is not solely in what they’re providing but what they’re leaving out. The ~two articles a day are both interesting. Because they’re not playing a page views game, they don’t need to overload me with 25+ posts every 24 hrs. The site is spartan because they don’t need to worry about IAB units. A small number of writers building their beats give me the chance to see each journalist’s style distinctly, not settle into some random byline slot machine of varying quality.

It’s sad that we have to pay not just to have a distraction-free reading environment, but also to reduce the amount of information we get to something more manageable (and focused on quality over quantity). But that appears to be the new world of publishing.

Robert McGinley Myers wrote a good post called Misunderstood or Double-edged? about the new Apple holiday ad. He starts off with familiar arguments about faces stuck in phones and blah blah blah — but wait, don’t roll your eyes because of yet another “technology is bad” post. It doesn’t end like you think it will:

That screen is not going away anytime soon, but we don’t have to be passive viewers of it, merely consuming and feeling vaguely guilty about what we consume from it. There’s immense creative power behind the screen. Instead of worrying about it, lamenting it, and disparaging it, we should focus on learning how best to use it — to gather, understand, shape, and share the information around us.

Agreed.

This week we saw quite a few articles on the rapidly changing online publishing scene. In particular, there is a lot of analysis going on about the sudden and unexpected traffic domination by sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy, as readers (or rather, clicks…) move away from more established outfits like the Huffington Post.

To set the stage, Alexis Madrigal wonders if 2013 will be The Year ‘the Stream’ Crested. He refers to the endless updates on social networks, which are always presented in reverse chronological order — a design that inherently implies that new=good and old=bad:

When the half-life of a post is half a day or less, how much time can media makers put into something? When the time a reader spends on a story is (on the high end) two minutes, how much time should media makers put into something?

The necessity of nowness plus the professionalization of content production for the stream means that there are thousands and thousands of people churning out more crap than can possibly be imagined. 

In a story that proves Madrigal’s point about an inevitable, exasperated move away from this “nowness”, Robinson Meyer asks Why Are Upworthy Headlines Suddenly Everywhere? He explains that beyond the obvious reason — clickbait headlines work because, well, people click on them — lies a change in Facebook’s algorithm that rewards “viral” stories more than recent stories. In Facebook’s words, “stories that people did not scroll down far enough to see can reappear near the top […] if the stories are still getting lots of likes and comments.” Meyer continues:

Simultaneous to this traffic upheaval, an entire vocabulary and syntax for headlines that people click and share — and oh, boy, do they click and share — had presented itself on the social web. For publishers trying to grab more traffic from Facebook, the path became clear. Borrow, adapt, employ the Upworthy style post haste. Assure readers your content was nothing but wondtacular. And so began the wondtacularization.

So “nowness” is replaced by whatever can get the most clicks, regardless of its age. On the surface this move away from “the stream” sounds like a good thing, but we need to dig a little deeper. Another interesting tie-in to these stories is Farhad Manjoo’s Why Everyone Will Totally Read This Column. It’s a profile on Neetzan Zimmerman, who is in charge of posting “viral” content on Gawker (with remarkable success):

He posts only about a dozen items a day. Almost every one becomes a big traffic hit — an astonishing rate of success. I’ve worked on the Web for years, and I still have trouble predicting which of my stories will be hits and which will appeal only to my mom. Mr. Zimmerman has somehow cracked the code.

His secret, he says, is a deep connection to his audience’s evolving, irreducibly human, primal sensibilities. Usually within a few seconds of seeing an item, Mr. Zimmerman can sense whether it’s destined to become a viral story. “I guess you could call it intuition,” he says.

And now we get to the crux of it. What happens to the truth when all focus shifts to a story’s ability to go viral? That’s what Ravi Somaiya and Leslie Kaufman explore in their NYT piece If a Story Is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating. They explain how this never-ending hunt for more clicks means that it doesn’t even matter if a story is true or not:

When the tales turned out to be phony, the modest hand-wringing that ensued was accompanied by an admission that viral trumps verified — and that little will be done about it as long as the clicks keep coming. “You are seeing news organizations say, ‘If it is happening on the Internet that’s our beat,’” said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. “The next step of figuring out whether it happened in real life is up to someone else.”

So this is the environment we find ourselves in right now:

Start with an entire industry built on the sandy foundation of ad revenue. Throw in a particular style of headline that feeds off people’s “primal sensibilities”. Add a Facebook traffic machine that is continuously tweaked to pick up these stories and recycle them endlessly on people’s news feeds. And what do you get? A race to the bottom where viral trumps verified, lowbrow beats intellectual, and cheap clicks beat in-depth reporting and considered opinion. Suddenly the Postliterate society doesn’t sound like such a crazy prediction any more.

My fascination with how internet memes change language gets another healthy boost with Annalee Newitz’s excellent article We who spoke LOLcat now speak Doge:

In the internet meme war between cats and dogs, the dogs are currently winning. The “doge” meme features an image (often of an adorable shiba dog), annotated with distinctive phrases representing the thoughts of the dog — or the dragon, or whatever is being depicted. What has the internet gained in its move from LOLcats to doges?

I can’t decide which part to quote, so I just went for the opening paragraph and hope it will entice you to read the whole thing. Has there ever been a time like this, where language is changing so quickly and so completely?

Also, grammatical humor rocks.

Also, I love the internet.

Adam Corner provides a very interesting perspective on modern advertising in Ad nauseam — Advertising turned anti-consumerism into a weapon. He starts off by discussing a new brand of ad that wants to join us in our distaste for, well, advertising:

These ads want to be our friends — to empathise with us against the tyranny of the corporate world they inhabit. Just when we thought we’d cottoned on to subliminal advertising, personalised sidebars on web pages, advertorials and infomercials, products started echoing our contempt for them. ‘Shut up!’ we shout at the TV, and the TV gets behind the sofa and shouts along with us.

He cites this recent Orange ad as an example of an attempt to empathize with our contempt for excessive product placement:

Adam then goes on to explain why it matters to be wary of these techniques:

And the industry’s seemingly endless capacity to perpetuate itself matters. Marketing is not simply a mirror of our prevailing aspirations. It systematically promotes and presents a specific cluster of values that undermine pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. In other words, the more that we’re encouraged to obsess about the latest phone upgrade, the less likely we are to concern ourselves with society’s more pressing problems. That’s a reason to want to keep a careful tab on advertising’s elusive and ephemeral forms.

In The Disconnectionists Nathan Jurgenson takes to task those who speak about digital detoxes and the negative social effects of being online:

Op-eds, magazine articles, news programs, and everyday discussion frames logging off as reclaiming real social interaction with your real self and other real people. The R in IRL. When the digital is misunderstood as exclusively “virtual,” then pushing back against the ubiquity of connection feels like a courageous re-embarking into the wilderness of reality. When identity performance can be regarded as a by-product of social media, then we have a new solution to the old problem of authenticity: just quit. Unplug — your humanity is at stake! Click-bait and self-congratulation in one logical flaw.

Which reminds me of this tweet of the picture below and the caption, “All this technology is making us antisocial. Before everyone used to talk to each other.”

There is nothing new under the sun… I also love this line from the article:

Disconnect. Take breaks. Unplug all you want. You’ll have different experiences and enjoy them, but you won’t be any more healthy or real.

It turns out our anti-social behavior comes not from technology, but from who we are.

I read two really great articles this week about a couple of recent language shifts. The first is Megan Garber’s English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet, all about the “because-noun”:

However it originated, though, the usage of “because-noun” (and of “because-adjective” and “because-gerund”) is one of those distinctly of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language. It conveys focus (linguist Gretchen McCulloch: “It means something like ‘I’m so busy being totally absorbed by X that I don’t need to explain further, and you should know about this because it’s a completely valid incredibly important thing to be doing’”). It conveys brevity (Carey: “It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone”).

But it also conveys a certain universality. When I say, for example, “The talks broke down because politics,” I’m not just describing a circumstance. I’m also describing a category. I’m making grand and yet ironized claims, announcing a situation and commenting on that situation at the same time. I’m offering an explanation and rolling my eyes — and I’m able to do it with one little word. Because variety. Because Internet. Because language. 

And then there’s Ben Crair’s exploration of SMS-speak in The Period Is Pissed — When did our plainest punctuation mark become so aggressive?:

The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.” […]

“In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all,” Liberman wrote me. “In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’”

If you have an interest in language, you’ll enjoy both articles very much.