A few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Carlos Castillo of the Qatar Computing Research Institute on news, and social media. I’d come under the impression that it would be about using social media to discover and generate news, but it was more interesting than that. Mr. Castillo’s presentation and research occupies an intersection between Computational Linguistics, social media, and news. He uses social media signals to identify the lifecycle of a news article, and its relevance to an audience.
It left me wondering how we can use the signals in both computational language analysis and social media analysis to keep people better informed. I don’t mean this in terms of volume of information, but accuracy of information. Right now, I can see the insights of Mr. Castillo’s work being mis-applied to increase the reach—and ad views—of a story rather than promote real journalism. To put it another way:
Truth has never been an essential ingredient of viral content on the Internet. But in the stepped-up competition for readers, digital news sites are increasingly blurring the line between fact and fiction, and saying that it is all part of doing business in the rough-and-tumble world of online journalism.
— If A Story is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating
A number of the fake news stories in the New York Times piece I just quoted and linked to are “soft news” at best. They succeed in their mission of getting attention, measured in tweets, shares, likes, and the all important Page View, but they are not journalism in any legitimate sense.
But there is a desire among people to read real news. In Mr. Castillo’s lecture, he noted that long-form journalistic pieces have a long timeframe of relevance and traffic, up to a week, while breaking stories tend to have a lifespan of about nine hours with an intense first hour. For both, the amount of traffic and social media a news piece gets in the first hour is the best judge of its relevance. QCRI’s demo site provides a good visual explanation. Green bars show the predicted page views for an article of Al-Jazeera news based on existing traffic and social media signal. The articles are primarily hard news, as that’s the bulk of what Al-Jazeera produces, but the source doesn’t matter. The same algorithm would work for Huffington Post, MSNBC, Buzzfeed, or Fox News.
While people will share and click for hard news and soft news alike, soft news has the risk of spreading misinformation. This can’t be good for society, right? Well, to quote a quote, “Even if it’s fake, it’s real.” Is there value in the fake news, engineered for pure virtality, to spawn discussion? Potentially. I haven’t seen much discussion around viral news stories except for people complaining about the viral news stories in their feed. This could just be a function of the online circles I travel in—jaded and cynical tech people, often former news junkies themselves.
The New Yorker recently published a piece trying to determine what stories go viral, and why. At the risk of spoiling the article, Aristotle may have had the answer already. “The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos. Content should have an ethical appeal, an emotional appeal, or a logical appeal. A rhetorician strong on all three was likely to leave behind a persuaded audience.” I’m not so sure about persuasion in the Internet age. It’s entirely possible to live online in an echo chamber of voices that are similar enough to yours that almost nothing counter to your worldview can permeate.
It’s that “almost” that makes things interesting. If viral news stories have a spread that can transcend, or at least bypass, the social filters in our online lives, and they can spawn constructive discussion, we may be on to something. In the technology world, The Verge’s Fanboys piece is extremely viral, and the discussion surrounding it constructive. The Verge could be creating a template for a story that forces people to think about a contentious issue, and if it gets even one obnoxious online “fanboy” to think about their loyalties and behavior with a little more nuance, it’s a win.
What is clear, is that virality cannot be forced, but it can be engineered. Fanboys may not be as engineered for virality as the stories on Upworthy and Buzzfeed, though the clever layout tricks it employs show that a lot of thought was put into how people will see it. This brings me full circle, to the research from QCRI and Carlos Castillo. Predictive analytics can be a valuable tool to make sure that, should an editorial team with a focus on elevating discussion and making an impact want, they can engineer a story that can go viral and spawn real discussion. The cynic in me, however, expects it to only drive pageviews and increase ad revenue. There’s no reason it has to be either one or the other, though.
Either way, you’ll still get jaded former news junkies complaining. Just maybe not as many.
There used to be a dream that all your entertainment would come to you on demand. Instead of needing to be at a certain place at a certain time to catch whatever monocultural touchstone was being broadcast, anything we would want could be a button push, or ten, away. This dream has come to fruition for anything that would have been broadcast in the past. Only sports are exempt. Parallel to the rise of on demand media, a new form of media that cannot be simply stored and caught up on has evolved. These are the streams, and you either keep up with them as they come in, or you accept that you’ll never catch up with what you missed. Or both.
Both old, broadcast media and our new streams make demands on us. At least broadcast media’s demands were concrete in time and space. If you weren’t home, and you didn’t set up your VCR or DVR, you missed what happened, that was it. Streams are in our pockets, inescapable wherever there’s a signal to our phones. We don’t want to miss a moment, so we’re always pulling out our phones, distracting ourselves from whatever we’re doing, just to catch up. If certain companies have their way, our streams will be on and in our faces as well. People already get hit by cars while checking their streams on phones. Face-mounted streams won’t be much of an improvement.
Even worse is when our streams make themselves demand our attention. They make our phones buzz and beep with each new activity. Another Pavlovian stimulus to deal with, the sound and sensation are our trigger to salivate and check our streams. We can turn the notifications off, but apps for streams come with the alerts turned on right out of the App Store. When the optimal is not the default, the default wins out for almost everything. Changing settings is a power-user move.
Of course, streams are in their infancy. We are still learning how to handle them; figuring out who is worth following, when is right to check, and what is right to say. Even as we learn, however, they’re still updating. Radio and television stations, in their infancy, at last had the courtesy to sign off at the end of the day. Though now they’re on the air constantly, there’s no need to stay up all hours just for one program when you can watch it at your leisure the next day. Streams never sleep. The operators of streams can have algorithms drop fresh new content into your stream at any hour of the day, multiple times a day. You never have to be without something new to see, and you never are.
We all could benefit from thinking about the streams we let into our lives and what we let into our streams. How up-to-date do we need to be about the things people do and say? What do we truly need to be informed about? The nature of a stream precludes being truly “on demand,” but judicious pruning of what we allow in can make it easier if we want to bother with catching up. There are a fixed number of hours in our day. We all could be more judicious about what we let consume our time, and when. And when it all gets too overwhelming, broadcast media and streams alike have an off switch we shouldn’t be afraid to press.
I keep an app running on my machine called RescueTime to keep track of what I use my Mac the most for. It turns out, Facebook has been the biggest timesink in my life for the past month. That’s not good.
The first things I do in the morning are check my email, check Twitter, and check App.Net. This is also not good.
So I’m taking a break. From now, until the end of January, I’m cutting myself off from Facebook, Twitter, App.Net, and a lot of the other endless streams that I wade in daily. There’s nothing special about my decision. I don’t expect this to give me some incredible insight about social media, or the human condition, or anything. I just expect it to free up hours of time during the week I can spend doing other things: reading more, writing more, and focusing on my new job. That’s it.
If there’s a greater purpose to all of this, it relates to a theme in 2014 of being more judicious in what I consume online. I vowed a while ago to follow fewer people, and filter my streams judiciously. With luck, I can contain the information firehose and reduce it down to a manageable trickle of valuable stuff. For starters, I just want to turn it off and find my bearings. Instead of wallowing in other people’s moments, I want to focus on my own moments, just for a while, before opening the floodgates again.
For all the folks who follow me on those various service, I’ll see you on the other side. Until then, I’ll be here, and if you really want to get in touch, there’s always the contact form.
Frank Chimero posted a great piece where he decided to “double down on his personal site in 2014”. Staring down 2014, and looking at the projects I have attached to my name, Frank has me thinking. Why do we silo the things we do? From a technical standpoint, we have a surplus of specialized silos for photos, pithy remarks, long-form writing, and other things because those silos are easy to build and easier to use. There’s cross-polination, but these services are designed to be best at one thing. To post my pithy remarks on Flickr would be a waste, and a pain.
It might also be an inevitable outcome of Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s “Obsession times Voice” theory. If you’re trying to create the greatest blog about the “third Jawa on the left” in that one scene in Star Wars, posting your favorite muffin recipe isn’t going to fit the format. Likewise, if you’re obsessed with muffins and Jawas, and you want to state your opinions on both, mixing the two isn’t going to make for a great blog. If you’re like a lot of us, you register another domain and now you can post about muffins on one place, Jawas on the other, and cross-pollinate whenever there’s something you think both audiences will like.
But that’s just blogging. It does suck having so much of your stuff scattered around multiple domains and services. It’s hard to keep track of it all. It also makes it harder for people who are interested in you, as a person, to get at everything you’re putting out. That’s why I have a link to Crush On Radio in my navigation bar, despite it being a separate domain. I figure if people like what I’m doing here, they might like what I’m doing over there with my friends. Now, there’s a whole separate set of silos around that project: a Facebook, a Twitter, an email account… It’s the same with Above the Runway, which I’m still building out. A few months ago, I finally registered richardjanderson.com to provide an easy place where one can find all my public-facing stuff. Still, it’s Sanspoint where I’ve invested most of my public identity online.
For all of us out there making “content”, a big part of the decision to silo out stuff comes down to whether we want to be known for a project, or as a person. Or both. And, let’s be honest with ourselves: we post stuff on the Internet because we want people to see it. We want to be known for something. We can be known as the guy who’s myopically obsessed with one particular Jawa, or with muffins, or the guy who has so many smart things to say about Apple that their C-level executives have read your work. One does not preclude the other. That said, I’m excited to see what a truly personal site looks like in 2014. How do you bring all of those silos and streams under one banner, one roof, and make it work? I’ll be keeping an eye on frankchimero.com in the meantime, and thinking about what it means for my silos.
Ian Bogost recently published a commentary on “Hyperemployment” in The Atlantic. It starts with the de rigeur comments on how we get too much email, then moves on to the obligations we’ve opted into through social media—especially Facebook. It would seem like the typical curmudgeonly ramblings of anti-Internet/social media types, until this part:
Often, we cast these new obligations either as compulsions (the addictive, possibly dangerous draw of online life) or as necessities (the importance of digital contact and an “online brand†in the information economy). But what if we’re mistaken, and both tendencies are really just symptoms of hyperemployment?
I don’t consider posting on Facebook and Twitter to be exploitation, but the necessity of building a personal online brand is something worth discussing. As someone who is in the middle of job hunting, it certainly hits home. Job hunting in the age of social media is job hunting in the age of utmost scrutiny. It’s not uncommon for prospective employers to scour a candidate’s social media profiles. I did it myself when evaluating summer interns at my previous job. On Episode 41 of QUIT!, Haddie Cooke mentions a college professor who made one of their final class days “Facebook cleanup day,” and recounts a frightening story of what happened to a student who decided to skip it.
This goes way beyond not having pictures of yourself smoking weed on your Facebook. Even the already employed in some fields have to keep up a social presence, along with their actual work. Mimi Thi Nguyen is an academic in the digital humanities and writes that:
To remain relevant [in academia], we are told we must blog, tweet, and code (whether this means learning genetic and neurobiological chemical formulas or computing languages). But it is important to ask, To what end?
— Against Efficiency Machines | thread & circuits
Elsewhere, there’s a debate brewing about the ethics of requiring programmers to contribute to Open Source projects as a prerequisite to employment. Then there’s what Sarah Kendizor calls “the internship scam”, and the prestige economy that replaces entry-level jobs with unpaid internships. In other words, even the unemployed are working overtime just to be competitive in a job market.
Your social media profiles, your passion projects, the internships—paid, and unpaid—you take to get skills, all of these things become your personal brand, and the personal brand subsumes all. Maintaining your personal brand is a full-time job in itself. Vulture posted an interesting piece by Joe Jonas of The Jonas Brothers on the difficulties of living in the spotlight under the Disney brand that offers an interesting perspective on personal branding. It’s not quite that insane for the majority of us. There’s a reason Disney has a team of people to handle the hard work of brushing indiscretions under the rug. It’s just that the rest of us have to keep up our own appearances.
As Ian Bogost writes:
Today, everyone’s a hustler. But now we’re not even just hustling for ourselves or our bosses, but for so many other, unseen bosses. For accounts payable and for marketing; for the Girl Scouts and the Youth Choir; for Facebook and for Google; for our friends via their Kickstarters and their Etsy shops…
My personal brand got me my last job. Having Sanspoint and Crush On Radio showed that I had the skills needed for the role I would take on, and could teach myself new ones. A few months ago, I considered shuttering Sanspoint and starting a new project to focus on my technology and culture writing. As I thought about starting from scratch, building a new audience, a new brand, I realized, first, how integrated this little blog was with my online identity. I’d have to do a lot more than just buy a new domain and set up a new WordPress installation. I’d have to build my personal brand all over again, and that is hard. It’s even harder when you’re already employed.
But is all of this hyperemployment and brand building exploitive? One reason why I was poking and prodding at the Facebook profiles of prospective interns is that they would be publicly representing the company on social media. If they know how to manage their own profiles well, it shows they would know how to manage a business’s profile just as well. It’s a skill, one they don’t teach in school (yet), and not every job requires it. There are still plenty of jobs where what you do outside of office hours simply do not, and should not matter, as long as it doesn’t affect your on the job performance. Why should they have to worry about their online persona and brand?
And what about those who opt-out? We may see people abandoning “traditional” social media in the future. If Snapchat and other temporary sharing services have staying power, how will its users build their brands? Even today, there’s still plenty of people in the first world who don’t use any of this stuff, or use it only sporadically. In 2011, 40% of active Twitter users didn’t tweet, according to an interview with Dick Costolo. Can a personal brand be an absence thereof?