Stowe Boyd

Once again, media watchers fail to connect the dots. In this case, the tectonic shifts underlying TV are missed while the details fill the discussion:

The Sofa Wars - Plenty to Watch Online, but Viewers Prefer to Pay for Cable

A New York Times/CBS News poll this month found that 88 percent of respondents paid for traditional TV service. Just 15 percent of those subscribers had considered replacing it with Internet video services like Hulu and YouTube.

Younger people, though, are more intrigued by the possibility: respondents under the age of 45 were significantly more likely than older ones to say they had considered replacing their pay TV service. The poll was conducted Aug. 3-5 with 847 respondents and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Even through the downturn, the number of people subscribing to pay TV continued to grow. Cable, satellite and fiber-optic providers added 677,000 customers in the first quarter of this year, according to the investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein.

The firm’s preliminary numbers for the second quarter, which is traditionally weak, show a slight drop in subscribers. Satellite providers and Verizon’s FiOS service have been stealing market share from cable.

The cable and satellite companies say that their customers are reluctant to pay more — the Comcast chief executive, Brian L. Roberts, described customers who paid only for video, without a bundle of other services, as “very price-sensitive” — but insist that cord-cutting has not been an especially disruptive trend.

To keep customers, especially the price-sensitive ones, the carriers are getting creative. They are trying to bring the living-room experience to every other screen in a customer’s home, including laptops and tablets. Last week Verizon became the latest carrier to announce plans for an app that puts live TV on the iPad, pushing out the walls of cable TV’s walled garden a bit.

[…]

lenty of people say they have foresworn cable for good. They are largely young adults who know their way around the Internet and have grown accustomed to watching video on computers and other devices.

The Times/CBS News survey found that people under the age of 45 were about four times as likely as those 45 and over to say Internet video services could effectively replace cable.

All the kvetching about whether a specific show is available on the pioneering tools today completely misses the point. The reason that the TV experience is going to move to the web is that the web is social: people want to discuss the football game with friends, share movies, and vote on who is the best dancer. And the younger folks more than older ones.

The race to provide the best social TV experience is on, and although Apple hasn’t really rolled out any strategically important social tools yet, I bet that their next generation iTunes in the cloud — based on the huge server farm called ‘The Orchard’ — will start to incorporate social features, along with an industry-changing capability to live stream recorded, and not too far down the pike, live TV.

This will be as transformative to TV as the iPod and iTunes were to the music business.

The natural unit for music is a song, not albums, as iTunes proved.

The natural unit of TV is the show, not a series, not a channel, and not a bundle of TV channels. This is what the networks and the cable companies are about to find out.

And the experience will be social, which is how people watch TV: talking, yelling at the screen, texting their friends about the last play, voting. The cable and network businesses have completely missed that revolution. Look to Apple to blow that open.

Flipboard burst on the scene this week like a Rodriguez movie trailer, or a new diet drug, and everyone rushed to download (following Scoble’s recommendation). Now that the dust has settled, and the controversy about Flipboard being unready to handle the surge of signups has started to abate, some larger issues are starting to arise from Flipboard’s modus vivendi:

Joel Johnson, Is Flipboard Legal?

Social news app Flipboard was yesterday’s hot new app, despite—or perhaps because of—technical problems that prevented some features from working. But there might be a bigger snag: Is Flipboard scraping content it doesn’t have the rights to?

Flipboard, the new iPad app that renders links from your Twitter feed and favorite sites in a beautiful, magazine-style layout, has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.

Unlike some similar news apps like Pulse, Flipboard appears to eschew the older syndication standby RSS to instead grab URLs from Twitter and Facebook feeds. While news sources that maintain their own automatic Twitter feeds tend to link the same stories as they do in their RSS feeds, there’s one critical difference: RSS also allows content to be included in the feed, whereas Twitter provides only the URLs that link back to the full website. (Unless, of course, the site only writes 140 character news stories.)

Back in the ancient days of the mid-aughts, there was a healthy debate online about whether or not news outlets should provide full content feeds or simply headlines and excerpts. Rather than rehash that debate—one that’s still ongoing—just remember this: whether a company chose to publish “full feeds” or excerpts, the choice remained theirs.

The fact that publishers have some explicit means of controlling the use of their published materials through RSS (as well as devices like the robot.txt files used to control indexing by search engine robots) has not actually always provided strong enough controls for publishers. Said differently, publisher have still blocked or threatened services like Pulse and Flipboard even when they are only serving up what has been published in their RSS feeds. Murdoch has made the case that search engines ‘bots don’t have the right to index his sites even when robot.txt files indicate that those sites are open for indexing.

This suggests the need for some other mechanism to define what sort of reuse or aggregation rights that publishers care to allow. Creative Commons suggests an example, but it is likely to be considered too coarsely grained, and it doesn’t delve deeply enough into the nuts and bolts of actual reuse.

The rise of tools like Flipboard may represent a new day. Tools that intentionally sidestep RSS, and instead reach through the URL and spider the websites themselves, like search engines do. Search engines build indexes and return snippets clipped from the myriad sites they have visited based on the search queries users enter. But Flipboard is tapping into our social networks — like those that I follow on Twitter — by reaching through the URLs in the Twitter stream, and aggregating what they point to, and rendering it in a magazine-like UX.

But the presentation in Flipboard poses some real business problems. Where’s the ads? Publishers make their money on ads (and pay walls), and so they are going to start to howl if people are viewing their stories with all the ads parsed out.

Perhaps even more contentious will be the response of Facebook and other social services like Twitter. To the extent that Flipboard replaces their UX, they may lose revenue as well. Twitter recently has moved into the realm of building its own clients and does so with the explicit goal of making ad revenue. These social network giants could block access to Flipboard and other tools of this sort, simply because they will resist being treated as a dumb pipe of social messages. Facebook will certainly move aggressively if Flipboard ‘dumbs down’ what Facebook does for users, treating it just as a messaging bus with URLs, pictures, and social gestures embedded in it.

It is relatively simple to extrapolate to a near future in which Flipboard, or some other entrant with similar aspirations, has ginned up a superior user experience, one that involves its own layers of sociality. Imagine that Flipboard can offer its users greater benefits by communicating directly through Flipboard, and not through underlying services like Twitter or Facebook — for example, being able to share Tumblr like reblog capabilities, or some other dimension of sociality that naturally falls out of the iPad experience.

I am certain that Twitter and Facebook would consider this course of events — however hypothetical — with some alarm.I believe that these companies must retain control of their user experience, and they must resist being commoditized by a richer layer of sociality superimposed above their offerings.

Related articles

• Flipboard (coolhunting.com)
• Too Successful, Flipboard Flops At Launch (thenextweb.com)
• You: Flipboard iPad app goes from fascination to mockery in a snap (washingtonpost.com)
• Flipboard hype crashes iPad app’s servers (money.cnn.com)
• Flipboard for iPad gives Facebook, Twitter a magazine-style makeover (thaibrother.com)
• Flipboard for iPad app review (engadget.com)
• Flipboard turns social network content into a virtual magazine (tuaw.com)

I have written a great deal about the rise of streams — also called microblogging, activity streams, and other names — and the application of streams in the business context, but yesterday’s ‘Microsharing’ panel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference demonstrated that there is widespread disagreement, confusion, and even antipathy about streams in business. So I thought I would collate a few thoughts into something resembling a business case for streams, and throw it out there. (Note that this is also a dry run for a section of the upcoming Microstreams In Business research report: see www.stoweboyd.com/research.)

What Is A Stream And How Is It Different?

One thing Marcia Conner might have wanted to do yesterday might have been to actually define what a stream is.

A ‘stream’ is the implementation of a social model of interaction, relationship, and communication. Social tools are generally based on the idealization of social networks, in which people connect to other people in many ways. John might connect with Mary, who also connects to Ahmed, but John may not know or connect to Ahmed.

Streams are based on directed networks, where John ‘follows’ Mary but Mary may not ‘follow’ John back. This is derived from the public blogging model, where authors publish their work freely and anyone may choose to read those works, or to subscribe to a feed from that blog. In a sense, streams are an extension, or advance, on the basic publiching model of blogs. This is why some have chosen to call streaming ‘microblogging’, focusing on the similarity of publishing involved, and making a distinction between long-format blogging and short-format ‘microblogging’. This distinction may not be the most productive one, especially in the business context.

So, streams are based on directed networks that emulate or parallel social networks. Relative to any user, there are upstream contacts (those that the user follows, ‘following’), and the downstream contacts (those that are following the user, ‘followers’). Note that a follower can be followed, as well.

Streaming tools have two sides, too, matching the directional nature of their structure:

Sending — This is the collection of features that support a user in the creation and publishing of a stream element. As a simple example of the posting side of things, consider the an editor for Twitter like Tweetdeck that allows a user to type characters, create retweets, shorten URLs, embed photos, and so on.In the business context, users can post a wide array of different sorts of message types, depending on the tool’s ability to support them. For example, a user might post a structured request for a meeting to one or more downstream contacts by name, or using other features — hashtags, defined project names, user lists — to bring the request to the attention of specific individuals.

Receiving — The set of features that help a user make sense of the aggregated stream of posts from all those that she follows. This can include search, filtering, and expansion of post elemenst, like displaying an image that is embedded as a shortened URL. The receiving side also includes the ability to learn more about the individuals behind the posts, and to create or modify relationships with them, such as following a user you have discovered by a retweet made by one of your upstream contacts.

There are a number of other aspects of the streaming model that bear examination, and which may vary across implementations:

Profiles — Generally, users create profiles with bits of information, like name, physical location, and whatever else is socially or contextually relevant. This may include the user’s followers and following, which makes the social network accessible, a node at a time.

Gestures — Actions that users take other than actively posting can also be pushed out to the stream, like posts. So, when a user decides to follow (or unfollow) another that social gesture can be streamed. Likewise, users may indicate that they ‘like’ (or ‘dislike’) users posts. In a similar way, in a business context, more structured posts can be implemented, like appointments to meet, and acceptance of a request to meet is another sort of social gesture.

These are the basic elements of the open stream model, and given a wide variablity of understanding about it and experience with it, it is always helpful to lay it all out so that we can share terms and avoid confusion.

How Is This Different From Email, And Does That Matter?

Email is not predicated on social networks, except to the extent that the users of email are networked. The premise is that there is a universe of individuals (and perhaps named groups) to who messages can be directed. And they can send messages to you, if they know your email address.

Like streams, email has sending and receiving contexts, but there is no notion of writing an email message without addressing it to a specific list of people.

Email is addressed, stream posts are released.

Email is private, and the distribution of messages is determined by the author at the time of writing. Individuals may decide to block my messages, but they can’t opt to see all of them. This means that the effective use of the information in the message is based on the premise that the author knows who should read it.

Streams are public (within some defined ‘public’), and the distribution of messages is determined by the actions of all the members of that public. Individuals decide who they will follow, and the collective streaming of information is the result of the affiliation of all the members of the public.

In the context of business, this means that email is selective: the author selects who should read the message. Streams are elective: the eventual recipients of messages elect to receive them. And this election is principally based on the individual, not the topic, per se, although different tools may implment that very differently.

Relative to email’s selection orientation, streaming is based on the premise that individuals might be more effective if they can elect to receive information flows that are potentially useful to them, and therefore, they should be able to make the determination for themselves as to what are the best sources of information.

Looking at this as a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ sort of issue, it is more likely that information will be best distributed within any given group if each person can decide what information sources are likely to provide good information for themself, rather than leaving it up to the sources of information to decide who should have access to it. This is the argument for openness in open societies, as well, and it has an immediate and obvious analog in the workplace.

So, whenever the discussion comes around (once again) about how we already have email, and that all this streaming malarcky is nothing new, please remember that the models are quite different, and at least in some ways are an inversion of each other. Email is inherently more centralized and top-down, while streaming is inherently more distributed and bottom-up.

When we hear arguments against streaming in the business context they are often the same arguments that are made against distribution of decision-making and the value of top-down controls. I won’t go into the counter to these arguments here — they are out of scope — except to point out that bottom-up and distributed business organization is often linked to agile and resilient businesses, ones that are more likely to thrive in challenging and fast-changing circumstances.

Last Thoughts: What We Can Learn From Corporate Email

We are at a juncture in the rise of streams which is similar to the rise of corporate email. People today don’t recall the controversy about adopting corporate email in the ’70s and ’80s, and then again, web-based email in the ’90s.

One lesson to learn is that ROI studies will be asked for prior to roll-out. However, later on, when the entire company and then the world has shifted to email, senior management will realize that there is no return to a pre-email or pre-stream world, and therefore most companies will simply opt not to calculate whether the return was realized. It will be moot. (See Lee and Sproul, Connections, for a detailed examination of this around corporate email.)

The second lesson is interoperability and standards. Corporate email led to a a Cambrian explosion of email products that were largely non-interoperable. It took years to get different systems to intercommunicate, so large companies often had three or more unintegrated email solutions, based on acquisitions, or different groups in different countries making differently local decisions.

We need to start thinking about interoperable streams, from the outset. For example, I have been advocating interoperability of the tumble blog model for some time, which is a specific subset of the more general streams model. Since we have some much innovation going on, this is likely to turn out to be like the SQL standard, which was the intersection of the leading implementations of the SQL model of databases. At any rate, businesses looking to roll out streams in their companies should definitely put pressure on the vendors to commit to interoperability in the next few years, before this gets away from us.

In a full frontal attack on multitasking and the tools that seem to seduce us into it, Matt Richtel makes the case for the evils of being wired by chronicling the day-to-day media addiction of a California entrepreneur and his family. Kord Campbell misses an email from someone who wants to buy his company, his son is getting C’s, and mom gets pissed when Kord reacts to stress by playing video games interminably.

Richtel uses this modern dysfunctional family to advance the conventional interpretation of recent psychological tests and conjectues about human cognition in the wired age:

Matt Richtel, Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

Ok, Richtel is reporter, not a scientist, so it’s a natural thing for him to start with the conclusions first. But what is the science here?

Just some background, though, to level the playing field.

The human mind is plastic — This is unsurprising, but commonly overlooked. We all can learn new skills, or repurpose existing cognitive centers in our brains when exposed to new situations. That’s how we learn to speak a foreign language, to juggle, or to play the guitar.

Mastery is distinct from learning — The first few weeks when you are trying to learn to play the drums can be humbling, and lead to a lot of bad music. The rule of thumb called the ‘10,000 hour rule’ — made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers — suggests that for many sorts of complex behaviors, like getting a black belt, ten years of very regular practice is a baseline. And while the white belt may be learning valuable skills, he may be no better in a bar room brawl than an average person, and perhaps worse, since her new training may actually slow her responses as she responds intellectually to the situation: her karate is not second nature, yet.

So, the assumption of much of the popular discourse about multitasking is that the cognitive adaptation that happens when we are grappling with wired world is, at base, bad. The reality is that we are always learning, always adapting. Underlying this sense that multitasking is bad is the industrial ideal of personal productivity: we are supposed to be heads down, doing purposeful work as much as possible, and not being distracted by other things that are not relevant to the task at hand. Anything that distracts us from that is an annoyance.

However, the fact is that people need to balance task-oriented work — like writing this post — with the thinking and learning that informs the work and my ability to perform it — like reading the scientific studies cited in Richtel’s article, and thinking about what it means. Or answering the phone while I am writing the post, because I have been trying to close the loop with someone for several days, and this is him calling.

The world is too rich and varied to imagine that there is a path through it where we can simplify our activities to a series of programmed single-tasking activities. So clearly there is a balance. And I propose the following maxim: each person can multitask successfully to some degree, and our ability to multitask is a combination of innate and learned behaviors.

Much of the evidence that Richtel cites — when stripped of the moralistic preaching about media consumption rotting our minds: the usual war on flow stuff — accords with my maxim.

As Richtel cites:

Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity.

[… much of the technical discussion in the article is spread all over]

At the University of Rochester, researchers found that players of some fast-paced video games can track the movement of a third more objects on a screen than nonplayers. They say the games can improve reaction and the ability to pick out details amid clutter.

“In a sense, those games have a very strong both rehabilitative and educational power,” said the lead researcher, Daphne Bavelier, who is working with others in the field to channel these changes into real-world benefits like safer driving.

What leads these better players to be better? Playing more games? Playing more games against better players? Better teaching from friends? Better genes?

Other research shows computer use has neurological advantages. In imaging studies, Dr. Small observed that Internet users showed greater brain activity than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural circuitry.

Many studies show that online activity — like reading — involves more of the brain than reading a book, for example. It seems we are thinking more critically while online, despite all the opportunities for distraction.

And Richtel only touches on one topic for a paragraph, and does not dig into the actual research involved. It seems that at least some people can in fact drive a car and talk on the phone at the same time: Supertaskers.

Preliminary research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These “supertaskers” represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists at the University of Utah.

That’s it? No mention of who these people are, or what sort of multitasking is involved? No suppositions?

Nope. Richtel wants to get back to his agenda, which is making the case against multitasking.

So I dug up the research which was conducted by Jason M. Watson and David L. Strayer at the University of Utah (Supertaskers: Profiles In Extraordinary Multitasking Ability), instead of just reading other reporters slander the authors. Watson and Strayer tested 200 subjects in a controlled fashion, and determined that 2.5% of the group could in fact drive in a difficult car simulation while conversing on the phone without significant loss of ability of the individual tasks. The ‘conversing on the phone’ wasn’t just talking about TV: it was a complex set of behaviors called OSPAN tasks, like remembered lists of items while performing mathematical calculations.

The authors state, unequivocally:

Supertaskers are not a statistical fluke. The single-task performance of supertaskers was in
the top quartile, so the superior performance in dual-task conditions cannot be attributed to regression to the mean. However, it is important to note that being a supertasker is more than just being good at the individual tasks. While supertaskers performed well in single-task conditions, they excelled at multi-tasking.

This means that there are some of us who can drive and talk on the phone safely. And it seems like their superpower is multitasking itself, not just the ability to do these two specific things together.

Obviously, much more research is needed to determine what goes into this. I am going to suggest a few ideas though.

Being good at multitasking draws on more than one cognitive center — I doubt they will find a single gene or region of the brain responsible for multitasking. Like most complex cognitive function, it will involve some extremely diffused network of interaction in our mind. What we have learned about the minds of musicians and zen monks will be related, in some direct way.

No matter who you are, you can get better at multitasking — This will turn out to be like other human activities that involve mastery: it will take a long time, and it is better to have a teacher who is a master. Thinking hard about moving your hands fast — like the barroom challenge of tying to catch a dollar bill between your outstretched fingers — doesn’t work. The only thing that makes your hands move faster is practice: ten years of practice.

The fear mongers will tell us that the web, our wired devices, and remaining connected are bad for us. It will break down the nuclear family, lead us away from the church, and channel our motivations in strange and unsavory ways. They will say it’s like drugs, gambling, and overeating, that it’s destructive and immoral.

But the reality is that we are undergoing a huge societal change, one that is as fundamental as the printing press or harnessing fire. Yes, human cognition will change, just as becoming literate changed us. Yes, our sense of self and our relationships to others will change, just as it did in the Renaissance. Because we are moving into a multiphrenic world — where the self is becoming a network ‘of multiple socially constructed roles shaping and adapting to diverse contexts’ — it is no surprise that we are adapting by becoming multitaskers.

The presence of supertaskers does not mean that some are inherently capable of multitasking and others are not. Like all human cognition, this is going to be a bell-curve of capability. The test that Watson and Strayer devised only pulled out the supertaskers: the one with zero cognitive costs from multitasking. There are others in the text who had a slight cost, and others with higher costs.

Who among us are the most capable multitaskers, and in a position to teach the others? It may not be the case that the specific subjects in Watson and Strayer’s study are the best to teach others how to multitask, but it’s likely that some supertaskers out there are also good teachers.

Expect this to be a hot trend: parents sending their children off to supertasking classes after school, to get a jump on the new century.

The furor about the Facebook Privacygate continues, with all sorts of people making grand pronouncements:

Henry Blodgett, Ignore The Screams—Facebook’s Aggressive Approach Is Why It Will Soon Become The Most Popular Site In The World

Facebook often shares way more information with the world than its users know, expect, or want.  It consistently approaches innovation and privacy changes with a do-it-first-and-then-see-what-happens attitude, which enrages those who feel it should ask permission first.  And it has often done a bad job of explaining to users what it is doing, why, and when, as well as what control users have over this.

But Facebook’s aggressiveness on the privacy front is a big reason for the site’s success. The company will survive the latest PR flap, just as it has survived all the other PR flaps. And unless the latest blow-up scares it into changing its ways (let’s hope not), Facebook will continuing growing like a weed until it is by far the most popular web site in the world (and note what “most popular” means: It means that, despite the howling of a tiny minority, more people choose to spend more time on Facebook than any other site in the world).

From a business perspective, in other words, Facebook’s approach to innovation is smart. It’s not always popular, but it works. And if Facebook wants to maintain its competitive edge, it will do what it has to do to smooth over the latest blow-up, and then go forth with the same approach and attitude it has had all along.

Step back and think about what Facebook is doing here.  It is pioneering an entirely new kind of service, one that most of its users have never seen before, one with no established practices or rules.  It is innovating in an area—the fine line between public and private—that has always freaked people out. It is allowing people to communicate and share information in ways they never have before. It is making decisions that affect hundreds of millions of people.  And it is trying to stay a step ahead of competitors that would like nothing better than to see it get scared and conservative and thus leave itself open to getting knocked off.

[…]

As loud as the recent screams have been, they will likely be forgotten in a month.  If they aren’t forgotten, Facebook can just roll back some of the changes that freak people out the most, just as it did a few years ago with Beacon, but keep the rest.

I actually don’t buy this argument at all. Facebook was growing very quickly with it’s old school form of privacy controls. It’s only after Twitter rejected Zuckerberg’s offers that he decided to throw privacy totally out the window, and subsequent privacy policy changes have enraged nearly everyone that understands what’s going on. It is not smart to disregard the serious issues here, hunker down in a PR bomb shelter for a few weeks, and then get back to pissing everyone off.

I also don’t agree that Facebook is pioneering something totally new; there have been literally dozens of social networking sites with millions of users, and they all have privacy policies of some description.

I do agree with Blodgett that there is a fine line between privacy and publicy, but I don’t see that taking a pause to figure out what exactly the Facebook’s privacy policies should be cedes competitive space to competitors. And even if it does, it should be done, anyway.

Innovation should not lead to users feeling that they are being raped, even if Blodgett and other boosters think it makes for good business.

danah boyd moves in a quite opposite direction, suggesting that Facebook has become a social utility, and therefore should be regulated:

danah boyd, Facebook Is A Utility; Utilities Get Regulated

Throughout Kirkpatrick’s “The Facebook Effect”, Zuckerberg and his comrades are quoted repeated as believing that Facebook is different because it’s a social utility. This language is precisely what’s used in the “About Facebook” on Facebook’s Press Room page. Facebook never wanted to be a social network site; it wanted to be a social utility. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Facebook functions as a utility.

And yet, people continue to be surprised. Partially, this is Facebook’s fault. They know that people want to hear that they have a “choice” and most people don’t think choice when they think utility. Thus, I wasn’t surprised that Elliot Schrage’s fumbling responses in the NYTimes emphasized choice, not utility: “Joining Facebook is a conscious choice by vast numbers of people who have stepped forward deliberately and intentionally to connect and share… If you’re not comfortable sharing, don’t.”

In my post yesterday, I emphasized that what’s at stake with Facebook today is not about privacy or publicity but informed consent and choice. Facebook speaks of itself as a utility while also telling people they have a choice. But there’s a conflict here. We know this conflict deeply in the United States. When it comes to utilities like water, power, sewage, Internet, etc., I am constantly told that I have a choice. But like hell I’d choose Comcast if I had a choice. Still, I subscribe to Comcast. Begrudgingly. Because the “choice” I have is Internet or no Internet.

[…]

Your gut reaction might be to tell me that Facebook is not a utility. You’re wrong. People’s language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago. Facebook may not be at the scale of the Internet (or the Internet at the scale of electricity), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not angling to be a utility or quickly becoming one. Don’t forget: we spent how many years being told that the Internet wasn’t a utility, wasn’t a necessity… now we’re spending what kind of money trying to get universal broadband out there without pissing off the monopolistic beasts because we like to pretend that choice and utility can sit easily together. And because we’re afraid to regulate.

And here’s where we get to the meat of why Facebook being a utility matters. Utilities get regulated. Less in the United States than in any other part of the world. Here, we like to pretend that capitalism works with utilities. We like to “de-regulate” utilities to create “choice” while continuing to threaten regulation when the companies appear too monopolistic. It’s the American Nightmare. But generally speaking, it works, and we survive without our choices and without that much regulation. We can argue about whether or not regulation makes things cheaper or more expensive, but we can’t argue about whether or not regulators are involved with utilities: they are always watching them because they matter to the people.

[…]

I cannot imagine that Facebook wants to be regulated, but I fear that it thinks that it won’t be. There’s cockiness in the air. Personally, I don’t care whether or not Facebook alone gets regulated, but regulation’s impact tends to extend much further than one company.  […] I just wish that Facebook would’ve taken a more responsible path so that we wouldn’t have to deal with what’s coming. And I wish that they’d realize that the people they’re screwing are those who are most vulnerable already, those whose voices they’ll never hear if they don’t make an effort.

danah takes the metaphor of being a ‘utility’ instead of an application to the logical conclusion. Other applications certainly have that characteristic, like instant messaging. Back when AOL was acquiring Times Warner the Justice Department considered AOL’s dominance in IM as a societal issue, and blocked AOL from adding voice and video support for years afterward, allowing Yahoo and MSN a competitive advantage. In essence, the Justice department was regulating that industry to ensure fairness and choice for users.

A similar case can be made for social networking, today. When so many people rely on these services — like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter — to work and play, and the actions of the largest players in this space impact hundreds of millions worldwide, and perhaps a hundred million or more US citizens, the US government should be involved in regulating this corner of the communications landscape.

If the government takes the side of the individual in the debate about Net Neutrality, certainly it must take the side of the individual in the face of actions taken by companies like Facebook that can cause societal harm. It is insufficient, as danah states, to say to users ‘You don’t like how we are running our application? Fine, just quit!’ The phone company is not allowed to do that, and neither are internet providers, or the electric company.

I’m with danah: this marketplace is ripe for regulation and reform. New and untried forms of advertising based on strip mining users’ information, considered private only a few months ago, need to be examined closely, not matter how happy they make VCs and market mavens like Henry Blodgett.

We are moving quickly into a web where people are voluntarily sharing more and more personal information, a world based increasingly on publicy instead of privacy. This transition is happening by the decisions of millions, on an independent basis, when they reveal their location, their purchasing preferences, or what they ate for lunch. But, as I wrote the other day,

Even though I am an advocate for publicy — living life in the open on the web — I am by no means an advocate for having it jammed down our throats by a unilateral change in the Terms Of Service agreement by a powerful corporation.

from Facebook Apologists Miss The Point: Facebook Isn’t The Future

Fred Wilson parses the situation pretty succinctly:

Fred Wilson, Privacy and the Treacherous Middle Ground

 The problem Facebook is having right now is that they are sort of private and sort of public. I think of them as a public channel. I don’t post anything to Facebook that I don’t want everyone to see. But that is not how many of their users see them. I believe Facebook is going to have to choose to be either totally public or totally private or they are going to gradually cede their social graph to services that stake out the totally public or totally private territory.

Privacy is pretty black and white. It either is or it isn’t. And trying to have it both ways won’t work.

Amen.

The recent furor about Facebook’s privacy policy changes is the outcome of several factors, the most glaring of which is Facebook’s apparent venality. They seem to consider the formerly private information that users squirrel away on their servers the way the energy industry looks at oil underground: a resource to be mined and exploited for their personal benefit, with little regard for others.

I think that efforts by apologists like Mark Ingram fail: trying to assert a balance between the aspirations of an aggressive company and the need for users to remain aware of changing privacy policies is pseudo rational:

Matthew Ingram, The Relationship Between Facebook and Privacy: It’s Really Complicated

The tension between Facebook and its users — and governments, and advocacy groups — over privacy is one of the biggest thorns in the company’s side right now, as it tries to balance the demands of the network (and of advertisers) with the desires of users, and with the law. And all of this is taking place in an environment where the very meaning of what is “private” and what is “public” is being redefined, by Facebook and other online giants such as Google, and even users themselves sometimes can’t decide what information they want to share with the world and what they don’t.

Over the past few weeks, the social network has been caught at the center of a privacy maelstrom, with consumer groups attacking it — 15 of them filed a formal letter of complaint with the Federal Trade Commission late yesterday — senators sending threatening letters, and growing numbers of users canceling or deactivating their accounts over privacy concerns. The company has been struggling to respond to security holes that expose private data such as chats, and a survey released yesterday by Consumer Reports says that more than 50 percent of people engage in what it calls “risky behavior” on the social network. Another survey of Facebook users finds that their use of the network is inherently shallow and largely unfulfilling.

Even as he is being hailed as a billionaire genius akin to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the empire Mark Zuckerberg has built seems to be taking fire from critics on all sides. But is all of this criticism fair? Probably not. It’s true that Facebook’s launch of recent changes involving “instant personalization” and the creation of community pages related to users’ profile interests has been badly handled. And it doesn’t help that many people are confused by how to adjust their privacy settings, how to control what information is displayed, and how to disable applications (we put together a comprehensive guide to the new changes and how to disable them if you want to).

But it’s also true that Facebook exists, and has accumulated almost half a billion users worldwide, because it makes it easy for people to connect with their friends and family and to share things with them: photos, thoughts, social games, goofy gifts and yes, even birth dates. Plenty of people clearly want to do this, even after they have been repeatedly warned about the risks, because they believe the trade-off is worth it. And perhaps Facebook doesn’t make it as clear as it could what is involved, or how to fine-tune its privacy controls — but at the same time, some of the onus for doing these things has to fall to users.

Except that the behemoth in this case specifically doesn’t care about the implications of privacy policy changes in the lives of individuals: they have a mass relationship with the millions of users who are being treated like cattle.

So Matthew’s arguments — and others — just don’t cast a lot of light on the issues here, because they are too narrow and too specific to Facebook.

Let me lay out a few threads that I think frame this situation.

The Rise Of Publicy

Facebook’s shifting policy from private as default to public as default is a reflection of the open web. Twitter, in particular, has always been based on a public model, where the default modality is that all information is public unless you go to great lengths to conceal it. Executives of Twitter have gone so far as to say they wanted to publish a publicy policy instead of a privacy policy, but couldn’t because of legal requirements (see A Publicy Policy, Not A Privacy Policy).

So, we have seen a very rapid change in people’s thinking about how and how much to share with others. Perhaps that’s why Matthew Ingram thinks we have to lay some of the ‘blame’ on the users.

However, because Facebook is in a sense trying to track a general shift in the web, it is such a large player — and with so many users that aren’t at the forefront of this trend — a lot of innocent fingers are getting crushed in the machinery.

I think Jarvis is onto something when he says that Facebook has lost the difference between the Public and Publics:

Jeff Jarvis, Confusing *a* public with *the* public

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it’s public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private. Therein lies the confusion. Making that public public is what disturbs people. It robs them of their sense of control—and their actual control—of what they were sharing and with whom (no matter how many preferences we can set). On top of that, collecting our actions elsewhere on the net—our browsing and our likes—and making that public, too, through Facebook, disturbed people even more. Where does it end?

Facebook has been playing this tension since its early days. Remember the hubbub over News Feed: When Facebook aggregated our updates into feeds, it freaked users, even though Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that all these updates were already visible to us among our friends on their pages. Zuckerberg’s vision was right in the end; the News Feed is critical to Facebook’s utility, value, and growth and it presaged the appeal of Twitter. But even in the public Twitter, even though we are publishing to the world, we still have a measure of control; we decide whom to follow—that is, which publics to join.

So let me repeat: In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone. Yet Facebook is pushing us more and more to publish to everyone and when it does, we lose control of our publics. That, I think, is the line it crossed.

Jarvis confuses things a bit with the various uses of ‘public’, but to restate: when I share things with connections on Facebook I don’t think of it as publishing the NYTimes. It is a social sharing with a specific social network of friends. But Zuckerberg and Co want to imagine everything going to everyone, thus obliterating social scale and tearing down any notion of socially afforded privacy.

Facebook As A Tonedeaf Velociraptor

The comparisons of Zuckerberg with Bill Gates are apt in one regard: he could care less that he is taking policy steps that benefit him to the detriment of users. Gates and Microsoft fought court cases for decades about monopolistic and illegal practices, and we can expect the same to be the case with Facebook, starting with the 15+ suits brought against them in recent weeks.

Zuckerberg wanted to buy Twitter because he was convinced that the open follower model was better than the Facebook architecture in the long run, and he has been pushing to rework Facebook into a system based on publicy rather than privacy ever since. To Zuckerberg, the users aren’t even pieces on the chess board, they are dust underneath the pawns. He’s playing against Ev Williams and Google: he doesn’t give a fig what other people think of him.

As a result, he will continue to delight with Asberger-ish interviews and one liners, like ‘Privacy is dead.’

Facebook Is Not The New Microsoft

So, Facebook might be the new Microsoft, except they don’t have a monopoly on something we absolutely need, like Windows or Office. (Well, we actually didn’t need those either, but it took a long time to get there.)

So a lot of people are simply bailing out. I stopped using Facebook for all intents and purposes several years ago, although I still have an account. My social needs are met by Twitter and blogging, so I haven’t gone through the disruptions of the past few turns of the wheel at Facebook.

We can simply say no. Facebook isn’t essential to life. It’s not even the same Facebook you were using a few months ago. Facebook is betting on people not leaving. Well, that’s what MySpace thought, too.

Open and Governance

There has been no credible open source alternatives to any serious social tool. There has been no open source, wikipedia-like music site, photo sharing site, or video sharing site: the bandwidth and legal issues are too large. There have been attempts for open source movements — like Identica — but they have made little progress in a market dominated by for-profit players. So I don’t think calls for an open Facebook (like Ryan Singel’s) will catch fire.

Perhaps the real question isn’t about ownership, or even privacy, per se: perhaps the real issue is governance. What rights do users have when they are using a service that is owned and operated by a private company? Can the company make policy changes at will? Do the users have recourse if such changes are perceived as harming the users?

Consider the unilateral decision of Twitter to change the sematics of @mentions or the way that retweet (RT) works: many were upset by these changes, and Twitter responded with more grace than Facebook, but that’s a low bar to set.

I think it would behoove any major player to create a user oversight board, made up of users, to help thrash out these sort of issues in advance of any launch of controversial features on an unprepared user community. I don’t believe Facebook will do that, but Twitter and other players might.

Last Word

Publicy is here to stay. It’s just too bad that the fall of privacy will forever be associated with Facebook’s maladroit market moves instead of the benefits of an open web largely built on publicy.

A new set of changes to Facebook privacy system is being proposed. Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch zooms into the most questionable change: Facebook shifted a few months ago into making ‘everyone’ the default sharing option (see Facebook Wants To Be Twitter). Now, they are shifting the definition of ‘everyone’ to include third party apps that you haven’t explicitly opted into.

Jason Kincaid, Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For

In short, it sounds like Facebook is going to be automatically opting users into a reduced form of Facebook Connect on certain third party sites — a bold change that may well unnerve users, at least at first. Here’s how Facebook is describing the change in its blog post:

Today, when you use applications such as games on Facebook.com or choose to connect to Facebook on sites across the web, you are able to find and interact with your friends. These applications require a small set of basic information about you in order to provide a relevant experience. After feedback from many of you, we announced in August that we were moving toward a model that gives you clearer controls over what data is shared with applications and websites when you choose to use them.

In the proposed privacy policy, we’ve also explained the possibility of working with some partner websites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience at the moment you visit the site. In such instances, we would only introduce this feature with a small, select group of partners and we would also offer new controls.

So what does that mean? We’ve heard that select Facebook partners will now be able to look for your existing Facebook cookie to identify you, even if you never opted into Facebook Connect on the site you’re visiting. Using that, the third party site will be able to display your friends and other key information. It’s possible that these sites will also be able to display any data you’ve shared with ‘everyone‘, which is of course now the default option on Facebook.

Facebook’s draft privacy policy states that you’ll be able to opt-out of these sites, and you’ll also be able to opt-out of these ‘pre-approved’ experiences entirely. But by default, you’re all in. How convenient.

I looked over the proposed privacy document. In short: a great deal of stylistic modifications, and what appear to be substantive changes to the sharing section, among others. Here’s the proposed language, with my comments:

3. Sharing information on Facebook.

This section explains how your privacy settings work, and how your information is shared on Facebook. You should always consider your privacy settings before sharing information on Facebook.

Name and Profile Picture. Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to find and connect with others. For this reason, your name and profile picture do not have privacy settings. If you are uncomfortable with sharing your profile picture, you should delete it (or not add one). You can also control who can find you when searching on Facebook or on public search engines using your search settings.

Remember, this defaults to ‘everyone’ and the only other options are ‘friends’ and ‘friends of friends’. Not a lot of fine grained controls.

Contact Information. Your contact information settings control who can contact you on Facebook, and who can see your contact information such as your email and phone number(s). Remember that none of this information is required except for your email address, and you do not have to share your email address with anyone.

Personal Information. Your personal information settings control who can see your personal information, such as your religious and political views, if you choose to add them. We recommend that you share this information using the friends of friends setting.

Posts by Me. You can select a privacy setting for every post you make using the publisher on our site. Whether you are uploading a photo or posting a status update, you can control exactly who can see it at the time you create it. Whenever you share something look for the lock icon. Clicking on the lock will bring up a menu that lets you choose who will be able to see your post. If you decide not to select your setting at the time you post the content, your content will be shared consistent with your Posts by Me privacy setting.

Connections. Facebook enables you to connect with virtually anyone or anything you want, from your friends and family to the city you live in to the restaurants you like to visit to the bands and movies you love. Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

Gender and Birth Date. In addition to name and email address, we require you to provide your gender and birth date during the registration process. We ask for your date of birth to verify that you are 13 or older, and so that we can better limit your access to content and advertisements that are not age appropriate. Because your date of birth and gender are required, you cannot delete them. You can, however, edit your profile to hide all (or part) of such fields from other users.

Other. Here are some other things to remember:

• Some of the content you share and the actions you take will show up on your friends’ home pages and other pages they visit.

And if those pages are public, so is the information your published ‘only to friends’?

• If another user tags you in a photo or video or at a place, you can remove the tag. You can also limit who can see that you have been tagged on your profile from your privacy settings.

How will you be notified about the tagging? Do you have to discover it on your own?

• Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.


• You understand that information might be reshared or copied by other users.


• Certain types of communications that you send to other users cannot be removed, such as messages.

I think the list of communications of this sort — that can’t be deleted — should be fully enumerated.

• When you post information on another user’s profile or comment on another user’s post, that information will be subject to the other user’s privacy settings.


• If you use an external source to publish information to Facebook (such as a mobile application or a Connect site), you should check the privacy setting for that post, as it is set by that external source.

“Everyone” Information. Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, just like your name, profile picture, and connections. Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), be indexed by third party search engines, and be imported, exported, distributed, and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations. Such information may also be associated with you, including your name and profile picture, even outside of Facebook, such as on public search engines and when you visit other sites on the internet. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete “everyone” content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook.

Minors. We reserve the right to add special protections for minors (such as to provide them with an age-appropriate experience) and place restrictions on the ability of adults to share and connect with minors, recognizing this may provide minors a more limited experience on Facebook.

So: it looks like there is a very murky area here. You have control over who can access your information (in part), but once your friends or others have access to the information, there are limited controls on what happens to it. Certain information — communications — can’t be deleted. And so-called ‘general information’ name, photo, and the list of your friends is publicly available no matter what you do.

And the second bit of murkiness: what can third parties do?

4. Information You Share With Third Parties.

Facebook Platform. As mentioned above, we do not own or operate the applications or websites that use Facebook Platform. That means that when you use those applications and websites you are making your Facebook information available to someone other than Facebook. Prior to allowing them to access any information about you, we require them to agree to terms that limit their use of your information (which you can read about in Section 9 of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities) and we use technical measures to ensure that they only obtain authorized information. To learn more about Platform, visit our About Platform page.

These third parties agree to fairly stringent terms, but the tough question is always ‘how do we know that they are in fact not using this information for other, nefarious purposes?’

Connecting with an Application or Website. When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. We may also make information about the location of your computer or access device and your age available to applications and websites in order to help them implement appropriate security measures and control the distribution of age-appropriate content. If the application or website wants to access any other data, it will have to ask for your permission.

We give you tools to control how your information is shared with applications and websites that use Platform. For example, you can block specific applications from accessing your information by visiting your application settings or the application’s “About” page. You can also use your privacy settings to limit which of your information is available to “everyone”.

You should always review the policies of third party applications and websites to make sure you are comfortable with the ways in which they use information you share with them. We do not guarantee that they will follow our rules. If you find an application or website that violates our rules, you should report the violation to us on this help page and we will take action as necessary.

Ok, they are giving third party apps access to general info, location, and public information. Seems benign.

When your friends use Platform. If your friend connects with an application or website, it will be able to access your name, profile picture, gender, user ID, and information you have shared with “everyone.” It will also be able to access your connections, except it will not be able to access your friend list. If you have already connected with (or have a separate account with) that website or application, it may also be able to connect you with your friend on that application or website. If the application or website wants to access any of your other content or information (including your friend list), it will have to obtain specific permission from your friend. If your friend grants specific permission to the application or website, it will generally only be able to access content and information about you that your friend can access. In addition, it will only be allowed to use that content and information in connection with that friend. For example, if a friend gives an application access to a photo you only shared with your friends, that application could allow your friend to view or print the photo, but it cannot show that photo to anyone else.

We provide you with a number of tools to control how your information is shared when your friend connects with an application or website. For example, you can use your application privacy settings to limit some of the information your friends can make available to applications and websites. You can also block particular applications or websites from accessing your information. You can use your privacy settings to limit which friends can access your information, or limit which of your information is available to “everyone.” You can also disconnect from a friend if you are uncomfortable with how they are using your information.

Here it states that third party apps when used by your friends won’t have access to your friend list. But those apps do have access to the info that you are connected to your friend, so that datum *is* available.

And then, the indigestible part: Pre-Approved Third-Party Applications.

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications. In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website). In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy. For example, these agreements include provisions relating to the access and deletion of your General Information, along with your ability to opt-out of the experience being offered. You can also remove any pre-approved website or application you have visited here [add link], or block all pre-approved websites and applications from getting your General Information when you visit them here [add link]. In addition, if you log out of Facebook before visiting a pre-approved application or website, it will not be able to access your information. You can see a complete list of pre-approved websites on our About Platform page.

These pre-approved apps *do* have access to your friend list, and other general information, without you agreeing to it in advance. You may only discover this when you visit some website — while still logged into Facebook — and all of a sudden the site is telling you about your friends, or recommending stuff that is suitable to someone of your age, location, and with this particular groups of friends who like karaoke or bowling.

The social networking equivalent of a shotgun wedding.

Does the ‘complete list’ never change? How will I be informed when new third parties may have access to my information? Do I have to visit that site frequently?

Exporting Information. You (and those you make your information available to) may use tools like RSS feeds, mobile phone address book applications, or copy and paste functions, to capture, export (and in some cases, import) information from Facebook, including your information and information about you. For example, if you share your phone number with your friends, they may use third party applications to sync that information with the address book on their mobile phone.

Advertisements. Sometimes the advertisers who present ads on Facebook use technological methods to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. You may opt-out of the placement of cookies by many of these advertisers here. You may also use your browser cookie settings to limit or prevent the placement of cookies by advertising networks.

Oh, and advertisers can use their own cookies to maintain a dossier on us.

Links. When you click on links on Facebook you may leave our site. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites, and we encourage you to read their privacy statements.

***

So, a slippery slope.

Facebook’s privacy policy is a strange hybrid of a bunch of contending forces, where none is the defining modality, and the result is a goopy quicksand. Those forces?

Private, Personal Relationships — Facebook was originally conceived of as a way for individuals to connect with other people that were likely to be, or could possibly be, real-world, face-to-face contacts, like two students at the same college. In this way, much of the base platform was — and still is — based around an intuitive notion of friendship, and the transitive relationship of ‘friend of friend’. Even the original notion of ‘everyone’ seemed like it meant other people who use the service as private individuals, not third partie apps, advertisers, or people standing in for companies or brands.

Corporate Strip Malling Of Social Networks — When corporations create accounts and build facebook pages and groups, which we can ‘friend’ or follow we are dramatically shifting the social contract around private, personal relationships into something very very different. And it changes everything.

Publicy Eroding Privacy — When Facebook changed the default sharing option to ‘everyone’ — where ‘everyone’ includes all entities now and in the future that are allowed to operate in the system, in essense the trend is toward full openness and the end of privacy. It is not happening all at once — because of the pressure of governments and watchdogs — but the likely end state is somewhere at the other end of the proavcy/publicy spectrum from where Facebook started.

Preapproved Third Parties — Facebook has created a class of third parties — presumably using Facebook Connect to augment their own websites — who have access to a greater degree of your ‘general information’, which is a synonym for information that you don’t control unless you delete it. This includes your friends list, so a wide variety of third parties will be able to socially market to us (if we use Facebook).

Where will this lead? Facebook is engineering a social setting where it has the rights to use all the public information and the general (uncontrollable) information you provide, however it wants. It is selling access to the information that it captures about our social networks to preapproaved third parties, and it allows corporations to mingle with us, in ways we don’t exactly fathom but which are some strange mutated version of friendship. Advertisers can gather all sorts of click data, or snoop on what pages we visit and when.

My recommendation is to operate on a full publicy mindset, even if Facebook seems to be safeguarding various sorts of privacy in very convoluted ways.

Just pretend this is the Facebook privacy policy, and you can’t go wrong:

There is no privacy on Facebook. Everything you create, access, or share is public. The fact that you looked at a page, created something or deleted it, and any relationship you agree to is public. We reserve the right to do anything with any information we can capture about you, or any information you offer about yourself or any of your ‘friends’ on the system. We reserve the right to make anyone or any corporation a user of the system, and they can conceal their reasons for being there or their intentions for how they will use any public information about you or your friends, which is all inforrmation on the system because nothing is private, even when we use the work ‘private’. Private is public.

While I am an advocate for, and a believer in a more public, open, and transparent web, I am concerned at the Orwellian overtones in Facebook. There is so much potential revenue in the gray between real privacy and this intermediate model,  where various sorts of snooping into our social relationships are attractive to advertisers and corporations. But the only way this can be monetized is to sell seats at the peephole, to let them peak in on things that feel private, but aren’t.

So just pretend it’s all very public and merchantile; but ask yourself if you want to live life in a mall under the security camers and the fluorescent lights.

I am happy to be public, myself, but I would rather do it in a setting that feels like a bustling plaza, a place that seems dedicated to the principles of open social discourse, rather than a place that is strip-mining our social connection and selling it off to hucksters by the truck load.

Umair Haque makes an economist’s argument about the devaluation of relationships because of social media, suggesting that what is going on, here, online is not as cool as the social media gurus would have us believe. He compares this to the real estate bubble:

Umair Haque, The Social Media Bubble

On the demand side, relationship inflation creates beauty contest effects, where, just as every judge votes for the contestant they think the others will like the best, people transmit what they think others want. On the supply side, relationship inflation creates popularity contest effects, where people (and artists) strive for immediate, visceral attention-grabs — instead of making awesome stuff.

The social isn’t about beauty contests and popularity contests. They’re a distortion, a caricature of the real thing. It’s about trust, connection, and community. That’s what there’s too little of in today’s mediascape, despite all the hoopla surrounding social tools. The promise of the Internet wasn’t merely to inflate relationships, without adding depth, resonance, and meaning. It was to fundamentally rewire people, communities, civil society, business, and the state — through thicker, stronger, more meaningful relationships. That’s where the future of media lies.

I think, first off, Umair is undervaluing the utility of weak ties, which is what the socializing online largely creates. Mark Granovetter and others have shown that it is through those that we are weakly connected to that we are most likely to get a job or meet a future mate. Likewise, they are extremely important for the transmission of ideas across different social groups.

But the central point that Umair is making is that social media — or social tools in general — are not doing a great job in certain areas:

• Making strong ties stronger — He suggests that because we are creating and expending time on a growing number of weak ties then we are diminishing our involvement with intimates. I think this is debatable. While the time I spend writing this blog or twittering could in principle be applied to talking to loved ones directly, in reality many of my closest friends read this blog and my twitter stream to remain in contact with me, at no extra cost (here I am adopting Umair’s economics jargon). This in no way weakens my strongest ties, and certainly is the wellspring of thousands of weak ties.
• The power laws lead to popularity contests — Umair skews the logic of the power laws that underlie influence online. Yes, it is true that a small number of social media participants have exponentially greater influence than the rest, but this does not necessarily mean that what they are talking about is unimportant. It is not just Casablanca v Farmville, as he styles it. Thinkers like Larry Lessig and David Weinberger (and Umair and me, by the way) are sharpening their axes everyday, and having an impact. It isn’t all ‘10 tips for packing’ or Farmville.
• The social revolution is bigger than this — Maybe Umair is standing too close to the SxSW hoopla, and can’t see the changes that are going on. We are being changed, as individuals, as a society, and particularly mainstream media. But the largest impacts are still ahead of us.

I do agree with the shadow of his argument though, which is the fact that social tools don’t go far enough, and certain critical areas in social theory just haven’t percolated through at all.

I wrote several posts last year based on talks I gave on this theme: see Better Social Plumbing For The Social Web, and The New Spatialism. In the second, I advanced the idea that we need the equivalent of the new urbanism movement for social tools. Based on the (flawed) metaphor that we are creating something like a shared space online, I suggested that we need to be new spatialists. Just as the new urbanism movement rejected the massive and dehumanizing architectural approaches of the ’60s and ’70s, which led to the destruction of vibrant although noisy and messy neighborhoods, and replaced them with concentration camp-like highrise tenements and inhuman urban cores designed to streamline traffic instead of walking your dog.

Maybe that’s what Umair is hinting at: our existing social tools are making some things easy, but the hard things aren’t being done at all, or at least, not enough. Maybe he’s a new spatialist, and he wants more Kivas. Me too. But there are things like Ushahidi emerging, too.

***

Here’s a very different take on this, the talk I gave several times last year, but never wrote up. The notes accompanying each slide are included, and I have only updated them a little.

What? Yet another call to action?

I am going to intentionally push a metaphor a bit too far. However, in the past, whenever I created metaphors and overdid it, it has worked out. I suggested years ago that email would die off; there is more email than ever, but a generation has grown up that distrust it, and use it only as a last resort. I had an insight in 1999 that social tools would emerge as the dominant form of communication media, as we actively sought to shape culture, and today the most important advances in the web are deeply social.

Now, I am suggesting that what we think of as social has first of all, not gone far enough: it’s really not very social at all.

Second, I am afraid that the corporate types have moved in and commoditized the little bit of social that we got right.

And lastly, I end worrying about the governance of this social space we’ve emigrated to, on the web.

I am calling for a return to the basic principles of social tools, and a movement of web denizens — designers, developers, and the lowly, lowly users — to push hard to reclaim the web.

We may have to stop thinking about this using the mercantile model — software ‘products’ that we ‘use’. Social connection on the web is nothing like buying and ‘consuming’ kleenex or ketchup. The fact that we have repurposed the concepts of buying Excel or choosing an O/S on our computers may be leading us astray when we talk about and think about social software on the Web.

Ten years ago, when I started blogging, it wasn’t called blogging yet. I thought I was writing an ‘e-zine’ although it had all the characteristics of a blog: reverse chronological entries, categories, and so on.

We were like pioneers, fooling around out in the wilderness, cutting crude roads, building villages.

Relatively soon, however, this personal publishing by the fringe lunatics became big business and old media arrived. Now the leading ‘blogs’ are either run by old media giants, or bloggers who have become new media giants. Social media has been strip-malled. The funky soulfulness of the early days has been replaced by SEO, ad networks, and ersatz earnestness.

The reality is that so-called social media — even in its earlier, Birkenstock and granola days — wasn’t very social. We didn’t call it that until much later, anyway. We thought of it as personal publishing, and it adopted the basic dynamics of publishing. Most notably, there was a publisher or author and then there were readers. It seemed more egalitarian since anyone could be a publisher, but still there was a broadcast media dynamic despite the fact that anyone could argue or agree with someone else’s posts on their own blog. Then for a few years, we just called it blogging. Rhymes with slogging, because, in the final analysis, most people didn’t blog: too hard, too much work, not rewarding enough.

And the problem may be the publishing metaphor, itself.

But the format is perfect for publishing companies, which is why the largest ‘blogs’ now are generally corporate media machinery. And as the blogosphere has become an increasingly corporate neighborhood, people are moving out.

Sprawl = developer’s decisions in the face of a zoning system based on an earlier reaility, not taking into account the impacts dowstream, and which leads to way way suboptimal results.

Developers own the land, zoning doesn’t require sidewalks: ergo, no sidewalks.

I visted Noida, a suburb of New Delhi in India. I couldn’t understand why the streets did not meet at the same height at intersections. There was very commonly a gap, filled with sand, and the streets were of different heights. Turns out the developers of different blocks were building the streets, and there is no master plan. So there is a chaotic mess, which is sort of workable, but which is a hassle for hundreds of thousands of drivers everyday.

Using an analogy from city planning and architecture, we need a rethinking of the basics: something like the New Urbanism movement, that tried to reclaim shared urban space in a way that matches human needs, and moved away from gigantic and dehumanizing cityscapes of the mid and late twentieth century, where garbage trucks seemed more at home than a teenage girl walking a dog.

Note: this was a response to urban ‘renewal’, which led to the inhumanification of shared spaces: towering housing projects where diverse and active communities stood. And also to suburban sprawl and the rise of edge cities as many fled the ‘inner’ cities, and distanced themselves from their problems.

New urbanism is utopian because it (at is core) operates on the assumption that caring can be built into cityscapes, or dehumanizing behaviors (like ignoring the man bleeding on the sidewalk) can be avoided by getting the streets and parks right.

So, we need a New Spatialism movement, to rethink web media and reclaim the social space that is supposed to be central to so-called social media. Some web media may just remain what it is, like an industrial district at the edge of town. But at least some parts of web media should be reconceptualized, and reconstructed to get back to human scale. Just as New Urbanism is about organizing streets, sidewalks, and plazas to support the growth of social capital, New Spatialism would help us channel interactions on line to increase sociality, and thereby increase the growth of social capital.

New Spatialism is based on the idea that our primary motivations for being online are extra-market drivers: we are not online for money, principally. We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new culture and build a better, more resilient world, for ourselves.

And we need better media tools than we have at present, to make that a reality.

Deconstruction may be more important that new planned communities.

Now we are having an economic reset, and malls are being repurposed all over America. Many cities are being ‘rewilded’ where entire neighborhoods are being deconstructed and turned back into wilds, instead of block after block of abandoned residences.

(There’s real opportunities for urban food belts, too.)

I noticed a few years ago that comments seemed to be moving from blogs into faster paced social tools, like Facebook and then streaming apps like Twitter. (Twitter has become so popular that most of the competitors have closed shop). People are moving to where things are more social, where the author/audience divide is less sharp, and where the scale of interaction is human-sized. This is the new loft district: social networks.

Social networks are truly social, where web media isn’t, very.

Social networks are really about individuals and their personal relationships with others. So, if web media is to really become social — which it isn’t at present — we need to take what we have learned from other, more social tools, and take another run at social media.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common;
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

as Twitter has become the bedrock underlying a growing and dynamic neighborhood of the web, how will it be governed?

Side story about instant messaging interoperability — which we still don’t have. A world where Jabber — an open source standard — did not make real headway against AIM (and later Yahoo and MSN). The justice department failed at the AOL / Time Warner merger to force this. And we have all been disadvantaged as a result.

From one point of view, Twitter is an application owned and operated by Ev and his colleagues, and our use of the app is controlled by the terms of the service agreement we all checked ‘OK’ to. From this point of view, they are free to do whatever they want, and we have the freedom to take a hike if we don’t like it. Or gripe, or write a petition. But otherwise we have little recourse if in fact Twitter Inc. decides to screw up replies (the #fixreplies mess has *not* been resolved yet, by the way), or makes other changes to functionality that degrades our experience.

It may seem that we have no grounds for any sort of complaint. After all, it can be argued that we aren’t paying anything, just freeloading on their largess, and they have borne all the costs.

On the other hand, their astronomical valuations — what they are using to pull in hefty amounts of paid-in capital from investors — is directly related to our participation. Without us using Twitter, by the millions, Twitter would just be a bunch of software cogs in a cardboard box. It is our animation that makes Twitter worth a billion dollars, not just the cleverness of the developers and the openess of their APIs.

To a great extent, Twitter is ours, like the air we breathe.

So, how will Twitter be governed? As a tool owned by a company that is owned by the inventors and some wealthy investors? Or as a world in which we live, and in which we have inalienable rights?

The entertainment business tried to say they owned all art, all music, all movies. We know they are artifacts produced by our culture, which we share with the artists, and the controls that the entertainment business thought they had — copyright and DRM — have failed with the digital and web revolution.

So, here we have the same revolution, come home again. Twitter’s world — its conventions, meaning and use — is our artifact: we have built it, 140 characters at a time, just as the Twitter developers have been building the platform underneath our feet. But it is our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, and not the code.

***

I hope I can persuade Umair to think of this in new spatialist terms, not just looking at it through economics. It is the extra-market aspects that are the most interesting, and ‘quiet enjoyment’ of a city is not just about what it costs to live there.

If we want social tools to be more humane, to help us to be more human, we should talk about it in the broadest possible terms, and for me that’s anthropology, not economics.

I loved Minority Report’s gestural interface, as a scifi representation of what we think a police state might use to watch us, given the ability to move through a nearly infinite amount of data — and time — searching for clues.

Apparently, that interface is not just the stuff of Hollywood, as it appears that John Underkoffler, the guy that mocked up that experience for the movie, has been off actually building the system he literally is hand waving into existence.

MG Siegler thinks this represents the future of computing. I disagree, but first, MG’s thoughts:

- MG Siegler, The iPad Is Step 1 In The Future Of Computing. This Is Step 2 (Or 3).

While we may not have been at this year’s TED conference, apparently, Oblong was. And apparently, it wowed the crowd. And it should have. If you’ve seen the movie Minority Report, you’ve seen the system they’re building.

No, really. The co-founder of Oblong, John Underkoffler, is the man who came up with the gesture-based interface used in the Steven Spielberg movie. And now he’s building it in real life.

The demo I saw a couple years ago was stunning, but it was still just a video. Apparently, at TED, the audience got to see it in action. NYT’s Bits blog detailed some of it in a post yesterday. For those not at TED, Oblong has also made a few demo videos in the past, which I’ll embed below. Again, this is Minority Report.

Oblong’s coming out party couldn’t come at a better time. Following the unveiling of Apple’s iPad, there has been a lot of talk about the future of computing at a fundamental level. That is to say, after decades of dominance by the keyboard and mouse, we’re finally talking about other, more natural, methods of input. The iPad is one step to a multi-touch gesture system (as is this 10/GUI awesome demo), but this Oblong system is the next step beyond that.

I don’t believe that huge displays based on petabytes of information — like Cruise was surfing — is likely to be the prototypical user experience for normal people in the near term. In some narrowly defined industries — military, cinematography — such displays may be temporarily of interest. But the future of user experience is a logical extension of what we have been seeing in consumer electronics: a continued movement to small, mobile, and personal.

Yesterday, I posted a Nokia video that I think is much more true to life. I reproduce it here, again, in the form of the complete video, and an image pulled out.

complete video

one screenshot from the video

The Nokia example is based on a few assumptions:

Augmented reality glasses will become the standard user display — Instead of huge displays, hung on walls with giant panels, people will wear augmented reality glasses. These will display on the inside of the glass images that provide access to various sorts of information.

Displays will become less complex than today’s file/folder/desktop jumble, and interaction will be based on simple eye movements and gestures — User interaction will rely on eye tracking and gestural interfaces to represent selection, expansion, playing video or audio, and the like. In this example, the woman looks at the name of an artist in a playlist long enough and the environment interprets that as a selection. At some points in the demo she flicks her hand to represent clicking or scrolling. Note she doesn’t wear gloves or special hand gear: the glasses have cameras that watch her hands. They don’t show her doing it but either a generalized sign language could be used for more complex communications — more than selecting an emoticon, like she does — or a virtual keyboard could be displayed, and ‘keystrokes’ recorded, again, by the glasses observing our hands.

I don’t think that the grand gestural, ‘orchestra conductor’ sort of scenario that we saw in Minority Report will be the norm, although in specialized contexts — like gaming, war fighting, and brain surgery — those sorts of advanced gestural languages might be developed.

Social interaction with others will be the primary modality of all future operating environments, and other activities will principally be constructed to help filter and aggregate social channels — This is not well-represented in either the Nokia video or Minority Report. In the Nokia example, the woman is mostly dabbling with relatively conventional streams and stores — weather and news, and riffling through a music library — while occasionally being pinged by an overly attentive boyfriend. Imagine a more rich scenario of a marketing executive racing through the streets of New York, communicating with four colleagues in an open semi-public sort of way, with integrated information streams of plans, designs, and marketing campaign mockups. And at the same time receiving local augmented reality information about the streets she is passing through, like GPS coordinates, a map showing her destination and where her four colleagues are, offers from the food truck she passes, and a global stream of socialized news and information from her network of friends, fans, and connections.

***

This can be condensed to the shorthand: not a wall, a world.

The steampunk idea that we will continue to have displays like today’s TV screens or PC monitors is dubious. I would give up mine in a heartbeat. More important, there is a world out there, and amplifying what we are already looking at — like the street we are walking on — with relevant information — like where the bus stop is, or what kind of food that restaurant serves — is so obviously helpful it doesn’t really need to be motivated.

We will continue to have personal and mobile computing experiences in the near future, because mostly we work and play on personal devices. Yes, there is the occasional meeting in a face to face setting where currently we use large displays, but this will be replaced by shared augmented reality: a presentation, for example, could be controlled by one person (or more) and viewed by a larger group. But this wouldn’t be projected on the wall, necessarily. Instead, it would be shared via each attendee’s glasses. We might be looking at a blank wall, or we might be walking through a virtual representation of a building being designed, or a product being assembled.

Amplifying the social through this sort of user experience would be phenomenal. Wandering around at a business meeting, a party, or a conference, and seeing salient information about the people you are looking at — where they work, when you last talked, the names of their loved ones, their pet peeves, whether they follow you and know of your work — would be an immense help. And would potentially change the nature of our social contract in startling ways. This is what I am expecting to appear, and very soon. Not 2045.

Recently, David Carr wrote a piece called Why Twitter Will Endure, in which he expressed some surprise at his own conversion to Twitter advocate:

On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.

The most frequent objection to Twitter is a predictable one: “I don’t need to know someone is eating a donut right now.” But if that someone is a serious user of Twitter, she or he might actually be eating the curmudgeon’s lunch, racing ahead with a clear, up-to-the-second picture of an increasingly connected, busy world. The service has obvious utility for a journalist, but no matter what business you are in, imagine knowing what the thought leaders in your industry were reading and considering. And beyond following specific individuals, Twitter hash tags allow you to go deep into interests and obsession: #rollerderby, #physics, #puppets and #Avatar, to name just a few of many thousands.

The act of publishing on Twitter is so friction-free — a few keystrokes and hit send — that you can forget that others are out there listening. I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)

Like many newbies on Twitter, I vastly overestimated the importance of broadcasting on Twitter and after a while, I realized that I was not Moses and neither Twitter nor its users were wondering what I thought. Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.

Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to.

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.

Carr’s piece stirred some yowling in the commentariat, in particular a post from George Packer that casts Twitter as the worst part of a world moving too fast:

- George Packer, Stop The World

The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell. I’m told that Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. Twitter sounds less like sipping than drowning.

The most frightening picture of the future that I’ve read thus far in the new decade has nothing to do with terrorism or banking or the world’s water reserves—it’s an article by David Carr, the Times’s media critic, published on the decade’s first day, called “Why Twitter Will Endure.” “I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible,” Carr wrote. And: “Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people.” And: “The real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice … the throbbing networked intelligence.” And: “On Twitter, you are your avatar and your avatar is you.” And finally: “There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.”

Nick Bilton responded to this post, trying to counter Packer’s points one by one, in The Twitter Train Has Left The Station:

[…] Mr. Packer’s misgivings seem to be based entirely on what he has heard about the service — he’s so afraid of it that he won’t even try it. (I wonder how Mr. Packer would feel if, say, a restaurant critic panned a restaurant based solely on hearsay about the establishment.)

“Twitter is crack for media addicts,” he writes. “It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it.”

Call me a digital crack dealer, but here’s why Twitter is a vital part of the information economy — and why Mr. Packer and other doubters ought to at least give it a Tweet.

Hundreds of thousands of people now rely on Twitter every day for their business. Food trucks and restaurants around the world tell patrons about daily food specials. Corporations use the service to handle customer service issues. Starbucks, Dell, Ford, JetBlue and many more companies use Twitter to offer discounts and coupons to their customers. Public relations firms, ad agencies, schools, the State Department — even President Obama — now use Twitter and other social networks to share information.

There are communication and scholarly uses. Right now, an astronaut, floating 250 miles above the Earth, is using Twitter and conversing with people all over the globe, answering both mundane and scientific questions about living on a space station.

Most importantly, Twitter is transforming the nature of news, the industry from which Mr. Packer reaps his paycheck. The news media are going through their most robust transformation since the dawn of the printing press, in large part due to the Internet and services like Twitter. After this metamorphosis takes place, everyone will benefit from the information moving swiftly around the globe.

You can see that change beginning to take place. During the protests in Iran last year, ordinary Iranians shared information through Twitter about the government atrocities taking place. That supplemented the reporting by professional journalists, who faced restrictions on their movements and coverage. More recently, after the earthquake in Haiti, Twitter helped spread information about donation efforts, connected people to their loved ones, and of course, spread news from inside the country — news that reprinted in this publication.

Bilton’s reasonableness completely misses the point, because Packerisn’t really concerned with Twitter’s relative merits, or even it’s potential utility to him as a journalist: he is lamenting the decline of a passing intellectual world in which criticism and long-form writing were the zenith, a pinnacle to which he had aspired and succeeded. In this rebuttal to Bilton’s piece, Packer makes this clear.

- George Packer, Neither Luddite Nor Biltonite

It’s true that I hadn’t used Twitter (not consciously, anyway—my editors inform me that this blog has for some time had an automated Twitter feed). I haven’t used crack, either, but—as a Bilton reader pointed out—you don’t need to do the drug to understand the effects. One is the sight of adults walking into traffic with their eyes glued to their iPhones, or dividing their attention about evenly between their lunch partner and their BlackBerry. Here’s another: Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic’s very good politics blogger, was asked by Michael Kinsley to describe his typical day of information consumption, otherwise known as reading. Ambinder’s day begins and ends with Twitter, and there’s plenty of Twitter in between. No mention of books, except as vacation material via the Kindle. I’m sure Ambinder still reads books when he’s not on vacation, but it didn’t occur to him to include them in his account, and I’d guess that this is because they’re not a central part of his reading life.

And he’s not alone. Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took! There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world. The Internet and the devices it’s spawned are systematically changing our intellectual activities with breathtaking speed, and more profoundly than over the past seven centuries combined. It shouldn’t be an act of heresy to ask about the trade-offs that come with this revolution. In fact, I’d think asking such questions would be an important part of the job of a media critic, or a lead Bits blogger.

Instead, the response to my post tells me that techno-worship is a triumphalist and intolerant cult that doesn’t like to be asked questions. If a Luddite is someone who fears and hates all technological change, a Biltonite is someone who celebrates all technological change: because we can, we must. I’d like to think that in 1860 I would have been an early train passenger, but I’d also like to think that in 1960 I’d have urged my wife to go off Thalidomide.

Bilton’s arguments on behalf of Twitter are that it’s useful for marketing and “information-sharing,” and that I, as a journalist, ought to understand the value as well as anyone: “Twitter is transforming the nature of news, the industry from which Mr. Packer reaps his paycheck. The news media are going through their most robust transformation since the dawn of the printing press, in large part due to the Internet and services like Twitter. After this metamorphosis takes place, everyone will benefit from the information moving swiftly around the globe.”

If there are any journalists left by then. Until that promised future, American newspapers and magazines will continue to die by the dozen, and Bilton’s Times will continue to cut costs by asking reporters and editors to take buy-outs, and the economic basis for reporting (as opposed to information-sharing, posting, and Tweeting) will continue to erode. You have to be a truly hard-core techno-worshipper to call this robust. A friend at the Times recently said he doubts that in five years there will be a print edition of the paper, except maybe on Sundays. Once the print New York Times is extinct, it’s not at all clear how the paper will pay for its primary job, which is reporting. Any journalist who cheerleads uncritically for Twitter is essentially asking for his own destruction.

Bilton’s post did prompt me to seek out a Tweeter, which provided half an hour of enlightenment, diversion, and early-onset boredom, at the end of which I couldn’t bring myself to rue all the Twitter links and restaurant specials and coupon offers I’ll continue to miss. It’s true that Bilton will have news updates within seconds that reach me after minutes or hours or even days. It’s a trade-off I can live with. As Garry Trudeau (who is not on Twitter) has his Washington “journotwit” Roland Hedley tweet at the end of “My Shorts R Bunching. Thoughts?,” “The time you spend reading this tweet is gone, lost forever, carrying you closer to death. Am trying not to abuse the privilege.”

[all emphasis mine.]

Here, Packer drops the curmudgeonly pretense of the first piece, and starts chewing the furniture. He makes clear that he believes Twitter is the archangel of a dark future, an appliance that will make us stupid. Twitter and other web tools take us away from grown-up activities like reading and walking slowly through museums. These are dangerous toys, he says, that could blow off your prefrontal cortext if you aren’t careful. And he’s an attention economist, saying we don’t have time to mess with this junk when there is so much to do! You can almost hear him yelling, “Get back to work, slackers!”

Then he attacks all those that smirked and called him a Luddite, calling us cultists and intolerant. (Well, I admit I am intolerant of people that call me an intolerant cultist.)

Packer also suggests that Bilton is a traitor to his calling, supporting the use of technologies that are directly leading to the erosion of old media. He has a point, since time that people spend using tools like Twitter does cut into traditional media, like TV, radio, and newspapers. But the media folks should take the rap for that, since they are losing us exactly because they failed to provide open social discourse. We moved onto the web to have what they failed to produce, and we are doing it ourselves, and to the degree that old media figure that out, the more they will change.

But beneath all this is fear: fear of the future, fear of change, and fear of the new.

Packer senses a world he loves slipping away. A world in which rereading Kirkegaard is seen as a noble end, and not just escapism or a mere hobby.

He makes Twitter a demon, and calls us cultists, worshipping technology. This is the war on flow, yet again. Packer and his ilk will say what we are doing is illegitimate, immoral, immature. Any slight merits these tools may have are overbalanced by the harm they do. While they may give their users pleasure, those pleasures are like drugs, gossip, or masturbation. We should put these dangerous mind-altering toys aside, and invest ourselves in grown-up activities, like quality face time with a small circle of ‘real’ friends, or reading.

Critics like Packer always miss the social dimension of these tools. They focus on their informational use, or talk about them as if they were communication devices like phones. Or compare them to drugs. But they are much more than that. Those of us online are deriving community and involvement from participating in these social settings, a sense of being connected that may have been missing in many people’s live before the web.

Sociality on the web is subversive, and it does alter the established role of media, which directly threatens Packer and other journalists. But mostly I think Parker is suffering a sort of future shock, a fear of the future, and the loss of a precious past, a time in which he knew what was right and wrong, what to do and say, and which way was up.

I might feel the same way if I thought the web was going to come to an end, and all that I have come to rely on — friendship, connection, and membership in a community of other minds — were to go away. But I think the web is here to stay, and if something new comes along, I would probably jump on that, anyway.