Keller, Huffington, And The Remassification Of Media

I read two argumentative posts this morning, one by Bill Keller, the NY Times Executive Editor  and the second by Arianna Huffington. Keller started the hair-pulling by writing a column, in which — after a long build-up about his throw-weight as a Lion of Media — he complains in an aggrieved tone that Huffington lifted some of his observations about the future of media:

Bill Keller, All The Aggregation That’s Fit To Aggregate

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come. How great is Huffington’s instinctive genius for aggregation? I once sat beside her on a panel in Los Angeles (on — what else? — The Future of Journalism). I had come prepared with a couple of memorized riffs on media topics, which I duly presented. Afterward we sat down for a joint interview with a local reporter. A moment later I heard one of my riffs issuing verbatim from the mouth of Ms. Huffington. I felt so … aggregated.

In her rejoinder, Huffington details with dates and locales, the same thoughts she had espoused for years prior to that joint interview with Bill Keller, stopping along the way to dis him about all the talent he’s lost to her, and how much bigger AOL’s readership is:

Ariana Huffington, Bill Keller Accuses Me of “Aggregating” an Idea He Had Actually “Aggregated” From Me

The trouble for Keller is that this viewpoint, right down to the use of the word “convergence,” is one I had been expressing to describe the changes happening in the media for years.

For instance, in May 2008, two years before the Milken panel, I told the Star Tribune, “I think that what we are seeing is a kind of convergence of the mainstream media doing more and more online, and those of us in online media and the blogosphere doing more and more reporting, along with citizen-journalism projects.”

In November 2008, 17 months before the panel, speaking of the media’s coverage of the ‘08 race, I told Reuters, “There’s this real convergence, where basically you found that the best and most accurate rose to the top, whether it originated from Time magazine or from Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com, which did not exist before the election.”

And in January 2010, three months before Bill Keller’s “memorized riff” on convergence, I told Canada’s CTV, “And then we can have a hybrid future where there is a convergence between old media and new media. It’s not an either/or world.”

Indeed, as far back as March 2007, over three years before the Milken panel, I wrote a post outlining my take on what was happening in the media world: “Those papers that wake up in time will become a journalistic hybrid combining the best aspects of traditional print newspapers with the best of what the Web brings to the table.”

So who was it, Bill, who was “aggregating” someone else’s ideas?

In this interchange, Huffington comes out looking more like the diligent reporter, fact checking the provenance of the ‘convergence’ meme, and who likely uttered it first. She’s obviously the better counter-puncher of the two, at least.

But the idea that they are fighting over is fairly humdrum, so the whole thing is almost laughable. Mainstream publications are adopting the tools and sensibilities of online media, and there is a ‘convergence’ as both sides move toward the new blendo mainstream. Yawn. Sounds like two hipsters arguing about who listened to some cool band first.

From the perspective of a longtime online media observer and participant, this convergence is the stripmalling of the web, where pioneering socially-scaled advances — like blogging and social networks — are being repurposed by old media companies. They are taking these tools, and in a sense, using them against us. It’s wolves in sheep’s clothing: they use online content management, they put up an area for comments, and allow us to share and like through Facebook and Twitter. It seems like we are talking among ourselves, but it is all done in these gigantic mall-sized, privately-owned semi-public spaces, and they are so mass scale that most voices are crowded out, aside from those of the owners and their staff.

We will have to start talking about socially-scaled media, I think, to distinguish it from this convergence into remassified and superficially socialized media, the sort of media that AOL and the New York Times are churning out.

I think there is still a great deal of innovation in socially-scaled media, particularly in social news tools like Flipboard and the newly released LinkedIn Today (another post in the works). In this niche we see the possibility of the long-awaited ‘daily me’ coming to the fore, where your user experience will be grounded in the specific people that you chose to follow, and much less in the hands of Huffington or Keller.

I recently wrote You Are Who You Follow arising from a Mathew Ingram-inspired discussion about online influence, but it is salient, here, again. As users of and active participants in media (I dislike the metaphor of ‘media consumption’), we have to chose what kind of media we want to follow. We can chose to be ‘consumers’ of the hybridized, remassified semi-social ‘product’ that Keller and Huffington want to create. Or we can connect to other people through socially-scaled news networks.

This doesn’t mean I won’t read anything from the NY Times or HuffPo, but the difference is that I will be following specific individuals (like Paul Krugman), specific topics (like union busting), or finding out what materials are most interesting right now to those specific people that I follow. And then I also curate, making observations, comments, reposing, and so on. And by so doing, I become an integral part of the news network, not a passive ‘consumer’ of news. I become someone worth following, not just another random reader who occasionally writes an online comment.

This may seem like a niddling difference, but it is not. Small talk is big again. And big media wants to make us small again.

related

Pilcrows And Flows: The Fragmentation Of Media In A Web Of Flow

A pilcrow is a typographic term for the paragraph marker that many publishers use, such as the New York Times. It looks like this: ‘¶’.

This has come into recent prominence since the NY Times has implemented anchors on every paragraph of its news stories, so that every paragraph has a distinct URL. To access the URL you can double tap the shift key when viewing a NY Times page in a browser, and pilcrows appear at the head of every paragraph, serving as the place to copy the paragraph specific URL.

This allows a simple way to direct someone to a specific paragraph in a news story, instead of qualifying a URL to the story’s page by saying ‘3/4ths down the page, he writes…’.

This techniques is also called Winerlinks by some in recognition of Dave Winer’s use of these anchors, and the NY Times is referring to them as Deep Links.

Here’s one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/technology/30jumo.html#p5

Or one that highlights a specific sentence in a specific paragraph:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/technology/30jumo.html#h5s2

I find it interesting that no one has considered this in terms of the adoption of stream-based social tools, where the use of URLs is increasingly not about navigation, but of fetching. Instead of clicking on a URL to a photo in my twitter stream, my Twitter client pulls the photo and resolves it in the context of my streaming application.

One of the principles of the web of flow is the fragmentation of older, page-based media into easily streamable bits. And for that to work, each fragment has to have a unique ID, which is exactly what deep links are all about.

So, clever Twitter tool developers will soon be implementing deep links, and hopefully so will content management systems.

So in a few weeks time, I might post this:

I think Krugman is dead on about the Irish http://sto.ly/eevbPT

where the shortened URL was based on a much more complex structure:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/opinion/26krugman.html#p2h3h4s2h5s1,3

And if you click on it you’d be taken to the NYTimes, which would resolve it like this:

And I would expect a hypothetical Twitter client, one that implements deep links, to show me something like this:

I think Krugman is dead on about the Irish http://sto.ly/eevbPT

O.K., these days it’s not the landlords, it’s the bankers — and they’re just impoverishing the populace, not eating it. But only a satirist — and one with a very savage pen — could do justice to what’s happening to Ireland now.

The Irish story began with a genuine economic miracle. But eventually this gave way to a speculative frenzy driven by runaway banks and real estate developers, all in a cozy relationship with leading politicians. The frenzy was financed with huge borrowing on the part of Irish banks, largely from banks in other European nations.

Then the bubble burst, and those banks faced huge losses. You might have expected those who lent money to the banks to share in the losses. After all, they were consenting adults, and if they failed to understand the risks they were taking that was nobody’s fault but their own. But, no, the Irish government stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debt, turning private losses into public obligations.

As we want to pull more context — to create deeper meaning — we can expect the URLs to get more and more sophisticated, representing much more than a physical address on the web, but instead emphasis, and contrast.

Bit.ly recently introduced bundles — collections of URLs bundled together. Combined with capabilities like deep links you can start to imagine very sophisticated ways to represent a collection of viewpoints on a contentious issue, for example, or a series of posts on a specific theme. It will require more tooling to help those that are curatorially minded to create these collations, or every to devise a complex deep URL like the one in my example above.

There’s a lot of moving parts: better CMS, like the NY Times has implemented; better Twitter (or other streaming media) clients, that would resolve these elaborate URLs effectively; and better tools for creating the complex URLs for curators.

But I bet it will all come together very quickly, indeed.

[disclosure: I am an advisor to Bit.ly, and have a financial stake in the company’s outcome.]

Short URLs in Academic Citations?

Catherine White recently brought this question to my attention, as a result of her using Bit.ly links in a citation for an academic paper she’s working on:

A bit off topic (my nod to the social ‘rules’ of thesis-post blog replies ;-) if such exist. I suppose by this I am indicating my ‘correct’ socialization, but begging your indulgence for an exception) but is there a citation style that allows bit.ly-encoded URLs? To me, it still seems a bit odd to see these in a medium where they provide little benefit. Are they regarded as a permanent method to reference the sources? Just curious.
RonM on July 5th, 2010 at 12:20 pm

Her response:

RonM, thank you for your comment. I chose bit.ly simply because the urls were really long and it just made my footnotes look neater on the page. Original draft was in LaTeX. I spoke to Stowe Boyd earlier this week and he told me bit.ly links are all being archived and are permanent – right Stowe?
cathcw on July 9th, 2010 at 10:52 am

My feeling is that it should be acceptable to use shortened URLs in citations. A few pros:

Descriptiveness — They are not necessarily any less descriptive. Consider Catharine’s post, which has the illuminating  URL of “http://www.justwhitenoise.com/?p=1059”. In fact some shorteners let you provide a distinctive name in the URL, like “http://sto.ly/noisyidiotdilemma”.

Analytics — Shorteners often have some click count capabilities, or maybe even stronger analytics, so the author can track references to the articles they cite, which is simply not possible otherwise.

Shortness — As Catharine points out, shortened URLs are short, which is meaningful on the printed page just as it is in Twitter. Incredibly annoying URLs — like the ones created by Google maps — simply have to be shortened to be used productively.

And a few cons:

Domain Obscurity — If the original article was posted at the New York Times, that bit of information is lost if it winds up as a Bit.ly link. However, many publishers like the New York Times are providing their own URL shorteners, so a link like “http://nyti.ms/a6hO6J” retains that domain clarity, however. Although in this case, the author loses the analytics.

URL Shortener Shutdown — There is always the possibility that a URL shortener service could cease operations. The NY Times shut down NYTUrl.com after ‘abuses’ by users, and as a result, any URLs created by that service are now unusable.

In 2009, I was involved in the formation of 301Works.org, a non-profit dedicated to ‘backstopping’ URLs, and where I serve as director. The idea is that participating URL shortener companies — which includes Bit.ly, and many others — will back up their URL mappings — the pairs of long and short URLs — so that if they decide to shut down the service 301Works.org (a project of the Internet Archive) can step in and provide the redirection for users.

My recommendation is that anyone planning to use a shortened URL in a permanent way, as in the citation of a paper, might want to a/ retain the long version of the URL, and b/ make sure the URL shortener service is a member of 301Works.org.

In the final analysis, all URLs are impermanent. Magazines and periodicals may go out of business, or change their URL structure. Blogger can rehost their blogs, changing their URLs. Or pages can simply be deleted. Avoiding short URLs would not get away from this fundamental law of the web.

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The Rise Of Web Culture And Its Enemies

Showing a typical lack of depth regarding the trend right before their eyes, the media are mistaking what the newest Comscore numbers about social networks mean:

[from Social Networking Sites Continue to Attract Record Numbers as MySpace.com Surpasses 50 Million U.S. Visitors in May - MarketWatch]

TABLE 1 Selected Social Networking Properties by Unique Visitors

May 2006 

Total U.S. - Home, Work and University Internet Users Source: comScore Media Metrix

Property………………………….. May-06 (000)

Total Internet Population……… 172,120 

MYSPACE.COM………………….. 51,441 
Classmates.com Sites…………. 14,792 
FACEBOOK.COM………………… 14,069 
YOUTUBE.COM………………….. 12,669 
MSN Spaces……………………… 9,566 
XANGA.COM…………………….. 7,146 
FLICKR.COM…………………….. 5,163 
Yahoo! 360 degrees…………… 4,936 
LIVEJOURNAL.COM……………. 3,904 
MYYEARBOOK.COM……………. 3,048

This is just tip of the iceburg of Web culture. People are turning the Web into Ted Oldenburg’s Third Place, or maybe Third Space is better. The place that is not our home or our work, but where we interact in a larger, and more diverse social milieu. Where we are more likely to hear a dirty joke, or experience insights into others’ lives. Where we are more likely to find a source for artistic expression, new ideas, and ultimately, a broader and more open perspective on what makes the world spin around.

This is an implicit rejection of the controlled media depiction of purpose and meaning in our lives, a turning away from centralized organizations telling us what is important or how to live our lives. These social sites are not merely some way for venture capitalists to make money, or for faddish cliques to indulge in marginal lifestyles. This is the start of a new global culture, defining its own principles and mores, hiding in plain sight.

Sure, the news services and talking heads are quick to focus on the emergence of global Web culture when China jails some journalist or dissident who has resorted to the Web as a podium, but when it’s Westerners who are flocking to the pleasures of online society, it is spun as entertainment, leisure time activities, or the gross immorality of the lunatic fringe.

I am actually happy that the rise of Web culture can continue to be a surreptitious revolution, happening out in plain sight, because otherwise there would be hearings in Congress, and a hue-and-cry in the press. There is already a smattering of cautionary stories, like in today’s New York Times, warning members of the social networking sites that posting licentious or blatantly sexual materials on your MySpace could lead to “losing that dream job,” because after all, we are supposed to be soulless drones if we want to work for the man:

[ from Online Party Crashers]

All good things must come to an end, including the chance to post lascivious photographs and diary entries on the Internet without repercussions. A generation that has come of age with blogging, Webcams and social networking sites is waking up to the fact that would-be employers are looking over their shoulders — and adjusting their job offers.

So the subtle repressive powers of conservatism inherent in corporate life are being quietly heralded by the inherently conservative media — even a hypothetically left-leaning pub like the NY Times — where it is taken as a given that individuals should jettison any hope for a private life if they wish to work for corporate America. Give up open self-expression, conceal any sexual tendencies that stray from normalcy, and do not be too strident in your protests against idiocy in government, business, or religion. The message is clear: if you want the benefits of a working career, put aside any personal expression.

And the message that is being sent at a deeper level — one that the senders may not even know they are sending — is that they reject the openness, freedom, and self-expression that Web culture is founded on. And, once they realize what is going on, they will try to counter this quiet, bottom-up, and diffused revolution. The repressive regimes use direct controls to silence or jail those who attempt to undo centralized control of media and the state. But the societal controls within theoretically more open societies in the West will come to bear, and it is the gentle coercions — like the mocking, “father-knows-best” tone of the NY Times editorial — that may be the most difficult to blunt.

We have institutionalized the messages of the media, we are the ones who accept the powers that the corporations and media use to hold us in line. Why can’t I protest the war in Iraq on my blog if I work for some multinational? Do I have no forum for political advocacy? Should I be fired if my opinions upset my boss, or some client? If I am living a sexual lifestyle via some social networking site — one that is legal, but unsavory to the conservatives — should we accept the fact that I might be denied a job that I am capable of performing? Should we chuckle along with the editors of the Times, who imply that “of course such indiscretions will nix your career.”

And the last line will be the patronizing, and smarmy tone that they adopt. After all, serious and well-adjusted people don’t spend time on the Internet, except to gather information necessary to do their jobs. It is only the maladjusted fringe or immature that spend time in chat rooms, on MySpace, or blogging away.

I suggest that we need to explicitly expose them when they say these things, and argue the not-so-obvious at every turn:

  1. Web culture is happening: a spontaneous global culture is emerging, and it is based on openness, inclusion, acceptance of diversity, and the desire to make the world a better place to live.
  2. This movement is driven both by the failure of traditional organizations — media, government, and religious — to cope with the modern world, and the stresses we, as individuals, are confronted with.
  3. Web culture is a return to earlier elements of human social life, especially the importance of social relationships and the central importance of self-expression through art, principles that have been devalued for the past few hundred years. This is almost a reversion to tribal norms, although the tribe may be a diffuse network of woodworkers that you submerge into everyday via Yahoo Groups.
  4. Web culture is living at the edge, where people are interacting with others directly, and organizations form organically, as groups seek to legitimize order that has emerged within the group, not impose order on supposed chaos.

So, the Comscore figures hide as much as they reveal, and the smartalecky attitude of the NY Times editorial says less than it means. The revolution is coming and it will be socialized, and the powers whose authority and control are threatened will try very hard indeed to subvert any movements, especially global ones, that reject the current state of affairs.

I know you think that your 20 plus hours a week on the Internet is merely a sideline to a busy life, the curious stretching of your mind to understand the world from a slightly broader perspective. You may have no desire to be a part of some radical restructuring of human society. Or, at least no conscious desire to do so.

But, at least for people like me, the vanguard who live most of their business and personal life online (or at least mediated largely online), we have really already turned that corner. We have seen what’s over the horizon, and we know it’s worth fighting for. And we know who we are fighting against, too.

[Pointer Steve Rubel]

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