Franzen on the Unspeakable Irritation That is Facebook... & Twitter

On Facebook:"We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don't have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It's all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.”


-The New York Times, Op-Ed, 5.28.11 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all


And, on Twitter:
"Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose. It's hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … It's like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it's like writing a novel without the letter 'P'… It's the ultimate irresponsible medium. People I care about are readers … particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves."


-Tulane University address, 3.5.12


Keep heaping on that scorn, Jon. We love it!

We're Not "Content Providers," We're Exploited Writers

sculpture by Jeremy Mayer, photo by m. saleem

After reading David Carr’s excellent article “At Media Companies, A Nation of Serfs,” in yesterday’s New York Times, I have a few reflections of my own, based on a short stint of “providing content” (formerly known as “writing”) for Demand Media and Associated Content. First off, I must say that this is a great piece, with a wonderful central metaphor, drawn from Mark Twain: Today’s online journalists are much like those kids who gladly volunteered to do Tom Sawyer’s chores, solely because of some perceived prestige value.

These Tom Sawyers now come in the guise of Twitter, Facebook, Demand Media, Huffington Post, and any other central organizing platform that relies on writers’ providing them with content. And for some strange reason, we writers ask for little or no payment other than strokes to our egos: the “prestige” of writing for Huffington (now AOL—toss prestige to the wind). The “thrill” of having 10 of our friends see our work published online. The chance to imagine that we have legions of “followers,” just like Julius Caesar, or Jesus Christ. As Carr wryly notes, “Just imagine if Tom had also schooled them in the networking opportunities of the user-generated endeavor: ‘You’re not just painting a fence. You’re building an audience around your personal brand.’ ”

My writing and editing career began back in 1983, when as a recent college grad I was faced with the realities of trying to earn a living in this field. One reality was that there was always someone with lower confidence and self-esteem who would do the job for less. And less was just about nothing. I remember perusing ads for NYC publishers who were paying $11,500/year for full-time editors. And that was in one of the largest cities in the world. Recent grads actually vied heavily for these jobs because I guess it seemed like the patina of a Farrar, Straus & Giroux might rub off on them by mere association. But at that wage, it was certainly only a notch up from indentured slavery. I declined the 2 ½- hour daily commute to make slightly more as a PR hack closer to home.

I later began trying to sell writing and editing on my own, and found that the terrain was similarly glum. If I asked a reasonable wage for the work I was putting in (aka legal minimum wage), I was outbid by kids who thought getting paid next to nothing was better than not working at all. People today carp about jobs being outsourced to India, and rightly so, but in those pre-outsourcing days, we writers and editors did it to ourselves. If I asserted that I should get paid $50 for a piece that had taken me 10 hours to write, they found someone who could do the same piece (at a lesser skill level, but who cares?) for $35. And on it went, until the lowest bid got the clip.

Writers have never been terribly fond of the company of other writers, and thus the idea of a writers’ union doesn’t seem all that likely. However…imagine if we as a group refused to write for nothing or next to nothing. Imagine if we made more than hairdressers straight out of beauty college. Imagine if we demanded at least half of what engineers earn for our considerable education, experience, verbal agility, intelligence, research skills, creativity, and wit.

Writing is not fun and games. For many of us, it is not a “hobby” nor a “sideline”—despite what is implied by our lack of pay. While it may be enjoyable, just as parts of any occupation can be, it’s also real work. Just ask anyone who hates to write, who’s agonized over a sentence, who has no skill at it (which is much of the world). Professional writers don’t just “talk on paper.” They spend large chunks of their lives honing and practicing their craft, taking classes, reading the work of others, getting advanced degrees, and working really hard to write sentences that have clarity, depth, precision, and grace. Real writing is the product of those who have logged countless hours creating millions of sentences and thousands of pages.

photo by stack

And such writing takes time. A single well-crafted page can take hours. But somehow we’re supposed to forget about that, just slough it off, as if well, maybe we’re "overdoing it"…maybe we’re "slow"… Well, maybe. But like anything done at a high level, true craftsmanship takes time. What if online writers were not only paid, but paid by the hour? Media companies would then gain a sense of what is actually behind the content that they toss up so casually.

My brief experience writing for Demand Media came at a difficult moment in my career and life. I was broke and my self-esteem was on empty. I thought that maybe, just maybe I could type fast enough that I could somehow research, write, and edit a short article for 15 bucks, and that if I stacked enough of them together, might be able to earn a chunk toward my rent. But the aptly named Demand seemed to derive great hubris from the fact that they, yes, demanded!, ever so much from the writer, and gave back very little. (Despite the claims of their paid sycophants.) This included demanding that the writer adhere to extensive editorial guidelines, which seemed to multiply like Oregon mushrooms after a storm. And just when you’d absorbed the guidelines and produced something you knew they couldn’t reject in one fell swoop (which often happens, and means not getting paid after doing copious research)…one of their ridiculous copy editors would object that you had not followed the intent of the article and insist on a rewrite. Not that Demand ever provided the article thesis up front—this was subject to interpretation based on one scrap of info: the article title. And forget about that half-day’s work if your interpretation didn’t jive with some that of some 18-year-old kid whose editorial experience was likely limited to editing his own tweets.

All this for 15 bucks. Or not.

Associated Content is actually less profitable than Demand. You may (or may not) be offered an initial payment for a piece you wish to publish. This is generally less than $5. You also accrue royalties according to how frequently the article is viewed. But this stacks up to very, very little unless you’ve written a wildly popular article. Even the 2 quite popular articles I wrote (thousands of page views) netted me less than I spend of a bag of groceries. The whole system is vanity driven. And for all those wannabe writers, age 14, who have never seen their work “in print,” this might be an OK deal. But for professionals like me, we might as well toss 28 years of experience into the landfill.

Companies such as Demand and HuffPo take advantage of people who don’t think enough of themselves to demand reasonable, if not good, compensation. They realize that, on the whole, writers are self-effacing depressives who value their work at far less than it’s actually worth. And because this mindset has become so entrenched, it has become impossible to form a union and strike for fair wages.

Carr’s article cites the case of Mayhill Fowler, who won a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her HuffPo reportage of the 2008 Obama campaign. Presumably that nod would turn the head of someone like Arianna Huffington, herself an experienced writer. But almost 3 years later, Fowler has yet to receive one dime from Huffington for her work.

Writers need to start acknowledging that others are getting rich from our work. HuffPo was just sold to AOL for a staggering $315 million. If you write for them, what was your cut of that? Or were you just happy to “build your brand”? Gack. A platform is just a grid; we are the ones without whom zero ads would be sold. Writers are the backbone of all print media, and we deserve to be paid fairly for the long hours we log. While yes, it’s fun to see things in print and brag to our friends, it’s also rewarding to be able to pay our bills and put food on our tables. If enough of us refuse to work without pay, the industry will be forced to look at how exploitative its practices really are.

"Our computers will now determine your liveness quotient. Please hold..."

If you’ve ever suspected that the line between screens and reality has increasingly been blurred, check out the following blog entry, which ran on Huffington Post on 2/4. Written by a Yale graduate student, this piece was posted not as satire but as an earnest guide to differentiating “real life” from virtual contacts with others. I confess that while surfing half-asleep at midnight last night, this completely stopped me in my tracks, as I hadn’t realized that we’d progressed to the point at which college students needed assistance in determining what was “real” and what wasn’t.

The post is also an interesting foray into helping young people assess which sort of virtual contact it is “polite” to acknowledge first, giving it an oddly retro, Emily Post twist. In my late 40s, I am part of the generation that straddles the analog and digital worlds. My generation didn’t begin to interact with computers (or even VCRs) until after college, so have lived approximately half our lives not having to do the apparently arduous work of distinguishing “real” from “virtual.” While some of our peers were clearly more interesting or articulate or better looking, the assessment of “liveness” never entered the picture. Except after, maybe, 17 drinks. We would not, for example, need a Yale grad student to tell us, “The more ‘live’ a person is in relation to you, the more attention they deserve, and the more promptly you should reply to their message.” As Gordon puts it, “Liveness was just life.” It makes me laugh that this truth is apparently no longer self-evident. Laugh, and maybe shudder a bit—or a lot. What tutorials will Yale students be posting 20 years from now?

Gordon proceeds to pitch the virtues of traditional conversation. Because young people tend to communicate via text at this point, perhaps this is a necessary reminder that vocal chords can and do work and utterances issuing forth from them can actually create interesting sounds and verbiage. As Thomas Dolby observed back in the 1980s, "The moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it."

I don’t know. I find this whole thing capital-S Scary. See what you think.

A Conversation with Your Cellphone

By Claire Gordon

My digital media use can sometimes graze the edge of social acceptability. I might reply to a text during dinner or download music while a friend monologues. Yet there are some transgressions that make my insides seethe -- a friend interrupting our conversation to tweet that hilarious thing she just said, or sitting silently with someone involved in an endless, banal BBM chat, when they could be sending endless, banal messages to my in-flesh face.

Some of these things are obviously rude. If you're irritating the person you're with, you have probably tripped up in the Kabuki of modern etiquette. But as digital and analogue life become evermore integrated, the protocols get blurry.

Why is not replying to a text less rude than taking a moment out of a conversation? Why is leaving someone lingering on Skype more or less rude than answering a phone call?

A simple answer is that one interaction is more "real" than the other, and the breathing organism should always take precedence over the bits and bytes. But the "real" and "virtual" divide is tricky. Firstly, we may all live in the Matrix, and everything both real and virtual is just the doodling of a malevolent cyber-intelligence. Secondly, the "virtual," in these cases, are also real people in real places with real thoughts and feelings. In some instances, like with Skype and the phone call, our competing interactions are both "virtual" in the sense of no one being physically present.

"Liveness" is perhaps a better barometer. The more "live" a person is in relation to you, the more attention they deserve, and the more promptly you should reply to their message.

If the message is an e-mail, give yourself a day. If the message is "what's up?" and he or she is sitting in front of you, give yourself two seconds.

But "liveness" is also a slippery creature. As a concept, it only sprang into existence with the birth of mediating technologies. Before that, "liveness" was just life. It wasn't even the invention of sound recording that spurred the human mind to construct the categories of "live" and "mediated." The difference was obvious: one was life, and one was a 78 rpm shellac disc revolving on your gramophone.

It was the birth of broadcasting that fundamentally jumbled the distinction, with no way to know whether those EM waves radiating from your receiver originated at a plucked string, or a plucked string in a recording studio that was now a disc spinning on the station's turntable. It was in the desperation to make sense of this difference that "liveness" was finally born.

Coined by the BBC in 1934, "liveness" became a nifty discursive distinction when an ontological one didn't really exist. As Von Phillip Auslander writes in "Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture," "liveness" never really referred to co-presence in space and time. The word instead evolved with emerging technologies, so that today phrases like "live broadcast" and "recording live" are meaningful and not paradoxical jibberish.

"Liveness" is experienced more as a feeling or an affect than an objective reality. But with such a flimsy definition, who's to say Gchat is more or less "live" than the guy sitting next to me on the subway?

Skype, for example, is very "live" for my mother. Too "live," in fact. But Facebook? She could go for weeks without checking. This is not a "live" experience for her; it's about occasionally dropping by, getting overwhelmed, signing off, and sending me an e-mail a few days later criticizing one of my photos.

"Liveness" is a very subjective thing.

Mushon Zer-Aviv, the designer and media activist, has invented a far more concrete framework by which to judge our social existence: content vs. conversation.

To define content, he uses metrics devised by Danah Boyd: persistence, replicability, searchability and invisible audiences.

When you tweet something, that tweet lasts forever (persistence); it can be easily retweeted, tweaked and retweeted, or slapped on a t-shirt (replicability); it can be found with some speedy Googling, and if deleted, scooped up from the darkweb (searchability); and no matter who you think your followers are, that tweet may eventually end up on the interface of an employer, creepy dude, or your born/unborn children (invisible audiences). If your communication fulfills some of these criteria, it's probably content.

Conversation, on the other hand, is ephemeral, unreplicable, unsearchable, and your audience is known, often right in your field of vision.

Why is conversation better than content? There's a lot of schmaltz I could spread for an answer -- that conversation is more authentic and less performed, more intimate and less displayed, magical in its fleetingness, and more existentially affirming in the ability, on occasion, to actually make eye contact.

It is in the world of conversation that ideas are really exchanged, opinions shaped, and laughing out loud makes a sound. These kinds of conversations may take place in chat rooms or on comment threads, but if nothing else, the existence of a Caps Lock key will forever doom many exchanges to CONTENT!!!!!

As Zer-Aviv rightly points out that in this framework Chatroulette qualifies as conversation and a parade of genitalia probably shouldn't qualify as anything. But there is something in the essence of Chatroulette -- two strangers serendipitously matched for a small spell of time -- that has the glimmery feel of conversation, even if one of those strangers takes off his pants.

Facebook and Foursquare, like video games, may be more instantly gratifying in the way that they dole out hits of rewards. Content can also be creative and socially valuable. But conversation, "real" or "virtual," "live" or "mediated," may be able to offer something even better than the Mayorship of your local discount liquor store.

Books and More Books

After being on the road for 7 weeks, I’m now settled down in Ashland, Oregon, where I’m renting a fabulous house with huge vegetable gardens and plenty of fruit trees. It’s a bit like the Garden of Eden, without the fig leaf or that nasty little rib. Not to say that ribs don’t come in handy—I’m quite attached to all of mine.

My current fascinations are Facebook, a highly addictive site that my friend Rachel was nice enough to turn me on to, and bookselling, which is at a peak right now with the academic ingress. I love putting books in mailers and thinking of all the great classes people are taking. Education is such a miracle. Without it, we end up with phenomena such as…well, George W. Bush, for starters…

My biblophilia was piqued recently on the plane rides to and from NM (details about the United Airlines debacle when I’m in a more savage mood). There I polished off most of an amazing book, entitled Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. You can pick it up today on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Outwitting-History-Amazing-Adventures-Rescued/dp/1565125134/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220046149&sr=1-1) for 88 cents, which is the screamingest of deals, as this book is an awesome tale about a young guy’s attempt at literally saving a huge part of a culture. While I was in NM, I kept reading pages of it to Margot, and we both found ourselves tearing up at the passages about elderly Jews handing down their entire lives to the younger generation via these books. My friend Tori taught me most of the Yiddish I know (and it’s stuck!), but even if you’re more than ein bisl goyische, it’s still fascinating.

The other fun site I've happened upon in my quest to find book sales was Bookcrossing.com. This is a community (of 703,000 members!) who leave books in random places so that other people may find them. Each book is tagged with a tracking sticker, so that the leaver can find out in whose hands the book ends up. This reminds me a bit of balloon launches our grade school used to have, when we’d tie tags to each balloon requesting info about how far the balloon had traveled. Bookcrossing is an international effort, so it’s exciting to think that someone from Medford, Oregon, could pick up your book and take it on a plane with them to, say, Thailand, and you could get a hit back from Bangkok. So, my new meditation is…what books most need to be released into the world for the betterment of society? And of course, an answer that springs to mind is one of my very favorites, Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer. But where to leave it? I’m thinking the front porch of the Ashland Hostel, where so many Pacific Crest Trail hikers congregate. I’m sure it could find a happy home in a backpack, all covered in dirt, gorp, and bug spray, as it should be. I’ll keep you posted on where it ends up…