Recently in Internet Category

(Felix Salmon - The Bitcoin Bubble)

Such people, including Satoshi Nakamoto, are far from unique in their mistrust of all existing financial institutions. What sets Nakamoto apart is that he turned that mistrust into a philosophy, the most important driving force behind the bitcoin project. When he introduced bitcoin to the world in February 2009, Nakamoto boasted that his new currency was "completely decentralized, with no trusted parties". And he explained in some detail what he saw as the problem in need of a solution:

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.

There are all kinds of amusing ways in which you can poke fun at Bitcoin and the subculture that has grown up around it. But, taken seriously, this is yet another big bet by the privileged techno-libertarian class that those of us who believe in society and a commonwealth and democracy and all that rot are the dumb money in the room. 

You don't fix problems of trust by eliminating trust from the equation. You fix them socially, democratically, empathically. The answer to a failure of trust isn't further atomization (neatly disguised as techno-utopian transcendence). It's justice.

(Which, easier said than done, yeah. People mistrust our institutions because our institutions are profoundly broken. And there has been precious little justice or reckoning with the events of the past decade and more. But the answer sure as hell isn't to run away and hide in the Singularity. Social problems have social solutions. Broken institutions have to be mended, and absent justice has to be created. Put your shoulder to the wheel. Start doing what the online community used to do best: inventing new systems of trust and new ways to connect.)

And that's the thing: Flickr feels like a permanent home. While sharing is great, it turns out that as we progress in our digital lives, as we take more and more photos and share them more and more places, we eventually want to go back and see them again. (Which explains the popularity of services like TimeHop.) We want to revisit them. We want to relive them.

And I think that gets at why the web was so adamant about Yahoo saving Flickr. It wasn't just that we wanted yet another app update. It's that we didn't want to give up on what we already had. In short, we wanted to go home again.

(Wired | The Return of Flickr)

I really want to see Flickr come back and do well, but I don't think I buy this impulse on any sort of mass level. The lack of a desire for a permanent home, and an accumulated and (inter)linkable public history of our online and offline lives seems to me to be one of the major ways in which the new web has passed us old-timers by.

That desire was a product both of our privilege, and of the unique conditions of the time, and I don't think it's coming back anytime soon. I'm not even sure I want it anymore, because I've seen how dangerous and depressing the new conditions of a corporatized, spammer/troll/abuser infested, government and employer surveilled, and mass-social web make it.

I might still be privileged enough that I could get away with most of what we used to in the early days, but few others are, and until those negative forces are neutralized, we won't have a neighborhood where enough people want to set down permanent roots and make a home to make such undertakings worthwhile.

wockerjabby:

I don't know who those people are, but a large number of my almost-adult students don't know how to attach documents to email, use the basic tools of a word processing program, or insert an image into a document. it's because, while they grew up with smart phones (and they all have twitter), they DIDN'T grow up with computers and most of them still never use a computer anywhere other than at school. 

so that's one place computer illiterate kids might come from. poverty & underprivilege, and just a different set of societal priorities & expectations.

These are definitely the sorts of issues we're getting into in my LIS program in re: the digital divide, computer and tech literacy, community and economic development and empowerment, etc. It's a really complicated picture with lots aspects you wouldn't expect, and our desktop-based computing skills (and even moreso, our handcoding, self-hosting, DIY web skills) and our notions about culture around these tools and literacies now look very time, place, and class bound to me.

They also happen to be dominant in the more stable and white-collar parts of the professional world, which is pretty crappy for a lot of people who have really rich technological and cultural literacies and skills, but who either missed or skipped the desktop computing moment and went straight to mobile access and social media.

Lots of kids (some from underprivileged backgrounds, some not, though it's easier on the more privileged kids and they have less of an excuse) are definitely having to seriously adjust their approaches to media and technology once they hit college and the professional world, and educational systems and adults aren't giving them much practical guidance at all when it comes to that.

The whole thing is a mess and sad in general, but this bit in particular leaped out at me.

"It is ironic," he said, "because I like these things -- freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas -- but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world."

Adopting openness means being "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists," he said, "so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem." Mr. Reagle is also the author of "Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia."

Generously, this is the Geek Social Fallacy at its worst. Less generously, it gives away the game on any nominal lip service we give to gender equality in online culture, and has little to distinguish it from pathetic wingnut tu quoque "arguments" that oh-so-cleverly point out that our precious tolerance doesn't extend to the very sort of intolerant and antisocial behavior that negates it, so of course it's no tolerance at all.

That Wikipedia could get this far along without examining those sorts of undergrad maladroit geekboy assumptions is troubling to say the least.

In 2008, when he was in the middle of his worst battles and wouldn't be able to make the trip to Champaign-Urbana for Ebertfest... he began writing an online journal. Reading it from its beginning is like watching an Aztec pyramid being built. At first, it's just a vessel for him to apologize to his fans for not being downstate. The original entries are short updates about his life and health and a few of his heart's wishes. Postcards and pebbles. They're followed by a smattering of Welcomes to Cyberspace. But slowly the journal picks up steam, as Ebert's strength and confidence and audience grow. You are the readers I have dreamed of, he writes. He is emboldened.

He begins to write about more than movies; in fact, it sometimes seems as though he'd rather write about anything other than movies. The existence of an afterlife, the beauty of a full bookshelf, his liberalism and atheism and alcoholism, the health-care debate, Darwin, memories of departed friends and fights won and lost -- more than five hundred thousand words of inner monologue have poured out of him, five hundred thousand words that probably wouldn't exist had he kept his other voice. Now some of his entries have thousands of comments, each of which he vets personally and to which he will often respond. It has become his life's work, building and maintaining this massive monument to written debate -- argument is encouraged, so long as it's civil -- and he spends several hours each night reclined in his chair, tending to his online oasis by lamplight. Out there, his voice is still his voice -- not a reasonable facsimile of it, but his.

"It is saving me," he says through his speakers.

He calls up a journal entry to elaborate, because it's more efficient and time is precious:

When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.

To me the best thing about the (deservedly) ubiquitous Ebert article is this passage, which captures some of what was and still can be magical about this medium, and what made all of us early adopters take to it so strongly and completely. I remember when Nightline came to our blogger meeting at Berkman right when the Web 2.0 hysteria was ramping up, and we all spent the whole time fruitlessly trying to explain to the host that this wasn't about Web 2.0 and technology and buzzwords and business, it was about something that had changed our lives and minds in a throughgoing way, and in some ways, saved us, or at least made us so immeasurably better and happier and larger-hearted that it would be difficult to imagine the people we would be in its absence.

Ebert is one of the few old-media transplants to deeply understand this, and it probably has a lot to do with how naturally and enthusiastically he has taken to blogging. And he is doing amazing and wonderful work in this medium, the kind of work that has become rarer and rarer as all those other buzzwordy distractions have horned in. The kind of work that makes me pine for the old days, and want to try to do it again myself.

As an interesting little side-note to the latest whine-fest about how the intarnets are destroying journalism, this article at Newsweek whingeing about how bloggers aren't willing to give interviewers carte-blanche on their terms sure is a treat. Now, Winer is notorious for being touchy and tough to deal with, and Calacanis is not known as the nicest guy on the web either, but still, they have good reason to be suspicious. Most bloggers who have dealt with the media at all do, because they have in many cases learned from hard experience. Now that they have enough power to have some degree of control of how the media represents them, they're certainly justified in using it.

"The interviewer used to be in charge, but that's no longer the case," says media blogger Jeff Jarvis. "I can decide how long the quote is, I can make sure the context is accurate."

All this can be unnerving to someone (like, um, me) who has spent a career conversing with people on the other end of the phone line or lunch table. A live interview allows me not only to follow up quickly but to sense the verbal cues that direct me to more fruitful topics. In e-mail, people talk at you; in conversation I can talk with subjects, and a casual remark can lead to a level of discussion that neither party anticipated from the beginning. I am more likely to learn from someone in a conversation than in an e-mail exchange, which simply does not allow for the serendipity, intensity and give-and-take of real-time interaction.

We in the journalism tribe operate under the belief that when we ask people to talk to us we are not acting out of self-interest but a sense of duty to inform the population. It's an article of our faith that when subjects speak to us, they are engaging in a grand participatory act where everyone benefits. But these lofty views don't impress bloggers like Rosen. "You have to prove [you represent the public]," he says.

Yes, we do. But every time we lose the priceless knowledge from those essential, real-time interviews, our stories are impoverished, to the detriment of our readers: you.

There is a reason that bloggers feel like reporters have to prove that they represent the public and are acting in good faith. And that is primarily that almost all of us, or at least someone we know, have at one point or another naively and in good faith given an interview about blogs or online culture to some traditional media outlet, and upon reading the end-product, found it to be a total misrepresentation of the content of the interview given and the terms under which it was given.

Over and over again, I've seen reporters come into stories about blogging and other geeky lifestyle stuff with a pre-written thesis that they're seemingly determined to cram whatever their interview subjects say into, regardless of whether said thesis stands up to the reality of the people they are supposedly trying to learn about. In just the most recent of many, many examples that I know of, a friend of mine was interviewed about fantasy hockey. The reporter pitched it as sort of an expository/anthropological lifestyle piece, and said he just wanted some info on the appeal and mechanics and what have you of online fantasy sports. The finished piece focused almost entirely on gambling and addiction, which scarcely came up in the interview itself, and it had a real "look at the freaks!" feel to it, further reinforced by the photo (now gone, retrieved from archive.org) they published with it, which almost seemed calculated to make him look like a pathetic loner or something, which he (and most of us who are thriving in the online world) is decidedly not.

Seeing this kind of thing play out over and over again has made me increasingly suspicious that this happens constantly on much more serious subjects as well. Some of it may be simple ignorance, but ignorance is no excuse for how some of these things come out. More like incompetence that is in effect indistinguishable from malice, if we are going to be generous about motives here.

Isn't the job of a reporter to go out and find the facts, and then write a story, instead of pre-writing a story and then cherry-picking facts to flesh it out? Sure, to even have the idea of a story you may have to have an angle in mind, just like scientists have to have a hypothesis to work from, but when the facts don't bear your hypothesis out, you're supposed to rethink it. If you're not doing that, you're not seeking the truth, you're creating it from whole cloth. Insofar as their mission is to turn out journalists with the tools and mentality needed to seek the truth, journo schools are not doing their job, if the often laughable coverage of any of the subcultures and technological changes that I've been a part of and am semi-expert on is any indication.

Now, there are plenty of ways to begin to earn back that trust. Some reporters, (but not nearly enough of them) are doing a very good job of using the interactivity of the web to turn these things into a public dialogue, which eventually results in them getting it mostly right by the end of the discussion. Another way to do this would be to use these tools to provide much greater transparency to the whole newsmaking process. Frontline, for example, does a very good thing, in that they still make and edit down their show as they always have, but they then post the full interviews and lots of the other background that went into making it to their website, so anyone who wants the extra context can easily get it, and anyone who feels they have been misrepresented by the finished product can point to the original sources by way of defense and correction.

In the absence of the limitations and costs of print, this should be fairly trivial for newspapers to implement. It would increase trust immensely, and it would allow bloggers and others to dig around in the source material and find new angles and connections, and ultimately help the journalists to do their job and uphold their civic obligations. This is just one of many ways in which newspapers are failing to grok the potential of the new mediums and technologies available to them, and in doing so, endangering their own survival and failing the people they claim to work on behalf of.