05.05.08
On Social Networking
Essay Week Spring 2008 runs from May 5th to May 9th, 2008. Each day Iíll present a short essay on a topic of concern to me; I have the option of including a pre-essay post giving updates on ongoing life events if necessary. All the essays this week will be here; the LiveJournal is on hiatus while I concentrate here. Some of the elements in these essays may be controversial; I hope, however, that most will be well-regarded and at least read with an open mind. If you have anything to say about them, please feel free to leave a comment; I read them all, even if I may not respond due to time or other concerns. To kick off this year’s first festival of words, I’ll discuss the impact of the so-called Web 2.0 and the associated lifestyle.
Just about a year ago, former Vice President of the United States Al Gore released The Assault On Reason, a lengthy discussion of the metamorphosis of American politics from a two-way participatory discussion to a “read-only” medium being distributed to the populace for recourseless consumption. Near the end of his book– most of which is a thinly-veiled j’accuse to the Bush Administration– Mr. Gore presents what he feels is the optimal solution to the malaise of discourse: the internet. Mr. Gore raises some interesting, and on the surface, valid points about the way American politics is increasingly ruled by statistics, strategic virtual gerrymandering, and the proper application of subtle or overt demagoguery. But, in its current state, I have to respectfully disagree that the internet is the panacea to America’s sickly cyclical political biosphere.
The advent of a specific class of websites– blogs, mostly, and the various periphery sites which provide blog services to users in addition to their primary focus– has spurred on a great onslaught of so-called “user generated content”. A blog by definition is the web-published personal observations of an individual, regardless of his or her position or circumstances. In some senses, it works along the lines of a newspaper’s opinion column, only in the case of blogs, literally anyone can and does write them. Again, on the surface, this sounds like exactly what Mr. Gore would desire deeply in the pursuit of reclaiming the voice of the people in democracy. In reality, however, it is the same problem as the existing media, just for slightly wider definitions of “producer” and “consumer”.
Mr. Gore’s core argument is that American political discourse is no longer a two-way communication process; that large, money-driven media ‘giants’ are in control of public opinion and that these controlling authorities dictate what the public are to believe. Granted, that’s a simplistic view of the complex argument, but either by fiat or by structural advantage, the point is that American discourse is presented with little to no ability for “anyone” to challenge it outside of the media companies. The concept behind the internet– free-flowing multilateral communications among a party of hypothetical equals– is ideal, but at the same time it is unnaturally idealistic and somewhat impossible due to the precise reason it would be ideal.
I use the “micro-blogging” tool Twitter. Perhaps I don’t exactly use it in the way it was intended– I use it as an adjunct to my blog’s main page, to toss off thoughts that are on my mind but unworthy of sitting down to compose a full post about– but I do use it. I’m also connected, through the tool, to several people who use Twitter for exactly the purpose for which it was designed. Among most of the self-described “Twitterati” (a word I find a little silly), there is a bit of an elitist bent. Twitter allows a reader to follow others on his or her personal timeline, and subsequently allows others to follow your own updates. There is an opt-out arrangement, but it’s somewhat sketchy and easily gamed through the use of the API. The problem arises with people bombarding others with follows, while not being followed back in return.
The canonical example of this phenomenon is someone who is obviously using Twitter to promote a commercial service or venture. This person watches the public timeline (that is, all “tweets”/posts that are not opted-out) and follows, often without checking for context, anyone and everyone who meets specific criteria (in some cases, only the language of the post). These individuals accumulate possibly thousands of ‘follows’, whose data shows up on their own personal timeline. The only reason for this is for the “follow-back”, akin to a reciprocation of a link/”trackback” in a traditional blogging environment. This individual accumulates a certain low percentage of his or her following list– it should be noted that after a certain point, the following list becomes too unwieldy to reasonably manage– who will, when the individual chooses, receive the posts of that individual, which will usually be typical spam content. Many Twitter users, myself included, have become increasingly savvy as to how to determine if a follow comes from a supposedly-”genuine” user or from a ticking spam-bomb.
This, on the surface, looks to be an affirmation of Mr. Gore’s argument. The collective individuals, cooperating to produce a mutual and more-or-less accurate zeitgeist digest, recognize and self-select-out participants who appear to or actively and demonstrably work against the multilateral communications framework– that is, individuals who are pursuing dictatorial, “write-only” communications. The problem is that, in creating the mutually-cooperative collective, a new hierarchy, similar to the existing, ‘legacy’ media hierarchy, emerges. The collective has at its core the vulnerability of being at the mercy of the majority opinion.
The concept of the “tyranny of the majority” is often applied to situations where a large sample population, in this case, the internet at large, is posed a question asking their opinion of the truth of a certain unknown matter. Let’s take as an example the O.J. Simpson trial of 1994. As is demonstrably and verifiably known, Mr. Simpson was acquitted of criminal charges in 1995 but found liable/culpable in civil proceedings in 1997. Those facts are public record. What is interesting to note is that the doubt produced during the original trial– doubt being a key tactic of Mr. Simpson’s defense. During the period of time between the criminal trial’s conclusion in June of 1995 and his civil trial’s conclusion in February of 1997, it is somewhat unreasonable to assume that Mr. Simpson’s case was poorly covered in the national media. (Let us, for the sake of this argument, presume that the media presented no bias towards or against Mr. Simpson’s guilt or innocence, and instead presented only facts without undue analysis; while my essay is, at its core, a discussion of possible media bias, introducing said bias in this case is detrimental to understanding “the tyranny of the majority”.) In 1996, then, the average American could reasonably be expected to have an opinion on the matter. One individual’s opinion on an unknown matter is more or less meaningless, as it will not change the actual truth value of that unknown matter. Concordantly, fifty million individual opinions on the same matter, even if they agree, are similarly meaningless because they have the identical effect on the truth of that matter. A poll of opinion on an unknown factual matter can only determine what a certain subset of the population believes the truth to be. It cannot determine or dictate the truth. Just as two sets of twelve people, working from slightly differing definitions of “sufficient doubt”, could not come to a concordance on the matter of Mr. Simpson’s guilt– without actually affecting whether or not he actually was guilty– fifty million Elvis fans can, in fact, be wrong.
Now, I am by no means discounting the value of public opinion polls. They are extremely valuable tools in determining the general mood of a public body and the general disposition it has to certain courses of action. In politics, they are the cornerstone of democracy. The use of advertising and unilateral communications can affect public opinion to an unprecedented degree in modern times, as targeted demographics and advertising science has advanced to a near precognitive level. What should be kept in mind is that a publicly-held opinion is still at its core nothing more than an opinion. The rights of the individual to hold a differing opinion must always be kept at the core of a free democracy.
Where things become murky is in the arena of social-networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and the like. Let’s go back to the hypothetical Twitter-collective mentioned a few paragraphs ago. It’s safe to say that the Twitter-collective has the free flow of information and opinion as its most valued principle, given the general backlash against spam-bomb construction. However, let’s say that within the individuals who oppose spam, a new difference of opinion emerges– say on the margin of follows to followers needed to determine what constitutes an embryonic spam account. The majority in this instance has the ability to declare a specific percentage as the threshold. In the case of Twitter it’s still an individual decision to block or not block, but let’s say that a certain number of blocks (unknown to the collective at large) applied to an account will attract the administrators’ attention and cause the blocked account to be removed (I don’t know if this is the true case or not). If there are enough people who disagree on the matter of the threshold percentage– thinking it’s too high or too low, and therefore not blocking a suspected account– the account will never reach the alert threshold, and will be allowed to live long enough to deploy its payload. Those who disagree will blame the majority; those in the majority will blame the minority; and the net effect will be a schism that splits the collective off into two mutually-exclusive, smaller collectives, where the process begins again, perhaps with a different dissension of opinion. In this way, the free-flow of information is now restricted. This has already happened on many social-networking sites deployed specifically to be cliquish, exclusive, and self-validating enclaves for or against an opinion or stance. The rise of viciously militant partisanship within the two major American political parties during the past eight years is further evidence.
If a service experiences sufficient schisms, certain individuals who rose to prominence within that service eventually attract followers to themselves and themselves alone. They then become the de facto opinion dictators. To move to yet another example, the folding of the TechTV cable channel into the G4 network caused several of the former’s most prominent employees to splinter off into individual projects. Chief among these are Leo Laporte’s TWiT.tv network, Robert Heron’s DL.TV (itself run by Ziff-Davis, which originally founded TechTV), Patrick Norton, Alex Albrecht, and Kevin Rose’s work with Revision3, and Veronica Belmont’s (until recent) hosting of Mahalo Daily. The fact that each of these individuals wound up in discrete endeavors should speak to the splintering effect that the shuttering of TechTV created. What is interesting to note is that, with the notable exception of “This Week In Tech”, each endeavor was largely independent and disregarded the others. Their fans similarly pocketed themselves discretely, and while there was a certain level of overlap, occasionally there would be prominent dissent leveled against a different project. “This Week In Tech” was usually above this by virtue of having, as part of its design, the hosts of these other projects on the rotating panel, and wound up proving that there really wasn’t much disagreement among the producers– which was on occasion in sharp contrast to the actions of their fans, in this case the consumers. In the end, for all of the posturing that Mr. Laporte claims about podcasts (netcasts in his terminology) being the voice of the people, he himself is still part and parcel of the unilateral-discussion epidemic.
This can be easily avoided in an ideally-moderated environment, where the discussion facilitators look to provide an equal voice to all participants. Such an environment is impossible. Moreover, many people mistakenly equate “an equal voice” with “an equal reception” and are shocked when their unsubstantiated or indefensible arguments are shot down. I have been over this common misconception of the right of free speech many times before, and my intent is not to belabor that point. I do, however, agree with Mr. Gore when he says that the Internet has the potential to provide such an environment. Where Mr. Gore believes the technology or application for reviving his marketplace of ideas is still forthcoming, however, I believe that we already have the most appropriate application (thus far): the long-standing, long-used and robust Internet Relay Chat protocol.
IRC provides for many of the necessary elements for an equal-footing debate. Relative anonymity, the option of moderation, and instantaneous feedback. There is still the potential for domination of discussion by a handful of people, but with a wide range of individuals acting as moderators and facilitators, this can be mitigated or relegated to a marginal concern. Furthermore, with the ephemeral nature of the chatter, fallacious arguments or incorrect assertions, once discredited or disproven, do not persist for later citation and memetic propagation. (Certainly, the chat can be logged, but the most ideal situation would be for an impartial party to log the entire chat, so as to avoid context omissions.) While it does not offer an immediate solution to the problem of mass-agreement improperly dictating truth, using IRC as a discussion venue would be considered a good start; the idea of reaffirming that public opinion is still opinion could be introduced, debated, and validated or vetoed in this venue.
I dislike using a blog for anything other than a personal opinion. I don’t assert that my writing on this site, and especially these essays, are anything but my own opinion and conjectured solutions to problems as I see them. A blog post can still serve a valuable purpose as a launching point for discussion, but the most valuable discussion and most effective exchange of ideas will still remain live speech or text chatter. I am especially loath to conceive of myself as a content producer, even though by virtue of typing this I am precisely that. I would much rather consider myself a participant in a slower-moving, more vulnerable to persistent inaccuracy, version of the great discussion. For my part, my opinion is my own, shared at my leisure and discretion and freely challengeable. What I choose to share, I permit and expect to be challenged by anyone. What I choose to keep private, I expect to stay that way.
In his promotion of the 2007 album and multimedia project Year Zero, Nine Inch Nails musician Trent Reznor included the following phrases on a poster: “You have a voice. Speak the truth; you will be heard. You can act.” I believe that those three phrases are the best indicator that unilateral discussions are not going to be the primary vehicle for political discussion forever, and that Mr. Gore’s marketplace of ideas is quite a bit closer than he thinks.
