Archives for the 'Media' Category
No Twitter for the Rich
Siren by Marc Quinn (Kate Moss)
First, lets get something out of the way, for once and for all: if you work in media and you still don’t get Twitter (today, three years after you should have) you should probably just quit or wait until you are eventually fired. Really, if you are pitching a “who cares what you had for lunch” article to your editor, you are no different than a major car manufacturer who doesn’t understand what the fuss over fuel-efficient vehicles is about.
But Virginia Heffernan, whose NYT The Medium columns lately have been, uhhh, questionable, has an interesting take on the old MSM “twitter is narcissism blah, blah…” She mentions Bruce Sterling’s talk at SXSW on how the new sign of poverty is, “dependence on ‘connections’ like the Internet, Skype and texting… Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.”
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Rex when I was in New York. What celebrities won’t join Twitter? I said Angelina Jolie, but he pointed out she’d probably hire someone to post UN Press Releases. A non-Twitter-ing celebrity would be someone like Catherine Deneuve, or less obviously Naomi Watts. Someone who is essentially content with their station on the Hollywood totem pole.
Some will say, as @biz explained on The Colbert Report, they Twitter to create and control their own PR –a wrecking ball to gossip glossies. But all the celebrities on Twitter are in some ways striving for something. Just browse CelebrityTweet (yes, it exists.) Witness the enormous explosion among hasbeens like Liam Gallagher, Donny Wahlberg, Soleil Moon Frye, and Danny Masterson.
If the celeb-twitterer is someone who might not seem to be the sort to bother with this kind of thing (eg @bjork) the account is inevitably run by someone else as a PR station. (The two clear exceptions being @DAVID_LYNCH and @yokoono, which are part art project, part PR.) Maybe every celebrity will eventually have a Twitter account. But only the striving will be the ones engaging its social aspects.
Matching Books and Readers: Publishers Need Better Websites
Darkness moves by Wendy Heldmann
To continue on some of the points brought up in last week’s post on the Future of Entertainment 3: why are publishers’ websites so difficult to navigate? There is plenty of “content” — author interviews and videos, RSS feeds by subject — but nothing to match a reader with a book depending on her taste.
A bookstore (a good bookstore) is fun to browse because of the care employees take in displaying titles they believe buyers will appreciate. Many small bookstores have wonderful websites, because they are suited to a particular audience. However, publishers do very little to curate their inventory.
Even Amazon is difficult to navigate. Although their recommendation agent has had access to my buying habits for nearly ten years, it still doesn’t know me very well and is like some guy at a bar, “Hey, I know you! Jessica? Ugh, Jen? Samantha?” (Yes, I bought a Graham Greene book last year. I’m not impressed it believes I would also like all twenty of Graham Greene’s other novels.)
Good interactive websites do not require the most expensive UX designers. It takes creativity– silly gimmicks and fun. What about an eHarmony parody that asks MBTI-type questions and answers with several suggested books for your “type”?
These websites forget the goal of the visitor: which is to find a book that speaks to him or her. Publishers need to think about readers as individuals.
As it happens this reader is a freelance book critic. I write about a half dozen reviews a years, and would double that if it were easier to learn about new releases. To pitch a review for a magazine, I like to know about a book a few months before it is released so the review will be timely. But I rarely receive any kind of notices from publishers. The effort to find books relevant to my interest is often too time-consuming. In contrast, I get lots of screener offers from documentary/indie film distributors even though I rarely write about film.
I’m a little surprised my name isn’t in some kind of Excel spreadsheet with the publications I write for and the types of books I typically review (popular science, technology, art, often female-penned, etc.) It seems a pretty simple task to delegate to an intern.
Plus, I have a blog and reach a certain type of audience with taste in books similar to mine. If I mention a book on my blog I sell at least a couple copies of it (which I know because of our Amazon affiliation. For the record, I receive no information about buyers via our website besides the books they purchase.) It’s not a ton, but I’m one blogger in a sea of a million other blogs.
Obviously, there are bigger concerns right now in the book world. But, as publishers are thinking about the bottom line, efficient use of advertising and marketing budgets has got to include “spreadable media.”
Literary Novels and Fan Culture: Some Thoughts Following The Future of Entertainment 3
Over the weekend I attended The Future of Entertainment 3, a conference organized by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department. The two day event featured back to back roundtables focusing on issues related to social media, audience participation, and “spreadable media,” a term CMS director Henry Jenkins coined as a more appropriate way to describe content than “viral.” (Viral connotes an inexplicable element the “infected” have no control over. It suggests you can “design the perfect virus and give it to the right first carriers.”)
From a post on Jenkins’ blog last year:
Our core argument is that we are moving from an era when stickiness was the highest virtue because the goal of pull media was to attract consumers to your site and hold them there as long as possible, not unlike, say, a roach hotel. Instead, we argue that in the era of convergence culture, what media producers need to develop spreadable media. Spreadable content is designed to be circulated by grassroots intermediaries who pass it along to their friends or circulate it through larger communities (whether a fandom or a brand tribe). It is through this process of spreading that the content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values. In a world of spreadable media, we are going to see more and more media producers openly embrace fan practices, encouraging us to take media in our own hands, and do our part to insure the long term viability of media we like.
Indeed, our new mantra is that if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.
While I was at the conference, Richard Nash publisher of Soft Skull responded to my article on the iPhone and the novel:
I’ve found in Joanne a fellow believer in the increased salience of the novel, more or less as we understand it now, long into the future…
[We] wish to take as given not only that the mobile internet could provide the means to read novels (various devices), the means to talk about and share them (various social media tools), and instead [merely] think about how it becomes part of the texture of the novel, like the letter and the phone call have.
And we notably don’t assume that the novel becomes a video game. Why should it? They video game already exists—it doesn’t need the novel.
This got me thinking about whether several attributes of “spreadable media” are inapplicable to most literary fiction. (Please note none of these points are meant as arguments for the superiority of literary fiction over other kind of fiction or entertainment.) Also some of these points are true of any type of media but especially true in this case.
- Size — selling 50,000 copies of a first novel is good run. Long Tail or not, 50,000 pageviews or tickets sold wouldn’t qualify as a major audience.
- Time – Reading a book is an investment of one’s time. And we read books at different stages. Someone who read Sleep Has His House seven years ago might have trouble conversing with someone finishing it now. There’s no broadcast or event unifying the audience.
- Solitude - Reading is a solitary experience. The reader’s imagination is as integral to the construction of the journey as is the writer’s words. We may share our books and love the same books, but with a good book, there is always the sense the journey was a private one.
Of these barriers, the solitary, private nature of a great book seems the significant. This isn’t true of genre novels, which are plot-driven, more visual, and for these reasons easier to discuss on message boards and blogs. Then again, running is also a solitary activity, as Kyle Ford from Ning pointed out during a panel on social media. Still, Nike rather ingeniously designed a game and social marketing plan in Nike+. A small wireless pedometer in your sneaker logs miles and tracks your progress. You can compare your run with your friends. The sneaker company even planned a half-marathon in a dozen cities around the world. Says the website: “Nike+ has become the world’s largest running community, who collectively, have run nearly 100 MILLION miles. Yes, 100 million miles. That’s nearly 4,000 trips around the world. Or roughly 5.28 billion running shoes lined up end to end. Or just a whole lot of miles logged by the dedicated runners of the Nike+ community.” (Update 12/1/08: See The Golden Notebook Project as a successful collaboration in reading. More in the comments.)
But size and time are the bigger problems. As Joe Marchese of Social Vibe pointed out, Dr. Horrible happened because it was Joss Whedon’s project. The excitement for True Blood and Barack Obama didn’t happen from social media, it carried over to social media. Kim Moses, executive producer of The Ghost Whisperer (a television series that incorporates an incredibly innovative fan community) said during her presentation that in spite of Tivo and Hulu, the audience will generally make a point to watch a show as it airs on tv. So they won’t have to deal with spoilers. So they can talk about it immediately with other fans.
People did wait outside all night for the last Harry Potter book. But could they do the same for the debut novel from an unknown author?
Fan Communities for Literary Fiction (by Author, by Publisher, by Readers)
There are existing online fan(-ish) communities for novelists. Some are managed by the authors themselves. Tao Lin has an online army. My friend Scott Heim has written three of the most widely acclaimed novels in twenty years, and he communicates with fans over Myspace. Keith Gessen has a Tumblr. Naturally, this blurs the line between fan and friend. And maybe this has to happen for an author to find success. It is taking cues from the sci-fi community, where due to conventions and meetups there never was the sense of the writer as someone walled away, inaccessible to readers. John Scalzi had an interesting post about this a few months ago.
Another shift, I see is in mainstream readers thinking about publishing houses as they do record labels. That the catalog was curated. That there is some reason this book was published on this particular imprint and if you like one book they printed, you’ll like another. Right now, readers don’t really have brand loyalty with publishing houses. But a publisher can aggregate support for a multitude of books at once by emphasizing their shared origin.
A smart publisher is going to figure out a way to encourage fan communities. And I bet it’s going to be a small press with an existing reputation for excellence — Small Beer, Dalkey Archive, Soft Skull, Akashic Books, Melville House, etc. A minor example exists in McSweeny’s Internet Tendency with user submissions for humor content. But that started several years ago. A new model, should work as Moses from The Ghost Whisper, explained. She thinks about the website and series as a “loop” — the audience goes from once back to the other. The show encourages the website. The website encourages the show.
Existing online communities (Goodreads, LibraryThing) find common ground in the act of reading itself. This isn’t always the best way to way to find like-minds and share passions. (See Jessa Crispin’s article on a bookstore event we attended a few years ago, as how one constant reader might not have much in common with another.) It does however make room for wider applications — maybe a mobile service that helps you find book clubs. Recommendation agents can be expanded upon.
Collaboration in Creation:
A major problem with novels is they take a long time to write and you probably won’t get paid when you finish. If you are paid, it’s probably not very much.
At the conference, there was some discussion of sellaband.com, raising recording budgets for musicians through micro-payment. Could this ever assist a writer? Maybe? Doubtful? It’s nice to think about. There is the Concord Free Press, a nonprofit which exists on donations of services (writers, designers, printers.) Books are also given away for free.
Collaboration in creating an actual work of literary fiction is tricker to discuss. It just hasn’t happened yet. (Well, it did and the product was a failure.) It is pretty obvious why it’s easier to collaborate on Wikipedia than on a novel. We might jointly write something resembling Burrough-style “cut-ups” or something experimental — and it could be very good — but it won’t be the sort of emotionally committed personal writing that we come to expect from a great literary novel. Yochai Benkler pointed out in his presentation, the “storyline in a novel is different from documentary,” which is why collaborative platforms just aren’t being built for the former. Were a project in a motion, it would inevitably take the tongue-in-cheek sense of “this will be crap but let’s just try” that NaNoWriMo admits to.
First You Need a Good Book
Ballardian is a great example of organic literary online community. It’s very well-written, frequently updated, and widely read. It as much explores the writing of J. G. Ballard as it does his obsessions and themes in a contemporary context. There is a forum and much activity in the comments. Simon Sellars, who runs the website independent of the author and publisher, even hosted a contest for cellphone-shot home movies inspired by Ballard’s novels.
This might have something to do with Ballard’s unique appeal to artists and musicians. His books are plot-driven with familiar imagery easy to sample and remix. But it also offers promise for other authors. Publishers need to try to find authors who inspire and engage. Maybe one day a similar site will exist for Junot Díaz or Tatyana Tolstoya. First you need to find quality and foster it.
We can’t move on to the conversation of fan communities and social media when the product itself isn’t delivering. In store displays are more effective than price cuts. So why is prime Barnes and Noble real estate wasted on hastily written, unsatisfying novels, which in turn end up in the remainder bin? Like the bad debts that created the financial collapse, publishing houses have for too long traded on unremarkable books.
It’s worth noting J. G. Ballard, still isn’t published in the United States. A known author, a known genius of an author with a wide online fan community is cut off from his contemporary audience here. Likewise, where were the major publishers when Thomas M. Disch needed them? This is an author of immeasurable talent, who should have seen success before he killed himself earlier this year. He’s precisely the sort of author who inspires passionate and loyal fan communities.
A basketball scout wouldn’t restrict his search to Park Slope. So why do publishers only really print authors who live there? Here’s another idea: outsource the slush pile SETI and Wikipedia-style. I’d love to take a look at it.
Random House or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are now both in tremendous financial difficulty — freezing pensions and suspending new acquisitions. This isn’t just the greatest blah blah blah since the Great Depression. It’s a problematic business model. It isn’t comparable and shouldn’t be compared to what is happening with newspapers, where advertising has changed and online content is a substitute for print. Web content isn’t a substitute for a novel. I find the more time I spend online, the more I crave the quiet escape of a novel. But to work as a technology respite, a novel first must be exceptionally well-written.
I’m reminded of Neal Steaphanson’s comment at a recent reading. I believe the question was was — as remembered by Diana Kimball — what is the point of writing if the world is full of unread books? He said the life of a writer is now like a monk’s experience. In a world of “creatives” with sky-high income, we’re the ones who live simply and act simply.
The novel won’t ever die. The more I think about it, the more I agree that fan culture/spreadable media is essential to literature, and will succeed in spite of constraints on time and size. The first step is a great book.
In Defense of Internet Lingo (Careful Fanboys, This Meme is Snarky)
Everyone has something to add to Oxford University Corpus’s list of the top “irritating phrases,” (for the upcoming book, Damp Squid.) The Telegraph article now has 2400 comments, some of which are a back and forth of what is and is not a misused phrase, eg, “To the person who ‘corrected’ the incorrect phrase ’spitting image’ to ’spirit and image’, your correction is incorrect. The original form of the phrase is ’spit and image’, commonly reduced in casual speech to ’spit ‘n’ image’, in the same way that ‘rock and roll’ becomes ‘rock ‘n’ roll’.”
Wired’s blog has another hundred or so comments, and many of them unsurprisingly sneer at common web lingo. Do these people really want to constrict the English language so that it never grows and words only mean what they have always meant? Or is it just a mild prejudice against the kind of people who talk like that?
Perhaps the greatest article on the subject was on Gawker a few years ago, rightly zinging the blogger-insider language that distinguishes it as not-real journalism:
I’m looking at you, [example of complaint].
Has been known to cause actual outbreaks of hives. As if the thing/person “looked” at would react with a surprised and bashful “Who, me?”. Puts the writer in the unflattering role (for all concerned) of pedantic schoolteacher addressing unruly children.Um, [condescension]?
As a verbal tic in conversation, “um” is perfectly acceptable and often auditorially invisible. Written in prose, it signals a level of smarmy superiority that would get you rightly punched in the face if you dared behave like that in person.[Argument], wait for it, [rhetorical flourish].
Where did this come from? Stage direction cues in the theater? No matter, it’s a ridiculous tease and artificial tension builder that’s never worth the wait.
Generally I’m annoyed by people who say “random!” when they don’t actually mean random or say it after a silly (not funny) joke. It’s not their usage of the word that bugs me, so much as the kind of people who tend to say it — a signal they might be part of a certain gum smacking subspecies. Hatred of business-ese also seems better directed at the overwhelming personalities of mid-management social media hacks who want to sell you something “bleeding edge,” part of the “brand called you” once they “touch base with you.” It has nothing to do really with the cliches themselves, misused or not.
Maybe I’ve insulated my world away from those kinds of people, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard or read the phrase “jumped the shark” used without the utterer knowingly referencing the annoyance the phrase inflicts. Likewise, “thinking outside the box,” always seems to be said with a knowing arched eyebrow.
There are three words web writers often can’t stand but I’d like to see them preserved as they so subtly acknowledge particular facets of online behavior: snark, fanboy, and meme.
I can’t improve on this response by Caesar on Wired about snark: “You can’t get replace ’snark’ with ’sarcasm.’ Everyone knows that sarcasm doesn’t come across over the internet, but it’s easy to tell when someone’s being snarky.” And a fanboy isn’t a fan. It is so much more, explaining a childlike blind devotion that is also a very isolating experience, one ususally can only share with others on online forums. Red Sox fans aren’t fanboys, especially in Boston, because you can meet and bond with anyone who shares your passion by entering the nearest Irish bar on game night.
I long tried to avoid using the word “meme” knowing how many people out there love to say Richard Dawkins wasn’t talking about dancing cat pictures. But, whatever. There’s no other word describing the way an idea on the internet spreads, um, “virally.” The term has been around since the early days of blogging. While it, like “blog,” is a hated word, it’s here to stay.
More interesting comments from the Wired thread:
I don’t know where to begin. Most people who think they have mastered English aren’t even close. In fact, there is no mastery of language, except in the understanding that it will never be static. Most phrases that annoy people are simply those that originate in a different region or culture (generation, dialect, etc.) and are misunderstood. Spelling and syntax errors aside (mostly), the flexibility of English is what makes it a great language, and I thumb my nose (I’m sure I just made a few people squirm) at those language Nazis who think their version is the correct one. If you want to sound intelligent, stick to the rules. However, there are great benefits to learning the lingo of another dialect or generation. And at the end of the day you’ll find you’ve communicated in a new way with someone who isn’t *you* (with all due respect). How about that.
Posted by: robogobo | Nov 7, 2008 10:36:23 AMMy god you people have a long stick up your collective asses. Do you hate every colloquialism? Is everything you say a completely unique combination of words? Are you never, ever redundant for emphasis, clarity, or just for entertainment? It’s tight asses like you who keep us from having an official genderless singular possessive pronoun equivalent of “his/her”, namely “their”- and so we’re stuck with one of the most awkward and yet “correct” phrases ever.
I swear all you English majors need to get laid more often.
Posted by: robogobo | Nov 7, 2008 11:24:06 AM“the”
I keep hearing that word all the time. I don’t care how useful it is; I’m tired of hearing it. If you’re not creative enough to express yourself without using old words, then you don’t deserve to express yourself.
…seriously though, cliches are pretty much the same as words. Why should I make up a new metaphor/symbol/sentence when a well known one already exists? I can use it without effort and my listener can understand it without effort.
The example of “snarky” was very ironic. In a piece that’s basically just complaining about people using old words, the author complained about people using a new word when the old word was “good enough.” Well, the expressions and sayings I already know are good enough for me.
The “begging the question” complaint is silly too. I have never once heard that phrase used “correctly,” and “circular argument” makes a lot more sense anyway. If everybody in the world forgot the original meaning of “begging the question,” nothing of value would have been lost.
I don’t care what any arbitrary “rules” (there are no actual rules… only conventions) say. The purpose of language is to express your idea in a way that others can understand. If you don’t do this, then you fail at language…. no matter how perfect your grammar/usage is or how unique your metaphors are.
Posted by: james | Nov 7, 2008 11:29:47 AM
A lot of comments make the infuriating assumption that typos evidence a writer’s sub-Grade 3 grammar skills. Look, the greater likelihood is someone accidently typed “their” instead of “they’re” because people often type homonyms accidently when they are typing fast. (For some reason I always seem to write celebrate as “selebrate,” even though I can’t remember not knowing how to spell the word. I guess my fingers are aligned in a weird way with the aural part of my brain.)
What we see as errors might be our own arrogance. One comment fumes over “centers around,” but while a bunch of centers wheeling around sure is stupid, one might also visualize this as finding a center point near or “around’ someplace.
Reading this, I was reminded of Steven Pinker’s op-ed, “Everything You Heard Is Wrong,” defending Sarah Palin and GWB’s pronunciation of “nucular”:
no, “nucular” is not a sign of ignorance. This reversal of vowel-like consonants (nuk-l’-yer —> nuk-y’-ler) is common in the world’s languages, and is no more illiterate than pronouncing “iron” the way most Americans do, as “eye-yern” instead of “eye-ren.”
Nucular, FTW!
Art by Mark Bradford
Previously:
Alright, Sokay: Tomorrow’s English Language
It Was Never About Experience. This Election Is About Elitism
On NRO’s the Corner, Victor Davis Hanson’s answer to the question “Why Do We Like Palin?” pretty much nails exactly why Sarah Palin is the most polarizing candidate we’ve seen in the election so far (Yes, more so than HRC.)
Various reasons, but one I think is that millions of Americans are simply tired of being lectured at by smug elites. Jetting Al Gore made tens of millions finger-pointing at us about our global warming. Obama’s America, apparently unlike Rev. Wright’s Trinity Church, is a cruel, downright mean and dysfunctional place. John Kerry’s United States is one of the half-educated in need of Ivy-League enlightenment and tutorials.
So along comes someone (unlike Biden’s vastly inflated middle-class biography) who really is from the working class. She likes it—and finds snowmobiling, hunting, fishing and living in small-town America not as a wasteful use of carbon-emitting fuels, cruelty to animals, gratuitous depletion of our resources, or proof of parochial yokelism. Instead it is a life of action in an often harsh natural landscape, where physical strength is married to intelligence to bring us food, fuel, and progress.
Palin’s symbolism is the antithesis of the metrosexual wind- or body- surfing politican, and hair-plugged, neurotic TV pundit So at this time, right now, millions apparently like Palin’s atypical 19th-century profile. Again, it’s a pleasant change of pace from Harvard Law School, DC politics, “community organizing” and the can’t-do, ‘they raised the bar on me’ collective complaint.
If she can beat off the frothing Newsweek/MSNBC/New York Times inbred rabid wolves, and do it with the grace she has shown so far, she will fill a deep yearning among Americans for someone like her. A lot of Americans, if they watch reality shows, prefer truckers on ice or Bering Sea crab fishing to endless psychodramas of thirty-something suburban whiners.
So apparently they are eager to see a rare politican who is unapologetic about America’s past achievements (cf. Obama’s “tragic history” and need for more “oppression studies”), and who reminds us with pride that a muscular world of action, not community organizing, creates the bounty that others use and take for granted but so often sneer at the methods of its acquisition.
Right now, there are millions rooting for her in a way not true of Biden—and many who are criticizing her don’t have a clue why that it is so.
Well I know why I’m criticizing her, and that is because I’m a libertarian and I remember the election of 2000. Her “reforming” political views and “down-to-earth” “symbolism” only remind me of George W. Bush in his first run for president. Naturally, it wasn’t the huntin’ and fishin’ that won over independents/libertarians, but his platform on limited government, free trade, and non-interventionist foreign policy. When you think about it, Bush in 2000 sounded a lot more like Ron Paul than John McCain today. From a libertarian’s perspective now, the worst thing Democrats can do is raise taxes. But I can’t even conceive of the worst possible Republican actions because the party has consistently gone beyond my most cynical expectations.
Foreign policy is the president’s direct responsibility, the economy is mostly out of his hands (Not that they’re unrelated: a hugely expensive war doesn’t help things.) Andrew Sullivan wrote, “Do you really believe that Sarah Palin understands the distinctions between Shia and Sunni, has an opinion about the future of Pakistan, has a view of how to exploit rifts within Tehran’s leadership, knows about the tricky task of securing loose nuclear weapons? Does anyone even know if she has ever expressed a view on these matters?”
I don’t fear Palin is the female Quayle but potentially the female GWB: a weak leader nevertheless capable of getting elected for the likability factor, falling under the influence of the people surrounding her while moving up the ranks. Remember, Bush had “executive experience” as a governor of Texas before the presidency. And they share a speechwriter.
From the Washington Post: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and McCain campaign manager Rick Davis “suggest Palin would be able to handle foreign policy matters by leaning heavily on McCain’s staff.” You aren’t electing a person, you’re electing a party.
While much is made about her lack of “experience” canceling out Obama’s, now the Palin pick finally makes sense: this election is about “elitism.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “The entire Sarah Palin pick comes down to one thing–the hope that George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, or (God forbid) Will.I.Am. will make a joke about moose-burgers.”
Class in our country isn’t well examined or understood, mostly as the division has much to do with race relations. And that makes Obama’s “elite” status so bizarre given his race and upbringing.
To the GOP, “elite” has nothing to do with money or race. It has to do with “values.” “Elite” is any social liberal. Which is why the left badly needs to reframe this debate and claim its side of the culture war as reasoned, principled, logical, honorable, any word other than something suggesting the result of a college education.
It all comes back to Karl Rove’s remark, “Even if you never met him, you know this guy… He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”
As Jon Stewart put it, “Doesn’t elite mean good?…This job you’re applying for — if you get it, and it goes well, they might carve your head in a mountain. If you don’t actually think you’re better than us than what the fuck are you doing?”
(BTW, if I had Photoshop on this computer I’d impose Palin and McCain’s faces on Grant Wood’s painting. And oh, maybe mash-up Cindy McCain and Marie-Antoinette.)
Update 9/4/08: More Sarah Palin 2008 = George W. Bush 2000 articles now. Sarah Palin’s real soul mate in Salon and George W. Palin in Huffington Post
Previously:
Boris Johnson isn’t London’s New Bicycle
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
Related links:
- It’s an Election, Not a Revolution, Tyler Cowen in NYT
- Book: The Bush Betrayal, James Bovard
- Don’t LOL. Palin Pick Is About Taking On Washington — Not About Gender, Joe Trippi
- Liberty Island, The American Prospect
- President Camacho Speech from Idiocracy
- The View on Palin from an Alaskan Anti-Real ID Activist and Democrat, Reason
Handmade Looking Writing
Reviewing “Lesser Panda,” by Sarah Morris at White Cube in London, The Guardian’s Adrian Searle recently wrote “Technically, Morris’s paintings are so accomplished there is nowhere for them to go. They are what they are and do what they do, resolutely declaring themselves as both product and spectacle.”
But…
Next to a Sarah Morris painting I feel sweaty, awkward, street-soiled and gangling. There’s not a bleed of paint, an errant hair or a fly trapped anywhere in the paint. If Morris’s horizontals or verticals ever appear off-whack, it is because the world is wrong. Euclid would run screaming from the room.To witness such perfection in a handmade object is wearying. Even Mondrian was allowed blips. Barnett Newman was positively sloppy. Morris’s unremitting dazzle is somehow soulless and inhuman, which I guess is the intention. However much the colour sings and the Olympic quoits jump and shuffle about, the general effect is alienating.
Reading that, I was reminded of an interview with Margaret Kilgallen, where she said she tries her best to make her lines even, but she doesn’t mind some asymmetry or crookedness as it is the sign of a human touch.
Will the Kilgallen way ever be the prevailing attitude toward online writing: the idea that a typo here or there is just the sign of a human being behind the text?
Were an artist to seek “perfection” in every painting, the end result would likely be fewer paintings. Some artists are better at it: a tighter grip, keener eye, or a number of other reasons can enable more precision. While it is true there is some laziness to letting a line get crooked, I don’t know of any art critic holding it against an artist unless it’s obvious.
Published writers aren’t allowed mistakes. To many, any kind of error proves absence of authority. Previously, we discussed the unlikelihood of conversational artificial life any time soon. The English language just has too many words, each nuanced with a number of scarcely interpretable resonances. But someday we’ll be talking to robots and they’ll be writing our press releases. And when they do, will it seem cool to let go a misspelling or a grammatical error here or there? You know…just to keep the reader on his toes.
The amount of email we all struggle with means if you aren’t born with a copyediting sixth sense, you probably made several errors today. The l33t-speak “teh” once seemed to signal “I’m too busy to backspace.” (Don’t we often feel that way? I’ve got something like 50 emails weighing on my shoulders and I’d love it if half the future recipients wouldn’t be offended if I type the message out as fast as I think it.)
Also, we make tradeoffs with our time. Time is allocated depending on the priority of the recipient. A document I turn in to my employer is edited line by line several times. But with emails to friends, I don’t just skip spell check — sometimes I don’t read it over before pressing send (which usually leads to clarifications in the Re:s, but anyway!) My blog is somewhere in the middle. Fretting over the spelling and grammar eats into the short time I have to write the posts. And writing out my ideas is the point of this blog. That being said, it’s the first page result googling my name, and on the off chance someone important is checking it out, I don’t want to appear hasty or incompetent.
That’s what spelling and grammar is all about: appearances. There are people out there who, no matter what you accomplish in life, will view you as at a third grade intellect if your tenses don’t match.
Tech Dirt recently wrote:
There’s a class of folks (you know who you are!) who are well known in any kind of written forum/blog/email list etc. It’s the infamous “Grammar Nazi.” There are nice Grammar Nazis — and we appreciate those — and then there are the obnoxious Grammar Nazis who like to imply that you are the stupidest person to ever touch a keyboard because you mixed up affect and effect. From my perspective, I certainly appreciate the folks who point out the grammatical errors we make (we try to fix them quickly, if it makes sense), though I often find it silly to get bogged down in some of the minutiae of certain grammar rules that for all intents and purposes are almost universally ignored.
He also explains a nice Grammar Nazi (”usually emails us privately”) and the obnoxious kind (”always, always, always posts their comments publicly.”) By the way, if a writer does happen to write “you’re” instead of “your”: yes, he probably does know the difference, dearest helpful readers. Those of us without the sixth sense sometimes type homophones when we are working fast.
What is particularly vexing about the correctors is the implication that someone who makes typos doesn’t deserve to write. This is the belief of elementary school English teachers, at least when I was growing up. Points were docked for misplaced commas or misspellings, so the person with the highest grade didn’t necessarily write the greatest essay.
The best editors aren’t the best writers. I like the first draft quality of Philip K. Dick’s books. Maybe Gertrude Stein wasn’t as self-aware as people thought, when it came to her run-on sentences. I hate to think the reason modern literature is such a wasteland these days is because the genius novelist we’ve been waiting for was turned away by a Random House editor, “Ah, he can’t spell.”
Art by Sarah Morris.
Previously:
Saying Yes and Hearing No
Open Source Art: Will There Ever Be Another Lily Chou-Chou?
Alright, Sokay: Tomorrow’s English Language
The New Wave of Neural-Advertising in Michael Crichton’s “Looker”
Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered
“Experimental fiction is the art of telling a story in which certain aspects of reality have been exaggerated or distorted in such a way as to put the reader off the story and make him go watch a television show.” – George Saunders (via.)
The other night, I attended “No More Bush Tour” at PA’s Lounge, a bunch of bands celebrating the last days of the shrub, including Bobb Trimble, whose obscure early-80s psychedelic records were rereleased on Secretly Canadian last year, the hypnotic Fahey-like guitar sounds of Jack Rose and several others. Between the acts there were literary readings, most memorably Damon Krukowski, (of Damon and Naomi, the best two-thirds of Galaxie 500.)
Krukowski and Yang run Exact Change, publishing experimental classics like Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, and Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring. It’s an impressive catalogue of books (beautifully designed by Yang.)
They focus on Surrealism, Dada, and Pataphysics, and all of the books are at least 50 years old. Nevertheless, Yang and Krukowski receive a fair share of requests to publish new work over the years. Many of the queries are strange. Very strange. One writer says he will “expose Marquis de Sade as the rank amateur he is” with his forthcoming novel including such horrors as “AIDS in preschools,” and other gruesome situations. Another was an extremely bizarre and lengthly erotic work — with numbered paragraphs — about a “brand new spiritual organ.”
I was reminded of the room in the Museum of Jurassic Technology with letters to Mount Wilson Observatory from amateur astronomers. (”Hydrogen, was created by Electricity between Nitrogen and Oxygen and the three forms the Trinity of Life Even as Electricity, Nitrogen and Etholeum form the trinity of all planetary existance. Electricity the (passtime p) thru Nitrogen the passtime Entrance ( ) Hydrogen between Nitrogen and Oxygen and these ( ) forms the air and the water with the surface of the earth.and that of the water between which is the trinity of the worlds existance. By the gathering of the water below and above to form the firmament which in the beginning God called Heaven, and wherein we live.”) And of the colorful stories of friends of mine who looked over the slush piles at their respective publications
Once I was a judge for a film script competition and it was a frustrating experience because, while everything I read was silly, I felt morally obligated to read closely in case I should glaze over the one line that might reveal a seemingly horrible script as a Hal Hartley-style farce.
A letter to Krukowski pronounces “we’re all insane unless something’s going wrong.” A crazy person zen koan that is kind of endearing, and an example of how the Diane Arbus question never went away.
One might look at the variations of “outsider art” and the mixed emotions of exploitation, sympathy, and curiosity of its spectators. And outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston, Roky Erickson, and the documentaries about them that never quite articulated whether their (in Erickson’s case, new-found) success was based on talent or novelty.
Very often, I turn to Paul West’s “Mem, Mem, Mem,” published in The American Scholar (and Harper’s) last autumn, as an example of sifting a golden kernel out of what might otherwise seem like nonsense. In it, West, once a first rate literature scholar, describes his condition of both Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia the only way he can now: in aphasiac language.
You disentangle the least bit of wiry fluff that has been haunting your tongue for half an hour, and assign it to the unwilling project of the human mess. These rank as contributions in some way or other, but the assorted confectioneries are too massive to eat, and the strand of henpecked fluff is too narrow, which makes them both second-rate substitutes and sees them out. What I’m trying to say, in language ever more oblique, is that the human psyche can sometimes see evidence of what is not present to the senses.
The book, The Shadow Factory, was released last April.
The other question this raises is whether we accept “crazy” experimental things from people so long as they appear upstanding. A recent Washington Post article on Jeff Koons says the most surprising thing about Koons is how polite and sane he appears. I find that least surprising. As Mikita Brottman said, “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks.” Naturally, the normal articulate ones are those most likely to receive grants and succeed in other ways.
Then there’s JG Ballard, whose novel Crash famously received the verdict “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!” from a publisher. That it was ever published must have something to do with Ballard’s record of several conventional(-ish) novels prior and that’s he’s Cambridge educated, undeniably intelligent, and presentable.
Were JG Ballard completely inarticulate about his ideas, and were that his only work, would Crash have the same power? Do we look at the man behind the curtain because we are too timid to align our sympathies with the work of a person who might genuinely be mad?
When it comes to experimental literature (or film, art, etc,) I find myself less capable of explaining what it is I like or dislike about it. And I am reluctant to suggest many of these titles to others simply because I can’t determine whether it’s the work that’s so moving or the result of projecting my own values and ideas on vague atmospheric paragraphs.
This is all a very long way to go about mentioning Mattathias Schwartz’s riveting New York Times magazine piece, The Trolls Among Us.
There’s not much I can build on what was already written (so very well!) by Schwartz, and commented on just about everywhere else. But it’s applicable here, because you find the strangest comments on the most MSM websites: CNN, New York Times. Conviction that their words are worthy of being printed in the grey lady. Finally the crazies have a platform. And so long as it’s left unmoderated, if there is a Cassandra among them, we might find her.
Automatic drawings by Unica Zurn
Previously:
Why Read at All?
Unica Zurn and Rachel Feinstein Currin: Fantasies Embodied
Related links:
- Damon and Naomi
- Damon Krukowski interviewed in The Modern World
- Naomi Yang interviewed in Dust Bureau
- Unica Zurn on Myspace
- “Under-Appreciated Existing Legal Remedies for Trolling, Defamation and Other “Malwebolent” Invasions of Privacy,” TLF
- The Chimeras of Unica Zurn, artnet
- Who cares about Ann Quin? Lee Rourke
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
A narcissist enjoys punishment as much as praise. Maybe “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word, but criticism is preferable to no attention at all. The Abu Ghraib scandal is a classic example of our country’s narcissistic impulse. Attention was never on the Iraqi prisoner-victims. Instead we focused on how bad this made us look. How bad we were to let those bad people move up to high ranks.
The iconic photos were all about America — about us. And after several years, there is no singular image of an Iraq victim — out of the context of American imprisonment — that captured our attention the same way.
The Abu Ghraib images created a remote sense of guilt — anger more than sympathy. If the attention is on our own terribleness that means we can change (or pretend to change.) In the end, justice was carried out on those bad apple soldiers (or seemed that way.)
Compare that to the unblinking attention the famous image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc requires of a viewer. The photograph told the world the only way they could correct this wrongdoing and put an end to her suffering, was ending the Vietnam war entirely.
There are many photographs of the Iraq war as powerful as that picture of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, but none has marked the public consciousness the same way. I bet most people couldn’t recall a single image of a victim other than the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think that has to do with how we are adjusting to new ways of reading news.
The shift toward Internet as a primary news source didn’t cause the Iraq war, but certainly made it more convenient. You don’t have to eat your peas before desert, you don’t have to sit through fifteen minutes of world news to find out what celebrity got married today.
Maybe it is knowing that we can always access information about Iraq that keeps us from doing so in the present. If it were that ABC News only showed Iraq footage at 6 pm every night, maybe we’d be more likely to tune in because then the footage would feel like an event — something we had to know, that we could only glean within a certain time frame. Without an event framing it, the sense “I should watch this now” is lost to the understanding, “I can watch this later.”
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented.
The challenge is designing a news website that encourage immediate and full attention. The Washington Post’s web chats with authors and public figures is a good example of this. The opportunity to communicate directly with a person of prominence cannot be done later, nor can one participate in a chat with only half his attention. I would also point to the book readings and events staged in Second Life, if Second Life didn’t seem so pet rock to me. A smart website would start using video conferencing software to have its writers interact with readers. The trick is not to archive the footage immediately. Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
I really think a return to live chat is where web 3.0 (or whatever it is called) is going. Maybe we’ll also see a move toward call-in online video. Live email, instant messaging, and live Skype chats with the hosts.
Images by Yang Shaobin.
Update 7/23/08: Ekstasis made this great point:
This is why ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), like the famous I Love Bees, are so incredibly effetive, the reason I am so drawn to the old telephone poetry projects like Dial-A-Poem. Such projects make the passive recipient of information into an active participant…not “participant” in the more commonly used internet sense, not a creator of information, but a physically participatory comsumer of the given media. ARGs turn information consumption into a game, or at the very least an adventure. Something like Dial-A-Poem, or in the same way a radio call in show, turns the comsumption of media into a community actvity. It takes one outside of themselves into the very over-rated but nevertheless important realm of external reality. Everybody loves it, when they are participating. Everybody forgets about it when they go looking for “the next big thing.”
It’s true, the most exciting media right now is game-related. It will be interesting to see how the New York Times or others tries to implement games with their media (as I’m sure they will.) Wouldn’t it be great to get a free subscription to the Sunday paper if you get the highest score on a news quiz? Things like that will make such a difference.
Looking over this post again, which I didn’t really expect anyone to pay attention to (ha!) it seems like two different points and discontinuous. But the point of my intro on Abu Ghraib is that the one detail about the Iraq war people really know about and fixate on is more about us than about the Iraqis. It’s kind of like, if the only thing people knew about Vietnam were My Lai.
Please Don’t Leave a Facebook Comment on My Birthday
I’m trying hard here to word this in the right way, without sounding exasperated or too demanding, because it’s not the worst thing in the word — but it is unfortunate there is no Emily Post for our generation, spelling out why and how we might best celebrate birthdays. The “happy birthday” comments on my social network pages get a fraction of my attention, as it took a fraction of the attention of the 
person who wrote it. Perhaps it wouldn’t trouble me if it didn’t seem a substitute for presence or substantial communication.
First there is the question of why it matters anyway. Aren’t we a little too old for birthdays? It’s true, some are indifferent to the annual “special day” but most of us just out of habit are not. It’s the one day of the year to receive special attention without doing anything to earn it: our personal New Year in order to reassess the paths we’ve taken and expect to take.
Plus, we grow up demanding this attention. It’s the best day in a child’s life, and one she waits for all month. For children, going to someone’s birthday is almost as fun as having your own. Becuase there will be cake and an inflatable castle in the backyard, or, at the very least, a slip-n-slide.
In college, replace “drinks” with “cake.” You ask the seniors to “buy” for you and get drunk in the dorms. But sometime, once school is done, a birthday is too much of a hassle to celebrate. For the birthday person, it’s a little awkward to send an email out: “Hi friends, please pay tribute to me at this sushi restaurant. By the way, I’m not one of those people that expects gifts but it would be nice to see you all.” For the invitees, well, sometimes they feel they have other priorities.
A text message, “Can’t make it tonight sick/busy/tired,” is an everyday disappointment, but on one’s birthday, it’s difficult not to take it personally. I thought I was the only one who got upset about this, until I went out with my friend, at the club he was DJing the night of his birthday. There was only the lightest shower just before he started playing, but he received text message after text message, “I’d go out, but it’s too rainy.”
Friends of mine, five years or more older, who actually have the sort of responsibilities one would assume might cut into their social time, never seem to do this, but with friends five years younger — forget it. Were there a Getting Things Done-style book for keeping up with friends, well articulated methods how not to alienate ourselves from the people we like best, no one would read it anyway. A shame, as I find so much of my email consists of messages back and forth from friends on why one or the other can’t meet up on this or that day. We all over-extend ourselves, because we can. But what it seems to bring about is what, T. S. Elliot called the “sty of contentment.”
And so you get the Facebook and Myspace comments instead. Both applications allow for no one to forget your birthday. But, here’s the thing, it requires nothing of a person to type and post two words and an exclamation point on a page. This is all part of the problem of time and attention, and also of priorities. I don’t know anyone too busy to watch The Wire or Man Men, but somehow we get too busy to meet up with friends.
Images by Laurie Simmons. The first a still from The Music of Regret
William Gibson Completely Deleted from BoingBoing Archives
Valleywag just reported Boing Boing deleted every mention of William Gibson on the site. A list he wrote of “Top 10 Science Fiction Memes of 2006″ is now offline. They no longer link to his books. A few days later the podcast interview they did with Gibson was offline too. Only a “via” link to a site that’s not his own remains.
Ok, it wasn’t William Gibson. It was Violet Blue who was unceremoniously purged. But whatever it was she did that so grossly offended Boing Boing, it is entirely possible that Gibson, Douglas Rushkoff, Bruce Sterling, Lawrence Lessig, Steven Johnson or any other male Boing Boing favorite could say or do the same thing. Violet Blue is a published author too (who is only going to gain prominence now that Kate Lee is representing her.) If you believe Boing Boing would ever so thoroughly scrub their archives of any of these men, please leave a comment here. I am always welcome to dissenting viewpoints.
This is sexism. It’s also bad journalism. And it goes against the free interactive spirit of blogging.
If Tim Noah got on David Plotz’s bad side, and the Chatterbox column vanished, the whole web would know about it within the hour. Pitchfork cleared Nick Sylvester’s reviews from their site after it was discovered he fabricated parts of a Village Voice cover story, a move most would say was unnecessary, but in the end it was Pitchfork’s call. (CORRECTION 7/2/08: They didn’t. The reviews are still there. Here’s one.) You’ll still see Jayson Blair as a byline in the New York Times archive. They only pulled the stories containing lies. “The Jayson Blair stories are going to (stay) in the archives,” Craig Whitney, standards editor for the New York Times told OJR. “We can’t pretend he was never here.” (He also discusses constant requests from divorced couples to nuke their wedding announcements.)
But no one is calling Violet Blue a dishonest journalist. She’s pulled from the Boing Boing site for some reason anyone several miles or more from Ritual will never know, (and doesn’t care to know either.)
And in one way what Boing Boing is doing is a lot worse than MSM pulling the plug on someone. It’s a snag in the blog quilt at large. Say I linked to a Violet Blue Boing Boing post using the old blog cliche “read the whole thing.” That post is worthless now, as is any external commentary on the content that Boing Boing deleted.
As Rebecca Blood wrote in her outline of weblog ethics:
Changing or deleting entries destroys the integrity of the network. The Web is designed to be connected; indeed, the weblog permalink is an invitation for others to link. Anyone who comments on or cites a document on the Web relies on that document (or entry) to remain unchanged. A prominent addendum is the preferred way to correct any information anywhere on the Web. If an addendum is impractical, as in the case of an essay that contains numerous inaccuracies, changes must be noted with the date and a brief description of the nature of the change…
The network of shared knowledge we are building will never be more than a novelty unless we protect its integrity by creating permanent records of our publications. The network benefits when even entries that are rendered irrelevant by changing circumstance are left as a historical record. As an example: A weblogger complains about inaccuracies in an online article; the writer corrects those inaccuracies (and notes them!); the weblogger’s entry is therefore meaningless — or is it? Deleting the entry somehow asserts that the whole incident simply didn’t happen — but it did. The record is more accurate and history is better served if the weblogger notes beneath the original entry that the writer has made the corrections and the article is now, to the weblogger’s knowledge, accurate.
History can be rewritten, but it cannot be undone. Changing or deleting words is possible on the Web, but possibility does not always make good policy. Think before you publish and stand behind what you write. If you later decide you were wrong about something, make a note of it and move on.
This is a discussion we need to be having. Already blog archives are rarely looked over by the authors or major readers of a site. But they are found by people googling something specific.
Evidently, this isn’t the first time Boing Boing has removed a post because of a perceived microfeud. In February this year, Rex Sorgatz wrote, “BoingBoing linked to me yesterday. For 10 minutes. Then someone apparently told them that I’m the guy who hates on BoingBoing. Post deleted.”
From the post in question:
One of these days I’m going to do a take-down article on a sacred cow of the internet: BoingBoing. I’ve already got a few ledes written: “BoingBoing, the pretend-thinking-man’s Fark,” “BoingBoing, your source for two-week-old links,” “BoingBoing, keeping post-hippiness alive since 1991….” And so on. Truth is, I like Cory and Xeni and the gang — they’re swell people. And I bet I’m the only one here who owns every single issue of bOING bOING — the magazine. But BoingBoing is clearly the most over-rated blog on the internet (which is easy to declare, since it’s also the third-most-popular).
Those are the words of a disgruntled fan, not a hater. There’s nothing there that wouldn’t get published in a print magazine Letters to the Editor section. Seems like Boing Boing should listen to Will Leitch’s parting words: “Someone Hates You Online. Try Not To Be Offended.”
Like Jim Harper at Tech Liberation Front, I get annoyed when people use “Big Brother” to describe non-coercive private actions. BoingBoing, as a private entity, is entirely free to censor their own material. They get a lot of flack for their overly eager moderating policy, but for the most part it seems to keep the trolls at bay. (Although, here’s an example of a heavy hand.)
But, Boing Boing hates corporate censorship too. They made a huge fuss when SmartFilter blocked their site for its “nudity.” And rightfully so. The story even ran in the NYT. The most interesting point coming out of the Valleywag story, was a comment from one of Cory Doctorow’s former students:
I find this extremely disappointing given that Cory Doctorow was a visiting Fulbright professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication in the Public Diplomacy program. Needless to say, there is a great deal of irony in Cory assuming such a “public”, democratic position, and yet for BoingBoing to censor voices like they seem to be doing.
I took Cory’s graduate seminar, which was a life-altering experience, but he clearly is stuck in larger “networks”, I guess.
Another blogger writes she’s angry “because I know that — because Boing Boing taught me — that we’re supposed to call out sites that do shit like that. So that’s what I’m doing.” Unfortunately, it’s unlikely any other bloggers will. This is a big fish in a small enabling pond situation. Most bloggers will ignore the story because they want to keep in Boingboing’s favor. Big media will ignore it, because they think it’s insignificant Mission District coffee shop gossip. Banning Violet Blue doesn’t exactly merit a Vanessa Grigoriadis expose.
However, this unfortunate incident is now noted on the Boing Boing Wikipedia page (”Sex blogger Violet Blue has, in the past, been regularly mentioned in Boing Boing, including a being the subject of a Boing Boing Boing interview. On the 23rd of June 2008, Blue posted on Tiny Nibbles that all posts making mention of her had been deleted from Boing Boing, without explanation. Boing Boing has refused to comment at this time.”) In the meantime you can hear the podcast on The Internet Archive.
So what might really be behind Boing Boing’s people purges? Fear of the inevitable. In cycling the person racing ahead of everyone else has to work the hardest. The person behind has an aereodynamic advantage from the drift, meanwhile the rider ahead has to work as much as 35% harder. That’s a great metaphor for everything — especially in technology. The leader is always the one who sweats the most. Because everyone can see where he is heading, but he can’t turn around to look at what’s coming from behind. There’s going to be a website that will do what Boing Boing does now, but better. Whomever develops it, is likely watching this event closely and vowing never to make this kind of mistake.
Images from “The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia,” by David King
Update: 6/30/08 Finally the media is commenting on this. The LA Times blog has a pretty long piece on what happened:
No one, including Blue herself, has any idea what’s behind the scrubbing. BoingBoing has been conspicuously silent; despite considerable confusion in the blogopshere, the site has not posted about the issue or said they planned to. Blogger and long-time BoingBoing contributer Xeni Jardin did not respond to an e-mail from me, and several other bloggers and writers reported non-answers too…
It’s bizarre that BoingBoing has failed to take any steps to clarify the situation.
For one thing, post-snuffing is usually “a serious no-no,” said Eve Batey, Blue’s friend and Chronicle editor. “That’s just against the rules of the blog world.”
But there’s also the fact that BoingBoing has often presented itself as a stalwart of cultural openness. Doctorow himself is a well-known copyfighter — a crusader against restrictive intellectual property laws. He has removed a post at least once before — when writer Ursula K. Le Guin asked that an excerpt of her book be taken down — but he immediately wrote a long, apologetic explanation of the incident.
I really hope Wired News and others continue to cover this story.
Update 7/1/08: If you are reading this for the first time, understand you’re a little bit late to the conversation. I wrote this post on Saturday. I first read about the deleted posts on Valleywag last Wednesday. I wrote this post because no one was talking about the issue, I would have been happy enough staying out of it, had other blogs and news sources commented on the Valleywag post. Since Monday, mainstream media picked up the story and today Boing Boing finally made an announcement, admitting the posts were deleted an entire year ago.
In the comments, Suzie Q writes:
Here’s the best theory I’ve come up with – and DO feel free to send this around the blogosphere, since hitting on the wrong answer will get the real answer just as surely as hitting on the real answer will get no response – it all comes down to this article on friend-of-boingboing Amanda Congdon:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/04/05/violetblue.DTL
This is a pretty blatant slam on Congdon for dishonesty regarding her corporate sponsorships, and may in fact have been related to Congdon leaving ABC ( I believe I heard a rumor about them getting upset when they found out about the side vlogging).
Essentially, Violet Blue possibly got Amanda Congdon fired, or at least that’s what it looks like. I would imagine that very likely, VB found out about this in a Boing Boing-related way. It could even be that VB didn’t get her fired, but betrayed their trust in revealing the info about her.
Which is why they’re not saying what the reason is. Because it’s actually the only thing that would make them look more hypocritical… because it’s anti-transparency.
But note that the only hint we get in their note of explanation is that VB’s posts were removed about a year ago – and this was the only really noteworthy thing she did around that time; at least, publicly.
Of course no one really knows what is going on here, but maybe this is worthy of a Vanessa Grigoriadis expose after all.
Another update: “violet blue boing boing” is #31 on Google Trends today. “Violet Blue” is #12.
Update 3: Here’s the post about Rex that was deleted.
Update 4: LA Times Web Scout this afternoon:
In its explanation of the Blue purge, BoingBoing cited what it called an “erroneous” claim that it had removed 100 Violet Blue-related posts. They did not name the allegedly erroneous post as mine or even bother to link to it, so let me name the post: it was mine, and I linked to it earlier in the sentence. Notably, BoingBoing did not offer the correct number of purged posts (saying only that they had “unpublished some posts relating to her”). Also, someone from BoingBoing refused to tell me how far off my count of 100 was.
Let me correct the record. With some help from Violet Blue herself, and her boyfriend, who stayed up late last night writing a script to scan the WayBack Machine for Blue BB posts, I can present this spreadsheet.
It contains 72 BoingBoing posts containing the name of Violet Blue. I found one duplicate in the 40 or so that I spot checked. This was not a high duplication rate, and Violet’s boyfriend, she said, had written a second script to eliminate duplicates. Maybe it missed one or two. So maybe 72 is slightly high.
In any case, let’s say that more than just “some” posts were removed. And let’s also note that this search only went from January 2005 to August 2007, when the archive ends. Further, BoingBoing’s Internet archive has many different gaps in it where other Blue posts might have been sitting.
In sum, I was remiss to take at face value Violet Blue’s number of 100. I should have said at least 70.
I apologize for the imprecision.
Update 7/2/08: Zenarchery articulates why this is a great breach of ethics far better than I did.
Also, I’m no longer allowing comments to this post
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