I came across Piotr Czerski’s essay We, the Web Kids through a great collection of quotes on James Bridle’s site. It’s the kind of essay that I think everyone who does anything on the Internet should read. It’s a pitch-perfect collection of thoughts on what it means to live here, now, on the Internet. For example:

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not “˜surf’ and the internet to us is not a “˜plac’ or “˜virtual spac’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

His views on the idea that we don’t want to pay for things are also spot-on:

This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist, but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever.

I know I probably say this too much, but this is a must-read.

Jon Kolko goes on an full-scale assault against online advertising in a post for the Austin Center for Design called Advertising Is The Problem. I am no fan of the advertising model myself, but Jon paints a post-apocolyptically grim picture of what’s to come:

I’ve seen the future, and it’s awful. It’s The Shallows: In the future, you’ll only see the things that are most likely to get you to buy. Everywhere. All the time. It’s an internet of consumption, based on an algorithmic profile of everything you’ve done, and it’s constantly selling, selling, selling. It’s pervading into real life, through targeted and adaptable advertising on digital billboards, physical computing, mobility solutions, kiosks, digital product placement, taxi flat screens, in-flight entertainment, and on, and on. Ther’s no conversation. It’s not engaging. It’s consumptive. It’s mindless. And it’s happening all around us.

I am (slightly) less bleak on this topic — I think there is enough evidence of content creators selling their goods directly to their readers/listeners/viewers that we’ll start seeing a slow but steady shift away from traditional online advertising. See Chris Wolff’s The Facebook Fallacy for some commentary on that point, as well as a follow-up from Doc Searls called After Facebook fails, where he makes this statement against the traditional advertising model:

The simple fact is that we need to start equipping buyers with their own tools for connecting with sellers, and for engaging in respectful and productive ways. That is, to improve the ability of demand to drive supply, and not to constantly goose up supply to drive demand, and failing 99.x% of the time.

Ironically, Doc is one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which Jon Kolko uses to set up his own post.

Anyway, I think viewpoints like Jon’s are important — whether we agree with them or not. They force us to think about how we spend our time, and how we can contribute to preventing those negative visions of the future from occurring.

Michael Wolff shares a brutal, apocolyptic view on Facebook in the MIT Technology Review. From The Facebook Fallacy:

I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.

Facebook, however, has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn’t advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits.

You may not agree with Wolff’s conclusions, but the article is worth reading — if for not other reason than to see an extreme argument delivered with relentlessly articulate conviction.

There’s an interesting discussion on The Verge entitled Filters vs. failure: Instagram’s perfect messes could spell trouble for creativity. Joshua Kopstein argues that the problem with Instagram and other digital creation tools like Paper is that it removes the ability to make mistakes. It’s virtually impossible to take a bad picture on Instagram, and he believes that this is a problem for creativity in general:

By removing risk we have fundamentally changed the nature of the medium, or technically speaking, switched to an entirely different one. Because the process is now streamlined and offers near-infinite forgiveness, the way we approach a camera has changed drastically from tools defined by limited exposures and semi-predictable chemicals, and the resulting product always reflects that.

Instagram’s foremost blasphemy isn’t that it “ruins” images or misrepresents reality ”” it’s that it mines another medium for selective, aesthetic purposes despite being unable to represent the processes and risks that define that medium. The software curates, emulates and packages appropriated qualities that its creators consider desirable, creating a risk-free detour that fast-tracks the creative process.

Kopstein also links to a very interesting article by Derek Holzer called Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the (In)Deterministic Possibilities of Sound Technology. Holzer discusses the move from analog to digital creation in the music industry, and makes a similar point about the absence of risk in the creative process:

I consider it axiomatic that, for any art work to be considered experimental, the possibility of failure must be built into its process. I am not referring to the aestheticized, satisfying glitches and crackles valorized by Kim Cascone, but to the lack of satisfaction produced by a misguided or misstepped procedure in the experiment, whether colossal or banal. These are not errors to be sought out, sampled and celebrated, but the flat-on-your-ass gaffs and embarrassments that would trouble the sleep of all but the most Zen of musicians or composers.

The presence of failure in a musical system represents feedback in the negative, a tipping point into anti-climax, irrelevance, the commonplace, the cliche or even unintended silence. Many artists try to factor out true, catastrophic failure by scripting, scoring, sequencing or programming their work into as many predictable, risk-free quanta as possible ahead of time. But this unwelcome presence also guarantees the vitality of that hotly-contested territory ”“ the live electronic music performance.

The resulting compositions from the most “easy” and “simple” software tools are often nothing more than “digital folk” art ”“ the endless and endlessly similar permutations which are possible merely from the tweaking of a few basic presets. Perhaps the artistic tragedy of the digital age lies in the social and economic pressure to immediately release “results” which barely get beyond this initiatory phase.

I find these discussions fascinating. Sweeping generalizations are dangerous, of course, but I do agree that taking the risk out of creativity also makes it much harder to make something truly great. I see this in my own creative pursuits as well. I love writing first drafts of pieces. I absolutely hate editing those pieces to become something that’s worth publishing. But it’s in the editing process - which is basically the discovery and correction of failures - that the opportunity for doing good work really presents itself.

If software came along that magically made every first draft look acceptable, writers would lose out on the surprising spurts of creativity that come from the editing process. And I think this is the same for Instagram and electronic music. If we can walk any direction we want and never get a course correction, how will we get where we need to go?

I was reading an article called The Internet’s Battle For Our Digital Souls on Big Think when I stumbled on this sentence:

We get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.

That just didn’t sit right with me. I’ve posted plenty of updates on Facebook and Twitter, and it definitely didn’t… ok, I’ll stop there. I don’t want this to get awkward. All I’m saying is that this doesn’t feel right. So I decided to trace the statement back to the original study that it’s talking about, to see what’s going on.

The post on Big Think appears to be a rehash of an article in the LA Times called Study helps explain why we over-share on Facebook, Twitter. The first thing I found interesting is that their conclusion about the sex thing is a little more measured:

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same sensation of pleasure in the brain that we get from eating food, getting money or having sex. It’s all a matter of degrees of course, (talking about yourself isn’t quite as pleasurable as sex for most of us), but the science makes it clear that our brain considers self-disclosure to be a rewarding experience.

The LA Times links back to the original research paper, which has the decidedly less sexy title Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding (PDF link). The paper explains that the study was about whether or not people would give up money to talk about themselves (my emphasis added):

Just as monkeys are willing to forgo juice rewards to view dominant groupmates and college students are willing to give up money to view attractive members of the opposite sex, our participants were willing to forgo money to think and talk about themselves.

The word “sex” appears six times in the 6-page paper, and only once in the context that these other news stories use it. The “Discussion” section starts off as follows (my emphasis added):

Despite the frequency with which humans disclose the contents of their own thoughts, little has been known about the proximate mechanisms that motivate this behavior. Here, we suggest that humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary rewards such as food and sex. Intriguingly, findings also suggested that both parts of “self-disclosure” have reward value. Although participants were willing to forgo money merely to introspect about the self and doing so was sufficient to engage brain regions associated with the rewarding outcomes, these effects were magnified by knowledge that on’s thoughts would be communicated to another person, suggesting that individuals find opportunities to disclose their own thoughts to others to be especially rewarding.

Note that they talk about “rewards”, not “pleasure” like in the news stories. The core research hypothesis is that sharing about ourselves has intrinsic value. To quote from a different section (my emphasis added):

Interestingly, a number of earlier researchers have put forward the hypothesis explicitly tested here — that self-disclosure will act as an intrinsic reward; however, despite calls to do so, this notion has not previously been tested empirically. As such, the current study validates a long-standing hypothesis that self-disclosure arises — at least in part — from the subjective value associated with it.

No mention of sex there, whatsoever. It’s also important to know what the phrase “intrinsic value” means in the philosophical sense of the word, because it’s essential to understanding the results of the study:

The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.”

So let’s be very clear about what this research shows. The hypotheses tested (and confirmed) is that people like talking about themselves on social media because it has intrinsic value. In other words, we like sharing because it’s enjoyable for its own sake as a social activity. They make the point (in passing) that this is similar to other activities with intrinsic value such as food and, yes, sex. It’s not that posting on Facebook makes you feel the same way that having sex does. It’s that all these things share a common thread: the subjective, intrinsic value that they possess.

But hey, that message isn’t nearly going to rack up the same number of page views as saying that “We get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.” I read so many “a new study suggests that…” articles that I just take at face value. Today I decided to read the actual research paper, and realized what kind of distortions happen the further you get from the source of a story. I’ll certainly be a lot more cautious about these kinds of stories going forward. Welcome to the new age of journalism, I guess.

I have a new favorite TextExpander snippet. Whenever I type /adhominem it now gets replaced with:

I will be happy to debate this further once you’re willing to respond using DH4 or higher: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

As an added bonus this sentence is less than 140 characters so it fits nicely into a tweet. You’re welcome.

Klouchebag - a satirical response to “influence” measurement site Klout - is making the rounds today. It’s a lot of fun (I’m apparently quite a nice person), but it’s more than that. At the bottom of the page, creator Tom Scott gives some excellent advice on how you should view your Klout score:

But… but my Klout score is important!

No it’s not. It’s like search engine optimisation, only for yourself. Ignore it. Concentrate on making amazing things, caring about the people around you, and not being a douchebag. If you do that, then you’ll soon realise that it doesn’t matter one jot what an algorithm thinks of you.

Not one jot. Sometimes only British English can describe a thing accurately.

The danger of creating a path instead of following one is far more important than the feeling you get resting at the apex.

AJ Leon

I’ve been thinking about the process of getting better at the things we do, the shortcuts we trick ourselves into taking to get there, and how those shortcuts inevitably lead us down the wrong paths.

This week another new service launched to “help you build an engaging online reputation” by letting individuals and brands buy followers on whatever social networks float their boats. Step 2 in their process is describes as follows: “Relax and watch your reputation grow.” Let’s skip some of the obvious gaps in this story, like what it means to have an “engaging reputation”, or the fact that number of followers is not the biggest driver of online influence. Let’s skip all that to talk about a deeper question: why are we so unwilling to work hard for the things that we want?

Think about a time when you learned to do something really difficult. Maybe it was learning to ride a skateboard, figuring out a new math equation, or debugging your first piece of code. Do you remember the strain, the frustration, and the countless failures? And do you also remember the enormous satisfaction you felt as you slowly mastered that task? Do you remember how doing it the hard way carried with it not only the benefits of learning that skill, but also many tangential thoughts or experiences that sparked new passions or interests?

When we do things the hard way, we invest in ourselves in the best possible way. We kick off an endless cycle of learning and mastery that helps us grow and lead fulfilling lives of purpose. When we take shortcuts, we become mere pretenders. We learn how to play the part, but there is no substance or continued growth. The instant gratification makes us build the house of cards ever higher, which brings anxiety about the whole thing coming tumbling down. Why would we shortchange ourselves like that?

Cal Newport nailed it when he said, “There is no avoiding the deliberate strain of real improvement.” If you want to become a better writer, read more and publish more. If you want to learn to design/code/fly, watch fewer episodes of Downton Abbey and practice the things that don’t come easy. And if you really want more Twitter followers, make and share things that are awesome, and be patient.

In short, to quote Frank Chimero, do things the long, hard, stupid way.

Paul Ford wrote the best article I’ve seen so far on the Facebook/Instagram deal. When Your Favorite App Sells Out includes gems like this:

Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience, Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever ”” a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life ”” that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world ”” but man, does it work.

Anyway, he goes on to explain why he thinks people are so upset about the deal. Just go ahead and read the thing - it’s worth it.

Jared Keller summarizes the results of a new study on online influence in What Fuels the Most Influential Tweets?:

According to co-author Vespignani, having millions of followers does not denote an important message. Rather, the messages with the most immediate relevance tend to have a higher probability of resonating within a certain network than others. Think of it as “survival of the fittest” for information: those tweets that capture the most attention, whether related to a major geopolitical or news event or a particular interest, are likely to persist longer.

This isn’t exactly earth-shattering news, but it’s an interesting study nonetheless (you can find the original research paper here). It shows that online influence is not so much about the number of followers you have, but the relevance the message has to existing current events. So it’s not really about guiding conversations, but about being good at joining whatever conversations are already taking place.