Blogging: a great pastime for the elderly
February 04, 2010
I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You'd walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it's just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak.
Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It's even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar. In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It's only geezers - those over 30 - who are doing more blogging than they used to.
Here's how Pew puts the bad news:
While blogging among adults as a whole has remained steady, the prevalence of blogging within specific age groups has changed dramatically in recent years. Specifically, a sharp decline in blogging by young adults has been tempered by a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults.
They even have a chart, just to rub salt in the wound:
When I blog these days, I feel like I should be sitting in a rocking chair, wearing a highly absorptive undergarment, and writing posts debunking some overhyped new bunion treatment (iPads?).
Yesterday I was out taking a walk and I happened to pass a group of tweens congregating on a street corner. I heard one of them say, "Hey, that guy's a blogger," and then they all started throwing their empty energy-drink cans at me. I had to take refuge in a Starbucks. I spent a half hour crying into my double-tall.
I hear that in middle schools "blogger" has become the most common term of abuse, playing roughly the same role that "wuss" used to play:
"You're such a blogger, Derek."
"You're the blogger, Sean."
"Am not."
"Are too!"
Blogger jokes are turning into the new big thing on college campuses:
Q: How many bloggers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Who cares?
Very funny.
Eric Schmidt's second thoughts
January 30, 2010
I admit to having a bit of a personal interest in this, but I've been fascinated to see how the thinking of Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, has evolved over the past few years on the question of the Net's effect on reading and cognition. Here are three quotes from Schmidt, the most recent of which came yesterday:
July 30, 2008: "I just got this in my in-box. Anybody read it? The Atlantic: ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ I mean, we’ve got a problem if this is true, right? In the article, the author ... points out that deep reading is equal to deep thinking, and since we’re not reading deep anymore, we’re obviously not deep thinking. And what I was realizing in reading this – and I encourage you all to read it – is that this is exactly what people said when color television arrived in my home in Virginia 40 years ago. This is also what people said 25 years ago when the MTV phenomenon occurred, about short attention spans and so forth. And I observe that we’re smarter than ever. So the important point here is that [despite] all of these sort of histrionics about the role of information and other changes, society is enormously powerful, enormously capable of adapting to the threats."
March 6, 2009: “I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry that we’re losing that.”
January 29, 2010: “The one thing that I do worry about is the question of 'deep reading.' As the world looks to these instantaneous devices ... you spend less time reading all forms of literature, books, magazines and so forth. That probably has an effect on cognition, probably has an effect on reading."
I'm glad Schmidt has continued to ponder this issue, and I salute him for having the courage to air his concerns publicly.
Tweet fantasy
January 28, 2010
How cool would it have been if Twitter had been invented a couple hundred years ago so our forebears could have used it?
transcendo: RT @emerson new idea: "the making a fact the subject of thought raises it" http://bit.ly/cAhzDL (expand)<----interesting!
J. D. Salinger and me
I just heard the sad news that J. D. Salinger has died. He was 91.
I went to school at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is just a few miles north of Cornish, New Hampshire, where Salinger lived. During the summer between my junior and senior year, I had a job at the circulation desk at the Dartmouth library. I was working one morning when my boss tapped me on the shoulder and motioned with his head over to the side of the desk. I just caught a glimpse of a tall, slender, slightly stooped man going through the doorway into the stacks. "That's J. D. Salinger," my boss whispered.
Holy crap, I thought. I just saw J. D. Salinger.
About ten minutes later Salinger suddenly reappeared at the desk, holding a dollar bill. I went over to him, and he said he needed change for the Xerox machine. I took his dollar and gave him four quarters.
That's my claim to fame: I gave J. D. Salinger change for a buck.
From writing to texting
The Britannica Blog is running, in conjunction with The Futurist magazine, a forum on Learning & Literacy in the Digital Age, which includes a piece by me on the resilience of the written word. (The brief piece actually originally appeared in a recent issue of The Futurist).
First paragraph:
The written word seems so horribly low tech. It hasn’t changed much for a few millennia, at least since the ancient Greeks invented symbols for vowels. In our twitterific age of hyperspeed progress, there’s something almost offensive in such durability, such pigheaded resilience. You want to grab the alphabet by the neck, give it a shake, and say, Get off the stage, dammit. Your time is up.
Read the rest of it.
Hello iPad, Goodbye PC
January 27, 2010
The New Republic has published my commentary on Apple's iPad announcement. I reprint it here (with the important second sentence, which was cut from the New Republic version):
The PC era ended this morning at ten o’clock Pacific time, when Steve Jobs mounted a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad, Apple’s version of a tablet computer. What made the moment epochal was not so much the gadget itself - an oversized iPod Touch tricked out with an e-reader application and a few other new features - but the clouds of hype that attended its arrival.
Tablet computers have been kicking around for a decade, but consumers have always shunned them. They’ve been viewed as nerdy-looking smudge-magnets, limited by their cumbersome shape and their lack of a keyboard. Tablets were a solution to a problem no one had.
The rapturous anticipation of Apple’s tablet - the buildup to Jobs’s announcement blurred the line between media feeding-frenzy and orgiastic pagan ritual - shows that our attitude to the tablet form has shifted. Tablets suddenly look attractive. Why? Because the nature of personal computing has changed.
Until recently, we mainly used our computers to run software programs (Word, Quicken) installed on our hard drives. Now, we use them mainly to connect to the vast databases of the Internet - to “the cloud,” as the geeks say. And as the Internet has absorbed the traditional products of media - songs, TV shows, movies, games, the printed word - we’ve begun to look to our computers to act as multifunctional media players. They have to do all the work that was once done by specialized technologies - TVs, stereos, telephones, newspapers, books - as well as run a myriad of software apps. The computer business and the media business are now the same business.
The transformation in the nature of computing has turned the old-style PC into a dinosaur. A bulky screen attached to a bulky keyboard no longer fits with the kinds of things we want to do with our computers. The shortcomings of the PC have created, the iPad hype suggests, a yearning for a new kind of device - portable, flexible, always connected - that takes computing into the cloud era.
Suddenly, in other words, the tablet is a solution to a problem everyone has. Or at least it’s one possible solution. The computing market is now filled with all sorts of networked devices, each seeking to fill a lucrative niche. There are dozens of netbooks, the diminutive cousins to traditional laptops, from manufacturers like Acer and Asus. There are e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. There are smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Nexus One. There are gaming consoles like Nintendo's Wii and the Microsoft’s Xbox. In some ways, personal computing has returned to the ferment of its earliest days, when the market was fragmented among lots of contending companies, operating systems, and technical standards.
With the iPad, Apple is hoping to bridge all the niches. It wants to deliver the killer device for the cloud era, a machine that will define computing’s new age in the way that the Windows PC defined the old age. The iPad is, as Jobs said today, “something in the middle,” a multipurpose gadget aimed at the sweet spot between the tiny smartphone and the traditional laptop. If it succeeds, we’ll all be using iPads to play iTunes, read iBooks, watch iShows, and engage in iChats. It will be an iWorld.
But will it succeed? The iPad is by no means a sure bet. It still, after all, is a tablet - fairly big and fairly heavy. Unlike an iPod or an iPhone, you can’t stick an iPad in your pocket or pocketbook. It also looks to be a cumbersome device. The iPad would be ideal for a three-handed person - two hands to hold it and another to manipulate its touchscreen - but most of humans, alas, have only a pair of hands. And with a price that starts at $500 and rises to more than $800, the iPad is considerably more expensive than the Kindles and netbooks it will compete with.
But whether it finds mainstream success or not, the iPad is the clearest sign yet that we’ve entered a new era of computing, in which media and software have merged in the Internet cloud. It’s hardly a surprise that Apple - more than Microsoft, IBM, or even Google - is defining the terms of this new era. Thanks to Steve Jobs, a bohemian geek with the instincts of an impresario, Apple has always been as much about show biz as about data processing. It sees its products as performances and its customers as both audience members and would-be artists.
Apple endured its darkest days during the early 1990s, when the PC had lost its original magic and turned into a drab, utilitarian tool. Buyers flocked to Dell’s cheap, beige boxes. Computing back then was all about the programs. Now, computing is all about the programming - the words and sounds and pictures and conversations that pour out of the Internet’s cloud and onto our screens. Computing, in other words, has moved back closer to the ideal that Steve Jobs had when he founded Apple. Today, Jobs’s ambitions are grander than ever. His overriding goal is to establish his company as the major conduit, and toll collector, between the media cloud and the networked computer.
Jobs doesn’t just want to produce glamorous gizmos. He wants to be the impresario of all media.
The Shallows: table of contents
January 25, 2010
My next book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues that the tools we use to think with - our "intellectual technologies" - not only shape our habits of thought but exert an actual physical influence on the neurons and synapses in our brains. I look at the Internet, an extraordinarily powerful intellectual technology, in this context, examining what the scientific and historical evidence tells about the effects it is having on our thoughts, memories, and even emotions - and how different the effects are from those exerted by earlier intellectual technologies such as the printed book.
Here's the table of contents for The Shallows:
Prologue: "The Watchdog and the Thief"
Chapter 1: "HAL and Me"
Chapter 2: "The Vital Paths"
Chapter 3: "Tools of the Mind"
Chapter 4: "The Deepening Page"
Chapter 5: "A Medium of the Most General Nature"
Chapter 6: "The Very Image of a Book"
Chapter 7: "The Juggler's Brain"
Chapter 8: "The Church of Google"
Chapter 9: "Search, Memory"
Chapter 10: "A Thing Like Me"
Epilogue: "Human Elements"
The Shallows will be published in June in North America, by W. W. Norton, and in September in the U.K., by Atlantic Books. Translated editions are also forthcoming.
The Times's delayed, leaky paywall
January 22, 2010
Jay Rosen points to another interesting, if not altogether surprising, tidbit about how the New York Times plans to construct its promised paywall. Essentially, it appears that if you come to a Times article via a link, either on the Web or in an email, you will get to read the whole article, and the article won't count against your monthly limit of articles. This news comes from a Q&A in which Times CEO Janet Robinson and digital chief Martin Nisenholtz answered readers' questions about the subscription plan. Here's what they said:
Q: ... will I still be able to send the e-mail link to others who may or may not be NYTimes subscribers so that they can open the link and read the article?
A: ... yes, you can still send links to your friends.
Q: What about posting articles to Facebook and other social media? Would friends without a subscription then not be able to view an article that I think is relevant for them?
A: Yes, they could continue to view articles. If you are coming to NYTimes.com from another Web site and it brings you to our site to view an article, you will have access to that article and it will not count toward your allotment of free ones.
The Wall Street Journal has been doing something similar with Google News; if you come to the Journal site from a Google News link, you get to read the whole article, even if it's blocked for other nonsubscribers. The Times model would seem to expand this loophole enormously, basically giving news surfers ("freeloaders" in my market segmentation scheme) unlimited access to the Times's online content. Or, as Rosen puts it, "for those people who get their news from the web itself, using search, aggregators[,] social media and blogs to find the stuff they want, the stuff they find from the New York Times will always be available, free of charge."
The Times's paywall is not only a delayed paywall, falling after some number of articles have been read; it's a delayed, leaky paywall. This makes it all the clearer that the Times plan is a versioning strategy, through which, as I described yesterday, Times readers will segment themselves according to the value they ascribe to the Times and their willingness to pay. Freeloaders will continue to get more or less unfettered access to Times stories for free, while Times Loyalists, who value the Times as an information source and want to spend significant time browsing its site (or using other digital delivery mechanisms), will be asked to pay a modest subscription fee.
Inveterate news surfers will scratch their heads at this plan. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? In fact, a commenter on Rosen's post raises this point: "This is super weird ... It's an interesting (if nothing else) way to structure a paid system, but it won't take long before people realize they can just browse the @NYTimes Twitter stream, as opposed to NYTimes.com's home page." (In another comment, the normally astute Scott Rosenberg also professes dismay at the Times plan, saying it "makes zero sense.") But that view is a fallacy. It assumes that everyone wants to bop around on the web all day trolling different sources for stories. It also assumes everyone is a scheming hacker who, to avoid having to fork out a few bucks, will click links in the Times twitter feed or otherwise figure out some geeky way to get around the system. But not everyone's like that. In fact, most people aren't like that. Some people just want to go to a few trusted outlets for most of their news - sources rather than links define their news-gathering behavior - and some subset of that group will likely be willing to pay something for the convenience of having free run of a trusted site. (The iTunes store has revealed that a substantial set of people will happily pay money for digital music files that they could fairly easily scrounge up for free elsewhere on the web.)
The Times subscription plan may fail. It may be built on a misreading of the marketplace. But it's not super weird, and it's not cockeyed. It's a reasonable, thoughtful plan, and the company may discover that a delayed, leaky paywall is the kind of paywall that pays.
UPDATE: Reuters' Felix Salmon writes: "if this is true, then [the Times is] not actually charging for NYT content; they’re charging for NYT navigation. What you get charged for isn’t reading NYT stories, but rather navigating from one NYT page to another. Now, the navigation at nytimes.com is excellent, and I can see that some people might be willing to pay for it. But it’s a pretty weird thing to charge for." I think navigation is part of what you're paying for, but I think the more salient sources of value will be convenience (of which navigation is one element), access to various modes of digital delivery beyond the web site, and, most important, the Times's editorial skill and judgement as a producer and aggregator of the day's news and commentary. (To find all of the Times's content through external links might be possible, but it would be a royal pain in the neck.) What the Times is hoping, obviously, is that a large enough set of people will perceive that value as something worth paying for.
Everybody's appy nowadays
The soon-to-be-disappeared Sun Microsystems had a knack for prescient slogans. "The network is the computer" has come true. And then there was "write once, run anywhere," which heralded the age of universal software applications. Rather than tailoring their programs to run on a particular type of computer - an IBM mainframe, say, or a Windows PC - programmers would use a language like Sun's Java that was adaptable to any computer. It was a liberating idea: Software developers and users would no longer be locked into one operating system, and beholden to the owner of that system.
And it came to pass. The Web, a universal medium built on device-agnostic standards, sped the embrace of the "write once, run anywhere" ethic. The idea of tethering an app to an OS came to seem kind of absurd. All was good in the land of software.
And then Apple opened its iPhone app store, and in a Cupertino minute everything changed. Suddenly, the idea of tethered software seemed normal again. (Ironically, when Apple was struggling to survive in the 90s, the Web's run-anywhere ethic had served as an important lifeline for the company, reducing the importance of Microsoft's control of the PC software market.) Proprietary app stores are popping up everywhere, as device makers and social network operators seek to extend the usefulness of their gadgets and sites and at the same time strengthen their ability to lock in customers. Just last week, Amazon announced it would be opening an app store for its Kindle e-reader.
The rise of the app store comes as the nature of personal computing applications is changing. Some of the apps sold for the iPhone and other devices are old-fashioned, self-contained programs, drawing on data stored in the device itself. But most of them are what might be called "cloud translators." They serve as software gateways between the Internet and the device. They tap into stores of data that exist out in the Net's cloud, from maps to message streams, and they tailor that data for some practical use geared to the device's form and interface.
So is Sun's "write once, read anywhere" ethic as doomed as Sun itself? Is the proprietary app store model the new normal? Farhad Manjoo, writing in Fast Company, doesn't believe so. Although "companies increasingly see it as the future model for all software distribution," he argues, "the app bandwagon" may soon hit "a dead end." The universality of the Web, he says, will once again win the day: "The App Store's true rival isn't a competing app marketplace. Rather, it's the open, developer-friendly Web. When Apple rejected Google Latitude, the search company's nearby-friend-mapping program, developers created a nearly identical version that works perfectly on the iPhone's Web browser."
"You'd be a fool," concludes Manjoo, "to ignore the long-term trend in software - away from incompatible platforms and restrictive programming regimes, and toward write-once, run-anywhere code that works on a variety of devices, without interference from middlemen."
He may well be right. The advantages of run-anywhere software, and of the browser as a universal platform, remain strong. And yet you'd also be a fool to ignore a different trend: people's retreat from the open Web and their embrace of private networks, whether run by device makers like Apple or site operators like Facebook. The battle between universal software and proprietary apps is also, in other words, a battle between two models for the future of personal computing. While both models will almost certainly survive, only one will be the dominant model. The question that will be answered in the years ahead is this: Is write-once-run-anywhere the destiny of software, or was it an anomaly?
The scanner's hand
It's always slightly disturbing, when scrolling through an old book in Google Books, to suddenly come across a page obscured by the fingers of the technician who manned the Google scanner. You find yourself, for a moment, both repelled and beguiled, as if you were witnessing a secret, ghostly act of violation.
The writer Caleb Crain, in doing research for a review of Adrian Johns' new book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, came upon a particularly eerie image:
And what work, you might ask, is the scanner's hand so boldly groping? It's an essay by Immanuel Kant, the title of which is "Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books."
Comments Crain:
Could there be a fitter representation of copyright’s contemporary plight than the fingers of a Google technician obscuring Kant’s defence of writer’s rights? An author’s consent, Kant cautions in a footnote, “can by no means be presumed because he has already given it exclusively to another”, yet Google is struggling to effect exactly this sort of transfer of consent today, as it attempts to win approval for a legal settlement in the United States that will allow it to republish works whose copyright owners have not come forward. I couldn’t have read Kant’s essay so easily without the Google technician’s labour – in fact, without Google, I might not have got around to reading it at all – but her fingers were nonetheless in the way. The internet’s attitude toward Kant’s words is ambiguous, combining respect, appropriation, liberation and accidental vandalism.
Jeff Jarvis's cockeyed economics
January 21, 2010
Jeff Jarvis, the popular media blogger, has long ridiculed newspapers for trying to find innovative ways to charge for the stories they publish online. True to form, he had a kneejerk reaction to the New York Times's plan to ask frequent readers of its digital content to buy a subscription. Jarvis argues that in seeking to charge its "best customers," the Times is guilty of "cockeyed economics":
So why charge your best customers? Why single them out? Why risk driving them away? The logic eludes me. So do the economics.
But it's Jarvis, not the Times, whose economics, and logic, are askew. Jarvis might want to spend some time reading about the fundamentals of pricing, particularly Hal Varian's classic work on the "versioning" of digital goods. Varian is a distinguished economist who teaches at Berkeley and is also now Google's chief economist. Here's a little of what he says about "versioning information goods," which is extremely pertinent to the Times's strategy as well as the news and media business in general:
One prominent feature of information goods is that they have large fixed costs of production, and small variable costs of reproduction. Cost-based pricing makes little sense in this context; value-based pricing is much more appropriate. Different consumers may have radically different values for a particular information good, so techniques for differential pricing become very important ... [One] particular aspect of differential pricing [is] known as quality discrimination or versioning ... The point of versioning is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay. Consumers with high willingness to pay choose one version, while consumers with lower willingnesses to pay choose a different version. The producer chooses the versions so as to induce the consumers to “self select” into appropriate categories ...
[Consider the case] in which the seller knows something about the distribution of willingness to pay [WTP] in the population, but cannot identify the willingness to pay of a given consumer. In this case the seller cannot base its price on an exogenous observable characteristic such as membership in some group, but can base its price on an endogenous characteristic such as the quality of the choice the consumer purchases. The appropriate strategy for the seller in this situation is to choose two qualities and associated prices and offer them to the consumers. Each of the different consumer types will [select] one of the two quality/price pairs. The seller wants to choose the qualities and prices of the packages offered so as to maximize profit.
The intention is to get the consumers to self-select into the high- and low-WTP groups by setting price and quality appropriately. That is, the seller wants to choose price/quality packages so that the consumers with high WTP choose the high-price/high-quality package, and the consumers with low WTP choose the low-price/low-quality package.
The Times's plan is, obviously, a variation on this versioning strategy, where the quality variable that is being controlled is the number of stories available to be read in a month. By establishing a volume-based trip wire for a paywall, the Times introduces a mechanism that requires its readers to self-select based on the value they perceive in the Times's offering and hence their willingness to pay.
Such versioning strategies have proven very successful for many digital goods. Software companies routinely use versioning to segment their customers and optimize their profits, and many cloud services - such as Google Apps - are also following the strategy. The common thread through the strategies is that the "best customers" pay more, while the "worst customers" pay little or nothing. When news stories or other media products are digitized, they also become candidates for versioning strategies. If news organizations don't experiment with versioning plans, they'd be foolish.
The only thing cockeyed about the economics of the Times's plan is Jarvis's view of it.
Just don't call it a paywall
January 20, 2010
In a mildly anticlimactic announcement, the New York Times let it be known today that in, oh, a year or so it will get around to figuring out exactly how it will charge some people for its stories.
If discretion is the better part of valor, the Gray Lady is Rambo.
This much we know: The Times will refer to its as-yet-undefined online subscription service not as a "paywall" (which it is) but as a "metered model" (which it isn't). "Paywall," apparently, carries the wrong sort of connotations; it sounds like the type of thing Ronald Reagan would have demanded to be torn down. "Metered model" is less likely to raise hackles; it's the way we get electricity and water and parking spaces.
But the essence of a metering system is that what you pay goes up along with your consumption. That's not what the Times has in mind. Its system will be a delayed-paywall scheme similar to that already in place at the Financial Times. You'll be able to read some number of stories, or look at some number of pages, during the course of a month, and once you hit the limit a big old paywall will come clattering down, and you'll be asked to fork up a few bucks for a monthly all-you-can-eat subscription. There are just two prices, in other words: zero and nonzero.
It's not the most aggressive move imaginable, but it's a smart move, particularly when viewed in the context of the Times's previously disclosed last-man-standing strategy. (Saying it's a smart move doesn't necessarily mean it will work; it means that the risk of not trying it at all is higher than the risk of trying it and finding that it doesn't work.) The structure of the written news business is in flux right now because the Net has erased the traditional local and regional boundaries that once defined newspaper markets. Because, as I described in an earlier post, the highly dispersed and fragmented newspaper supply model was built on the assumption of local market boundaries, the industry is now weighed down with much too much supply. That imbalance is in the process of being remedied as newspapers fold, consolidate, and lay off journalists. The supply side of the industry is shrinking, and every time a newspaper disappears the surviving papers get a little bit stronger. Once the shakeout runs its course, the "last men standing" will face less competition, for readers and advertisers, which in business is always a good thing.
The reduction of supply won't solve all the problems faced by written news organizations. They will still have to grapple with changing modes of news consumption (and production), the resistance of large numbers of news consumers to paying for the news, and the fact that the web provides a less-than-ideal platform for the kinds of traditional advertising that have been the bread and butter of newspapers. One way to deal with these challenges is to start some rational experiments in market segmentation, and that's what the Times's paywall plan - oops, I mean "metered model" - is fundamentally all about.
The Times recognizes that, even in our digital age, the news-consuming public is not an undifferentiated mass. Some people are blind to differences in the quality of reporting and writing; other people pay attention to those differences and place a high value on quality. Some people are happy to skip around the net sampling all sorts of stories by all manner of producer; other people have better things to do and would prefer to stick with a few trusted sources. Some people still prefer printed newspapers; other people prefer to get their news from web sites or Kindles or iPhone apps; other people want all of the above. Some people find the idea of paying for news anathema; other people don't.
The Times's plan involves dividing the market into three categories and tailoring a different offering and business model to each. Here are the segments, as I see them:
Traditionalists: Largely though not exclusively an older and fairly well-heeled crowd, they continue to value the unique attributes of a printed newspaper while also wanting the option of digital delivery. They'll pay a pricey subscription fee for a print edition, and they'll (likely) get the full panoply of digital options thrown in for free. Because they're an attractive audience to many advertisers, they'll also generate significant advertising revenues, across print and digital media.
Loyalists: They don't care about print editions. They want their news digitally, but they value quality and hence tend to be fairly loyal readers of what they see as quality news outlets. The Times hopes to convince a good chunk of these folks to subscribe to the all-you-can-eat digital version of the paper. This will be a tough sell, but it's not an impossible sell. And if more digital news starts to be delivered through software applications and computing devices better geared toward the display of text and the navigation of an online newspaper (like the soon-to-be-nonmythical Apple tablet), the idea of paying for access to a quality online news outlet will likely become more palatable to this segment. Here, again, the subscription fees will be supplemented by ad revenues.
Freeloaders: The biggest and (from a business standpoint) least attractive segment of the market, they're happy to hop around the web gathering news content from many different outlets, and there's no way in hell they're going to pay for it. The Times will give these folks free but limited access to its site (though probably not other kinds of digital delivery), and it will carefully establish the limits on free access to ensure that most of the members of this segment will go on getting what they're used to getting from the Times (and if they don't, they'll come back for a few stories next month). Freeloaders will continue to provide the Times with some marginal ad revenues, and over time some small but not insignificant number of them might relocate themselves into the Loyalist category. Maintaining some level of free access is crucial for a news outlet like the Times because, as the company's top execs put it in a staff memo, it needs to "remain a vibrant part of the search-driven Web." It needs to stay in the link stream.
The newspaper business has been shrinking for decades, at least in terms of readership. It will never be what it was, and it will certainly never be what it was before the Web. But for the last men standing, things may not turn out as bad as the doomsayers think. The consolidation of supply in the industry, the reduction of competition, the emergence of new market segments, the willingness to experiment with targeted subscription programs and other types of pricing schemes, and the coming of new devices and software for news delivery: these may not be causes for optimism in a beleaguered industry, but they are causes for hope.
This is the third installment of "Dog Bites Newspaper," Rough Type's non-award-winning series on the future of written news. The earlier installments were The Writing Is on the Paywall and Google in the Middle.
Information wants to be free my ass
January 18, 2010
Never before in history have people paid as much for information as they do today.
I'm guessing that by the time you reached the end of that sentence, you found yourself ROFLAO. I mean, WTF, this the Era of Abundance, isn't it? The Age of Free. Digital manna rains from the heavens.
Sorry, sucker. The joke's on you.
Do the math. Sit down right now, and add up what you pay every month for:
-Internet service
-Cable TV service
-Cellular telephone service (voice, data, messaging)
-Landline telephone service
-Satellite radio
-Netflix
-Wi-Fi hotspots
-TiVO
-Other information services
So what's the total? $100? $200? $300? $400? Gizmodo reports that monthly information subscriptions and fees can easily run to $500 or more nowadays. A lot of people today probably spend more on information than they spend on food.
The reason we fork out all that dough is (I'm going to whisper the rest of this sentence) because we place a high monetary value on the content we receive as a result of those subscriptions and fees.
Now somebody remind me how we all came to think that information wants to be free.
It's a strange world we live in. We begrudge the folks who actually create the stuff we enjoy reading, listening to, and watching a few pennies for their labor, and yet at the very same time we casually throw hundreds of hard-earned bucks at the saps who run the stupid networks through which the stuff is delivered. We screw the struggling artist, and pay the suit.
Somebody's got a good thing going.
UPDATE: Alan Jacobs, over at Text Patterns, adds an interesting gloss to this post:
One of Nick's commenters suggests that his point is misleading because we're not paying all that much per bit of data. That's probably true, but it may not make the point the commenter wants it to make. Consider an analogy to restaurant dining: Americans in the past twenty years have spent far, far more on eating out than any of their ancestors did, and that's a significant development even if you point out that huge portions of fat-laden food mean that they're not paying all that much per calorie. In fact, that analogy may work on more than one level: are we unhealthily addicted to information (of any kind, and regardless of quality) in the same way that we're addicted to fatty foods?
Back when we were more conscious of what particular bits of information we were spending our information dollars on was our information diet (so to speak) healthier than it is today when we buy tickets to all-you-can-eat buffets? I'm not sure I know the answer to that question, but it's a question worth pondering. It certainly underscores how silly it is to simply try to measure "cost per unit of information" as if that alone tells us anything. Unless, of course, you believe that every unit of information is identical in terms of quality and value.
Other people's privacy
January 17, 2010
In the wake of Google's revelation last week of a concerted, sophisticated cyber attack on many corporate networks, including its own Gmail service, Eric Schmidt's recent comments about privacy become even more troubling. As you'll recall, in a December 3 CNBC interview, Schmidt said, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."
For a public figure to say "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" is, at the most practical of levels, incredibly rash. You're essentially extending an open invitation to reporters to publish anything about your life that they can uncover. (Ask Gary Hart.) The statement also paints Schmidt as a hypocrite. In 2005, he threw a legendary hissy fit when CNET's Elinor Mills, in an article about privacy, published some details about his residence, his finances, and his politics that she had uncovered through Google searches. Google infamously cut off all contact with CNET for a couple of months. Schmidt didn't seem so casual about the value of privacy when his own was at stake.
The China-based cyber attack, which apparently came to Google's attention just a few days after the CNBC interview, makes Schmidt's remarks about privacy and deferring to "the authorities" seem not just foolhardy but reprehensible. When the news reached Schmidt that some Gmail accounts had been compromised, perhaps endangering Chinese dissidents, did he shrug his shoulders and say, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"? Did he say that Gmail customers need to understand that sometimes "the authorities" will have access to their messages? Judging by Google's reaction to the attack, it takes the privacy of its own networks extremely seriously - as well it should. The next time Schmidt is asked about privacy, he should remember that.
Of course, Schmidt isn't the first Silicon Valley CEO to make cavalier comments about privacy. It began back in 1999 when Schmidt's onetime boss, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, proclaimed, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." Just this month, the idea was repeated by the web's most amusing philosopher-king, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In an on-stage interview, Zuckerberg defended his company's recent decision to roll back privacy protections on its site by arguing that the desire for privacy was evaporating as a "social norm." Facebook, said Zuckerberg, was merely responding to that putative shift.
Reading through these wealthy, powerful people's glib statements on privacy, one begins to suspect that what they're really talking about is other people's privacy, not their own. If you exist within a personal Green Zone of private jets, fenced off hideaways, and firewalls maintained by the country's best law firms and PR agencies, it's hardly a surprise that you'd eventually come to see privacy more as a privilege than a right. And if your company happens to make its money by mining personal data, well, that's all the more reason to convince yourself that other people's privacy may not be so important.
There's a deeper danger here. The continuing denigration of privacy may begin to warp our understanding of what "privacy" really means. As Bruce Schneier has written, privacy is not just a screen we hide behind when we do something naughty or embarrassing; privacy is "intrinsic to the concept of liberty":
For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that - either now or in the uncertain future - patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.
Privacy is not only essential to life and liberty; it's essential to the pursuit of happiness, in the broadest and deepest sense of that phrase. It's essential, as Schneier implies, to the development of individuality, of unique personality. We human beings are not just social creatures; we're also private creatures. What we don't share is as important as what we do share. The way that we choose to define the boundary between our public self and our private self will vary greatly from person to person, which is exactly why it's so important to be ever vigilant in defending everyone's ability and power to set that boundary as he or she sees fit. Today, online services and databases play increasingly important roles in our public and our private lives - and in the way we choose to distinguish between them. Many of those services and databases are under corporate control, operated for profit by companies like Google and Facebook. If those companies can't be trusted to respect and defend the privacy rights of their users, they should be spurned.
Privacy is the skin of the self. Strip it away, and in no time desiccation sets in.
Google and the ethics of the cloud
January 13, 2010
The New Republic has published my comment on Google's about-face on China. I reprint it here:
Google is being widely hailed for its announcement yesterday that it will stop censoring its search results in China, even if it means having to abandon that vast market. After years of compromising its own ideals on the free flow of information, the company is at last, it seems, putting its principles ahead of its business interests.
But Google’s motivations are not as pure as they may appear. While there's almost certainly an ethical component to the company’s decision - Google and its founders have agonized in a very public way over their complicity in Chinese censorship – yesterday’s decision seems to have been spurred more by hard business calculations than soft moral ones. If Google had not, as it revealed in its announcement, "detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China," there's no reason to believe it would have altered its policy of censoring search results to fit the wishes of the Chinese authorities. It was the attack, not a sudden burst of righteousness, that spurred Google’s action.
Google's overriding business goal is to encourage us to devote more of our time and entrust more of our personal information to the Internet, particularly to the online computing cloud that is displacing the PC hard drive as the center of personal computing. The more that we use the Net, the more Google learns about us, the more frequently it shows us its ads, and the more money it makes. In order to continue to expand the time people spend online, Google and other Internet companies have to make the Net feel like a safe, well-protected space. If our trust in the Web is undermined in any way, we’ll retreat from the network and seek out different ways to communicate, compute, and otherwise store and process data. The consequences for Google's business would be devastating.
Just as the early operators of passenger trains and airlines had, above all else, to convince the public that their services were safe, so Google has to convince the public that the Net is safe. Over the last few years, the company has assumed the role of the Web’s policeman. It encourages people to install anti-virus software on their PCs and take other measures to protect themselves from online crime. It identifies and isolates sites that spread malware. It plays a lead role in coordinating government and industry efforts to enhance network security and monitor and fight cyber attacks.
In this context, the “highly sophisticated” assault that Google says originated from China—it stopped short of blaming the Chinese government, though it said that the effort appeared to be aimed at discovering information about dissidents—threatens the very heart of the company’s business. Google admitted that certain of its customers’ Gmail accounts were compromised, a breach that, if expanded or repeated, would very quickly make all of us think twice before sharing personal information over the Web.
However important the Chinese market may be to Google, in either the short or the long term, it is less important than maintaining the integrity of the Net as a popular medium for information exchange. Like many other Western companies, Google has shown that it is willing to compromise its ideals in order to reach Chinese consumers. What it’s not willing to compromise is the security of the cloud, on which its entire business rests.
It is what you know
January 12, 2010
"It's not what you know," writes Google's Marissa Mayer, "it's what you can find out." That's as succinct a statement of Google's intellectual ethic as I've come across. Forget "I think, therefore I am." It's now "I search, therefore I am." It's better to have access to knowledge than to have knowledge. "The Internet empowers," writes Mayer, with a clumsiness of expression that bespeaks formulaic thought, "better decision-making and a more efficient use of time."
The late Richard Poirier subtitled his dazzling critical exploration of Robert Frost's poetry "the work of knowing." At his best, wrote Poirier, Frost sought "to promote in writing and in reading an inquisitiveness about what cannot quite be signified. He leads us toward a kind of knowing that belongs to dream and reverie on the far side of the labor of mind or of body." For Google "what cannot quite be signified" does not exist. In place of inquisitiveness we have acquisitiveness: information as commodity, thought as transaction.
"The Internet," writes Mayer, "can facilitate an incredible persistence and availability of information, but given the Internet's adolescence, all of the information simply isn't there yet. I find that in some ways my mind has evolved to this new way of thinking, relying on the information's existence and availability, so much so that it's almost impossible to conclude that the information isn't findable because it just isn't online." When Mayer says her "mind has evolved" to the point that it can only recognize and process information that has been digitized and uploaded, she is confessing to undergoing an intellectual dehumanization. She is confessing to being computerized.
Poirier:
[Frost] insists on our acknowledging in each and every poem, however slight, that poetry is a "made" thing. So, too, is truth. Thus, the quality which allows the poetry to seem familiar and recognizable as such, that makes it "beautiful," is derivative of a larger conviction he shares with the William James of Pragmatism. "Truth," James insisted, "is not a stagnant property ... Truth is made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experience."
It's not what you can find out, Frost and James and Poirier told us; it's what you know. Truth is self-created through labor, through the hard, inefficient, unscripted work of the mind, through the indirection of dream and reverie. What matters is what cannot be rendered as code. Google can give you everything but meaning.
Mr. Tracy's library
January 11, 2010
Edge's annual question for 2010 is "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" Some 170 folks submitted answers, including me. (I found it a bit of a challenge, since I wanted to avoid pre-plagiarizing my upcoming book, which happens to be on this subject.) Here's my submission:
As the school year began last September, Cushing Academy, an elite Massachusetts prep school that’s been around since Civil War days, announced that it was emptying its library of books. In place of the thousands of volumes that had once crowded the building’s shelves, the school was installing, it said, “state-of-the-art computers with high-definition screens for research and reading” as well as “monitors that provide students with real-time interactive data and news feeds from around the world.” Cushing’s bookless library would become, boasted headmaster James Tracy, “a model for the 21st-century school.”
The story gained little traction in the press—it came and went as quickly as a tweet—but to me it felt like a cultural milestone. A library without books would have seemed unthinkable just twenty years ago. Today, the news almost seems overdue. I’ve made scores of visits to libraries over the last couple of years. Every time, I’ve seen more people peering into computer screens than thumbing through pages. The primary role played by libraries today seems to have already shifted from providing access to printed works to providing access to the Internet. There’s every reason to believe that trend will only accelerate.
“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology,” Mr. Tracy told a reporter from the Boston Globe. His charges would seem to agree. A 16-year-old student at the school took the disappearance of the library books in stride. “When you hear the word ‘library,’ you think of books,” she said. “But very few students actually read them.”
What makes it easy for an educational institution like Cushing to jettison its books is the assumption that the words in books are the same whether they’re printed on paper or formed of pixels or E Ink on a screen. A word is a word is a word. "If I look outside my window and I see my student reading Chaucer under a tree,” said Mr. Tracy, giving voice to this common view, “it is utterly immaterial to me whether they're doing so by way of a Kindle or by way of a paperback." The medium, in other words, doesn’t matter.
But Mr. Tracy is wrong. The medium does matter. It matters greatly. The experience of reading words on a networked computer, whether it’s a PC, an iPhone, or a Kindle, is very different from the experience of reading those same words in a book. As a technology, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distractions that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite. It’s designed to scatter our attention. It doesn’t shield us from environmental distractions; it adds to them. The words on a computer screen exist in a welter of contending stimuli.
The human brain, science tells us, adapts readily to its environment. The adaptation occurs at a deep biological level, in the way our nerve cells, or neurons, connect. The technologies we think with, including the media we use to gather, store, and share information, are critical elements of our intellectual environment and they play important roles in shaping our modes of thought. That fact has not only been proven in the laboratory; it’s evident from even a cursory glance at the course of intellectual history. It may be immaterial to Mr. Tracy whether a student reads from a book or a screen, but it is not immaterial to that student’s mind.
My own reading and thinking habits have shifted dramatically since I first logged onto the Web fifteen or so years ago. I now do the bulk of my reading and researching online. And my brain has changed as a result. Even as I’ve become more adept at navigating the rapids of the Net, I have experienced a steady decay in my ability to sustain my attention. As I explained in an Atlantic Monthly essay in 2008, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” Knowing that the depth of our thought is tied directly to the intensity of our attentiveness, it’s hard not to conclude that as we adapt to the intellectual environment of the Net our thinking becomes shallower.
There are as many human brains as there are human beings. I expect, therefore, that reactions to the Net’s influence, and hence to this year’s Edge question, will span many points of view. Some people will find in the busy interactivity of the networked screen an intellectual environment ideally suited to their mental proclivities. Others will see a catastrophic erosion in the ability of human beings to engage in calmer, more meditative modes of thought. A great many will likely be somewhere between the extremes, thankful for the Net’s riches but worried about its long-term effects on the depth of individual intellect and collective culture.
My own experience leads me to believe that what we stand to lose will be at least as great as what we stand to gain. I feel sorry for the kids at Cushing Academy.
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