a thaumaturgical compendium

Brilliant talk by Clay Shirky:

A psychological report that indicates that self-esteem programs have given us a generation of narcissists is getting a lot of attention in the media. The authors argue that decades of being told that “gosh darnit, people like them” has gone to the heads of today’s college students.

Moreover, it seems social technologies encourage narcissism. Jean Twenge, an author of the report, is quoted as saying: “Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism. By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube.” (Wait: How can both MySpace and YouTube be narcissistic names, but whatever.) In other words, you may be a narcissist if you blog.

Uh-oh. Maybe this is all about me.

Naturally, there is something narcissistic about blogging. You have to believe that what you have to say is important enough for other people to hear. Twenge’s claim that the ability to express yourself actually “fuels” narcissism, rather than attracting narcissistic people (as does acting, journalism, and other careers—ahem, teaching—that require personal performance) seems to me to be more than a little premature. But what about this: are we all becoming narcissists?

By 2006, the article suggests, two-thirds of the students surveyed had scores above average on the Narcissistic Personality Index. Now, unless they were surveying near Lake Wobegon or the distribution was really skewed, it seems unlikely that two-thirds are above average—what is meant is that two-thirds are above the average of 1982 students. The difference is more than merely semantic, as a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder generally relies on someone being significantly above the average in terms of self-regard. If everyone’s self-regard is rising, it gets a bit harder to be considered a narcissist.

I am one.

I mean, I’ve always known I was a bit of a narcissist (I’m really good about knowing things like that), but never realized that I was a clinical narcissist. As I run down some of the short-form NPI items, I am clearly leaning toward that top (bottom?) end. For example:

• I have a natural talent for influencing people < --> I am not good at influencing people.
• I think I am a special person. < --> I am no better or no worse than most people.
• I will be a success. < --> I am not too concerned about success.
• If I ruled the world it would be a better place. < --> The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me.
• I see myself as a good leader. < --> I am not sure if I would make a good leader.
• I like to start new fads and fashion. < --> I don’t care about new fads and fashion.
• I rarely depend on anyone else to get things done. < --> I sometimes depend on people to get things done.

(These are from the 40-item NPI created by Raskin & Terry in 1988, and reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.)

Now, it’s true, I didn’t answer all forty items as a raging narcissist, but I did tend very heavily to that end. As an aside, I wonder whether seeking out the NPI to take it can itself be considered a narcissistic act. In any case, I’m OK with being a bit of a narcissist, and I am interested in knowing other people who tend toward those characteristics. Normal is boring.

I guess the real question is the degree to which some of the less socially beneficial elements go hand-in-hand with these tendencies. Clearly, we don’t want to eliminate narcissists—in doing so, we would probably take out most of the interesting people who have ever lived or been imagined, from Gandhi to Godzilla. It seems that the worry is that if we are all becoming more narcissistic, we might all want to lead, all create our own fashions, all rule the world. But I wonder if, when it comes to being a creative owner of our selves and what we contribute, I wonder under these circumstances if greed is good.

Perhaps the real issue is that some people think that students should recognize their place, as passive recipients of collected wisdom. I don’t think that is the case. I am confident that I would do an OK job at ruling the world, but part of that is because I grew up knowing that I was special, and that I therefore had special responsibilities. The attitude that I find disturbing among students is not inflated self-regard, but deflated other-regard—a lack of respect for their fellow men, and a lack of knowledge about their circumstances. I am a humble narcissist; I know I believe I am more able than most, and therefore have to work harder to make everyone’s lives better. Too many college students believe that they are just average members of their caste, and have no desire to work their way to the top. They have no will to power, no will to commit the extraordinary, but instead believe that they should profit by being as close to average as possible.

If that’s narcissism, then I’m not your average narcissist. I’m special.

A number of people in my Intro to Interactive class at Quinnipiac are employees of ESPN’s mobile effort. I noted earlier in the semester that the killer app for Verizon’s vCast was not sitcoms or sporting events—both of which are expensive, long content—but YouTube. It’s not exactly free, but moving that content to phones is just a no-brainer. It looks like they think so too.

Now, it seems to me that they are shooting themselves in the foot by basically ignoring the “long tail” of YouTube’s uploads. And even if it were not so limited, I’m not sure it will take off (I won’t be buying the service, esp if I can’t watch my favorite vlogs). But it is at least a step in the right direction.

What’s “the new black”? More importantly, what’s the new X that is the new black? Check out the cool diagram of such claims from 2005.

Wouldn’t be all that hard to automate the creation of that diagram, I think. A little script to automate a Google or Technorati search for “is the new,” a bit of scraping, and shipping it off to a grapher to create a map. Would be fun if I had the time. Maybe someone else does?

1st page of Google:

• Small is the new big.
• Awake is the new asleep.
• Random is the new order.
• ‘Force protection’ is the new buzzword.
• Pink is the new blog (2x).
• Funny is the new sexy.

(Technorati won’t let me search the phrase. Probably considers “is” and “the” as stop words. That’s kinda dumb.)

Ze Frank has recently been getting more didactic in his Show, but in a good way. He does a short blurb on Friday about the democratization of ugly. He’s running a contest for the ugliest MySpace page, which, as some of the commenters note, may be a bit redundant. But it does give him an excuse to expound on the history of taste, in bite-size form, in an interesting way. He did something similar with gerrymandering in an earlier show.

I’ve been thinking a bit about new forms of learning on the Internets lately, and this strikes me as an interesting example because it is really pretty far toward the traditional institutional learning model, though it certainly doesn’t feel like it. It includes a lecture—though elements clearly mark it as part of a different genre. It is, in some ways I suspect, a particularly effective lecturing style for new media saturated students (“You’re soaking in it!”). I can’t imagine watching, or wanting to watch, an hour-long “The Show.” Nor can I imagine the prep time it would require to produce. But it may be that this is paradoxically one of the areas in which massification still has a run. I doubt Frank would continue to produce the videos if he had an audience of a few dozen, but a large audience in some way justifies what must be a substantial investment in time.

Beyond the lecture, he also now has assignments. OK, perhaps the audience considers the ongoing chess game, the earth sandwich, and the contest for the ugliest MySpace page to be games, but many of my assignments are structured that way too. It really can be homework and still be fun to do. Designing the ugliest page possible has been a mainstay assignment in my classes where we do web production, as well as in graphic communication (make the worst infographic possible), for many years. So let’s get this down: here is someone producing a daily talk, which is viewed by a large group, who ask questions and comment on the talk, and who are periodically given assignments.

In sum, while Ze may claim that he is “thinking so you don’t have to,” I am beginning to suspect he might just be joking.

Went last night to a talk at the New York Public Library celebrating Slate’s 10th Birthday, featuring Michael Kinsley, Malcolm Gladwell, Arianna Huffington, Jacob Weisberg, and Norm Pearlstine. Given the topic, “online media and the future of journalism,” it was one of those blogged-to-death deals. I’m slow to the punch, my friend Trebor Scholz wrote about it, as did David Cohn, David Hirschman, Dylan Stableford, a rat, probably a dozen others, and some pictures from Will. You can listen to the whole thing as an mp3 if you so desire. I really don’t have much to add. But if you think that means I’m not posting, you are new to blogging. As Weisberg noted, blogs are really good at talking about something even when there is nothing new to say.

Paper vs. Mecha-Godzilla

All the wrap-ups linked above have the some quotes. This is a group of people who live and breathe soundbites. Yes, Huffington noting that the argument over “paper vs. online” has the feel of the Ginger or Mary Ann bar-room debates and “it’s 2006, can’t we just have a threeway,” is eminently quotable, but doesn’t get you very far. Malcolm Gladwell rolling out the old chestnut of “what if printing had just been invented,” likewise is a kick in the side of the head for an audience that has already been kicked that way a lot. The first part of the discussion revolved around this “will there be paper in 10 years,” which—to me at least—is the dumbest question ever, and has already been done to death anyway. Predicting the future is a bad business to be in, but I’ll lay even money against anyone willing that in a decade we will still be buying newspapers and magazines on regular old dead trees.

Pearlstine especially wanted to know what the economic model would be. Several times, he brought up the importance of the shift in advertising from agglomerated audiences to search-based ads. I think folks are incorrectly shying away from the importance of this, assuming that it is merely the concern of dot-com entrepreneurs and old media CEOs, but it is of vital interest to anyone who wants to know the long-term direction of online media. The growth of the mass media was certainly predicated, in part, on technological advances, but if not for the mass production and mass advertising, there would never have been an economic model that allows for mass media. Without a networked model of advertising, or some other business model, there isn’t any way to know how online media will change our media environment. The technologies have already shifted, as have some of the social expectations, but the money question is still up in the air. The panel seemed to keep coming back to the rather prosaic questions of the technologies of printing and distribution by mail, but there were some interesting observations beyond this.

Weisberg noted that the iPod, in large part because of its rapid penetration, has changed the way the industry and the audience engage music. He suggested that what we were waiting for was the “iPod of reading.” Andy Bowers piped in from the audience to suggest that the iPod of reading might end up being… the iPod. I have a feeling that we identify the iPod as revolutionary in some way because it is the most proximate view of iTunes—an economic model that is new(ish) and seems to work, despite a lot of controversy over how it handles intellectual property rights.

Huffington suggested that the New York Times was making a mistake in putting its best stuff behind walls. If it’s not linkable, it doesn’t matter. This feeds into the larger question of who pays for content—where does the money come from. Again, it will be interesting to see what the Times does with the MyTimes project. I was surprised that no one brought up the BBC, which has gotten a huge push in US readership, I suspect, in part because they are so friendly to linkers.

At one point, they called out a survey: how many of the audience, of several hundred, read a newspaper daily (in its traditional on-paper format). Nearly every one of the hundreds of audience members raised their hand. How many did not: perhaps five or ten, including myself. They took this in stride, but I was shocked. At the Hyperlinked Society conference a couple of weeks ago I was speaking with someone (sorry, don’t remember who it was) who noted that he was teaching journalism students who had never read a newspaper, and didn’t know what to make of it. I found the reaction in this audience to be staggering. Kinsley, however, noted that a Rice professor (no name given) had suggested to him at one point that the question of paper would be “solved actuarially.” If this room was any indication, though, that seems like it is a fairly remote solution. I was by no means the youngest person in the room.

Blogging is… different

Several times the discussants circled around to the idea that writing for the web is different, in part because web audiences are different. Huffington argued that web audiences expect and require interactive content, and some feeling of conversation. They also are obsessive about following a story in the news. A front page story may show up and drop off the traditional newspaper in one day—but bloggers will keep at that story until some conclusion is reached.

Weisberg suggested that writers needed to start writing for new media: using hyperlinks, exploiting the potential of the medium. This is not only what readers want, it is what they expect. Journalists of the old school—of the J-school!—still write for their print audience (which, by the way, we have already established were the people in this room). That their articles happened to show up on the web was an afterthought. That needs to change. That articles eventually find their way into the printed newspaper should be the afterthought; the focus should be on the web. There is a need, in Huffington’s words, to find people “able to swim in these new waters.” And these people are not coming out of the J-schools right now. The internet has “broken down the barriers to entry” for doing journalism (Weisman).

And now for something completely Denton

Several people asked questions. Nick Denton challenged Huffington on whether she was a comment whore. I am sure he put it more nicely. Basically, the question was whether she (like he) carefully analyzed server logs and found out what people commented on and liked and concentrated on those items. I think this is really a good question (it’s one I’ve been very interested in of late), and Huffington acknowledged it as such. She said something about how it was important to maintain integrity, but there was certainly some interest in maintaining interest. That balance is a really important one for any medium, for any journalist. Is it pandering to listen to your audience? It’s certainly not a good thing if you are listening to your advertisers, but in some ways, your advertisers shape who you listen to. In the mass media era, advertisers required a mass audience, and a mass audience was only obtainable through least objectionable reporting, or “objectivity,” or “balance,” depending on who you ask. In an era of networked media, the contrary seems true: you don’t reach audiences without being objectionable. If you look at “dugg” or “slashdotted” or other flash croweded posts, it is unlikely that they will be non-controversial. Attention whoring works because people are paying. Which reminds me, I need to get AdWords back up on my site.

Everything else

I’ve passed over a lot. There were mentions of bloggers picking at the carcass of the New York Times and counter-claims that the New York Times is less than the paragon it might have once been, especially given their extremely weak—possibly complicit—reporting on the build-up to the Iraq war. This was a group at home in front of an audience, who also has spent some time at the front lines, and it was an interesting discussion for it. Just wish they could have done it backwards—they spent a bit of time wading through truisms before starting to touch on the meatier questions.

Went to see District B13 on opening day with two friends. Throw in the popcorn and soda, and we were at nearly $50. It’s especially expensive to see films in New York, but it’s expensive to see them anywhere. I still go and see a movie whenever there is anything remotely watchable in the theater. Heck, I even saw MI3.

I was especially enthused about going to see B13 for two reasons. First, Luc Besson was the writer. I don’t think he’s a great writer, but I like the films he writes, if that makes sense. Second, the action drew heavily on Le Parkour, and co-starred Parkour star David Bell. (To see him in action, check out this short documentary on YouTube.)

Given that I like Besson and Le Parkour, you would think—obviously—that I have also seen Yamakasi, the first Besson/Parkour combo. You would be wrong. I could: it’s at Amazon.com, in the $25 range. But I don’t want to buy a movie that may suck and that I may only watch once. Especially since the DVD might not even play on my DVD player because of an accident of geography. I want to rent it.

Of course, my local video store in Buffalo didn’t have it. I suspect that there is a video shop somewhere in NYC that does, but I haven’t put in the hours needed to find it. Netflix doesn’t have it. As ArsTechnica found, this particular title isn’t an anomaly—video shops tend not to provide for the broad needs of their customers.

So what’s a movie fan to do? Well, I would never violate the law, but this is enough to drive someone to go to a site like The Pirate Bay and use BitTorrent to download a free version. As more and more computers are tied to home entertainment systems, and as BitTorrent becomes better understood by the average user, this will be an option of increasing ease. I can, therefore, understand why the MPAA wants so badly to shut it down.

But even if I were to give in to the urge to download a pirate copy of this film—a film that the movie industry, meaning theaters, distributors, and even rental shops, haven’t bothered to provide at a price point that makes sense for the casual viewer—it doesn’t mean that the movie company is out $25. I’ve wanted to see this movie for years but not enough to shell out that much money. And when they close down a resource like The Pirate Bay, it closes that little escape valve that allows people to feel as if they are partners with the movie industry and not just users/customers. If I were, frustrated with my ability to find this one film, to download it, MPAA would consider me a “movie thief,” despite the thousands of dollars I have sent their way. Alienating your best customers is the wrong way to go.

Most people don’t care very much about copyright law and Digital Rights Management. But the MPAA seems determined to make people care about it. The question is whether, once people are made aware of the rights that the film industry is asserting, that education will lead to a rollback of these rights. I’ll admit, I’m not particularly hopeful that there will be a great rising up against over-reaching copyright, but it’s not beyond comprehension.

The furor over the recent police action against the Pirate Bay, police action that appears to have been instigated by American corporations, may end up hurting the efforts of the MPAA more than helping them. The “Pirate Party” in Sweden, an offshoot of the Pirate Bay, seemingly well out of the mainstream, is now gathering increased support from Swedes. If Sweden decides that this is an issue worth debating, and that a different path may be appropriate for Swedes, this is a chink in the armor of an international regime for intellectual property. It provides that little bit of wiggle room that may lead other countries to recognize that more limited monopolies may actually help smaller countries in the world market (cf. Japan’s liberal interpretation of foreign patents, for example), and may encourage the development of cultural products rather than retard them.

At the same time films are being made and distributed outside of the expected structures of Hollywood. Not just the “indy” films, or those from Bollywood and Hong Kong, but animation produced using open source tools and making use of distributed, open source approaches to financing and creation. Sure, these are just experiments, but they show that there is something more than a vacuum outside of Hollywood—that there are other possibilities. Does the MPAA really want to push people away? Does turning off the escape valve make sense? Or do they want to recognize what some industries (did I hear “porn”?) have already figured out, that piracy is the best form of advertising out there for the “TiVo Generation.”