extensions

PC Magazine’s John Dvorak writes on the “fragility” of social networking:

I’m of the opinion that there is no such thing as a real community online. It’s a “pretend” community that we like to feel we’re a part of, but it’s composed of users who could jump ship at any moment, and often do.

…A good online community, whether it’s Second Life, Twitter, or something new, is indeed fun to belong to if you have the time or inclination. But please do not take it seriously, and never believe that you’re part of a true community. Get out of your house, and you’ll find the community out there in the street. That’s real.

This seems to counter the actual experience of anyone who has participated in an online community, as people indeed take these social interactions seriously. Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Commmunity, writes about his life as part of the 1980s online site, The WELL. Here, he considers the question of “realness”:

Some people–many people–don’t do well in spontaneous spoken interaction, but turn out to have valuable contributions to make in a conversation in which they have time to think about what to say. These people, who might constitute a significant proportion of the population, can find written communication more authentic than the face-to-face kind. Who is to say that this preference for one mode of communication–informal written text–is somehow less authentically human than audible speech? Those who critique CMC because some people use it obsessively hit an important target, but miss a great deal more when they don’t take into consideration people who use the medium for genuine human interaction.

Rheingold, in fact, has just posted an old video on his blog, from a WELL party back in the day, which was picked up by Boing Boing. A quick glance through the comments shows just how much this community meant to its participants:

“…at 5:00 the man walking behind Howard is, I believe, David Morgenstern, a mordant wit whom I later worked with at MacWeek. I still recall (and tell) his joke about the thrice-married virgin.”

“I miss those days. Of all the services from back then (GEnie, Compuserve, Etc.), I wish I would of hung on to my Well account.”

“Yo bobert!”

“…FWIW, pozar had a 50th birthday party this weekend and I got to see a bunch of the old WELL gang f2f. Didn’t see flash, even though he had said he was coming. Hi to the rest of you!”

“…I was on the well from 1988 to around 1991, when I left to go to Asia to be a Buddhist nun, and then a bit after I got back (still a nun). Howard put me in his book about virtual community after the Well pulled together to help me when I was dying in India, and it’s sweet to see everyone again.”

A close look into other online communities reveals similar types of strong connections between people. Consider this exchange between bloggers in a post on Daily Kos, as one of them discusses his or her struggle with addiction:

…While I find myself re-entering the world outside my home gradually, I realize I’m still having a hard time connecting to people. I know I need to be patient but I also realize that it is this feeling of loneliness that triggers the desire to use. I only really feel I deserve to be around other addicts because I still feel too much shame about the damage I’ve done to myself. And the best thing for me to do would probably find some 12 Step Meetings with people I am comfortable with…

Good Ideas (38+ / 0-)
Working out, or riding a bike, or what about helping others? I’ve never been in your shoes, but my brother is a dead man walking and his whereabouts are unknown.
I’d give anything if he could be clean for even a week.
Stay strong.

… part of the process maybe? (25+ / 0-)
hang on. it’s my understanding learning how to deal with those feelings is part of the process of recovery from addiction.
do you have a counselor or a sponsor you can talk with?
if not, we’re always here …

… 18 years in May is nothing (25+ / 0-)
compared with your 83 days. Your success is immense and the world of goodness that awaits you hinges on you staying “clean and sober” today, not one week at a time.

Participants in online communities often share deeply personal, touching stories about their lives. While these examples are presented here anecdotally, they are actually quite common in the blogosphere, and speak to the strong, and often intimate, social ties created online. (To relate this to some of my prior posts, this parallels oral cultures, in what Walter Ong calls being close to the “human lifeworld.”)

Dvorak seems to be saying online communities aren’t “real” because they’re not permanent, that their users could “jump ship” at any time. Is this really all that much different from communities in the offline world? Don’t offline communities fail, or fizzle out, or base themselves on trivialities? Are we still friends with everyone we knew in high school, or college? Is the after work TGIF’s beer crowd anything more than a convenient gathering? Do most of our offline “communities” involve discussions about addiction, or engender the kind of heart-felt responses as seen in those comments about the WELL?

Perhaps more importantly, what Dvorak misses completely is that online communities are often conduits for real-life interaction. We see that in the WELL video, and we saw it in the Dean campaign’s use of Meetup.

Positive, working communities can certainly develop both online and off, and to question an online community’s “realness” misses the point completely. The trick, it seems, when considering the question of community, is to figure out why they work, and how we can replicate these successes more often.

The tech-focused blog TechCrunch has today added the ability for readers to post comments in video format. The obvious take against is that it’s simply more of our narcissistic culture coming through, that not only do we have to sift through the banality of the blogosphere’s chattering class, but now we have to look at them too! On the other hand, we could easily see this as a step towards making the web more personal, more human.

(The fact that one of the video comments from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has a dog incessantly barking in the background seems to be a strong argument against this new feature…just sayin’…)

Video commenting does raise interesting questions, though, regarding previous posts I have written, about Walter Ong’s notion of orality and today’s social media. In particular, I wonder if video comments make the blogosphere a more “oral” space? Walter Ong, from a 1996 interview:

Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange.

Ong’s “secondary orality” refers to how electronic media can form people into groups, and create communities. The comments section of a blog can be seen, in this light, as something oral, something suggesting the “immediate experience of direct sound,” something that extends us outward rather than inward.

So the question is, does the addition of video to the comments section of a blog add anything to this idea of orality?

After trying it as a reader, I don’t think so. Running through the comments over at TechCrunch, I find viewing the video comments clumsy — you have to break the “flow” of reading, you need to wait for the video to load, you need to deal with uneven sound levels.

And dogs barking.

Part of the experience of participating in a blog’s community is this flow, a rhythm that develops as you read through the comments: you scroll past some, you read through the one’s from people you know, you find key words that catch your eye. Reading through text comments, frankly, is much quicker and “smoother” than clicking on video comments. The fact that it all happens inside your head has everything to do with why reading isn’t as jarring as the videos; yet, at the same time, it seems counterintuitive to “orality” — reading is an interior practice. This paradox is what Ong is getting at in the above quote.

In any case, perhaps it’s just a practice thing, and one day “reading” video comments will seem just as fluid as reading text-based comments.

But, for now, I’m sticking with text.

It’s fascinating what the primary campaign has done to the liberal blogosphere. Granted, we’re still in the middle of it, and, personally, my guess is this split isn’t going to be long-lasting, once the Democrats settle on a nominee. But it’s astounding how the campaign has exposed fractures among bloggers (although it’s possible and maybe even likely the fractures were always there…).

For those who haven’t followed, here’s a quick summary from Open Left:

This tendency of “birds of a feather” to “flock together” is called homophily. In this case it’s “value homophily,” blog readers and contributors have gravitated toward the blogs that support their values, in this case the blog or blogs where writers say nice things about their preferred candidate. For example, for much of 2007 the Big Orange Satan was an Edwards blog and slowly morphed into an Obama blog in January. MyDD has become the home of Clinton supporters. This “flocking” was seen most dramatically when DKos contributors went on “strike” and took their efforts to more Clinton-friendly environs.

The “strike” marked the point where the split became public, covered by the news media, including the Times. The complaint, sentiment that is echoed elsewhere in the blogosphere, was:

…the administrators have allowed this hostile environment to develop in our online community for anyone who isn’t planted firmly in the Obama camp. They’ve routinely ignored personal attacks and allowed disruptive, spam-like posts to go unchecked whenever anyone expresses support for Hillary or challenges something their candidate has said or done…As a result, our community has become little more than an echo chamber with an attitude that harkens back to the early days of Dubbya’s administration - yer either with us or yer a’gin us, heh!

A commenter in a post at TalkLeft, another “pro-Clinton” site, believes “[TPM's Josh] Marshall, Kos and their like hate Clinton so much that they would destroy the Democratic party to ensure that Obama wins the nomination.” While this is something of a cherry-pick, the intention is simply to illustrate the extremes to which bloggers are reaching when talking about others who, in the big picture of things, are on the same side.

Of course, Obama supporters have their own complaints, perhaps the most significant being the characterization of them as vapid and “cultists.”

Is this just politics? Is this a natural result of the primary practice, but made more overt and public through the medium of the blog? Is this just what happens when more people are given a space to participate?

I have previously posted about what I call “the orality of blogging,” using Walter Ong’s work to help situate the blog in terms of our media past, and perhaps reformulate his concept of “secondary orality” in terms of social media. Ong identifies “agonistically toned” as one of the characteristics of an oral culture, noting how “orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.” There is a certain parallel here — the political blogosphere, at its most basic level, has always been about struggle and contestation. It seems appropriate that the 2008 primary campaign, played out at the same time bloggers find themselves entrenched in “mainstream” politics more than ever before, became the center of this struggle.

The question now, of course, is whether or not the movement to separate “flocks” is permanent, or whether, once a nominee is selected, the focus turns to a common foe, and the sense of community, which for the world of orality was a necessity, returns in the “secondary orality” of the blogosphere.

I discussed the orality of blogging in a previous post, but, in certain ways, the social media service known as Twitter is something much closer to the world of orality.

Oral cultures distinguish themselves, obviously, with an absence of the written word. Ong, in Orality and Literacy, describes this as trying to “imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything” (p. 31). For oral cultures, phrases such as “look up” or “take a note” or “read through” are empty, as they are visual metaphors, rooted in literacy and writing. Oral cultures center existence within sound – McLuhan’s “ear man.” Spoken language becomes a “mode of action,” bounded with magical qualities; words represent power. Oral cultures rely heavily on mnemonics and formulas to develop memory systems, as knowledge cannot be written down and persisted.

The focus on sound and memory, at the expense of the visual, creates a different kind of sensory configuration within an oral culture. Now, of course, this is not to suggest the tweets on Twitter exist outside of the realm of the visual. And our senses — long trained in the ways of literacy — are nothing like those of a non-literate culture.

But engaging Ong’s intriguing idea of “secondary orality,” how media has the potential to extend us outward (McCluhan’s “global village”), provides something of a theoretical space to consider the “orality” of social media. Ong has stated:

Oral communication is all immediate, in the present. Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the recipient can receive what is communicated with no such interval. Although it is not exactly the same as oral communication, the network message from one person to another or others is very rapid and can in effect be in the present. Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange. To handle [page break] such technologizing of the textualized word, I have tried occasionally to introduce the term ‘secondary literacy.’

Terminology aside, it’s clear Ong was formulating something that connects our communicative and technological present to our oral past. With Twitter, there is a parallel to the world of orality in both the ephemerality and the immediacy of the words spoken from user to user.

Unlike a blog, where every blog post and comment is persisted in a database, tweets, for the most part, come and go. There is no long-term storage of posts in Twitter — services such as Tweet Scan can tease out a couple weeks worth of tweets (see here for my most recent), but something I “said” last year? Not there. The words spoken on Twitter are, by nature of the service itself, ephemeral.

And, of course, that’s not the intention behind Twitter. It’s something more like chat — real-time, less permanent…the immediacy of the technologized word.

This, then, is the orality of Twitter — like the spoken word, fleeting, ephemeral, lingering only in our memory.

Walter Ong, from Orality and Literacy:

By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal, and religiously neutral. Print encourage the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space. (pg. 129)

This interiority imposed on our consciousness by print culture is precisely what social media — and blogs especially — are helping to reverse. This is perhaps one of the most significant aspects of today’s media: we are drawn outward, rather than inward.

In particular, the group or community-based blog encourages a “return of the oral,” as the words typed into a blog are not closed, not final, but open-ended, as is a conversation. They’re specifically written with the expectation of a response, inside the blog’s “comments” sections. The “interior conscious” that print encourages is now, on the blog, an exterior consciousness, captured within a database.

The blog is both drawing us outward in terms of relating to other people, and creating an exteriority of thought in its database.

The work of medium theorists, such as Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, has helped awaken us, or, rather, reacquaint us, with our oral past. It is a past that is elusive to those steeped in literacy – Ong, in Orality and Literacy (1982), describes the difficulty trying to “imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything” (p. 31). For oral cultures, phrases such as “look up” or “take a note” or “read through,” phrases which are commonplace and taken for granted today, are empty, as they are visual metaphors, rooted in literacy and writing. Yet the history of oral cultures is rich and extensive, as Ong notes only a fraction of the languages spoken have a literature, and even now, “hundreds of languages in active use are never written at all: no one has worked out an effective way to write them” (p. 7). For oral cultures, speech and sound are primary – this is McLuhan’s “ear man.” In these societies, spoken language becomes a “mode of action,” bounded with magical qualities; words represent power.

Today, even with literacy rates relatively high within American culture, there is a still a lingering oral component within language:

But, in all the wonderful worlds that writing opens, the spoken word still resides and lives. Written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings. ‘Reading’ a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination, syllable-by-syllable in slow reading or sketchily in the rapid reading common to high-technology cultures. Writing can never dispense with orality. (Ong, 1982, p. 8)

Similarly, McLuhan (1962) notes for a phonetic alphabet culture, “…there is constant pressure from the subliminal fact that written code carries for the reader the experience of the ‘content’ which is speech” (p. 72). This legacy of our oral past is retained, for example, in culturally significant events, as an officiant who performs a wedding ceremony, a juror who proclaims a defendant’s innocence or guilt, or a President who declares war on another country. Words today are more than simply textual representations of thought; they have preserved the sense of magic and power that was integral to the age of primary orality.

This, then, is the starting point for an examination of the orality of blogging. For the blog is not simply a print medium, not simply textual, but a medium of speech, a collection of conversations (or, in blogger terminology, “comments”) in cyberspace. The words on a blog are more than words; they have power. They represent social acts and practices, and, in this manner, blur the boundaries between the written and oral media spaces within which blogs are situated.

The orality of blogging also creates community. Unlike Putnam’s (1995) bowling metaphor, there is no “blogging alone,” as bloggers, through their conversations, create social bonds in cyberspace. In a similar vein, medium theorists studying oral cultures find that words bring people closer together. Ong (1982) notes the “interiority” of sound, as the spoken word “manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as person, the spoken word forms human being into close-knit groups” (p. 74). For McLuhan (1964), oral man lived in a “seamless web of kinship and interdependence” (p. 50). The world of orality is rooted in sounds, in language, and words that invite participation and community, illustrated here with a post by a Daily Kos blogger:

It turned out that even though I was Wicked Smart, there were others here not only just as smart and aware as I, but some even smarter and more aware than I! I had one convo that went roughly like this. Paraphrased of course…

Me: Well, I disagree!!! I have studied extensively, as an avocation, the way the human brain works.
Other Guy: I am a Neuro-Surgeon
Me: oh.

But I also found PLENTY of folks who were ready and willing to help me…to overlook my ignorance and newness and point me in the right direction to become a productive member of the community. I learned to be a little humble and to listen to those who had been here longer and knew the ropes. Eventually the community accepted me wholeheartedly and gradually I reclaimed my imperious arrogance…..but now molded and modeled to community standards. (buhdydharma, “New Users Guide To DKos”)

If we think of blogging, and perhaps social media in general, in this light, as something more than a textual medium, something closer to our oral past, this opens up many possibilities. If we think of what we do online in terms of “conversations,” then it’s easier to see the social side of these media. Just as, in the real world, what we say and do makes us who we are, what we post, and blog, and create in the virtual world is part of us. While our online interactions are “virtual,” they are real – people are using social media to bond, to explore their identity, to advocate their politics. We’ve even seen the all-too-real downside of social media, with news media reports of cyberbullying, and the sometimes-tragic results.

This idea of orality, and the connection it creates between our non-literate past and our technology-mediated present, helps explain much of why we find social media so very compelling.

To follow on this recent post, two stories of note. First, paper airline tickets are finally a thing of the past, the medium of paper being replaced with bits and bytes. (Of course, Jet Blue has never had anything but e-tickets.) The paper ticket is gone, but “the ticket,” as a concept, moves to digital.

More interestingly, researchers are attempting to capture the world’s quickly-fading oral languages, which are becoming extinct at an astoundingly fast rate, something like one every two weeks:

The researchers, focusing on distinct oral languages, not dialects, interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammars and preparing children’s readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families.

Over at the National Geographic’s “Enduring Voices” site, there is much more about this effort. And while the Times article doesn’t mention it specifically, I think we can assume that digital technology is being used to record, catalog, and index these dying languages.

Oral cultures can continue to live on, digitally.

Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture, remarks that “old media never die.” Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, has this to say on the matter:

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. Manuscript culture had sustained an oral procedure in education that was called “scholasticism” at its higher levels; but by putting the same text in front of any given number of students or readers print ended the scholastic regime of oral disputation very quickly. Print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made a personal memory inadequate.

Of course, McLuhan was speaking to medium theory’s zoomed out, larger perspective, the “break boundaries” in society that move us from media paradigm to media paradigm. Jenkins’s point is zoomed in: the move from 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs is much smaller in scale.

But perhaps the question today should be posed differently? In the age of participatory culture, it’s not that media is being replaced as it is media being confused: mashed up and remixed, to the point that we don’t know what to make of it. A recent example is “Quarterlife,” a new series debuting on MySpace:

Hollywood has been dipping its toe in original online content. Two seasoned producers are about to take a full plunge.

‘); } //–> Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick — who have made films like “Blood Diamond” and “The Last Samurai” and whose ABC series “Thirtysomething” helped to define television drama in the 1980s — have made a deal with MySpace, the online social network owned by the News Corporation, to produce an original Web series called “Quarterlife.”

Mr. Herskovitz described “Quarterlife” as a regular television series, made by network-caliber writers, directors and production crews…A day after their original MySpace posting, the episodes will be available on quarterlife.com. A week later, they will be generally available on the Web. And, if all goes as planned, they will eventually find their way onto conventional television screens.

What’s becoming apparent is that our need (is “desire” a better word?) to categorize media — this is television, this is Internet — is quickly becoming irrelevant. These boxed-in descriptions of media no longer work, no longer apply. Is Quarterlife television? Online? Both? Neither?

From our vantage point, the impact is not that clear. There’s certainly something happening, some sort of societal change is taking place; whether it’s of the same magnitude as print displacing our memory, as McLuhan notes, I’m not sure…

Spaces such as YouTube and MySpace are essential parts of our participatory culture, and yet Quarterlife is an overt attempt to co-opt some of new media’s democratizing potential. That’s why I’m not so sure — it seems like a power struggle at this point, and it’s not clear who will win.

Quarterlife is simply, “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”