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.

As we all know by now, The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is selfie. That annoying, ubiquitous self-portrait that you just can’t get away from no matter what social network you participate in (and taken to its illogical, wonderful extreme by mrpimpgoodgame on Instagram).

Most of the coverage of the culture of selfies is understandably negative about this seemingly overly narcissistic behavior. So it was with great interest that I read Casey Cep’s In Praise of Selfies: From Self-Conscious to Self-Constructive, a very intriguing history and defense of the self-portrait:

Self-portraiture, like all reflexive art, turns its gaze inward from what we see to the one who sees. In the digital age, the rise of selfies parallels the rise of memoir and autobiography. Controlling one’s image has gone from unspoken desire to unapologetic profession, with everyone from your best friend to your favorite celebrity laboring to control every word, every pixel of himself or herself that enters the world. Self-portraiture is one aspect of a larger project to manage our reputations.

We cherish the possibility that someone, anyone, might see us. If photographs possess reality in their pixels, then selfies allow us to possess ourselves: to stage identities and personas. There is the sense that getting the self-portrait just right will right our own identity: if I appear happy, then I must be happy; if I appear intellectual, then I must be an intellectual; if I appear beautiful, then I must be beautiful. Staging the right image becomes the mechanism for achieving that desired identity. The right self-portrait directs others to see us the way we desire to be seen.

I’m not 100% convinced, but ok, I’ll give it a shot. Am I doing it right?

This Interview with Clive Thompson About Twitter, Ambient Awareness, Socrates, and Recency Bias is really interesting. Clive has a decidedly more positive take on technology than what we’ve come to expect recently:

There’s an idea, popular with many text-based folks—like myself, and many journalists and academics—that reading books is thinking; that if you’re not sitting for hours reading a tome, you’re not, in some essential way, thinking. This is completely false. A huge amount of our everyday thinking—powerful, creative, and resonant stuff—is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us. This has been true for aeons in the offline world. But now we have new ways to think socially online—and to do so with likeminded folks around the world, which is still insanely mind-blowing. It never stops being lovely for me.

The interview covers some of the material Clive talks about in his new book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, which is definitely next on my list (after On Writing Well, which is kicking my butt right now). Also, I don’t know if this will be interesting to anyone, but I share highlights from the ebooks I read on the Twitter account @rianisreading.

Rob Horning’s Google Alert for the Soul is a very dense read, but don’t let that put you off. It’s an in-depth, well-written exploration of how social media affects our sense of identity and authenticity. In particular, Rob discusses the idea of the “data self”, where our identity starts to come from the data that different social media sites collects about us:

The data self no longer seeks meaning through action; it seeks to be processed into meanings. It’s available for audit and pliable to the incentive structures built into social media platforms. By letting social media capture and process everything, a more reliable, socially authenticated version of the self is produced, better than what our memory can give. Facebook Timeline, for instance, can be seen as an infographic of our personality so compelling that we can comfortably overlook its formulaic nature. Facebook invites us to forget we even had a self before Timeline was there to organize it.

He goes on to say:

The pleasant Pavolovian buzz of seeing someone respond to one of our social media posts is not merely pleasure at having gained some attention but a momentary reassertion of control over identity.

With all of social media’s feedback loops, we get a comprehensive status update from ourselves, allowing us to consume our own personality as novelty. We effectively set a Google alert for our soul.

It’s an interesting idea, that through social media we effectively step outside of ourselves, and become observers into our own lives — as if we’re mere actors trying to convince the world that our “character” is the real thing. Notifications, followers, and likes become the barometer of how well our character(s) are doing at this life thing. So we also rewrite the script constantly based on the instant and constant feedback built into the system.

Once again it’s worth asking: Who will hold a brief for the real?

Last month I posted a theory on how Facebook might get taken down by competitors. From Taking down Facebook, piece by piece:

Facebook is in a classic position where, as a dominant provider of horizontal social services, it is in danger of being taken down piece by piece by several vertical players who provide specific, narrow experiences very well. Facebook has become a social media firehose. It won’t be replaced by another firehose, but by a bunch of different cocktails that users can customize as they please.

Over the past few weeks, a couple of things happened that appears to back up that theory. First, there’s The Guardian report Teenagers say goodbye to Facebook and hello to messenger apps:

Their gradual exodus to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk boils down to Facebook becoming a victim of its own success. The road to gaining nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users has seen the mums, dads, aunts and uncles of the generation who pioneered Facebook join it too. No surprise, then, that Facebook is no longer a place for uninhibited status updates about pub antics, but an obligatory communication tool that younger people maintain because everyone else does. All the fun stuff is happening elsewhere.

And then, of course, there is yesterday’s news that Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisition Offer from Facebook:

Facebook is interested in Snapchat because more of its users are tapping the service via smartphones, where messaging is a core function. Facebook has rapidly increased the share of its revenue coming from mobile advertising, but said last month that fewer young teens were using the service on a daily basis.

Perhaps trying to acquire all their vertical competitors is the wrong approach for Facebook. Ben Evans summed it up very well in Instagram and YouTube:

So buying Instagram certainly looks like a good trade — it would be worth a lot more if it was selling today. But as a strategic move, it’s looking increasingly irrelevant. Is FB going to buy WhatsApp, Snapchat, Line, Kakao and the next ten that emerge as well? Sure, some of those will disappear, but it doesn’t look like FB will crush the competitors the way it did on the desktop. On mobile, FB will be just one of many.

Just maybe, Facebook might have been better off rethinking the core product instead of buying what turned out to be just one of a swarm of alternative services.

That last sentence is key. Instead of trying to expand their territory, Facebook should fortify their core product and defend that territory to the death. Even though everything was different in 2009, I think the conclusion I drew back then in Why Facebook should forget about Twitter still holds true:

So here is my advice to Facebook: go where your users are. Understand how they use the site, what their needs and behaviors are. Go visit them, talk to them, watch them navigate around, understand why they are there in the first place. And then enhance your platform to fulfill those needs. Build new ways to feel closer to the people in your life. Make it easier to share and discuss media. Build families-only mini-communities. Who knows what you can come up with if you just understand your users and build a web site for their needs?

We’ve seen a lot of articles about the negative effects of social networks this year. And yes, I’ve even written a few of those. So it was refreshing to read Roxane Gay’s What Twitter does — a reflection on the positive side of social networks:

Social networking does not offer a universal panacea, but it is something far more significant than “constant self-promotion.” The bonds of this community, at least the one I have found, are sprawled and unruly, but these bonds are not merely virtual. I travel all the time and wherever I go, I meet people with whom I am acquainted online. There may be initial awkwardness, but always, always, there is familiarity. We may not know each other but we know something of each other. We are a little less alone. Sometimes, the change technology brings is simple, intimate, and still significant.

One of the main criticisms against social media is that it fosters superficial relationships. Roxane’s point is that knowing a few superficial things about someone is better than knowing nothing, because it gives you a head start on a possible friendship.

Dan Frommer weighs in with a positive view of Twitter’s more visual timeline in The Best Part Of Twitter’s New Design Is That It’s Experimenting In Public:

Love or hate Twitter’s new design features — I like the in-line photo and video previews, but the reply/fav/retweet icons under every tweet feel a little too noisy — they say one great thing about Twitter: That it’s not afraid to experiment boldly in public. […]

Remember: Twitter’s goal is to maintain its independence, and soon become a large, profitable, public media company. If Twitter can try new things — in public — that make its service easier to understand, easier to use, easier to monetize, and easier to grow, that’s a big victory for the company and its users.

The key point in Frommer’s analysis is what Twitter has become: a media company that makes money through advertising. This means that there needs to be a way to show ads more prominently, so that they can charge more for those ads. That places very specific constraints on how the product can be designed. If ads need more clicks, ads need more prominence. One way to give ads more prominence is to make them take over a larger part of the screen. So Twitter is testing one way of accomplishing that with their “more visual timeline”.

Of course, brands figured out pretty quickly that they can take up more of the screen if they add a photo to their links:

Contrast that with Tweetbot’s view of the same Co.Design tweet (and others):

I think what we’re forgetting is that Twitter has chosen their path. Sorry for repeating myself, but they’ve become a media company that makes money through advertising. For the foreseeable future, all product decisions will reflect that. This is where I disagree with Frommer. I don’t think this change makes the service easier to understand and easier to use. It does, however, make it easier to monetize, and easier to grow.

The bottom line is this. Don’t think for a minute that Twitter doesn’t realize that inline images hurt the user experience by reducing the scanability of tweets. Of course they know. But they don’t have a choice. They are now operating within the design constraints of the company they have chosen to become. If you don’t like it, buy Tweetbot before they hit their API limit.

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Tom Chatfield looks at the meaning and value of our time and attention in What is the real cost of your online attention? He makes the point that we are now all amateur attention economists who have to make increasingly complex decisions about how we spend our time:

We watch a 30-second ad in exchange for a video; we solicit a friend’s endorsement; we freely pour sentence after sentence, hour after hour, into status updates and stock responses. None of this depletes our bank balances. Yet its cumulative cost, while hard to quantify, affects many of those things we hope to put at the heart of a happy life: rich relationships, rewarding leisure, meaningful work, peace of mind.

What kind of attention do we deserve from those around us, or owe to them in return? What kind of attention do we ourselves deserve, or need, if we are to be ‘us’ in the fullest possible sense? These aren’t questions that even the most finely tuned popularity contest can resolve. Yet, if contentment and a sense of control are partial measures of success, many of us are selling ourselves far too cheap.

Jonathan Franzen wrote a Guardian piece on what’s wrong with the modern world. It’s long and dense and sometimes requires multiple re-readings to figure out what’s going on, but he gives us much to think about. Let’s just say that he’s not a fan of what technology is doing to us:

One of the worst things about the internet is that it tempts everyone to be a sophisticate — to take positions on what is hip and to consider, under pain of being considered unhip, the positions that everyone else is taking.

He also has some harsh words for Amazon:

Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world.

And that’s all I’ll quote from the article, in the hopes of piquing your interest to read the whole thing.