extensions

What does it say when an underground cult favorite tech toy is really an anti-tech toy? One function: on/off.

It’s not all that different from an iPod shuffle, actually…

Last night, CNN and YouTube held their highly-anticipated debate. A few things came through loud and clear. First, despite whatever sea change (or not) this debate represented in our politics, the change was certainly one-sided — the candidates, for all the spontaneity of the questions posed, answered in essentially standard, rote responses. One the whole, there was little originality or emotion from the Democrats, certainly none that equalled the pointed, and often poignant, questions from the YouTubers.

And it was the questions — the user-generated content which fueled this political debate – that really marked a sweeping change. They were a fresh wind blowing through an all-too-often stodgy, boring process, a process that by and large stirs little interest beyond the “political junkie” class. (A class that has, of course, grown tremendously as political blogging has grown, but, overall, it’s a small subsection of the nation.) At its best, a YouTube-style debate can bring into the political discourse the voices of many previously disaffected citizens, especially within the ranks of young people.

But this debate also sets a marker — it very well may be the point where citizen journalism has finally arrived. The questions, of course, were not “journalism,” but this was the point where the voice of the citizen “officially” substituted itself for the voice of the journalist. The YouTube debate was a dialog between the citizenry and the politicians. It’s true that CNN moderated the debate, not only with the presence of Anderson Cooper, but, more importantly, by selecting the questions, instead of allowing the wisdom of the YouTube crowds to bring the “most popular” or “most viewed” or “most favorites” to the top. Still, having such personal and emotional questions asked by The People is a very powerful thing, and it is likely that this approach will be a permanent part of the political debate process going forward. It seems hard to imagine going back to a round table of journalists asking their “Serious” questions.

MIT Professor Henry Jenkins recently posted an interview with author and NYU Professor Stephen Ducombe, where they discussed not only the YouTube debate, but the significance of the emerging participatory culture and its impact on politics:

This demonstrates the awesome power - and talent - of the “audience.” This is, um, “poaching” at its best: political “fans” tapping into popular desire and, using pop culture language, delivering, a different message. At its worst this pop culture poaching leads to the Hillary Clinton Soprano’s ad: using all the style of popular culture but ignoring the deep seated reasons that such a series was popular. Clinton’s approach is just using pop culture a gimmick.

One of the things that interests me most about the explosion of media production is the multiplicity of messages and meanings that political campaigns have to contend with…We’ve already seen how fans of Barack Obama have used pop culture tropes to make him into a sex symbol and render Hillary Clinton as Big Sister. Political campaigns are just going to have to make peace with the fact that they can not control their message, and that the message is going to be determined, in part, by their fans. This means that “unacceptable” material is going to be part of the political discussion and decision making.

We can either bemoan this fact: the debasement of the political process and so on, or we can look for what might be more positive aspects. It could be argued that one of the things that’s wrong with electoral politics today is that what is considered “expectable” is determined by professional pundits, big media and those who make large campaign contributions. Consequently, what is of interest to the majority of us is left out of the discussion. Certainly, Obama Girl isn’t opening up a substantive political discussion of anything, but it’s very existence, and its popularity, suggests that we, the people, want something else, something more, than the sanitized, pre-packaged, content-free politician packages we’ve gotten in the past.

It’s difficult to deny that the YouTube Generation is having an impact on our culture, and on our politics. Last night’s CNN debate may just be the start.

I’m a big believer in what crowds can do. It’s mostly come from watching and participating in the blogging phenomenon, seeing this nascent movement grow up into something that, in many ways, has a real effect on our culture. Certainly a lot of the 2006 election was about the bloggers, mostly on the Left.

So, as a “vast left wing conspiracy,” in other words, as a way to influence politics from a decided point of view, they’ve been an effective tool and medium. They’ve allowed a more left-of-center viewpoint to reach millions of people, and have basically created for the Left what talk radio created for the Right. A way to message, and to influence. (Interestingly, the Right has not had all that much success with blogs.)

Certainly, there are downsides. The NewAssignment project made some of the difficulties obvious. Without structure and focus, it’s hard to reign the crowds in. The kind of crowdsourcing on Daily Kos works much better than the NewAssigment kind, and I think a lot of that has to do not only with the singular focus of the site (get Democrats elected), but also with the more affective, emotional factors that tie together the community. It seems a lot easier to stir passions about politics than it does about journalism. Not to say journalists, pro and amateur alike, aren’t enthusiastic about their profession, but politics seems much more “raw.”

That said, while some of the goals of the NewAssignment experiment were not met, it still had an excellent outcome. I like the hybrid approach, and, especially when it comes to writing, I don’t see having some editorial control over the final product is a bad thing. Especially if they are willing to publish the pre- and post-edited words (which is what they did in at least one case). I think one of the keys to this kind of project is that openness and transparency has to be there. The reason (or, one reason) Wikipedia works is because everything is out in the open.

Lately, I’ve been trying to get a feel for Digg. It’s a sort of mashup of Web 2.0-ness: part social bookmarking, part blog, part news editorial board, all wrapped up in a crowdsourced community.

Mostly, I’ve known about Digg from the controversies — the DVD hack, the Ron Paul minions, the bury brigades, and other “madness of crowds” incidents. But, despite the potential downside, or perhaps because of it, the site is popular, currently ranked 95th by Alexa.

In many ways, Digg is difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is because my experience in virtual communities has primarily been in community-based blogs — once you learn how to use, for example, Daily Kos, you pretty much know the blog paradigm. But Digg is different, and it’s mashup-ness adds to the confusion. It’s a way to bookmark sites and articles, but there are no tags. There are, though, categories in which to place submissions, but they are both very broad (”Political News”), and yet also very limited (no categories for Culture. Or Food!!! What is a world without food???). The site seems to be primarily a place for technology and political news.

Digg is not a great space for personal expression. User submissions are limited to a 75 character title, and a 350 character text box to summarize their link. Often, users simply paste in a quote from the linked material. Unlike a blog, where users post lengthy diaries, exploring issues and personal convictions and ideas, the expressiveness of Digg comes from the crowd — stories “bubble up” to the top (based on a secret algorithm to prevent others from gaming the system). Personal expression is limited to comments, which appear along with every story. The comments are generally a free-for-all, some insightful, others simply name-calling or spam, not unlike many community-based political blogs. Similar to the way blog comments can be “troll-rated,” users on Digg can vote to digg or bury comments with a thumb’s up or down click.

Because of the lack of focus of the site (it’s not just a left-leaning Democratic political blog, for example), it’s difficult to know where to start. I’ve decided on a strategy of primarily reading the “Political News” section — I’m curious if others have also settled on certain practices within Digg?

I started this post with a reference to getting a “feel” for Digg. The wording is intentional, as social media seem to have a tactical quality to them. Twitter, for example, has been called a “social sixth sense.” Right now, I feel Digg is too disjointed for me to “feel” anything with it. It’s frenetic, and I’ve been unable to fall into any behavioral patterns. In other social media, again, political blogs, I have a routine — check the front page, check responses to my comments, check the Diaries page, etc. On Digg, I’ve been unable to find a comparable practice.

It’s very possible, of course, that this is simply because Digg is new to me. Over time, perhaps things will settle in.

Stay tuned…

Most of the articles I’ve found discussing “continuous partial attention” use the term as a negative consequence of our multi-media environment. Tom Friedman, for example, laments that taxi drivers are now too busy multitasking to give their usual slice-of-life quotes to reporters.

Searching for a different viewpoint, I found a NYT article, called Meet The Life Hackers, which described the ways scientists and computer engineers were researching our new habits, habits that aren’t just about interruptions, but about social meaning:

This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships - someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood.

Which, in turn, let me to another piece by Clive Thompson, a discussion about Twitter, and what he calls the technology’s “social sixth sense”:

When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Taken at face value, Twitter is Tom Friedman’s biggest nightmare — lots of little one-line pings on your cell phone. It seems to be a technology that fits the very definition of “continuous partial attention.” But, as Thompson suggests, it’s possible that media cannot fully be understood without immersing one’s self in it — social media can be a tactile experience.

This, of course, is not a new idea. Walter Benjamin talked about tactility in his seminal piece, The Work Of Art…, where he compared the state of “distraction” created through media to the way we perceive architecture:

Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit.

So perhaps we are not examining the concept of continuous partial attention in the correct way. Most accounts of this idea are temporal — cubicle workers running through a series of 11 minute projects broken into short three minute tasks.

Maybe the value of continuous partial attention is the way it creates a social sixth sense, how, in Walter Benjamin’s words, it allows us to achieve reception in a state of distraction.