Facebook is Worse than AOL
Devin Troy Strother, Please Don’t Shoot Up the Dancehall. From The Armory Show 2010 preview.
“Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else. I don’t know if they’re even considering what users want anymore. It’s all about how to maximize revenue and all that crap. It’s wanting to be everything to everybody possible so they won’t have to go anywhere else.”
– Matt Haughey. (via.)
Facebook is worse than AOL. It’s like a neverending digital teambuilding exercise. But instead of trailing a rope course or catching blindfolded people leaning backward, participants post pictures of doppelgangers and list “25 things” about themselves.
I really dislike the term “walled garden,” as it brings Frances Hodgson Burnett to mind and people imagine something privately enjoyed rather than simply restricted access. Don’t confuse this with invite-only message boards or mailing lists that make the Internet wonderful. To end the confusion, lets call the good places secret gardens.
Back in the day, AOL had a lot of secret gardens. According to my friend Erin, there was a Spin magazine message board frequented by established rock critics that was at an off the index location. A lot of corporations and publications created “channels” which would include chat rooms and message boards. These were about as successful as the businesses with Second Life presences. But some users would take over the dead space and make it their own. Several online friends and I once claimed the message boards for a Canadian radio station long after it was launched and quickly abandoned. Likely the citizens of Second Life do that with virtual ghost town storefronts.
It’s a little surprising Facebook isn’t used more like a message board or a mailing list –most people seem to use Ning or Google Groups for that purpose. The problem is something that tries to do everything can’t do anything well. Anyone who remembers Usenet or even the AOL message boards knows that as soon as posts dropped to one or two a week, the whole thing died not long after. Constant updates keep a social network alive.
I don’t have a problem with secret gardens on the Internet. Actually, just about everyone I know is on some kind of private invite-only mailing list or message board. But a walled garden leads to a number of complications. In 2007, Jason Kottke called Facebook the New AOL, referring their platform:
What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that’s different for each platform? That gets expensive, time-consuming, and irritating. It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously…imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.
As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.
This sort of reminded me of Alex Payne’s The Case Against Everything Buckets. Someone smarter than me about these subjects could probably make a comment about how this is happening with mobile apps right now. Android developers, for example, fear that too many differentiated models will make their job harder. I’d love to see data on how many users don’t install Facebook apps at all. Or never use them. Or only use them. For a lot of people Farmville is Facebook.
My real frustration with Facebook has to do with context collapse. This was exactly why I was slow to sign up for the service. I can’t remember exactly when I did, maybe 2006, but I used the email I have just for online shopping and mailing lists and never imported my gmail contacts. I knew then I wanted it to be as small a part of my life as possible. Why? Because my friends weren’t on it, but a bunch of professional acquaintances were. And also because of the poke feature. danah boyd’s Facebook vs MySpace class distinctions was very apparent, as I was living in Chicago, and had few friends affiliated with universities, but old work colleagues from DC were all there. Even today, many of the musicians and artists I knew there still favor Myspace, but is there a 4.0 average student alive who doesn’t Facebook?
And when I heard about the “poke” feature that did it for me. It indicated the creators just weren’t serious about making something that could be more than a place for goofing around in a perplexingly formal way. “Poke” is the dumbest and worst feature ever invented for a social network. Even worse than that “suggest a match” thing on Friendster back in the dark ages (I still turn bright red and wince thinking of the time a less than socially savvy pal suggested a match for me with the person I had a crush on at the time.) I don’t really like when people lay out “best practices” for social networking like, “oh, she doesn’t @ reply enough people on Twitter.” And “netiquette” very often neglects the fact that introvert/extrovert classifications also exist in the digital world. But no, there’s never a good time for a poke. (Why stop with the poke? Why not call me and hang up before answering? Why not send me a blank email with no subject? Why not blank @ me?)
Rule of thumb on who to listen to in social media: ignore every non-artworld person talking about “curation” and instead subscribe to the feeds of those blogging about “filter failure.” (More on this in an upcoming post.) Facebook epitomizes filter failure for me. Yes, there are ways to segment information and keep groups, but there aren’t very good ways to keep worlds from overlapping. Facebook isn’t a more neutral LinkedIn and Myspace. It is the collapse of LinkedIn, Myspace, and a bunch of other networks, while many people want these worlds compartmentalized. I mostly avoid Facebook the same way that I’ll get drinks on a Monday night with colleagues, but not on a Friday or Saturday night. This generation blurs the line between work and play, but there is still a line or else you’re not getting the best out of either.
Now, this is my experience with Facebook. I don’t doubt there’s value to it for lots of people. I like it as a visual rolodex, and if I were a heavy user, I can see the advantage of adding just about everyone you meet at a conference or class as a “friend.” But mainly my use of Facebook is transitionary. I import my contacts to newer, hopefully better social networks as they come along like Foursquare or Quora.
That being said… add me.
Previously: The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns
Here are two great posts on why Dodgeball died from Caroline McCarthy and Rick Webb, who points out “despite what you will read these days, it did indeed take off at first.” The general problem was, the circa-Friendster network started before people used web and email on their mobile devices. Twitter was lucky enough to catch the smartphone wave. I had about nine friends on Dodgeball in 2004 in DC (where I was living at the time). It was, at face value, perfect as most of us just went to the same five bars anyway and there was a one-in-five chance we’d run into each other on a Saturday night. But, I never felt comfortable mass-SMSing “my network.” It seemed too damn needy and unspecific. The seemingly narcissistic borderline-autistic tendency that people knock Twitter users for is really its saving grace. You can use Twitter without knowing another person on the network. It’s microblogging, not mass-texting service, and that less specific platform allows for more transformative use.
The Annotation Impulse: Graffiti and Social Media
Some of the bathrooms at MIT have chalkboards in them. It plays into the fantasy of being an MIT student: the head-in-the-clouds genius who will come up with the answer to a seemingly unsolvable theorem while standing over a urinal. He just must jot it down! But it also combats more permanent bathroom graffiti. Given a place to scribble something scandelous, knowing it can easily be erased, people who wouldn’t otherwise write things on walls might leave something behind for the next person to ponder.
In Oklahoma City, residents still mourn the 1991 passing of the “graffiti bridge.” Since 1930 it was where rival schools would make threats, students painted murals, and a whole lot of memories were made like the time on kid spilled a bucket of paint on a brand new BMW (The rubble is now repurposed as jewelry by a local artist.)
Some people think of books as holy things that should never been handled too roughly or written in, but I read everything with a highlighter between my thumb and index finger and a pen or pencil between my index and middle finger. Highlighting is a mnemonic device — I slow down and concentrate on the text when the fluorescent ink covers it. The pen is for writing my own commentary.
One of the best things about used books is the opportunity to pick a stranger’s brain. Not just the author — the previous reader. I’ve found so many odd, wonderful scribblings in previously owned books: first drafts of what eventually may be love letters and other funny or sad or interesting things. Sometime the annotation is enlightening. Sometimes it’s annoying. Whomever owned my copy of Understanding Media before me is an idiot and I cross out everything of his when I start a new page because it annoys and distracts me. But that’s part of the annotation impulse too.
Says Dovegreyreader:
Nothing sacred about my books, they are living and working extensions of my mind which as I get older is feeling slightly more full to overflowing, marginalia becometh a necessity not a sin.
Words that sum up the book as I’m reading, often a family tree if it feels complex, page numbers and gems of lines from the author, sometimes a message that the book will have hit me with suddenly and like a sledge-hammer, often a flash of blinding truth gone in an instant unless
I write it down.Don’t anyone suggest a notebook or post-it notes because those are never around when you need them whereas I have furnished the entire house with pencils.
After the publishing apocalypse, when we are all reading almost exclusively digital ink, we will share our scribbled pithy commentary, line by line, with whomever cares to read it (You can see a glimpse of this future on The Golden Notebook Project.)
Book marginalia is like graffiti without the property law infringement. The impulse is the same. It’s the same thing that drives kids to collect signatures on their cast when they break a bone, or later, get tattoos. And that is the same impulse that fuels the social web.
I know a lot of people who dream about painting their bedroom or office walls with chalkboard paint. Then there are those cafes where you can text something to appear on a screen on the wall. The bigger the cafe the more scandalous the messages get: “Dark haired girl in blue sweater cut me in line.” Before that there were places with paper walls and tables covered entirely with people’s scribbling. There are a bunch of them in Chicago. I was sad to see the emo verses I left on a wall in silver sharpie at a Gold Coast pizzeria as a teenager weren’t there ten years later. But that’s the nature of those things.
Karla Diaz in Journal of Aesthetics and Protest writes about those kind of places in an article about graffiti and texting: “public texting allows the once private text messages to be displayed on the sides of public buildings, on screens in coffee shops or on huge digital displays. People speak of this digital writing as an exciting possibility for language to exist in a visual, public space. However, one has to wonder how is this different from reading Graffiti on a wall somewhere?” So the big screen Twitter feeds at the tech conferences are kind of like graffiti.
“[Looking] at what I call the Older Graffiti artists’ original method of art practice which fosters collaboration and is guided by it street context, one can see how Graffiti culture has influenced text messaging,” Diaz continues, pointing out how younger, digital native graffiti artists think about their tagging as how it might look on a laptop or cellphone screen.
The major problem graffiti presented as an art form — its mortality — was overcome with the rise of blogs and digital curation. Looking beyond Diaz’ points about text messaging. How about Photoshop? What does seeing a website like LOLGraves make people think of architecture and space? Or what about the Internet as a hive mind? And then there is the joy you can get in doing something completely anonymous. The pleasure of a secret life. And don’t forget the way the Internet blurs the line between amateur and professional.
And on the Internet we can say whatever we want wherever we want. It completely open, for good and for bad. Some of us take that sense of entitlement with us to the street. People are writing “THE DOG DIES” on Marley and Me ads in Los Angeles. Just as they would to annoy others on a message board. Maybe it’s wrong, but what about last summer’s AT&T Billboard improvement in San Francisco?
My favorite blog post this year was Anti-advertising Agency’s call to “Demand a Read/Write City”
Our city is read-only. You’re free to read advertising, business signs, and city signs. But dare you write or hang anything of your own; you will be labeled as a criminal – a graffiti vandal. In many cities it’s even illegal to hang a sign for a garage sale on a light pole. If you happen to have a several thousand dollars, you might be able to say what you want – as long as it’s not too political.
But this is public space. You’re free to say whatever you want in public space, but freedom of speech does not extend to the visual environment. The visual environment is pay to play. Public visual space has become commercial space.
The visual environment is read only.
Why is read/write better? Because you can consume, process, and respond. This is how we think critically. This is how we learn. You can talk back. You can express yourself. You don’t just consume expression, you create expression.
Read/write is how democracy works.
There’s a reason kids want to write their names on walls. There’s a reason why people take graffiti seriously. Granted, graffiti writers don’t always know how to direct this energy, but I’d argue there’s some overlap with the reasons one writes their name on a wall and the reasons one runs for the school board. Being able to write means being able to affect your environment. To change it. You exist in the world not as a consumer, but an active citizen.
Read only culture creates apathy.
We need more places like the MIT bathrooms or the Oklahoma City graffiti bridge. In a better world, anywhere could be our chalkboard paint office.
Images: Geoffrey Raymond’s “Annotated Paintings” (some for sale on his website.)
Previously:
Graffiti in the Wilderness: Rock Climbing in a Granite Museum
Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection
Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments
94 percent of blogs are abandoned. 133 million are indexed by Technorati but only 1.5 million were active this week (7.4 in 120 days.) 57% of US bloggers are male, and surprisingly, 58% are older than 35 (42% 18-34.) Abroad, in Europe and Asia three-quarters are male. Nicholas Carr has an interesting commentary expanding his 2005 argument that the historical precedent for blogging is amateur radio.
From The Independent: “there’s an equally strange phenomenon occurring on the web these days: a profound disbelief that things are what they claim to be. Wary of being seen as gullible, people simply assume that everything is fake.” (via.) Previously.
“Why I FFFFFing Hate FFFFound” at greg.org. See also Things Magazine on “novelty and invention” and a456 on the “(Un)compromising War on Whimsy,” referring to Things again.
Now Verizon plans to ban all newsgroups, but once Usenet was all we had. Remember alt.gothic.fashion? Melissa Gira does, “we can all agree on one thing: The Internet was so much better when we were the only people on it.”
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
“Do you know who Marcel Duchamp is? Do you know who Roland Barthes is? Do either of them have any bearing on art practice?” From Tom Moody’s quiz “What Kind of Net Artist Are You?”
Microcelebrity and Frienemies
If you used AOL in the early 90s, you likely remember Courtney Love going nuts on the music message boards. She’d stop in every few months and leave a whirlwind of mostly incoherent posts — sometimes something about Mary Lou Lord and oral sex and Kurt and a van after a show and how it is all NOT TRUE, sometimes just her daily gripes (”I am thinking heavily of trying Prozac…. I would appreciate info from intense, passionate, sexual (hetero, generally) and esp. CREATIVE females regarding this drug__I’m NOT clinically depressed__I’m not even manic-depressive, just super neurotic and paranoid….”) — whatever it was, she always sounded defensive. From an article written around that time:
“It’s like a masturbatory videogame all about me!” Courtney Love brags over the phone, only halfself-mockingly. Love first stormed onto America Online in the spring of ‘94, not long after her husband took a shotgun to his head and changed her life forever. Her first mission: to intercept her estranged father, Hank Harrison, who had been on the service promoting a very unauthorized Kurt Cobain biography he was writing. In an online battle in full view of AOL’s thenthree million users, “hunnypi 28″ accused “BioDad” of exploiting the tragedy. BioDad eventually vanished back into anonymity. Love decided to stick around.
“For a while I was really addicted to it,” she says now. “It was like my only friend. I just couldn’t deal with humans__I was dealing with these cyberbeings, and having these inane conversations, banal conversations, crazy conversations, dealing-with-grief conversations with people from fucking God-knows-where who looked like God-knows-what.”
But she wasn’t treated with adoration at all. Love was entangled in major drawn out online feuds, at a time when everyone hid behind anonymous “handles.” Part of it was to accuse her of killing Kurt, partly a reaction to her paranoid writing style, but I think most of the people coming at her, just wanted to get her attention.
Online, Courtney Love was a pinata, but most of these people were just random suburban teenagers who would inevitably act obsequiously given a backstage pass to meet her. Because they were — kinda — her fans. She still blogs, but has, as far as I know, kept out of online discussions.
There is one case when the rage toward a public figure is genuine: when it is not really the public figure, but someone posing as him. Look at Richard Dawkins on Twitter. Some hater registered the account and used the opportunity to eventually tell his fans how Dawkins is wrong. Following that, he got a number of flaming replies.
Now, anyone who paid attention from the beginning would have noticed it couldn’t possibly be Dawkins. But no one on the internet bothers investing the time to even read a sentence from somebody seemingly important, unless it directly matters to them. You just add “Richard Dawkins” to your Twitter feed cause you know he’s smart and you’d like to read his stuff one day and maybe that passive-contact will make you smarter by osmosis.
AOL users never doubted Courtney Love’s posts were fake. It had to be her. The way she wrote was so uniquely strange. It was a nervous breakdown reduced to online text. It was great!
I was reminded of Courtney Love, reading Keith Gessen’s blog. Not in terms of content, but the reactions he’s received. He made some comment about “Taking back the internet,” and a blog appeared using that name:
Last week, when Gawker linked to this blog, I took some solace in the fact that I suddenly had a slew of tumblr followers. My followers, I thought, would follow me to the ends of the earth.
But now I’ve clicked on some of your tumblrs, and it turns out you all hate me.
Will I ever forget the moment I discovered “takebacktheinternet.tumblr” in my followers? “Ah!” I thought. “A fan site.”
It was not a fan site.
So, without further ado, I’ve decided to take the initiative and buy up all the potential tumblrs my less than enthusiastic followers might be inclined to one day occupy. These are:
keithgessensucks.tumblr.com
keithgessensucksballs.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’sear.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’searandcalledhimnames.tumblr.com
istuckmyballsinkeithgessen’searandcalledhimnamesinthegawker
commentssection.tumblr.com
ididn’tevenstickmyballsinkeithgessen’searbecausei’veneverhe
ardofhimandhesucks.tumblr.comI think that about covers it. Now what you gonna do?
See that’s kind of funny. Maybe he’s not conceited, like everyone thought. And he’s writing it on a Tumblr — the least pretentious blog software one could use. But the criticism kept coming, playful jabs at his alleged inflated sense of entitlement (here and here and here.)
It’s a perpetuation of previous aggression and the capacity to get attention from someone who is in the public eye. Criticism is always easier to write than praise. But the haters don’t really hate him. At least, not the way I hate Chris Matthews or Londoners hate Boris Johnson. They may resent his success. They might find something about him annoying. But the premise of the annoyance — that Gessen takes himself too seriously — was proven wrong as soon as he set up a Tumblr. Now he’s having a party, inviting the very people behind the mocking websites.
Attention is attention whether its praise or venom. As Rex Sorgatz writes in his New York magazine article on how to attain microcelebrity:
If there is a Latin phrase for “reply to everything,” it should be crocheted on your pillows and tacked above your door. Anytime your name is used, you are required to e-mail, comment, or firebomb the person invoking it. When in doubt, remember these three maxims: There is no such thing as being above the fray, every battle is worth fighting, and all disputes are good press.
Tao Lin gets it. He offered free copies of his books to “shit talkers,” anyone who can produce evidence “that you don’t like me (a link to something you typed on the internet or a description of what you said to someone about me).”
McLuhen didn’t predict a medium that keeps you busy every minute of the day — even when you are doing nothing. There is always another thing to “Read Later” or email or blog or cut+paste, or skim rather than read. Time and attention are spread too thin. People are too busy to decide whether they like something or not, the Internet makes everything a joke.
What was the last thing on the Internet you concentrated on for longer than a minute? What got a strong reaction from you? Besides this photo of Ryan Gosling and this video from a My Bloody Valentine concert, just about everything I see online is encoded in my mind as a murky grey shade. And it isn’t often retrieved after I close my laptop for the day. I have no idea what I looked at thirty minutes ago. I could take or leave it, but I can’t tear myself away from looking, when I’m in the middle of it.
And that gets to an idea I have, which is going to be an upcoming post: why everything on the internet goes back to sex. Porn is the one thing that consistently holds one’s attention online (And if you can’t concentrate on that, man, maybe you really should consider visiting those Chinese rehab clinics.)
Another good point from Sorgatz’s piece:
Where traditional fame was steeped in class envy on the part of the audience and alienation on the part of the celebrity, microfame closes the gap between devotee and celebrity. It feels like a step toward equality. You can become Facebook friends with the microfamous; you can start IM sessions with them. You can love them and hate them at much closer proximity. And you can just as easily begin to cultivate your own set of admirers. Though an element of luck often plays a role in achieving traditional fame, microfame is practically a science. It is attainable like running a marathon or acing the LSAT. All you need is a road map.
This is important because for most creative types, microcelebrity is all you can dream to achieve. Sorgatz points out Tila Tequila only sold 13,000 copies of her album. But that’s the average for a Pitchfork-approved musician. An author under contract with a major publishing house might sell twice as many books. Microfame is inevitable for most authors and musicians, regardless of their web participation. And money plays a part in this. Someone can be extremely well known and just never manage to profit from it. When you hear about an author earning six figure advance for a novel, it might seem like they’ve entered a tax bracket above your own. But not really. If that book took two or three years to write (as it very well should have!) the advance isn’t as impressive.
How can you pretend to have any power over your fanbase when they earn twice as much as you did, working as administrative assistants? If you want to be a public figure in these times, you can’t play boss.
Images of male celebrities crying by Sam Taylor-Wood, courtesy of Arab Aquarius.
Previously:
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