When our worldly knowledge is based around an ever-changing cycle of products, it means that our skills and perspective have a sort of expiration date–one that is often far shorter than an average professional career.

On my desk is a pocket watch, ticking quietly.  It is 123 years old, yet it works as well as the day it left the factory in Waltham, New York.  Its aesthetics are timeless–polished metal, glass, and delicate black-on-white roman numerals.  Though it is obsolete–its gentle discrepancies made unacceptable in a world of radio-controlled quartz movements–its value has remained largely constant over its long life.  After all, even if it were broken beyond repair, it contains 4oz. of coin silver (and a broken clock is right twice a day).

This watch, for me, throws into contrast our failure to bring past visions of ‘the future’ to life.  While our technology and products have become increasingly advanced, any sense of quality and value has started to come apart in the relentless product cycle.  This cycle–an insistence on new and better–has infected our media and minds as well.  In our movement further into the digital frontier, we have started to leave permanence behind in favor of freshness, depth in favor of convenience.  We are in danger of losing a certain fundamental sense of meaning.

As a culture, we have achieved incredible things.  What would the man who owned this watch in 1890 think if I showed him an iPhone?  In the pocket that he carried a timepiece, I can fit a device that can record and transmit live video, can connect us to others anywhere via voice and image, can give us access to our exact location on maps from around the globe, and any number of other incredible things.  It becomes even more fantastical when you take into account the ways in which this technology has changed society for the better.

However, the iPhone lacks a certain solidity and permanence–it lacks ‘realness.’  A clever man in 1890 could take his watch apart and puzzle-out its function, just as I have learned to work on them today.  An iPhone, on the other hand, would be incomprehensible to either of us–assuming we could get it apart.  It is more or less disposable–hardly intended to last beyond the terms of an AT&T wireless contract.  It isn’t only that an iPhone does not retain its value (when broken beyond repair, it is HAZMAT worth less than nothing), it is also that it is an object that only has meaning within a fraction of our life.  The commerce-driven product cycle and the push towards ‘new’ and ‘different’ that drives it encourages planned obsolescence and shoddy production standards.*

When the objects with which we surround ourselves are cheap and have no lasting power or solidity, it cheapens us and our culture. Look at images of offices from the early part of the last century–how many of the objects in that space probably still exist and have value today?**  How many of the skills necessary in that office were based around basic principles of business that would still have value and application today?  Now look around–how many objects in your office will have value in 80 years time?  How many of your skills are based on fundamentals that could possibly have value in 80 years?  When our worldly knowledge is based around an ever-changing cycle of products, it means that our skills and perspective have a sort of expiration date–one that is often far shorter than an average professional career.

When the objects with which we surround ourselves are cheap and have no lasting power or solidity, it cheapens us and our culture.

Our media is also becoming cheaper, disposable, and less permanent.  With the move toward digital and away from print, we’ve begun a process towards leaving permanence and quality behind in favor of brevity and freshness–abandoning meaning for medium and context.  It’s a process that means our cultural legacy is less likely to survive than the works of many cultures that have come before us.  I don’t just mean that digital files are in more danger of corruption than their physical counterparts (which is arguable)–even given the limited lifespans of proprietary file formats, changes in physical storage hardware, etc.  The move into the digital world has changed the way that we consume and think about media in general.  The media we produce is becoming more prolific, shorter, and of a lower quality.

With the slow death of print journalism has come the birth of ‘infotainment’ as the dominant paradigm of News while independent journalism moves away from attempted objectivity and towards editorial, first-person, or folksy style pieces.  More dramatic is the move away from long-form writing in both social media and expository prose.  The chat room has been replaced by the instant messaging client, which is being absorbed into the social network.  Personal home pages and online journals were largely eclipsed by blogs, which have begun to die out in favor of micro-blogging and social networking.  In both cases, the media we create is being moved away from more permanent forms that we control and into “walled gardens” where our control is very limited.  Increasingly, the media we generate is assigned an expiry date out of our control.

As a culture, our attention spans are growing shorter.  Nicholas Carr has explored this issue in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

With the movement away from long-form writing also comes a sort of media-cycle that means what we produce has less value.  It is possible to produce informational graphics and short-form writing of great value, but it isn’t how the vast majority of content creators have been taught.  The average tweet is as cheap as a $2 pair of sunglasses.  The inability to filter through the media noise makes it hard to find the valuable bits in all the static.  We have so much media, so much writing, so many images—they have become as worthless as a piece of currency in a hyper-inflation economy.  Our reliance on software to consume this vast quantity of media grows stronger.  Our media diet becomes poor while we lose control over what we choose to consume.

I have a growing sense that the way we understand our world at any given moment will be meaningless in the next.   Our lives have lost gravitas.  We have lost historical continuity and the sense of our own future.  We seem to have lost a sort of fundamental grasp of meaning, and that is where the hypothetical gentlemen from 1890 would not envy us our iPhones.  While we may have a gadget that syncs its time automatically and displays it in sleek, bright LCD, we have started to lose a sense of what that time means in the context of our lives as human beings and as inheritors of a rich and ongoing culture.

I am hoping to try and find ways of working against these negative trends.  Groups like the Long Now Foundation and books like Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew Crawford, give me hope.

For more, see the following blog posts:
The Grand Disappointment: Apple and Obama After Hype and Hope
LIFT09: The Future in Permanent Beta
Why The iPad is Crap Futurism

* Caveat: I realize that the product-cycle also drives innovation, which has essential functions in society, such as creating more energy efficient products and responding to problems like oil price inflation.

** Many of these objects are valuable because they are made of natural resources not easily come by, such as finely-grained furniture hardwoods.  Of course I do not advocate a return to unsustainable logging and mining practices that produced the objects of that time.  However, the plastics and cheap metals in today’s industry are arguably no less harmful in terms of how they deplete natural resources and damage the environment.

People rarely use gossip as a way to delve into the psychological depths of others, but rather consume it like a form of greasy fast food.

This article is part of a virtual reading group for Daniel Solove’s book The Future of Reputation (schedule here).

There is a longstanding argument made against privacy advocates that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. The second half of Chapter 3 of Daniel Solove’s book The Future of Reputation nicely counters the “nothing to hide” argument by pointing out how personal information can only really be understood in context. Out of context, a person’s secrets are likely to foster snap judgments based on misunderstandings and irrational reactions to social stigmas. (Not surprisingly, Solove is the author of a paper on the subject.) In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

From the chapter:

In countless societies, whether primitive or modern, gossip generally functions in similar ways. Gossip is essential to establishing reputations. According to the psychologist Nicholas Emler: “Gossip does not merely disseminate reputational information but is the very process whereby reputations are decided. Reputations do not exist except in the conversations that people have about one another.” Gossip is a way to expose people’s infringements of norms [...]

People used to tuck their diaries away in drawers or lock them up, but now, they are sharing them with the public on the Internet.

An important element of privacy is the ability to conceal issues too complex to be successfully integrated into reputation. Reputation generally contains only information relevant to the context of the relationship: can this person be trusted, are they a good worker, are they honest, will they cheat in a relationship, etc. Too much information can be distracting and can lead to unfair judgments. For instance, a philanderer may still be an excellent employee, which is why hiring laws forbid prying into private and family affairs when considering a candidate for a job.

People are multi-faceted and never ‘bad’ or ‘good’ altogether, but the nature of judging a person’s reputation lends itself to snap decisions. We are fascinated by difference–divergence from norms. The quirky, strange, or downright kinky are always the subject of gossip not because they are relevant to reputation-building in its purely utilitarian form but because they are entertaining. Unfortunately, being outside the norm can almost always have a damaging effect on reputation. More information about an employee or friend is not necessarily a good thing–eventually you will find where that person differs from you or from societal norms. Even though someone is a good friend or employee, knowing what makes them different could certainly strain those relationships. What’s more, we are rarely willing to spend the time during a gossip session to work to truly understand the context for the information we learn about someone else. This problem is only amplified online, where information is absorbed in seconds and often completely without context. Solove says, “when intimate information is removed from its original context and revealed to strangers, we are vulnerable to being misjudged
on the basis of our most embarrassing, and therefore most memorable, tastes and preferences.”

The Internet is transforming the nature and effects of gossip. It is making gossip more permanent and widespread, but less discriminating in the appropriateness of audience. [...] I believe that it is imperative that we do something to address the developments inherent in the marriage of traditional gossip to the technology of the Internet. But what? How do we protect privacy in a world where information is flowing ever more freely, where anybody can publish information to a worldwide audience?

Any ideas?

Many teens seemed to indicate that cyberbullying was a common part of every day life.

The last several days have seen some interesting news on teen privacy and social issues online.   Foremost is the news that YouTube has opened a new Safety Center to help educate children and their parents.  Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood (or under-understood).  The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults.  To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers:

43% of teens surveyed in 2006 were the victim of ‘cyberbullying.’ (2006 NCPC Survey)

75% have visited a web site bashing another teen. (2005-06 iSafe survey)

85% of parents don’t know what cyberbullying is. (2005-06 iSafe survey)

81% of teens believe their peers engage in cyberbullying because “they think it’s funny.” (2006 NCPC Survey)

20% of teens have posted nude photos or video of themselves on the Internet. (2008 Sex and Tech Survey)

40% of teens surveyed had their password(s) stolen and changed by a peer. (2005-06 iSafe survey)

Some more details below the jump…

From Ars Technica:

A survey of 1,280 teenagers (users age 13-19) and young adults (age 20-26) conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com has revealed that one out of five (20 percent) teens overall have posted nude photos or video of themselves on the Internet—that number goes up to a third when young adults are included.

From a National Crime Prevention Council survey[doc] on cyberbullying:

About four in ten teens (43%) report that they have experienced some form of cyberbullying in the last year.  It is more common among females (51%) than males (37%).   It appears that cyberbullying is most common among high school students.  While 46 percent of high school teens have experienced cyberbullying, only 35 percent of middle school teens have had that experience. [...]

Teens were also asked why people cyberbully, and they provided a wide-range of responses.  Many teens seemed to indicate that cyberbullying was a common part of every day life.  Most commonly, teens reported that people who cyberbully think it is funny (81%).  Teens also thought that people who cyberbully don’t think it is a big deal (59%), are encouraged by their friends (47%), or think that everyone does it (31%).  [My emphasis -M]

More information available on the ‘Making a Difference for Kids’ website.

Wired’s ‘Threat Level’ blog picked up a story yesterday from the Miami Herald on a lawsuit in Florida that is one of the latest in a small handful of court cases dealing with the emerging legal issue of ‘cyberbullying.’ The bullying, in this case, came from former high school student Katherine Evans (pictured at right) when, in November 2007, she created a group on Facebook that used her teacher’s full name paired with “is the worst teacher I’ve ever met!” She invited her friends to “express your feelings of hatred.” Only three of her classmates responded, criticizing Evans:

“Mrs. Phelps is one of the most amazing teachers I’ve ever had and there’s plenty of people who agree with me,” one student wrote. “Whatever your reasons for hating her are, they’re probably very immature.”

Evans deleted the group shortly after. Her high school responded by suspending her for three days and removing her from the AP class taught by the teacher in question. The lawsuit claims that the high school violated Evans’s right to free speech and is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Before the internet, student speech cases usually concerned student newspapers and dress codes.

As with the Megan Meier case, it looks as if the issue of cyberbullying is dodging serious consideration by being addressed poorly and out of context. In my opinion, schools do not have any business punishing students for what they do online at home any more than they can punish them for giving a younger brother a wedgie in the backyard or stealing candy from the corner store. The issue of free speech complicates it, but it seems fairly clear that it’s acceptable to voice your mind about someone else in a public forum… right?

There are consequences for speech used to mislead and defame–to deliberately damage someone’s reputation–by presenting false facts. There are not, however, any laws against voicing your opinion of someone else as Evans was doing. It may sound harsh at first, but I think there is a gap that new law should seek to fill–a law addressing defamatory opinions when wielded against a citizen in an international context when that citizen is not otherwise newsworthy. To clarify: it would be protected speech for Evans to speak her mind in her community against her teacher, but legally actionable for her to take her poor opinion into the international, mass-media sphere of the internet. Or would such a law be more than a little fascist? There is, I think, some privacy laws already in place that govern mass media’s use of personal information.

One thing I believe strongly is that teenagers should be treated as adults in issues of internet defamation because the internet, like a gun or knife, can be a very dangerous weapon when wielded against someone’s reputation. It wasn’t appropriate for the school to take action in this case for a variety of reasons, but suspension was not really an adequate redress anyway. In my opinion, a lawsuit awarding the teacher damages in proportion to the harm done to her reputation (which was small before this lawsuit made it a national issue) would have been more effective.

Ironically, Googling “Katherine Evans” produces news stories about this situation. Evans, now nineteen-years-old, has insured that her indiscretion on Facebook will be a few seconds’ search away from her future employers, friends, etc. She has become her own cyberbully.

people’s online social networks may be only an “imaginary” community

Class after class of students come through the small college where I work. They pour out their hearts into the digital blackness and spend their time with socially networked acquaintances; their conversation comes in fast spurts over AIM. Their relationships are increasingly weak and standoffish at the same time that what they reveal of themselves to the public is incredibly intimate. Secrets that they would hate for their parents to see are only a Google search away. Do they realize that those hasty admissions—ideals that will change, relationships that will sour, drunken indiscretions—will all be preserved like fossils in the digital strata for their entire lives and beyond? In a virtual world designed around speed, convenience, and ego, they will loose a sense of what constitutes a strong relationship and their ability to empathize will suffer. At a time when it is easier than ever to find a reason to hate someone, they will be more likely than ever to be willing to hate. How can we—as mentors, as parents, as developers, as netizens—put a stop to this progression?

The Internet is a Cruel Historian

My wife used to write online about our son, who was a baby at the time. Her journal was ‘onymous,’ meaning she made it a point of pride to use her real name. The stories she wrote were the sorts of thing that any parent would share about a baby—harmless amusing anecdotes, pictures, and such. As time went on, we had to think of something that parents before us had never considered. What will our son do when these funny baby stories are still available within seconds of a search when he is in high school? Or when he applies for his first job out of college? Or when he’s middle-aged and looking to distinguish himself in a profession? How will these stories effect his ability to find love or to raise his own children?  Fortunately, she put a lot of thought into where to draw the line on what was shared and what was held back, but many—probably most—parents won’t have that discretion.

Time as a Context and the Usefulness of Forgetting

Our reputation is an essential component to our freedom, for without the good opinion of our community, our freedom can become empty.

Many of us may have had parents who jokingly pulled out the family photo album to show our significant others embarrassing baby photos. It’s a poignant moment, when someone you love can laugh at pictures of you as a tender, vulnerable youth. It never occurs to us that mom may have showed these pictures around her office to near strangers when the pictures were newly made—they weren’t taken for the sole purpose of gathering dust in a photo album, after all. Sharing fun moments is part of the reward of being a parent, but the way we share is changing faster than our consideration for how, why, and with whom we choose to share our personal lives. The internet is ageless and its memory does not dim like a human memory does. The ability for endless lossless copies creates a further complexity.

Yesterday a friend of mine IM’ed me a link to a lifehacker.com article on Adobe’s Zoetrope, which is shaping up to be like the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. In other words, it’s a second and more robust attempt at archiving the internet and tracking changes across time in a way that will allow a user to browse a website through time with ease. Part of me recoiled in horror at this, and I was relieved that Adobe has not been archiving the internet, nor does it plan to move beyond a few high-profile websites. Still, with computer memory capacity, processing capability, and bandwidth getting cheaper and cheaper, it is only a matter of time before a company like Google—who already caches copies of nearly every webpage it crawls—to maintain a detailed, searchable, and browsable archive.

Part of growing up is the ability to move on—to change social contexts at different life stages. This is an ancient truth: “Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter’s son?” Starting fresh in a new place allows a person to re-invent themselves without the burden of memory, and this is especially important for young people. Solove said:

We may find it increasingly difficult to have a fresh start, second chance, or a clean slate. We might find it harder to engage in self-exploration if every false step and foolish act is chronicled forever in a permanent record. [...] As people chronicle the minutia of their daily lives from childhood onward in blog entries, online conversations, photographs, and videos, they are forever altering their futures—and those of their friends, relatives, and others.

I have had several discussions in my office about the need for colleges and high schools to begin counseling students on how they craft online identities and how to use pseudonyms for identity exploration that may come back to haunt them in the future. After all, what is appropriate to share online is still a decision that many adults cannot make intelligently—expecting experimenting teenagers to be responsible for creating immortal reputations online is impossible. Solove says, “For most of us, the foolish things we do as teenagers disappear into oblivion and are revived only when we reminisce with old friends. But in today’s world, foolish deeds are preserved for eternity on the Internet.”

In my case, I was lucky enough to have spent my formative period online before Google and the Internet Archive—the internet did slowly forget my teenage years (thankfully). However, with new tools like Zoetrope and whatever ultimate librarian succeeds it, there is little hope that the information revealed about us online will ever fade. Worse, my colleagues here at Warren Wilson seem totally disinterested, and I imagine the situation at public schools is much more bleak. It seems the ‘Google generation’ will have to fend for itself because too few people today are aware of these issues at all.

The Fallacy of ‘Nothing to Hide’

Daniel Solove asks a sticky question: “Is there a justification for allowing people to conceal information
about themselves that will lower their reputations?” He goes on to discuss what reputation means and how using Google to build an opinion about someone in a matter of minutes is not reputation—at least not in the sense that society has relied on reputation for centuries. One key to reputation is that it is built largely on strong relationships between people who have known each other for a long time—that is the only guarantee that reputation is accurate. The problem with using Google to form an image of a person in moments is that there are only random fragments to draw from. It is foolish to think that we can know something of a person’s reputation from a Google search when a sense of ‘integrity’ would be impossible to convey believably from such a hodge-podge of scanned data. Solove discusses how we are living today in a ‘global village’ in the sense that we have access to all sorts of personal information about each other that used to only be commonly available to members of a small community. He says:

The global village not only revives features of the small village but also amplifies and alters them in profound ways. The global village is worldwide and it encompasses millions of people. The people of the global village have weak rather than strong ties; they are often known not for their whole selves but for various information fragments others hastily consume.

The Social Industry

I have lost the immortal part of my self and what remains is bestial.

My wife and I frequently reminisce about how we met in a CGI chatroom. At the time, the internet was still in its youth, and we formed a relationship from chatting for hours both alone and in a group. That sort of relationship-building happens more and more rarely online. Chatting has changed into Instant Messaging and the way it is commonly used is nothing like the long, soul-searching chats I remember. Social networks are designed to foster a large quantity of shallow relationships between acquaintances. Social networking activities are generally very surface-oriented, topical, and fast. As a result, it is increasingly unlikely that real, deep, and lasting relationships will be formed online. Solove points out, “when little is invested in a personal relationship, even information that is incomplete and of dubious veracity might be enough to precipitate ridicule, shunning, and reproach.”

Relationships mean less on the internet, and damaging someone else’s reputation becomes less serious at the same time that it becomes much easier. At a time when families are shrinking and the support systems that our ancestors enjoyed from community are missing, the internet is doing more harm than good in our social lives by turning socialization into shallow, monetized entertainment. It’s high time we had a social network designed to build real-life, deep connections between people. If we can learn about what it means to live and love meaningfully in a virtual world, perhaps we can better appreciate reputation (and each other) in a virtual context.

It’s a nice way to spend five minutes.

cyberspace norm police can be extremely dangerous—with an unprecedented new power and an underdeveloped system of norms to constrain their own behavior

This article is part of a virtual reading group for Daniel Solove’s book The Future of Reputation (schedule here).

‘Hard words break no bones’ is a phrase that has been in use since the Renaissance, but things may be changing. The internet is a realm composed mostly of language, and the process of identity creation that youth go through is thrown into sharp relief when it’s stripped down to words. When teens invest themselves online, they are putting a great deal of value into terms: names, labels, and the power of specialized language to build a sense of community. In a world of interaction and reputation built entirely on words, the old adage is being revised. Online, ’sticks and stones will never hurt you, but words may break your heart,’ and on the internet, reputation and the damage done to carefully constructed online identities can have devastating ‘in real life’ (IRL) consequences for youth who are already unstable and in need of help.

International Dog Crap

Sometime in 2005, a tiny dog—one of the toy breeds very popular in Asia—crapped on a subway train in Korea. It’s owner, a young college student, refused to clean up the mess. A fellow passenger took a picture with a digital camera and ridiculed her online, unleashing a tidal wave of online activity that made her the center of a moral witch-hunt and an international discussion about privacy. The consequences for the Korean woman far outweighed her poopy faux pas. The stress ended in her dropping out of college and becoming suicidal. The introduction of Daniel Solove’s book, titled “When Poop Goes Primetime,” uses the case of ‘the dog shit girl’ to introduce us to the issues surrounding privacy and freedom of information on the internet. Even if you’re not going to read any of the rest of the book, this first chapter is worth your time.

More below the jump…

More recently, the tragic case of Megan Meier has revealed online emotional abuse as an issue of vital importance. Solove discusses how enforcing societal norms—a common and arguably necessary social force IRL—takes on new and disturbing dimensions online. While not precisely the same as the varied problems of the Meier case, both deal with the issue of ‘public shaming.’ Most of us probably remember occasions in our youth where we were singled out for ridicule because of some difference or infraction. The snickering, finger pointing, and name-calling is usually bearable IRL, and there are safety nets in place for those kids who can’t cope on their own (although the Columbine massacre shows that even our IRL safety nets miss the opportunity to prevent the very real damage possible from social ostracism). However, the power of the internet to draw massive crowds and unite communities has changed the dynamic of public shaming. Where once the class nerd may have had to deal with a handful of tormentors, now thousands or even tens of thousands can potentially participate in the shaming process.

The Internet Hate Machine

How do we allow people to control their personal information
without curtailing free speech or stifling freedom on the Internet?

There is a sizable online youth culture that makes a hobby of ridicule. Sometimes organized for arguably noble purposes—sometimes scorn is necessary, after all—this very loose association of people is mostly just in it for the lulz (for the uninitiated, that’s a nuanced plural of LOL with strong overtones of Schadenfreude). The tamer venues for those who find age-old humor in the misfortune of others include sites like break.com and collegehumor.com, but these sites are generally not much more problematic than the content you might find on youtube.com or the evening news. (Not that youtube.com hasn’t caused its share of problems.) Where the practice of public shaming comes into play in an arguably problematic way is deeper down the rabbit hole, on 4chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica[NSFW], and other sites frequented by what Fox News outrageously termed ‘hackers’ and ‘an internet hate machine.’ It is on these sites, in part, that self-identified members of culture-moniker ‘Anonymous‘ carried out various campaigns that fall under ‘Project Chanology.’ Some of these, such as the actions against Scientology, are carried out with a strong moral sense in mind (for better or worse), and Anonymous as a whole cannot be called ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ really. It is simply / complexly an internet culture. However, some of the venues and individual actions of public shaming read like virtual scenes from A Clockwork Orange.

4chan… I’m not going to try and describe 4chan’s /b/[NSFW]. It’s an imageboard, better known than but similar to 420chan.org[NSFW], 711chan.org[NSFW], and other (English) parts of the Japanese Futaba Channel. Here’s how Digg user Frywater described /b/:

Are you brave? If so, come hang with the most intelligent, most vile, most underground kidz on the net hands down. Chat with hotgirls, professors, artists, pedos, geeks, all at the same time. Have images burned into your head for the rest of your life. Stay long enough, and meet satan himself. youve been warned.

Right. So, contrary to the seeming chaos, things actually do get started on 4chan and its sister sites (see Project Chanology). On a smaller level, these sites have been used by individuals to propegate public-shaming memes such as the Korean ‘dog shit girl.’ The virtual mob leaders who start public shaming campaigns often adhere to an anti-philosophy that is most evident on the humor site Encyclopedia Dramatica[NSFW].

Encyclopedia Dramatica is a Wiki whose mission is simple: “spread the lulz” (read: time for a little of the ultra-violent, my droogies). As part of the fun, authors single out individuals online for strong ribbing (have a look at the Drama Queens or Furries[NSFW], for example). Many of its contributors are intelligent and college-educated, and it’s multi-author approach to dark humor leaves the articles drenched in a pervasive nihilism. For example, frequently the site challenges societal norms with the ironic use of hate language—used in such a way that it ridicules both the haters and the hated—and the articles are often deeply self-depreciating. The overall sense I came away with is that, were the site to have a singular author, that author would have no philosophy, moral, or belief whatever. Even the stated devotion to humor rings hollow, as the site’s long chronicle of lulz seems laced with bitterness and anger. In the end, none of it is real at all—not the humor, not the hate, and certainly not the ever-changing and conflicting sense of normalcy—and that irony may be the site’s only core ideal.

The online youth culture who frequent these venues think that the ‘internet hate machine’ phrase is ridiculous. The hate and ridicule isn’t quite fake, but it’s hardly real either. It’s just trolling. It’s just for the lulz. The problem is, the effect of their complex, nihlistic, mock-hate for the sake of chuckles is the same as real hate.  It’s little different from the high school bully who defends his brutality by saying “I was just pickin’ with him.” Bullying has become more sophisticated as youth have learned to communicate with so much more than their mouths and fists, but public shaming doled out for lulz is no less damaging for its sophistication and use of in-jokes, specialized language, and philosophy.

The blogosphere can be a much more powerful norm-enforcing tool, allowing bloggers to act as a cyberposse, tracking down norm violators and branding them with digital marks of shame.

The Virtual Street Worker

So what can be done to prevent virtual bone breaking and the very real emotional damage that public shaming can cause IRL? What is appropriate for humorous mockery and parody? One thing seems clear to me: creating laws around the technology of the internet (such as what’s happening in the wake of the Megan Meier case) is not the answer, nor is a top-down authoritarian approach possible or useful. Danah Boyd had a very interesting suggestion:

The most important thing that we need are digital street workers. When I was in college, college students volunteered as street workers to help teens who were on the street find resources and help. They directed them to psychologists, doctors, and social workers. We need a program like this for the digital streets. We need college-aged young adults to troll the digital world looking out for teens who are in trouble and helping them seek help. We need online counselors who can work with minors to address their behavioral issues without forcing the minor to contend with parents or bureaucracy. We need online social workers that can connect with kids and help them understand their options.

What is certain is that adults–parents especially–need to understand these issues and work with children to help combat the issue of online bullying. This can start with something as simple as parents actually paying attention to what their kids are up to online. Teens need their privacy, but that doesn’t mean that parents shouldn’t know whether their children have invested large emotional sums in online relationships and an online persona.

Perhaps Daniel Solove will also have some insights in Chapter 4: ‘Shaming and the Digital Scarlet Letter.’ I’ll return to this topic then.

In then meantime, what are your thoughts?

Description [from Amazon]:

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.

Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free.

Reading schedule / links to responses below the jump…

Remember this is when I hope to post my responses only. To participate, you can read at your own pace and post your thoughts whenever you get around to it!

1. Make your blog a platform for long-form articles that remain relevant.
2. Become a source for specialty or niche content and aggregate existing content in new ways.
3. Focus on individual conversations and leave the community-building to Facebook and Linkedin.
4. Fulfill a personal need in your life beyond ego-stroking.
5. Remain adaptable and refine your blog based on its strengths in the face of change.

More below the jump…

Are blogs dead? Seth Godin makes a concession that Paul Boutin omitted in favor of being provocative (or just inflamatory): it is the personal blog that is passing away. For the purposes of keeping up with friends and family, social networking services are easier to use and purpose-made to enrich our social lives (and earn wads of cash for the keepers of the ‘walled gardens’). What Boutin misses is that many blogs are not about building a cult of personality.  Godin points out: “The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking.” There is precious little room on Facebook or Twitter for depth or permanence, which is precisely where a well-written blog has the upper hand.

Boutin’s article has been roundly criticized, so I won’t spend time rehashing what has been said so well.  Instead, I’d like to make a few predictions about where the successful blog is going in the wake of blog mania.

1. Use blogging for long-form writing on topics with a lifespan of weeks or longer.

Be it micro-blogging or the darling of social news sites, where the most hyped forms of new media fail is in their depth and permanence.

The last time I tuned into a tweet feed was during the presidential debates when blogger Chris Cillizza was using the medium for live coverage.  It was interesting at times, but mostly disappointing–the text equivalent of someone who won’t shut up during a movie–the comments rarely provided valuable insight and at worst were a distraction.  What’s more, micro-blogging is about what’s happening right now.  Trying to look back at entries from a couple months ago is not very easy on Twitter because the simplicity of the medium precludes the sort of organizational tools like tagging, categorization, and permalinks that make blogging robust.

I find that the same lack of permanence and depth is often true of the most popular forms of social news such as Digg and Reddit.  Popular items tend to be very short and often shallow because the pace of social news media is so much faster than it was in the hayday of Slashdot and Kur5hin.  Once a link has slipped off the first few pages, it can be difficult to find again.

Micro-blogging (and the equivalent pieces of social networks, such as Facebook’s status updates) serve their specific purposes very well.  They are great for keeping up with friends or even managing a network of professionals.  Social media is also here to stay–despite my quibbles, Digg remains a part of my daily surfing experience.  However, niether of these things are going to eclipse the blog as a platform for publishing thought-out and long-lasting articles.

2. Specialize on your expertise and act as a content aggregator.

If blogs are indeed dead, it is the death of the literal single-author “web log” (in the sense of travelogue).  Social news media (Digg, Fark, etc) and multi-author blogs (boingboing, ars technica, Daily Kos, etc) have locked-up the market for the combination of news and neato links.  Single-author blogs simply can’t keep up in the generalized interest areas served by the giants in the Technorati top 100.

Rather than using your blog to report on everything you find interesting, focus specifically on a niche where you have specialized knowledge.  You’ll be much more likely to succeed if you write content that isn’t likely to be found on many other sites.  This is also the best way to get traffic from the large sites.

Another area that has come in vogue recently is aggregating blog posts or ‘meta blogging.’  These articles appear constantly on Digg–they are most often lists of lists.  An example could be “5 Resources for Web Designers” that then links to five different blog entries that are themselves lists of links to tutorials, free fonts, etc.  Show off your knowledge of a niche and collection of worthwhile links by re-packaging them as a toolkit or list of resources.

3. Focus on conversation more than community.

Blogs were early, successful examples of ways to build a community online.  Blogrolls were like the friends list of today.  Social networks have co-opted the successful community-building components of blogs.  For those interested primarily in social interaction or community building, sites liked Linkedin are far better than blogs.  The other barrier facing building a community around a blog is the lack of regular readers.  With the improvement of webzine-style blogs and social news sites that aggregate everything that’s fit to read on the web, there is less chance that readers will subscribe to and regularly read a blog.  Instead, certain entries may gain significant attention and a large one-time audience while others remain obscure.

Rather than trying to tailor the whole site around a community of regular readers, instead focus on creating meaningful conversations with a post or group of posts.  The back-and-forth between different bloggers and their readers is not going away anytime soon, and the blog format allows both the fast pace of micro-blogging (via comments) and the more thought-out trackback responses from peer bloggers.

4. Have a personal reason for keeping a blog beyond ego.

If the only reason you blog is for the perceived audience, then you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.  Readers will come and go with your varying success in promoting your site, writing well, and writing regularly.  Your blog should serve some purpose for you that is important enough to justify your time.  For me, I enjoy having a single place to collect and refine my thoughts about the issues surrounding my career, and I think that having a professional blog will be an asset in promoting myself to potential clients and employers in the future.  Any benefit I can get from attracting readers into a conversation around an article is just icing on the cake.

5. Keep perspective in the face of hype and don’t be afraid of change.

The choice to bury your blog should never be based on the hype of the moment.  Blogs are certainly not ‘dead’ anymore than email mailing lists or forums (both of them practically antique mediums) are dead.  As new technology and new ways of packaging and sharing information arise, the unique strengths of each of these old media will only become more refined.  Following the hype and trying to use only the newest media is both exciting and frustrating.  I, for one, would rather learn from the early adopters’ failures than be the one failing.

At the same time, don’t be afraid to say goodbye to your blog if you find that another media will better serve your needs and interest.  Are you blogging mostly to keep up with friends and family?  Have a look at Facebook instead.  Do you want up-to-the-minute community engagement?  Look at Twitter.  Interested mostly in organizing face-to-face events?  Linkedin.  Have an occasional link you want to share?  Digg.  But if you want to write original, thoughtful, and longer articles that have some amount of permanence, blogs are still the best way to go.

Today I am a web marketer and designer for a small, liberal arts college. erelevant.net was started initially in the Spring of 2006 as a way to explore my profession. I have since realized that being “on-topic” was little better than succumbing to the internet echo-chamber called “higher ed marketing blogs.” There were some good times, certainly. Some good people and some insightful exchanges. Mostly, though, exploring my profession by looking at others in the industry meant receiving someone else’s cold innovation leftovers or, worse, being spoon-fed fads by vendors—these were often sugary and filling but provided little lasting nutrition. (WARNING: Metaphor Change Ahead) There is no “on the bleeding edge.” Electronic marketing bliss will not come from a $19.99, syndicated, podcasted, webinar. Either you work hard and, for a meteoric moment, become the bleeding edge, or you’ve been left behind.

I took a summer hiatus that turned into a year-long absence, and I did allot of thinking.

The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

avra kehdabra