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Yes, We Can Tweet

2010-10-01 04:18:30 UTC

Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote an article arguing that social media hampers the likelihood and effectiveness of high-risk activism. Dave Pell disagreed.

In his article, Pell tries to argue that giving people a voice, while not strictly necessary for success, could hardly be viewed as a bad thing:

The realtime, social web is clearly not a required element to organize and execute a high impact revolution. Neither is a megaphone, but it sure makes it easier for the folks in the back to hear you.

But the analogy doesn't work. A megaphone is a centralized communications device. By using one, I establish myself as a dominant figure in the room. My volume commands your attention. Twitter and its distributed communications brethren are like giving everyone in the room a megaphone. No one voice can stand out. No one voice can guide. And centralized guidance, Gladwell argues, is what successful high-risk activism requires:

Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

Again, Pell disagrees:

Gladwell goes on to argue that Facebook and Twitter create a kind of connectedness that is ultimately the opposite of what’s required for true activism.

The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life ... The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvelous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

I don’t know about you, but my Facebook and Twitter communities are made up of both weak-ties and strong ones. I have several family members and best friends with whom I share an online connection. I would label them as strong ties. I also share online content with many people who I’ve never met.

But Gladwell's characterization of Twitter and Facebook relationships as "weak" is unrelated to the strength of any small subset of real relationships represented therein. That you may be connected to close, personal friends on Twitter and Facebook does not make those technological associations "strong".

These digital connections are weak, and not simply because the majority of the real relationships they represent are too. Twitter and Facebook are, at their core, impersonal media. They are fueled by public bulletins, statuses, and wall posts¹. Everyone has a megaphone with which they can shout their way into your feed². It is this impersonality, Gladwell argues, that hinders these technological ties from being anything more than weak, and it is that weakness that prevents them from inspiring and motivating:

It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.

Of course, "impact" and "inspiration" and "motivation" are relative. But live-tweeting a sit-in won't provide the organization and strategy necessary to make whatever secondary actions it "inspires" worthwhile. Social media is not something to be harnessed. It is the unruly mob to successful activism's disciplined army. If its by-products are helpful, it will be in spite of the medium, not because of it.

Pell concludes by stating that "any inherent weaknesses in the technology are beside the point." Unless those weaknesses undermine the very work you seek to accomplish. Then they are entirely the point.

Sure, each service has its own private messaging functionality, but that is not what defines them. The bread-and-butter of these services is public pronouncements. The private messaging they offer is little more than branded email.
Yes, it's possible to carve out a very small, private niche for you and your closest friends. But I'm willing to bet good money that if it isn't already, such use is becoming increasingly rare.

Repetition

2010-01-28 23:26:12 UTC

If an artist becomes too idealistic, he will commit suicide, because between his ideal and his actual ability there is a great gap. Because there is no bridge long enough to go across the gap, he will begin to despair. That is the usual spiritual way. But our spiritual way is not so idealistic. In some sense we should be idealistic; at least we should be interested in making bread which tastes and looks good! Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread. There is no secret in our way. Just to practice zazen and put ourselves into the oven is our way.

From Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

The Scholarship Trap

2009-11-16 22:25:46 UTC

The poverty trap reminds me of paying for college. My university provided unbelievably generous need-based aid. Despite being a private university with a lofty tuition, this made them far cheaper than any other school to which I had applied, including state universities, and may have been the sole reason I was even able to attend anywhere.

All they expected in return was a minimum contribution from the family, but unfortunately outside aid, e.g. scholarships, didn't count. Worse than that, it would be met with an equivalent decrease in the aid provided by the school. (I guess familial cash is more fun to roll around in than non-profit cash.) So unless you could find enough scholarships to cover the aid provided by the university (in my case, well over $20,000 a year), there was no point in even trying, as it wouldn't make a dent in the expected family contribution.

I had one outside scholarship my freshman year. I never bothered to reapply.

Get Out of My Way

2009-09-13 00:59:55 UTC

A while ago I switched to Safari. It was a transition I had desired for some time; I yearned for its simplicity. But there were certain things in Firefox I was accustomed to, and every attempt to switch only reminded me of that. Now that I'm a year past the leap, the opposite is happening. Every time I open Firefox—usually from a need for simultaneous sessions—I am assaulted by the things that drove me away. Time has made their intrusions ever more pronounced and the most odious among them is the update.

Staying current with application updates is the duty of every good user, and making those updates easy is the duty of every good developer. But something must be said for unobtrusive.

Firefox updates involve dialog boxes, buttons, progress bars, waiting, and, if it's a browser update, a restart of the application. When does Firefox prompt you to install these updates? When you start the browser. Why are you starting the browser? If you're like most people, to visit a web page—not to install updates. And because my usage of Firefox is infrequent and extremely task-oriented, these updates are all the more probable and infuriating.

I want to stay up-to-date, Firefox, but when I'm cracking you open, that's the last thing on my mind. Save the update alerts for when I've gone idle or when I'm shutting you down. Anything else is just getting in my way.

Not Everyone Needs Awesome

2009-07-02 18:21:28 UTC

Having six billion different versions of a single operating system annoys me as much as the next nerd, but I can't find anything morally reprehensible about it. Atwood takes particular issue with it, but "segmenting the market" is not, as he claims, the same as "capturing consumer surplus", and his examples only work to undermine him.

All of these different "editions" -- of Windows, of Basecamp, of Stack Exchange -- are different in more than just name. They offer different features and thus can and should reasonably be subject to different prices. If it costs Microsoft X dollars to implement support for memory beyond 32 GB (an assumption, yes, but one I have no reason to doubt), then it seems reasonable that they should pass that cost on to the customers that are actually going to be using it. Just as it's reasonable for 37signals to charge extra to allot more disk space for your extra projects. Just as it's reasonable for Stack Exchange to charge for those extra pageviews.

The alternative is charging everyone the same price for the same (unlimited) features. That may sound good to power users like Atwood and me. And it is, but only for us. It screws over the guy with the small e-commerce site who only needs a couple gigs of RAM and one or two cores.

All Microsoft is asking is to get paid for the work that they've done. Just like 37signals wants to get paid for the resources you consume. Just like Atwood wants to get paid for the pageviews people consume that could have been sold to someone else. The only reason people object to this tactic with Windows is because they're used to getting everything, all the time, for the same price as everyone else.

3GS Upgrade Pricing

2009-06-08 23:22:35 UTC

People are already starting to complain about the cost of upgrading from the 3G to the 3GS, but I'm not surprised and neither should you be.

Last summer, many existing AT&T customers were forced to pay a similar premium for the iPhone 3G. Who, exactly? Any non-iPhone owner still under contract. AT&T had subsidized their phone in exchange for the promise of two years of revenue. And like any carrier that subsidizes, if you're going to bail out of your contract, AT&T is going to want its money back, be it in the form of an early termination fee or an upgrade premium.

Still, when the 3G was released, the upgrade premium was $200, not the $400 newer 3G owners are seeing today. This drastic difference is most likely due to cost differences between phones. The iPhone is a rather expensive piece of hardware, after all. Original iPhone owners may recall the unsubsidized $499/$599 price tag. No doubt the 3G cost a little more with all that extra fancy hardware. Maybe $599/$699? Getting that down to $199/$299 required a rather healthy investment from AT&T.

But the usual subsidy for a provider is around $200. Why would AT&T subsidize so much more than usual? Simple: the iPhone is a phenomenon. People bought the original in droves despite its high price. AT&T knew there would be very little risk in heavily subsidizing because it was all but guaranteed a boatload (millions, in fact) of new customers, customers who would be loathe to give up their precious iPhones just to switch carriers. If I were AT&T, I'd have doubled down too.

But like any company, AT&T is in the business of making money, not losing it. If it does you a favor, like subsidize your phone, expect it to call in that favor.

The Non-Replaceable Battery Non-Issue

2009-01-05 19:52:40 UTC

That's why companies (not just Apple) move to non-replaceable batteries. Cheaper, more reliable, and for most devices, users don't actually replace the batteries. It's a big non-issue, except for the really loud and noisy minority -- the power users.

And even for them, this is a solved problem. Just look at the iPhone. [...] Battery charging systems exist -- and really, have made the replaceable battery on an iPhone unnecessary. The technology has moved beyond swapping spares.

The only time one truly needs to replace a battery is when it loses the ability to reasonably hold a charge, but how often does that actually happen? It took my MacBook Pro over two years to need a replacement and my iPhone is still going strong after 16 months. The Apple repair process is fast enough for my needs and likely for the vast majority of users as well.

From Chuqui via Daring Fireball

Synecdoche, New York

2008-12-08 23:05:23 UTC

For about an hour after leaving the theatre, I was in a complete daze. The fog that had descended upon the city was certainly no help.

I became acutely aware that I was not a real person; that I was actually just one of Charlie Kaufman's meta characters; that the fog I saw around me was a metaphorical one; that these streets were the pathways of my brain; that my struggle to find my way home was the cinematographic manifestation of my struggle to comprehend the film I had just seen; that my every step was being projected against a screen in a theatre somewhere far away, being reviewed, being applauded, being reviled.

Slowly, and with the help of less complicated popular entertainment, normalcy returned to my world. I stopped yielding to my invisible author, stopped acting for my invisible audience. But my brief moment as a character in a Kaufman screenplay will not soon be forgotten. This is the kind of effect great cinema should have on us, no?

Time Heals All Discrimination

2008-11-12 00:42:41 UTC

At the end of the day, Prop 8's passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two.

...

The good news for supporters of marriage equity is that -- and there's no polite way to put this -- the older voters aren't going to be around for all that much longer, and they'll gradually be cycled out and replaced by younger voters who grew up in a more tolerant era. Everyone knew going in that Prop 8 was going to be a photo finish -- California might be just progressive enough and 2008 might be just soon enough for the voters to affirm marriage equity. Or, it might fall just short, which is what happened. But two or four or six or eight years from now, it will get across the finish line.

From FiveThirtyEight.com

Why Video Calling Is Not More Popular

2008-06-10 04:36:53 UTC

I don't think I'd use it because it doesn't seem the least bit practical. Consider what is required: holding the phone out in front of oneself with one's hand. For one thing, most people have enough trouble walking with it pressed firmly against their ear let alone balanced in mid-air such that it is stationary relative to their face so that the transmitted video isn't a nasuea-inducing mess. Perhaps some advanced algorithm could reduce the jitter, but a more pressing concern remains: Do we really need more things to keep people from paying attention to where they're going? The alternative, of course, is to use it while stopped. I imagine that'll go over about as well as telling people to pull to the side of the road to make phone calls without video. What good is a mobile phone if you can't be mobile while using it?

Assuming people are about as thrilled with that prospect as I am, that relegates the use of video calling to the home and office. Here it seems slightly more useful, and as screen size and quality increase, I imagine this would become its most likely adoption vector. But I can't help shake the image of grandma and grandpa gathered around a docked phone, screaming and waving and peering and asking "Can you see us?" repeatedly with earnest. And while we're sitting down at home, why not just whip open the laptop? Given the suddenness with which webcams have saturated the portable computer market, it seems the only hope for video calling lies in the much anticipated "convergence" of the phone and computer. Moore's Law may help bring that about sooner rather than later, but I think it may be a while before people throw away their 15-inch screens entirely.

If you ask me, the only hope for video calling outside of the laptop rests with some unforeseen breakthrough in technology. When our phones can generate accurate 3D models of us by tapping into our brains and detecting the positions of our muscles, and when the corresponding models of the other parties on the line can be injected directly into our visual cortex, then, just maybe, will video calling really take hold.