I'll Publish, You Filter

In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky extends a discussion on media as publication – whether it be weblogs, MySpace (or Facebook for today’s readers), or Wikipedia – over three chapters: “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” “Publish, Then Filter,” and “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production.”  What these three chapters seem to have in common is the “replacement factor.” In “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” Shirky discusses the replacement of professionalism with amateurism in regards to print journalism being replaced by blogs. He explores how the rise of new technology has also impacted how we see professionals and experts.

In “Publish, Then Filter,” Shirky looks at how social media has replaced intimate relationships, which leads to a misunderstanding of what is being published on social media websites. When faced with the question “why would anyone put such drivel out in public,” Shirky answers with “they’re not talking to you” (85).  He also looks at the ratio of readers to the author: in a personal site, the author has interactions with (almost) all commenters, while in a widely read site, the author rarely is able to respond to most commenters.

In “Personal Motivation,” Shirky spends much of his time on how Wikipedia has replaced traditional encyclopedias, and how the collaborative environment keeps Wikipedia somewhat accurate. His analogy comparing Wikipedia to a car company posed a problem for me, however. It really is a false analogy, comparing not only a service oriented collaboration to a tangible product, but setting up a problematic comparison between a site where false or erroneous information is not physically harmful to its users and a product that is subject to government safety regulations to avoid physical harm. If Wikipedia were a product that users were paying for, and contributors were being paid to update, I have a feeling it would function, at least slightly, similarly to the car company.

How these chapters relate to our class and our projects is quite obvious. In the social media analysis for the Clemson University Libraries, we must be aware of how social media functions, what is expected from a site administrator who has potentially twenty-thousand-plus readers, and what sort of collaboration could be expected from library patrons. While Ms. Reid does try to greet each new follower on Twitter, as the social media expands, this may be an unrealistic goal. As Shirky says, “someone writing for thousands of people … or millions, has to start choosing who to respond to and who to ignore” (93). Keeping this, and all of these chapters, in mind can only prove beneficial when analyzing the library’s social media use.

RIBS in the Real World

While reading Tharon Howard’s RIBS model in Design to Thrive, I found myself constantly thinking about the arrival of Google+ and the recent changes that Facebook forced upon its members.  As far as social networking, Facebook has been the most popular site in the past few years, practically pushing MySpace off of the radar. When Google announced that it was releasing Google+ (G+) to compete with Facebook (FB), the social networking world was filled with excitement. What could G+ bring to the table that FB was missing? Would G+ feel more like the “old” FB, the more exclusive one? With G+’s invitation only platform, many hoped it would.

Unfortunately, instead of creating the “social capital” that Howard explores in his chapter “Significance,” G+’s exclusivity felt more like isolation. Each member was allotted 150 invitations to spread to friends, but the requirement of a gmail account kept several people that I know from being interested in joining. Ironically, many people were using FB to announce that they had invitations to spare, or to ask for an invitation from someone, anyone, who had already been invited to join. Even with this widespread “conversation,” G+ remained a lonely place to “hangout.”

But with FB’s recent changes to their newsfeed, and announcement of more changes to come, G+ has become a livelier place to visit. Because FB has taken control away from the members as to how their news feed is organized, FB has violated the remuneration rule in Howard’s book: it has taken away a benefit that was once available to its members. FB has also created a messier, more cluttered interface, creating confusion and redundancy for its members.

When FB forced its changes on the membership, without any forewarning, the newsfeeds were filled with complaints and requests to change FB back. Obviously, these complaints and requests fell on deaf ears because FB has not changed back, and in fact, is planning even more changes with the rollout of its Timeline. When members’ pleas for help are ignored, they no longer feel as if they have influence, as explained in Chapter 5 of Design to Thrive, and start seeking new places to spend their online time.

In fact, on my G+ account, my circles more than doubled in the two days following FB’s changes. While there are still some complaints on G+’s stream that it isn’t any different than FB, there has been increased activity in the network. And there are differences between the two sites; now that G+ has gone public and no longer restricts use to invitation only, there seems to be much more remuneration, influence, belonging, and significance in the G+ world. Now, let’s see if G+ learns from FB’s mistakes and listens to its membership.

(Un)evenly Grazing Sheep

Clay Shirky opens Here Comes Everybody with a story about Ivana, who left her phone in a cab. When her friend Evan created an online community – what Tharon Howard would call an “adhocracy” in Design to Thrive because of its temporary status and purpose in solving a problem before disbanding (25) – to get her phone back, it created a whirlwind of media attention. The questions that Shirky raises about the fairness of this community are ones of race and class. He points out that Evan is a “grown-up doing the work that lets him take countless hours off to work on the retrieval of a phone” while “Sasha is an unwed teenage mother” (Shirky 12). Sasha has the support (no matter how warped it may be) of only her family and friends, while Evan can garner the support of countless (online, unknown) people who can come together – at least virtually – to get something done. The safe bet is that the members of this group are also from a privileged class, allowing them the access and the time to follow the story and lend their support. Sasha, on the other hand, did not have the technology, time, or privilege to create a following, and was only supported by the close relations that helped shaped her sense of moral value; for instance, the belief that she didn’t need to return a phone that she found because it was expensive and she felt she deserved it. 

Had Sasha had access to the technology that Evan had, this story might have had a different ending. Instead of the book jacket reading, “A woman loses her phone and recruits and army of volunteers to get it back from the person who stole it” (Emphasis added). The media attention has shifted the story to one of theft, even though Shirky points out that Sasha “gets a very cool phone that someone found in the back of acab” (7). If not for Evan’s website titled “StolenSidekick” and the group pressure on the NYPD to treat the phone as stolen, this would only be a story of someone refusing to return a lost item, not one of a 16 year-old girl being arrested for theft.

If Sasha could have painted Ivana as a careless, entitled woman who could leave and expensive phone behind and afford to replace it, she might have garnered the same amount of support (provided that the group who would identify with her would have access to the community). As much as society might have a wish to “right a wrong” (Shirky 8), there is also a segment of society who could be convinced that those who are well-off are selfish and undeserving.  

It could be tempting to compare this story with Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (Shirky 51). In the example of grazing sheep in a common access field, Hardin discusses the weighing of individual needs against the community. The difference between the two is the question of common access: Sasha, Evan, and Ivana clearly do not share common access. The issues of class and race create an imbalanced access, to which Hardin’s theory would not apply. Sasha is not concerned with the good of the community, because the community appears to not be concerned with Sasha. And the only reason the community is concerned with Ivana is because she was privileged enough to have a well-off friend with (seemingly) nothing but time and money to help her.

Virtual "Realities"

In Computers as Theatre, Brenda Laurel examines the ways in which the production of a drama is similar to the creation of a computer interface. She uses metaphors to explain how the user is like an audience, albeit an interactive audience, the computer is the stage, and the interface is the combination of the actors, props, sets, lighting, and dialogue. Her argument that “interface metaphors can fail in many ways” (5), and the “point that the design of an effective interface-whether for a computer or a doorknob-must begin with an analysis of what a person is trying to do, rather than with a metaphor or a notion of what the screen should display” (7) doesn’t stop her from utilizing her own metaphors (Besides, her argument that “many people failed to employ the word ‘desktop’” (5) is dated, to say the least.) But instead of thinking about the metaphors we use when creating or using computer interfaces, maybe we should consider how the interface is itself a metaphor. Laurel almost reaches this point in her discussion of the components of the interface as representations of actions or objects on pages seven through nine, but she doesn’t quite get there. Thinking about the interface as a metaphor can open up different ways of thinking about what Laurel deems “reality” and “representations of worlds that are like reality only different” (10).

Laurel’s goal is to create an analogy between theatre and computer design, but she introduces psychology early in her chapter. Unfortunately, she seems to drop psychology and only focus on drama. Had she more carefully thought about psychology, she could have used both fields to support her argument. Instead, she sets up the differences between psychology and drama (rather simplistically) by giving the following definitions:

In general, psychology attempts to describe what goes on in the real world with all its fuzziness and loose ends, while theatre attempts to represent something that might go on, simplified for the purposes of logical and affective clarity. Psychology is devoted to the end of explaining human behavior, while drama attempts to represent it in a form that provides intellectual and emotional closure. Theatre is informed by psychology (both professional and amateur flavors), but it turns a trick that is outside of psychology's province through the art of representing action. (6)

While it may be one goal of psychology to “explain human behavior,” that is not the only goal of the field. It could be argued, quite easily, that one goal of psychology is to “provide intellectual and emotional closure,” which Laurel reserves for theatre. Also, her claim that “the art of representing action” is “outside of psychology’s province” is not well informed at all. One only has to think of the act of role-playing, writing letters to those who have caused us pain with no intention of sending them, or relaxation techniques that involve imagining a safe place to see that psychology is mired in representation. Along with that, the field of psychology is built upon Freud’s ideas that dreams are representations, and that psychological disorders have their origins in representation. 

Nonetheless, Laurel makes her claim that interface design is equivalent to theatre. She talks about how the actions on the screen are only representations of “real” actions, and how these representations pose problems for designers. She mentions several times about “barking up the wrong tree” (14, 20), and I think that she may be doing so when she tries to talk about real worlds and actions versus representations of these.  

She talks about how users may switch modes from experiential to productive when interacting with the computer. In defining productive modes, she calls to the “seriousness vis-à-vis the real world” (23) of the outcomes of productivity. She even admits that “a printed paper … has ‘real’ implications … even though it is itself a representation” (23). If she would take this realization a step further, she would see that even the “concreteness” she is concerned with is a representation. The printing on the paper, the words we speak, the “language” we use for thought are all representations with no grounding in the objects we are representing. And going even further, many philosophers have argued that the “real” world is just what is represented to us through our perceptions. So instead of focusing on how representation may cause problems, perhaps it would be more useful to use psychology’s “attempts to describe what goes on in the ‘real’ world” and figure out the different ways that different representations pose problems of interaction. Much like the attempt to use linguistic theories to help understand interactivity, an understanding that all interaction relies on representation and metaphor will help designers understand how to create more effective interfaces, instead of more “realistic” ones.

Visual Interpretations/Interpellations

Anyone who knows me knows that I have postmodern/post-structural leanings, and that I am constantly fighting against those who write off the ideas of postmodern theory because they lead to relativism or nihilism. I admit, this is often a tough defense, because it is difficult for many people to admit that there is no objective capital-T Truth, or that we are created by language (or culture), and that we have little or no control over “who we are.” But as difficult as it is to defend postmodern theory, I continue on that track.

Reading Practices of Looking by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright has thrown me back into this defense of postmodern theory. Many of the theorists they cite – Barthes, Foucault, or Althusser – have complex, complicated ideas on authorship, author function, authority, interpellation, ideology, and reader/audience created meaning. But while Sturken and Cartwright attempt to explain these theories as support for their claims about visual texts, I felt that many times their explanations were over-simplified or were just “not quite there.” Without fuller discussion of the complications of these theories, Sturken and Cartwright have left the door open for the spiral into relativism and nihilism that so many people believe postmodern theory leads to.

For instance, on pages 59-61, when Sturken and Cartwright are discussing Bourdieu’s theory of “taste” and how it is “learned through exposure to social and cultural institutions that promote certain class-based assumptions about correct taste” (60), they fail to examine where and how these social and cultural institutions are constructed. While it may seem that Althusser himself is not interested in the origins of ideology (see the section title “Ideology has no History” in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”), without even acknowledging that culture and society have some sort of origin, Sturken and Cartwright have left their readers to wonder where culture and society get the values that they (seemingly insidiously) pass on to the individual.

Sturken and Cartwright’s discussion of ideology even seems a bit simplistic. Their definition – that “ideologies are systems of belief that exist within all cultures” (23) – leaves the reader believing that they have a full understanding of ideologies. In fact, the term “ideology” is used in many different ways with many different connotations. Cultural Studies theorists are still struggling with the definition of ideology, and how it influences individuals, and likewise, how individuals influence it. The ideas of dominant ideologies and counter ideologies have filled many pages, and for Sturken and Cartwright to so simply define ideology and then use it to explain how meaning is made, could be dangerous.

Please don’t get me wrong – I find Sturken and Cartwright’s explanations of how viewers make meaning of visual texts and how cultural context influences that meaning quite helpful, even if they are somewhat simplistic and incomplete. Yes, I was exposed to these theories about texts, authors, and meanings before, but I don’t always keep them in the front of my mind. Reading Practices of Looking has reinforced the ideas that visual texts are subject to the same examination and interpretation that literary texts are. It is a helpful reminder for me to think about culture, society, and ideology, and how meaning is made by the viewer that is placed within these structures. The authors’ claims and explanations will no doubt serve me well when I am examining – or even creating – visual texts, and not just for this semester.