In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith has written an interesting review of Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network that doubles as a critique of Facebook. Smith rhetorically positions herself as a sort of luddite or dinosaur, a defender of what she calls "Person 1.0" against the debasements wrought upon -- and by -- a generation of "People 2.0." Drawing on the arguments of Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, Smith suggests that Facebook entraps us "in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore":
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.
Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX
When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?
Initially, I felt that Smith's argument bordered on alarmism -- a sort of critical low-hanging fruit for the Smart Set. Who, after all, really thinks that the existence of a memorial means the person so memorialized continues "in some sense" to live? Doesn't Facebook merely supplement our personhood, not replace it, giving us new channels through which to express or constitute whatever greater totality we are? Didn't advertisers think of us as little more than our capacity to buy well before Facebook ever came into the world?
After a bit of thought, though, I recalled recently seeing this video on the construction of a "game layer" over reality, which speaks very much to Smith's concerns--
--and I came to think Smith may have a point, though I also offer this video as a way of reformulating or restating Smith's argument. In the terms of this reformulation, the issue isn't so much that we become 2.0 folk when we enmesh ourselves in electronic systems such as Facebook. Instead, the question is one that is relevant in all areas of political, economic, and social significance: Who designs the systems we are embedded within? Who gets to build -- and who has the technical expertise to build -- the frameworks or, as Priebatsch puts it in this video, the "game dynamics" that incentivize certain behaviors and suppress others? In an era increasingly obsessed with behavioral economics and its myriad "nudges," who is nudging you -- and how?
Indeed, the medium contrives the thoughts and the increasing currency or dependency (addiction?) on software that are formally restrictive while branding themselves as life-expanding (facebook, flickr, twitter) gives me pause. I have absolutely no doubts that the technologies we write with and communicate with drastically influence the kinds of thinking processes we engage in, hence the qualities of the mind, heart and else that we either nurture or forget (cognitive sciences just keep pouring more data if a personal experience was not enough). How much, and what kind of literature would be produced if twitter (140 characters for God's Sake!) became the dominant medium? I've thought about this experiment, which would be too grueling to perform, but maybe instructive: to "publish" The Odyssey as a series of tweets. I thought about Montaigne's Essays first, and--that's the simple elegance of the experiment--had to stop short because few interesting sentences would fit a tweet. But a sentence of Montaigne is a complex (and often voluptuous) thinking process in itself. A phrase that pulls you by ways of metaphors, exempla and quick jumps in many different conceptual and sensual directions. It is an experience of the mind and the imagination that has density, but requires length (what Montaigne calls a certain flexibility, as for a pliable material). Its qualities dissolve without context. Now, there are several @Montaigne accounts: they reduce the Essays to a list of aphorisms, making him a moralist in the not so great sense of the term. (One Montaigne a Day is the title of one of those accounts). So we are left with a lot of cross-referencing instead of writing (let’s not even mention that forgone art of spelling, aka loving words and their embedded meanings): there is a whole corpus that consists now of only quoting (re-tweeting) others. A corpus of footnotes that attach to not text. Sigh.
Plus ça change.... In the seventeenth century there was a vogue for producing books in a lapidary style. The lapidary style, associated with Tacitus, was so-called because it was appropriate for the severe concision of carving in stone: on monuments or documentary steles or the like. Tacitus was opposed to Cicero (as Dante might be opposed to Montaigne or Hemingway to Proust) as a master of this style.
So you can find books that look like facsmiles of stone carvings containing the works of Tacitus. Then people got the idea of doing Cicero the same way, which required just the stort of concise rewriting -- butchery? -- of Cicero's periodic sentences. The result is not pretty. Well, actually it is pretty. It's just not Cicero.
The best book on this is John Sparrow's Visible Words; on the style of epitaphs in particular, there's Joshua Scodel's The English poetic epitaph: commemoration and conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth. Wordsworth too would have been against Twitter, because he was against Pope -- Pope's lapidary epitaphs are the objects of his strongest criticism in his Essays in Epitaphs.
But the larger point, I think, is that every restriction is also a challenge and a gift. I love Twitter because it forces me to write with very great concision, but love it most for the masters of the form. Obviously it's not a form for Ciceronian or Johnsonian style. If Twitter were all we had, we wouldn't have much. But it is a discipline, as poetic form is -- what Shakespeare called "cutler's poetry." Or compare haiku. Or OuLiPo. I loved the Zadie Smith article about The Social Network, but I think she underestimates the interaction of human creativity with the forms whose restrictions it finds dazzling ways to transmogrify.
Just to take an example from Arcade, Nicholas Jenkins's tweets are pretty wonderful.
This reminds me of a poetry collective in the Philippines that has produced a number of books, one of them called Text Poets' Society, where all of the work originated as text messages. This is a lot easier in the Philippines even pre-smartphones because there are only 20 letters. I have the book but I haven't looked at it closely, though one thing it clearly invites is a kind of quick textual interaction among a large group that would be so much more unwieldy in another medium. Hmmm.... kinda like blog entry v. journal article I guess!
I agree: some styles of writing --specifically 17th c. maxims and other aphorisms-- work really well with Twitter. Thanks for the link to Nicholas Jenkins tweets.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. I agree, Bill, that Smith doesn't fully recognize the potential of the new channels of communication she derides and ignores the possibilities of genuinely creative expression within those forms. I do think, as I mention in my post, that there is a version of Smith's argument that is more persuasive, one which would emphasize the different landscape of incentives -- and institutional frameworks -- that impact action.
Smartphones, to give a simple example, incentivize small bursts of attention, constant connection, and addictive message-checking. They also, though they have the technical capacity to do so, do not make it easy to find out how many minutes you have used up or how many texts are left in your billing cycle. Those who make these systems want us to use them in certain ways, toward certain ends, and not toward other ends. Smartphone software and hardware designers reveal and conceal information, construct metaphors of "user interaction," accordingly. Though some users might creatively repurpose those devices -- say, by hacking their phones -- most do not. The question lingers: who gets to design our phones? What values are built into those designs? Do we like these values and designs?
Answers will vary from system to system, and technology to technology.
The whole being a slave to the constraints of technology thing seems to me to not just apply to smartphones. Book publication is full of constraints, not just in terms of the technology itself, but also in terms of the expectations of the people who control the technology. This is of course extremely evident when we think generally about the length of first novels; so hard to publish one that's longer than say, 350 pages. And let's not even talk about adding images or spreads or whatnot. Just as not that many people hack their smartphones for creative purposes, not that many people hack books.
Speaking of hacking books, two years after the Macintosh came out, Michael Green published Zen and the Art of Macintosh (and Amazon, used). Since the Mac made it easy to put words and images on the same page, anywhere on the page, he wrote a book that took advantage of that. It was dazzling, and undisciplines. When I saw it I started dreaming of a renaissance in publication design that never happened. Why? I suspect one reason is that what Green did required some one person who was good with words and images. It wasn't the sort of book where you can have one person do the words, and another do the images. It's worth taking a look at.
I've used html to link in an image or two. I don't see the interface link you're talking about.
I've noticed that when I reply to a comment, the default mode (on Firefox for Macs, anyhow) is to have rich text disabled. If you start a comment and then hit comment preview, you'll get the pane that allows you to edit the comment with rich text enabled, and then you can use the image link (this is the icon:
) to link to images.
On Safari for Mac rich text is automatically enabled, so I guess it shows what different browsers are prioritizing. Now I'm tempted to experiment and see which HTML or even CSS tags can work within this comment field, which kind of means hacking an interface that I theoretically have control over. Hmmmm....
I'm wondering if this will work.
Nope, doesn't seem to be working, & I'm using Firefox (3.6.12) on a Mac (OSX 10.5.8). I'm in preview mode, but I don't see any such panel, or anything that might toggle one. I used html to bring in the following image:
I'm OK with html, still . . .
It also seems like the interface filters out CMS and HTML it doesn't like so no green background and different font for me. I can try to do something flash-based but I have to get back to working on a journal article!
Drupal strips css, unapproved html tags, and scripts for security reasons. There are some kinds of hacking that we just really don't want people doing.
I'm pretty aware of that, just seeing if I can benevolently hack our own system, which may also expose security holes. I'm being unduly influenced by my hackery Russian computer programmer partner.
A lot of design-effort goes into steering users in the directions they want us to go, and a lot of the landscape we see is on our way is an artifact of being steered one way and not another. Same with supermarkets. And I am a lusty Facebook hater (though like everyone else I'm on it) -- mainly because of its cavalier attitude towards privacy and partly because it doesn't give you much control over how the information you want gets aggregated. I hate missing status updates from friends because Facebook treats updates without links or pictures as something other than a "top story."
Smith makes a little uninformed fun of Livejournal in her article. It's true that LJ has become kind of ugly for non-paying users, spiraling into more and more intrusive ads. But it was always a beautiful and sweet way of connecting its users, much better than anything Blogger does, and for paying customers like me it continues to be lovely. I hate that people have abandoned it for Facebook, but I still have enough friends there (and that's where I first came into contact with Meredith) that I think it's life-enhancing. Is Facebook? Much less so, if at all. But counterhegemony is always possible, and sometimes forced into its most dazzling modes by the hegemony it counters.