They are what they write
That’s an extremely poignant quote about blogs and bloggers from NYRB’s Sarah Boxer. Read her very insightful piece here (via LanguageLog).
A few thoughts on blogging (in an instituational context)
Recently, I’ve been working on pieces of writing that have forced me to cut down my otherwise burgeoning rhetoric to a more manageable density. In order to not lose track of a few interesting ideas about the nature of blogging, I’ve tried phrasing them in simple, short paragraphs. The result is mildly fluffy and philosophical, but I think it will help me remember certain ideas, for example on why blogs are not “online diaries” and what is special about personal publishing. And hey, who knows, maybe you’ll also find this useful. Let me know what you think.
Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not
A piece of software is a usable idea. It can be changed more or less inside the limits of what we can imagine. We tend to imagine things in terms of what we already know: by thinking of pages and books and journals we can think of web pages and e-books and online journals. But the constraints we add are there because they are cognitively useful, not because nature demands them. A blog is not a diary, because a diary is what it is through its physical attributes. Its constraints are real, while in digital reality there are no constraints. Blogs are persistent thoughts.
Now it’s personal
There has never truly been such a thing as personal publishing before. You may have written something by yourself, but you did not publish alone, because publishing depended on physical reality. It was a special ability of institutions and how this ability is used still profoundly shapes our idea of an organization’s identity. That’s why we mistrust bloggers and think of them as extroverts and narcissists. It must be strange to us that individuals can now do what had been the privilege of institutions since the dawn of human civilization. Blogs are personal in power, not content.
Alone on the blank page
Publishing ultimately means defying time and - in digital reality - space. The price for this defiance has always been that we were alone on the page, that while we could cite and quote and refer what we would point to would always be detached, isolated from our brains by time and distance and it would always be a physical object, not a person. The connections between these objects were undocumented and people had to reconstruct them for themselves, starting over every time. Blogs are about making connections where previously none existed.
A scale from communicate to publish
Communicating with another person was previously dependent on sound waves, while publishing was dependent on paper. The first thing allowed us to interact with the people around us here and now, the second allowed us to store our thoughts for posterity. We’ve had technology to extend the here and go beyond the now for a while, but with digital technology communicating and publishing have become the two ends of a single scale. Whether we do one or the other is a choice we make and we can use the same tools for both. Blogs are not conversations. Blogs are anything between a nod or glance and a 10,000-page personal epic.
But it’s public!
Public used to be a well-lit stage that everyone was watching from the dark theater rows. Now the stages are round, with no curtains and no hidden props and they are scattered around the theater. Small groups of people are watching a range of improvisations being performed and occasionally an actor will stop to answer a question from an onlooker or point to another actor. The performance with the largest audience may not be the most interesting one and a lot of great monologues go unnoticed. Public no longer means “everyone”, it means “potentially anyone”.
Behavior beats bottom line
Your blog is you in words and sentences, it is the extension of the communicative self into digital reality - a voice without a half life or limit of reach. Because of this, nothing is ever final in the same way that words anchored to a physical object are. Anything that is said can and will provoke a linked response at some point in time, either from yourself or from someone else. A reader from outside your organization will intently watch this interaction as it unfolds and he will deduct who you are from how you communicate. Interact skillfully and he will note it positively, flout the rules of communicative fairness and transparency and he will perceive you as arrogant, insecure and out of touch. Whatever you do stays on record forever and the record never stops growing. The qualities you demonstrate in interaction beat what you accomplish on your own, because there’s always someone watching.
Old media semantics
Douglas Gray wrote a wonderfully concise piece about what you could call ‘the blog stereotype’ a little while ago that I thought I should mention. The subject of his commentary is this article by Edward Champion, which is actually not concerned with blogs at all, but with the fact - surprise, surprise - that you might find having a blog quite convenient if you happen to be a famous (or at least notorious) exhibitionist. That, and Champion needs to consult a dictionary. As Gray notes:
The number of stereotypes and sweeping generalizations Champion manages to compress into the opening paragraphs of the article is truly dazzling. If only he’d taken the time to consult an undergraduate-level textbook on modern literature, he might have also gotten some of his terminology right.
The “confessional” writers were a movement of poets (primarily) who in the 1950s and 1960s began treating an autobiographical “I” as the primary subject of the work, delving with stark frankness into emotional and sexual experiences in a way that violated previous taboos about what constituted proper poetic material.
Champion conflates confessional material with introspection, though they are not the same thing at all. T.S. Eliot, for example, was a deeply introspective poet, but he avoided personal revelations in his own work. I’ve heard it argued that Anne Sexton, one of the leading confessional poets, was herself not terribly introspective.
Of course, among other things, introspection is also a scientific methodology. For example, to decide whether or not a sentence is grammatical a syntactician may resort to introspection, i.e. his intuitive judgment. Obviously that has very little to do with him revealing his private secrets to the general public. In fact, if you look at linguistic blogs you’ll find disappointingly little outrageous personal revelations. Heck, if you ask Google what introspection means it becomes quite clear that it’s not the same as exhibitionism. This journalist is in need of a plain old dictionary, it seems.
The elephant in the room: observations on the Google vs. Sicko incident
(Edit: this post by Teresa Valdez Klein on the subject is also interesting.)
The tumult over the whole affair has been impossible to miss. A little over a week ago, Lauren Turner, a health care marketer at Google, wrote a blog entry in which she criticized Michael Moore’s new movie Sicko for its allegedly unfair depiction of health care companies. The piece was posted in Google’s new Health Advertising Blog and led to an outcry. Many in the blogosphere saw Turner’s recommendation to insurance companies - buy ads from Google to fix your image problems - as a sleazy and manipulative form of marketing (samples: this post by ZDNet’s Dan Farber and this bit by Mike Abundo calling for Turner to be fired). The company reacted with two meta posts, one by Turner, explaining that the views expressed in her initial post were purely her own and a second one in Google’s main corporate blog that also sought to douse the flames. Since the incident made Slashdot it can be considered a fairly bad moment for Google’s PR.
Most comments that I’ve read deal with the question of accountability - whose opinion is expressed in an official blog and where do we draw the line between personal opinion and the company’s official stance?
While I also want to deal with that question, my impression is that Turner’s (and thus Google’s) mistake is not firstly the opinion expressed in the post - that Sicko is biased and treats health care companies unfairly - but failing to understand the communicative situation in which the exchange takes place. Turner manifests a fairly stunning lack of knowledge and sensitivity when it comes to blog sociology and that is why the piece caused such an uproar.
Let me elaborate, using several quotes from the post:
Lights, camera, action: the healthcare industry is back in the spotlight. (Not that it ever left the stage.) Next week, Michael Moore’s documentary film, Sicko, will start playing in movie theaters across America.
The New York Times calls Sicko a “cinematic indictment of the American health care system.” The film is generating significant buzz and is sure to spur a lively conversation about health coverage, care, and quality in America. While legislators, litigators, and patient groups are growing excited, others among us are growing anxious. And why wouldn’t they? Moore attacks health insurers, health providers, and pharmaceutical companies by connecting them to isolated and emotional stories of the system at its worst. Moore’s film portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show healthcare’s interest in patient well-being and care.
These are the first two paragraphs of Turner’s piece and careful reading quickly reveals several interesting things. Firstly, the style is very journalesque. The lights, camera, action-enumeration in the first sentence could also be from a movie review or some other traditional journalistic text type (e.g. an editorial).
A slight shift occurs with the first instance of a personal pronoun (us). While the referent of the pronoun is at least somewhat ambiguous, it appears to be what could be called the ‘universal we‘ that Turner uses - legislators, litigators, and patient groups are part of the American public, as are others among us. The referent of others is named a bit later: health insurers, health providers, and pharmaceutical companies are worried about the way the movie depicts them. The important detail here is that Turner does not place the two groups equally for away from herself. She could have simply written others are growing anxious or something similar, but by inserting among us she has placed herself (and arguably her employer) in direct proximity to her potential clients in the health care business. Of course that placement is quite deliberate - she wants to sell ads to these companies, after all - but it soon becomes clear why it is also highly problematic.
Sound familiar? Of course. The healthcare industry is no stranger to negative press. A drug may be a blockbuster one day and tolled as a public health concern the next. News reporters may focus on Pharma’s annual sales and its executives’ salaries while failing to share R&D costs. Or, as is often common, the media may use an isolated, heartbreaking, or sensationalist story to paint a picture of healthcare as a whole. With all the coverage, it’s a shame no one focuses on the industry’s numerous prescription programs, charity services, and philanthropy efforts.
I think you’ll agree that the entire paragraph is essentially a flowery declaration of love for the health care industry. Now, this isn’t surprising per se (again, this is a sales pitch), but the lack of balance is still noteworthy (the nasty press vs. the friendly insurance companies). But wait, there’s more.
Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through “Get the Facts” or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them?
Note that here the pronominal references change. We becomes Google and the more distant our clients is replaced by you / your brand. Why is this significant?
Because the post starts out with no clear speaker and referent. There is no “I”, as in “I want to express my views on Sicko and the health care industry today” and no “you” as in “Dear John, how are you ?”. The latter -that there is no clear referent - is perfectly normal for a blog, but the former is unusual. More importantly, these roles are only clearly assigned in the last two paragraphs.
We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.
The pronominal reference at this point is clearly we = Google, you = health care companies. In other words, this is a message from Google to companies in that industry and while other people may also be reading it they are of no concern to the author. When a third party is introduced into the text (the public, later users), it is treated as though it were not a part of the exchange. Apart from pronominal use there are other signature characteristics of the text type that Mrs. Turner had in mind when writing this: verbs such as act, educate, promote, connect and help are indicting, as is the need to tart up nouns adjectivally (relevant websites, ever-expanding content network etc).
If you’re interested in learning more about issue management campaigns or about how we can help your company better connect its assets online, email us. We’d love to hear from you! Setting up these campaigns is easy and we’re happy to share best practices.
This is the equivalent of telling Bob that you think Mary is fat… while she is standing next to you. The public that needs to be educated is the elephant in the room and it doesn’t like to be talked down to. Turner appears to be unaware of this however. She seems to either assume that only potential clients will read the blog and that her pitch will work with them, or (even worse) that the gullible and asinine public will read it but not be offended.
The moral of the story is simple: you should anticipate that your blog is a public forum, no matter how specialized and in-group it may seem. Corporate bloggers should also forget most of what they know about the language of marketing. Certain linguistic tropes (like the aforementioned super-dupering of products via excessive use of adjectives) are recognized immediately and have a lot of potential for negative interpretation.
Delivering a sales pitch like this through a blog is bad enough, priding yourself with how effectively your employer can manipulate the public opinion for the right price is… well, I believe in American English it is called effing stupid. The problem is further aggravated by the fact that Turner’s claim - this is my opinion, not Google’s - is extremely weak.
In all but the last sentence we is the personal pronoun of choice, and that we clearly refers to the company. Obviously, Google as a corporate entity cannot have an opinion, but what is posted in an official corporate blog will understandably be interpreted as noted and accepted by someone further up the ladder (and it seems unlikely that there was no monitoring in Turner’s case).
Not understanding blog stylistics is at least a part of Turner’s failure. She has applied a language common in one context to a completely different and inappropriate one and the result is a bit like someone telling a bad joke aloud at a funeral. Clarifying that your views are your own by using I instead of the collective company we is a decent start.
Following up on danah boyd’s essay and its reception
After reading a number of interesting comments in the course of the last few days, I thought it would make sense to follow up on danah boyd’s blog essay concerning socioeconomic status and social networking sites with a second post (read the first one here). As with my previous piece, I’m especially interested in the reception and in how boyd herself is reacting to the (shoddy) journalism of the BBC and others.
Last week, boyd posted this on the heels of her essay:
Dear esteemed members of the press,
I am in the field collecting data and then will be attending a conference. I am not able to respond right now. Do not call my house phone. Do not pester my department. And do *NOT* hound my subletter. All press inquiries should be sent to press [at] danah.org. When I can, I respond. When I can’t, I don’t. Do not use other email addresses - I check the press one from my phone and answer them in order when I have spare cycles. Other requests are typically ignored.
The BBC coverage of my blog essay is hugely problematic. If you want to discuss what I’ve written, please read the essay itself. This is not a formal report. This is a blog essay based on observations from the field. And this is not a 6-month study; it is a 4-year study with a tide shift that I’ve noticed in the last 6 months. Again, read the essay. At some point, I will turn this into a formal article, but this is not that. Cover it as you see fit, but do not call it a report.
Thank you,
THE MANAGEMENT(emphasis mine)
From the viewpoint of anyone who has ever done genre studies, this is a pretty interesting text. Obviously the genre categories boyd uses - blog essay, formal report, study, formal article and report - are important. boyd essentially claims that the semantics of these terms place them in distinct distance from one another. In other words, the fact that a) her blog essay is in fact a blog essay (and not a report, study, article etc) and b) the knowledge of what a blog essay is should both have been available to the BBC’s reporters and their failure to use the correct terminology to describe her piece suggests incompetence or even a willful misrepresentation. They are calling it a study although it isn’t, because they don’t understand how ethnographic research works.
And of course this is perfectly true. All the labels used by the mass media to describe Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace are their invention -nowhere does boyd use the terms report or study.
Some of the comments I’ve read capture the problem quite well. Says Marianne Richmond:
I think perhaps that the fallout of Danah’s blog essay is a case study in new media participation and consumption in and of it self: Her observations were interpreted, misinterpreted and remixed within the context of academic research that is more typical of the author…even though the standards of academic research were specifically stated by the author as not applicable.
The last statement is actually incorrect. boyd made the explicit statement that the piece was not an academic article after the initial posting. This short paragraph originally preceded the text, followed by the essay proper.
I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I’ve been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I’m having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren’t so good at talking about class and I’m definitely feeling that discomfort. It’s sticky, it’s uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don’t have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it’s also hugely problematic. I don’t have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed to be said anyhow. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I’m going to face the stickiness and see if I can get my thoughts across. Hopefully it works.
The paragraph following it - what could be called the ‘disclaimer for academic readers’ - was added retroactively:
For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this is not an academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my observations in the field, but I’m not trying to situate or theorize what is going on. I’ve chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I know that they are not precise uses of these terms. Hopefully, one day, I can get the words together to actually write an academic article about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go unacknowledged.
boyd also later edited the blog post announcing the piece. Sadly, I have no way of retrieving the original text to check what changes were made, but it seems she highlighted the word essay multiple times to emphasize the status of the publication as something other than an article/study/report etc. Of course, she also made no claim going into the other direction. When using a descriptive label for her piece, she consistently calls it a blog essay or essay. As I’ve noted before, the semantics of the compound term blog essay are bound to be unclear to her readers, as she is one of very few people who use this phrase at all.
That being said, I fully agree to Marianne’s observation. In the media ecosystem we live in today, an author constantly risks losing control of her text and it being recontextualized by others in meaning-changing ways that cannot be predicted. Such recontextualizations can be deliberately misleading or the result of a misunderstanding. It’s often a thin line.
In this vein, Elaine Young sides with boyd and notes the inaccurate reporting:
You go girl! Fancy that. Asking the media to READ something before they report on it. But … there is no guarantee that they will full comprehend what they are reading and there in lies the challenge in posting “information” that is somewhat controversial on the web in an open forum.
The way “information” is put in quotes here is interesting to me, as it seems also to point once more to the unclear status of the piece and a lack of clarity regarding boyd’s investigative methodology. Note that I’m not saying that her methodology is in any way unsound. It’s a perfectly well-established practice in a range of disciplines that produces highly valuable results. I am saying that Young’s way of phrasing it suggests that she is not clear about the kind of evidence that ethnographic methods produce (is it information or just “information”?).
This blog gives a very good summary of the sequence of events:
Berkeley PhD candidate Danah Boyd, has the web astir after she posted an informal essay on her blog about the class divisions associated with the popular social-networking sites Facebook and MySpace. Boyd, who is already among the most prominent of academics of the Internet’s social sphere, posted the essay on Sunday. On Monday morning, the BBC reported on Boyd’s “conclusions”, and by midday Monday, nearly 100,000 readers had flocked to Boyd’s original entry. Though many have written in support of the essay, others have taken major offense, calling the work “racist” and academically unsound. Boyd sees the negativity towards her essay as a product of its misrepresentation in the press–specifically in the BBC’s “hugely problematic” coverage of her essay–which she says referred to the essay as a final product of academic research, rather than the exploratory mid-process musing it was meant to be.
Kevin P comments over at Tuttle SVC:
I’m not sure. I can’t decide if we should blame danah for not being *more* clear it was not research or the media for not being *more* clear that it was not research.
Certainly she’s getting flamed, and boy is she getting known.
The topic is being discussed like crazy.
Blogs are confusing with standards and danah is firmly on the crack, but I think it’s put her out as a leader.
Would her problem have been solved if she had moderated comments like you do and just taken out the really nasty ones?
It’s interesting to conclude that the essay is “not research” (which is again not phrased that way by boyd). If it were not research, or based on research, the idea that there is a socioeconomic split between Facebook and MySpace users would merely be an opinion. Instead, it is supported by research data - just not by data of the right kind, in my view. Whereas a large volume of quantitative data could answer the question of the Facebook and MySpace user communities’ makeup with relative precision, the qualitative data that has been used cannot. That does not mean that the assumption isn’t true, it just means it can’t be validated.
This post also caught my attention:
Ms. boyd is a quite accomplished scholar of social systems and her thoughts tend to carry a fair amount of weight. She’s an acknowledged expert in a given field, yet as an academic, she has two different “modes” of presenting her thoughts. One is very formal, involving calculated and well researched statements reflecting research and study and highlighting correlation and conclusion. In other words, your typical research paper.
The other is the equivalent of sitting at a coffee shop for an hour.
The funny thing is that it’s often those latter statements that seem to have the highest likelihood of spreading like an Atlanta lawyer on a transcontinental flight.
Kent and i got into a quick discussion about this and i think he touched on something kinda key. He noted that it won’t be long before academics realize that they don’t necessarily need the structure and peer review that they previously always had. They can be more open and have greater impact without it. i disagreed, since i know that often that peer review system exists for a good reason and a lot of folks actually like it since it helps them refine and defend their assertions instead of just shouting them into the void.
Peer review is regarded by many as a guarantee of scientific integrity, yet to others it means elitism and expert-worship. I agree with the author though - without peer review, the scientific process can turn into a popularity contest. What can be proven often isn’t what’s generally believed, what is plausible or popular.
Ken Cousins of Augmentation is impressed by the potential of blogs as a publishing platform for academics:
Think about this - a grad student publishes preliminary fieldwork notes to the web, and within 24-48 hours has drawn the attention of a mid-sized city. Granted, danah is a rock star, and not all of the comments were appropriate or well-conceived. But I think most academics would consider their careers a success if they commanded an audience of such size over their entire careers.
Is danah a super-hub? Are the rest of us scattered throughout the long tail? Clearly, on both counts. But at the very least, this suggests an emerging mode for scholarship, a new means of engaging the broader community (both scholarly and pedestrian) in our work.
The awareness that you can communicate with an enormous number of readers almost effortlessly via your blog has still not reached the majority of academics, who are used to thinking in very tightly knit groups and don’t really consider the importance of addressing a wider audience. I’d be very surprised if the majority of researchers in the humanities and social sciences isn’t blogging 10 years from now. Why? Because I think these areas have suffered from a lack of knowledge about what they do and how, on the part of the majority of the population.
Finally, I want to quote a full post by Michael Clarke on the topic that I found very insightful.
The reaction to Danah’s essay in the newspapers suggests that mainstream media are still very fond of privileging expert, authoritative discourse - when it suits them (i.e. when it gives an opportunity to discuss/reinforce class divisions, say “Oooh, it’s bad this Noo Medjaa stuff, isn’t it?” and so on…). Three days previously, Weinberger and Keen were debating the “…value of authority in a connected world…” and it’s fascinating how much of the attention given to Danah’s post accrued from her status as an academic (and how much hatred that this seems to have generated on the comments on her most recent post).
This is in line with studies such as the Edelman Trust Barometer (see slide #22). Academics are still generally trusted as credible, though a democratization of trust is taking place (”someone like myself” is now considered the most trustworthy source of information in many areas).
One might argue that perceived “expertise” has always been related to demagoguery both benign and sinister (Gina Ford of Contented Little Baby, Scoble, Hitler, Alain de Botton, Ghandi…) - social media just democratises people’s access to becoming a demagogue (lowers the entry requirements).
I find that observation both keen and very amusing, though I don’t think Robert Scoble deserves being mentioned along with mass-murderous dictators.
Perhaps “experts” then, in a constructed sense, are still very much with us but social media renders them more open to challenge than ever before. The Danah cited in a slightly sloppy piece by the BBC is thoroughly mediated by their take on her work but it’s one click away from her blog. On her blog, she’s speaking for herself - and people can answer back.
No doubt the openness of the social media is a good thing, but the diversity of opinions and the lack of accountability also make it hard to figure out whom to believe. That isn’t a catastrophe, but the market for things which are simply untrue (but nicely serve to compound our stereotypes) is definitely there.
Any conclusions? Expertise is accountable on Web 2.0. And perhaps more useful as a result of this, as any socially mediated means of distribution makes the consumer of expertise equally accountable for the uses they put it to. Well, that’s my optimistic take on it, anyway…
Expertise is only truly accountable if you have it yourself. In other words, I have to be physicist to understand an advanced physics problem, social web or no social web. If I don’t, my only alternative is to trust someone who knows more about this stuff than I do. Believing what the majority finds plausible can be a dead end. That doesn’t mean that the social web is not a boon for academics, but since earning and keeping trust is vital to what we do, we should make sure we do our job well.
The initial lack of clarity regarding the genre-status of the piece is what caused all this fuss. While it would be nice if journalists and the general public knew more about different forms of academic writing, I believe that danah boyd intended the piece to be both more than just a blog entry and less than a real research paper - and therein lies the problem. I don’t think you can have it both ways and make it authoritative for those who believe and “just an essay” for those who don’t, which is what this looks like.
The Scienciness of danah boyd
Hmm, funny how these things go. Originally, I just wanted to write a short entry about an essay by danah boyd, but then things turned out differently, in the sense that the entry became anything but short (a blog essay, if you will) and that it ended up concerning more than just one piece of writing and its reception.
Let’s see.
boyd’s recent post on class divisions on MySpace and Facebook caught my attention because it raises a number of interesting questions (the full essay is available here) and I was eager to blog a detailed comment.
But on the Web time works against you and others were a lot more prompt with their responses than me. Many others. So many, in fact, that boyd was taken off guard by the mass of reactions, which were provided by both the mainstream press (1, 2, 3, 4 - many more if you search) and of course by countless bloggers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, …. the list is endless). So instead of adding my nitpicking to what has already been written – much of which is strongly decontextualized and hyperbolic – I want to look at the dynamics of the situation instead.
-
A PhD candidate writes up her impressions regarding the socioeconomic status of users on two social networking sites and puts the resulting text on her web site.
-
The new and old media pick up the piece and present it as the result of scientific inquiry (see below).
-
People hotly debate whether a) the claims made in the piece are accurate and b) what the (negative) implications are.
-
The essayist qualifies her writing, calling it “problematic” [1] and noting that “as an academic… I feel guilty” [2].
Looking at this course of events, I realized that I was actually more interested in the reception and interpretation of boyd’s essay and in what it means for the relationship between science and society in the digital era than I was in the content of the essay per se.
Why?
Because it is a perfect example of how genre conventions can be creatively subverted to gain prestige and authority (though I am not implying that this is boyd’s goal). Furthermore, the essay’s reception demonstrates how the lack of reliable formal criteria to distinguish between emergent digital genres can cause uncertainty, and that the news media reinforces this uncertainty through shoddy and inaccurate reporting.
The result of this process is a sort of Scienciness – a set of opinions and impressions which are supported by the experience, intuition and (most importantly) prestige of an academic, but not by empirical data. This last fact is not problematic per se, since there are many interesting questions that simply cannot be answered in a satisfactory way by relying purely on quantitative data. In countless areas of investigation the ethnographic methodology as employed by boyd is ideally suited to the question – just not here, where the question is a simple socio-demographic tidbit: are the user communities of Facebook and MySpace economically stratified or not?
In the following paragraphs, I want to look at how boyd characterizes and classifies her own writing and how it is in turn interpreted and (badly!) recontextualized by some of the news sites that cite her. In that context it is worthwhile to point out that the popular reception of the essay is partly due to its usefulness in confirming what we suspected all along.
Is anything a scientist says scientific per definition? Is it our job to find proof for what people suspected all along (for example, about the unwashed masses and the digital Las Vegas they have created on MySpace, to use boyd’s example)? In other words, is what we (as in “we scientists”) do about finding the truth, or about finding answers; the difference being that the truth can be rather fuzzy and inconclusive and answers are, by contrast, meant to satisfy the inquirer?
Let’s start by looking at some of the points made in boyd’s essay and blog entry:
There is indeed a change taking place, but it’s not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.
(from the blog)
The assertion made is simple enough: the migration of people from one site to the other is not age-related, but influenced by socioeconomic factors. boyd notes that she lacks both a concise definition of class and the empirical data needed to back up her claim that there is a migration from one platform to the other and that this is indeed socioeconomically motivated:
(I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I’ve been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I’m having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren’t so good at talking about class. It’s sticky, it’s uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don’t have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it’s also hugely problematic. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I’m going to face the stickiness and see if a point can be made through it all. Hopefully it works. If not, sorry.)
(from the essay)
(A “meta point” that could be made here is that her piece is not so much descriptive as it is impressionistic. In order for something to be descriptive it has to accurately describe something.)
Now, although having empirical data on the users of Facebook and MySpace and their demographic and socioeconomic status at hand would be convenient, lacking such information by no means precludes any kind of analysis. boyd has conducted countless interviews and analyzed a large number of profiles in the course of her studies. The unique advantage of an ethnographic methodology is that it allows the researcher to capture contextual information that is simply omitted when just looking at numbers on a spreadsheet.
But the problem is that the kind of question boyd asks doesn’t require or even allow an ethnographic methodology. It requires a large-scale, representative quantitative analysis. I fully agree with boyd when she notes that, to pick a prominent example, income is not a single sufficient indicator of “class”. But this does not impact the central issue at all: when making judgements on two internet communities with a size exceeding 125 million users having conducted a series of interviews seems grossly insufficient.
It is interesting that boyd reacted one day after initially publishing the essay by appending the following to her foreword (without marking the change in any way):
For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this is not an academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my observations in the field, but I’m not trying to situate or theorize what is going on. I’ve chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I know that they are not precise uses of these terms. Hopefully, one day, I can get the words together to actually write an academic article about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go unacknowledged.
(from the essay)
Several aspects of this qualifying paragraph are interesting. Firstly, she specifically addresses the academic community when stating that her piece is not an academic article, which almost creates the impression that this caveat does not apply to those outside of academia who interpreted it as such a text (e.g. the news media). Secondly she presents the defect of the article as a linguistic problem – she isn’t able to find the correct terminology for the phenomena she believes to have noticed. Thirdly, her motivation for writing and publishing the text despite of its self-attested weaknesses is that of the activist who finds the issues “too critical to go unacknowledged”.
But what exactly is it that shouldn’t go unacknowledged? That the use of social networking sites may be socially stratified? Not only would that be hardly surprising (if it could be proven), but it would also hardly serve as a grounds for any kind of activism (should we ban Facebook for elitism, or MySpace for appealing to the proles?). Or, does boyd mean it is an important issue that American society is shaped by its socioeconomic makeup, or that this makeup should be changed, or that this is a new, pressing issue that needs to be urgently addressed?
All of these things seems ridiculously implausible.
And what about the second problem – that she is lacking the words to describe the problem. The claim frames scientific inquiry as the application of obscure jargon to an issue, a jargon that wouldn’t change the quality of the facts presented in any way. A discussion about the implications of how the user bases of social networks are socially stratified may be highly political, but the data itself certainly isn’t. In other words, the issue isn’t what to call things, the issue is whether or not they are there in the first place. Accurate quantitative data precludes a careful description – there is no language fix to that problem.
This “message to the academic readership” echoes similar remarks made in boyd’s blog:
I think some folks misinterpreted this piece as an academic article. No doubt this is based on my observations from the field, but this is by no means an academic article. I did add some methodological footnotes in the piece so that folks would at least know where the data was coming from. But I didn’t situate or theorize or contextualize this at all. It’s more like publicizing field observations. There’s much work to be done before this can be anything resembling an academic article. The “citation” note at the top of my pieces also confuses this. That was meant for when people picked it up and stole it whole from my page or when people got to it indirectly. I put that as a standard for my blog essays a while back because of this issue. I guess I see my blog as a space to work out half-formed ideas. I just didn’t expect 90K people to read it. Blog essays to me are thoughts in progress, blog entries that are too long to be blog entries. But I can see where there’s confusion.
(from the blog)
The last highlighted remark is what genuinely puzzles me. When is a blog entry too long to be a blog entry? The software imposes no natural limit on how much you can publish in one entry. In fact, I have individual posts in my corpus that exceed 5,000 running words of text. Whether that is typical is another question, but there is certainly no technical reason to limit the length of a blog post any more than the length of any other piece published on-line.
But instead of publishing it in her blog, boyd evokes a new genre of writing: the blog essay. Googling for that compound term results in 26,500 hits, a tiny fraction of the number of results found when searching for either “blog” or “essay”. It can thus be assumed that boyd is either an early adopter of the term, or possibly its inventor. The blog essay is published on boyd’s website danah.org, which also contains a full biography and information on her to-date research. By contrast, her blog apophenia is located at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/. The meta-description she provides in the side-bar there reads: “I use this blog to express random thoughts about whatever i’m thinking about.“ By contrast, the essay is stored at http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ - the only text currently in that folder. The danah.org/papers folder is linked to in several places and referred to as “my research papers” and “formalized reflections” [1, 2].
Here’s the layout of the essay’s header, as published at http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html:
Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
danah boyd
June 24, 2007
Citation: boyd, danah. 2007. “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace .” Apophenia Blog Essay. June 24 . http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
(If you have comments, please add them to the related entry on my blog. Thank you.)
[text body]
The citation, as noted by boyd [1], serves to reinforce any assumption on part of the reader that this is a scholarly article, or at least the draft of one.
Let’s summarize: the text is on a separate HTML page, located in a folder that contains research papers. It is deliberately published in another place than the blog (that is used to publish thoughts and opinions) and instructions are given for how it should be cited.
And yet it is not an academic article.
It appears that those citing the piece are under an entirely different impression (and I’m not saying that this isn’t largely their own fault). The BBC mentions a study, calling the essay a “preliminary draft”, to Mashable it’s a “case study”, BoingBoing also uses the term “draft”, blogger John Scalzi uses the more specific label “draft of an academic paper” and finally, MonstersAndCritics.com calls it “a new six-month interview-based study”.
Looking again at the novel genre label of blog essay doesn’t help to clarify the issue, as the semantics of the term are confusing (to me at least). Looking up definitions of essay nets explanations such as these:
an analytic or interpretive literary composition
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Essay, a short work that treats of a topic from an author’s personal point of view, often taking into account subjective experiences and personal reflections upon them.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay
A short literary composition on a single subject expressing a personal view.
www.peabody.jhu.edu/index.php
I think most people would agree that these definitions are equally applicable to a blog, with the difference that the essay is a pre-digital genre and one that is usually associated with traditions of learned or academic writing. boyd makes a choice when calling her text a blog essay: she assigns it a certain degree of authority by delineating it from the pieces published in her blog. Together with her status as an academic – at least that is the role that virtually all news sources assign her – the implication for most readers is clearly that what she is saying is the result of scientific research. In other words, it is an assessment based on empirical facts that tells us something about the world we live in. It is verifiable, objective and the result of thorough inquiry.
I know I’m applying the most drastic view possible here, but you can probably see the problem. boyd has – whether deliberately or not – positioned her blog essay in an ontological nirvana between scientific research and impressionistic argument. She has creatively remixed different forms of publishing in a way made possible only by the push-button power of the Net. By placing her blog next to her archive of research papers, she has created a hierarchy – here a few loosely connected thoughts, there a collection of structured ideas. The blog essay is the hybrid form that reaps the benefit of both text types but is under none of the constraints. To those who find it convincing it can be research, to those who are skeptical it is supposed to be just an opinion piece.
It’s like science, just without all that rigor.
Maybe that is what is causing boyd’s uneasiness about the impact of the piece, expressed in her closing note:
I also need to get my head around the fact that sharing something problematic has sparked more of a conversation and reflection than being precise. In some senses, this bothers me. At the same time, inciting people to think is exactly what I want. So I am feeling very bewildered. Is the way to make change to present something problematic so that people have to engage by disagreeing? Hmm..
(from her blog)
It’s the truth vs. answers conundrum again. Scientific investigation leads us to more questions, not to any definite, final answers that are easy to understand and confirm the stereotyped expectation we have, based on our own anecdotal experience. It isn’t science’s job to spark “conversation and reflection”, as harsh as that may sound. I don’t mean that it’s not great when that happens – I mean that that shouldn’t be the primary goal. Because if it is our goal, we are putting social gratification before investigating the truth, since in the end “conversation and reflection” largely accomplishes social ends. It’s not a popularity contest, it’s a truth contest. But of course I’m probably looking at this from an entirely wrong angle.
In a way, Robert Scoble summarizes the appeal of boyd’s blog essay chimera aptly:
Here’s why I was interested in her paper last night where some of her other, more “researched” writings just leaves me cold.
1. It clearly defined a conflict. And a big one at that between two classes of people.
[drama makes for great entertainment]
2. It fit my already pre-defined stereotypes. My brother, Ben, for instance, is on MySpace […] Of course these kids totally fit into danah’s post last night.
[stories are told to reinforce our view of the world]
3. Most of danah’s posts are written for an academic audience. Put a little simpler: they are information dense and hard to get through. The one last night had a breezy, conversational feel to it. It was more approachable than her usual writings. I think that in our RSS “J, J, J, J” fast track world we just give up on posts that are too academic and not interesting to us as humans.
[please don’t make me think]
Oh danah, do you forget that we live in a world that pays 1,000,000 times more attention to Paris Hilton in jail than we do to whatever our President is doing? And you wonder why your article yesterday got so much attention? You hit the same nerve that Paris Hilton does.
Perhaps it is just me, but I am not entirely sure boyd enjoys being framed as the Paris Hilton of internet sociology. At least, I can see that not working out so well with her feminist activism. Mass appeal is just one form of currency and in the academic world it’s not the one with the highest value.
In the end this is not about one piece of writing, its author or how it’s being received though. It is about how we communicate what we do as researchers in a networked world. When everyone suddenly has a voice, authority is crucial – and absolutely invaluable. Scientists have authority not because of academic titles or the prestige of universities, but because they play by certain rules and present their work in specific formalized ways. These ways are changing, invariably, along with the way we communicate digitally. The academic community (and especially an innovator like mrs. boyd) should actively engage this change. Academic publishing won’t take place on paper in the future and the genre labels we’ll use will be different. But we will need clear labels nonetheless; we will need peer review and we will need other measures of authority that are as objective as possible, because otherwise there is the danger that authority and popularity become synonymous and that our job is merely to validate what the majority finds plausible. We should let the priests and the politicians do that.
I know that in the context of the Web as a democratizing force this probably all sounds medieval, backwards and elitist. But my concern is trust, plain and simple. We are trusted for basing our claims on facts and we should do all we can to prevent incompetent journalists from misrepresenting what we do. I know that that’s easier said than done, but to me at least it’s something to strive for.
No “I” in corporate blogs?
I thought I’d post this quick bit as a belated response to Pranam Kolari’s piece on the frequency of “I” in blogs and to Doug Karr’s comment on the post (Dave Sifry also weighed in).
Pranam first looked at the relative frequency of the token “I” (which often signifies the first person pronoun in English) in blog posts and then at the overall total of posts containing “I”. Since according to Nielsen BlogPulse roughly 45% of all blog posts feature at least a single occurrence of “I”, it can be deduced that a bit more than twice of all Technorati matches for “I” is the total number of blog entries written in a given month.
As Pranam explains:
The token “I” (1, 2) can provide interesting cues on the Blogosphere, other than signifying the obvious personal nature of blog posts. “I” sometimes use it to study the growth of the blogosphere (between David Sifry reports ofcourse), or just for fun to see how frequently indices of blog search engines are updated and if any of them are in a “breather” mode.
Apart from the fact that it is annoying having to resort to such complicated measures (wouldn’t it be nice if Technorati just provided us with these numbers?) my first impulse was to complain that “I” is not a very good candidate for this calculation. Firstly, it isn’t the most frequent word in English-language writing, at least in off-line contexts. A quick look at the BNC shows that it’s not even among the top 10.
BNC frequencies
rank | token | word class
1 | THE | AT0
2 | OF | PRF
3 | AND | CJC
4 | A | AT0
5 | IN | PRP
6 | TO | TO0
7 | IS | VBZ
8 | TO | PRP
9 | WAS | VBD
10 | IT | PNP
“I” comes in at number 16, making an odd choice at first glance. But of course anyone who has ever worked with a search engine to do some kind of linguistic investigation will immediately know why Pranam didn’t pick “THE” instead: BlogPulse (like Google) ignores function words (all those listed above) and thus you don’t get any matches if you search for them.
Still, I’m very skeptical about measuring the size of the English-speaking blogosphere by counting the frequency of “I”, for several reasons. The most important one is that “I” may indicate the first person pronoun in English, but it can just as well mean something else. Look at the following results from Google for “I”-matches in languages other than English.
1,170,000 Arabic pages for i
1,320,000 Bulgarian pages for i
1,430,000 Catalan pages for i
6,860,000 Czech pages for i
13,300,000 Spanish pages for i
These are just examples - I think it is safe to say that you can get in excess of a million matches with basically any language, including some which are not represented in a large number of pages. In some cases these matches may come from agglutinative languages in which it is possible to compose what equates to a full sentence in English by “gluing” morphemes together*. “I” is a meaning-distinguishing morpheme in many languages and a word by itself in others (if I’m not mistaken it means “and” in Catalan, a minor alternation in spelling compared to the Spanish “y”). Note that neither Technorati not Google take case into account, so “I” and “i” are both counted.
Apart from that, there are many initialisms starting with “i” (iMode, iPod, iFilm), roman numerals (i. , ii., iii. ..) and other possible sources of error. “I” is a veritable minefield, at least from my point of view.
So let’s turn to the question of why and when it appears in blog posts as the English first person pronoun.
Doug Karr, commenting on Pranams post:
I believe what is missing is the implementation of corporate blogs and aggregation blogs. These blogs are less apt to utilize ‘I’ because they speak to an organization or to a technology. They are less likely to be personal.
Since I’ve been collecting what should by now be a representative sample of corporate blogs - 4.82 million words from 140 sources, as of today - I’m itching to answer that question. Let’s see.
Corporate Blog Frequencies
Rank | Word | POS | Frequency
1 | the | DT | 210540
2 | to | TO | 118966
3 | and | CC | 106665
4 | of | IN | 93750
5 | a | DT | 92646
6 | in | IN | 64756
7 | I | PP | 55424
8 | is | VBZ | 49713
9 | For | IN | 43940
10 | It | PP | 43651
This chart also gives us a better idea of how frequent “I” really is in blogs. When you compare it with the BNC table above you’ll see the difference. “I” is much more frequent in blogs than it is in most registers contained in the BNC, which is not that surprising when you take into account that the BNC contains no computer-mediated communication, which is considerably more likely to be direct interpersonal communication than material from the paper age.
But what about corporate blogs vs. blogs in general? My corpus contains 18 non-corporate blog sources for comparison. Here are the word frequencies for personal blogs:
Personal Blog Frequencies
Rank | Word | POS | Frequency
1 | the | DT | 11585
2 | and | CC | 7908
3 | to | TO | 7495
4 | of | IN | 5108
5 | a | DT | 5049
6 | i | NP | 4590
7 | I | PP | 4318
8 | in | IN | 3526
9 | It | PP | 3365
10 | you | PP | 3091
There’s a minor hiccup here: number 6 (”i”) and number 7 (”I”) are probably both instances of the first person pronoun. The trouble for my tagger is that those creative individual bloggers don’t bother with standard spelling and write “i” instead of “I”, which the tagger stubbornly interprets as “NP” (proper noun). If you add the two frequencies “I” comes in second, with a fair margin.
As you can see, Doug’s basic assumption - that “I” is less frequent in corporate blogs than in blogs in general - is confirmed. However, “I” frequency in corporate blogs is still much higher than it is in company press releases or newspaper op-ed columns, where it is generally not even in the top 50. Or, to put it another way: blogs are firstly blogs and secondly corporate, political, private etc when it comes to “I” count. This isn’t even a stylistic thing that’s unique to blogs. It’s simply very difficult to write a text in English that is somehow concerned with actions, events or objects that have any kind of relation to you without using “I”. Only when you are not involved in any direct way in what’s happening can “I” be easily avoided (think of a wikipedia entry or your VCR’s instruction manual). In established genres such as legal texts and scholarly articles, “I” is artificially avoided** to “foreground” the institution and “background” the individual. But since the opposite is conventional in blogs - the author is normally very visible - and because every piece of text written in a blog must have a clearly visible author because of the way entries are structured by the blogging software, it would be perceived as quite unusual if such avoidance strategies were used.
Note that there’s a minor problem with my frequency lists: they don’t really give us the same information that Pranam looked up, because he checked how many blog posts contain “I”, while I checked how often it is used across sources. So let’s check for “has I” vs. “doesn’t have I” as well.
19502 total posts (100%)
10670 with “I” (54.7%)
8832 without “I” (45.3%)
As it stands, I have almost 10% more posts with at least one occurrence of “I” than BlogPulse. Obviously my sample is much smaller than theirs, but when you consider that the vast majority of blogs in my corpus are institutional blogs, the 45% figure seems quite low. The simplest explanation that I can think of is that there is a large number of non-English sources indexed by BlogPulse and that these sources are “I”-free. While that doesn’t explain the disconnect between the BlogPulse and Technorati numbers, I think there are more sources of error in there than we can possibly account for. We should better stick to David’s numbers and assume that the English-language blogosphere hasn’t peaked - at least that’s my take.
* In the Eskimo-Aleut language Yup’Ik the “word” angyaqegciuq is actually not a (single) word but an entire phrase, the English translation of which is He has a good boat.
** Common strategies to avoid “I” in academic writing are agentless passives (”It is assumed that…”), existential There constructions (”There is reason to assume that…”), use of the plural pronoun (”We demonstrate…”; in some cases natural, e.g. when there are multiple authors, in some cases as a purely stylistic device) and use of so-called inanimate agent constructions (”This paper argues that…”, “The data shows that…” etc.).
Writing 2.0
This interesting video by Michael Wesh, an anthropology professor at KSU, has been making the rounds recently (found it on JP’s blog). It illustrates the range of areas which are affected by our transition into a fully connected and digital world, a world where people work, play, learn, create art and foster relationships online and where the perceived line between online and offline identity in increasingly blurred. While I find the whole Web 2.0 complex fascinating - overhyped and idealized as it may be - what really caught my attention in Wesh’s clip was how one particular cultural practice is influenced by the evolution of social computing: writing.
Wesh begins his presentation by remarking that text is linear, then qualifies this statement by adding “when written on paper”. He goes on to point out that digital text is different, or, to be perfectly precise, that it can be read differently. Text as such is always linear in the sense that one word in a sentence is parsed after the preceding one and that there is a starting point and an end point (not necessarily in the sense of meaning but it the way that strings of words are presented to us, whether on a website or in a sticky note left on your desk). What is actually different about digital text is that a) it can be both read and used (hypertext with clickable links), b) that it can be a mesh of text and other media, c) that it can be easily modified and d) that it exists not in any single place but is potentially omnipresent when published on a network.
One item in Wesh’s list of things we need to rethink is rhetoric. Rhetoric in its broadest sense is about understanding the effectiveness of communication, whether we communicate to persuade, praise, inform or criticize. Classical rhetoric is applied, in other words it is about how we can communicate more effectively, whereas modern rhetoric is mostly descriptive and concerned with how we achieve our communicative goals.
So what kind of rhetoric is adapted to a networked culture? How are the rules different in a digital world?
Digital text can no longer be assumed to be read in just one way. I don’t mean this metaphorically as in “there are different ways of interpreting this”, but literally. People may read your text or just parts of it; they might skim through it, copy and paste it, quote it, link it, email it, blog it, digg it, bookmark it. They might put it on their blogs or talk about it in their podcast. Or perhaps your text is not even read by a human being but by a machine. Knowing and reacting to these many different applications changes how we write. And then there’s the question of whom you’re addressing that also has an effect. Traditionally, when you’re writing a novel, a poem, a newspaper article - anything on paper - you are holding a monologue. You may have an implicit reader in mind but there is nobody who will actually give a live response to what you are saying. The way our culture of writing has evolved in the course of centuries to the present day is shaped by this situation. Writing meant talking to yourself in the paper age - and not just that. It also meant that whatever was put down was meant for posterity. Publishing was not merely the idea of making a text available to a group of readers - it meant committing it to the public record, making it a part of some assumed eternal archive. Funny to think that this was actually the early concept we had of the Web: a repository of mankind’s knowledge. Before something was published, it was edited, vetted and checked for mistakes with the greatest utmost care because it was assumed to be immutable and permanent. But since it is now possible to modify a text later if you discover an error, the pursuit of perfection has become relatively senseless. You instead create texts that works in the situations that you need them in, for those people you are talking to. You create texts on an as-is basis to serve a concrete function. Consequently, the weight and relevance of a text is not longer fixed and no longer comes exclusively from the author but is instead an amalgam of quotes, comments and links.
It follows that digital text is different for a reason: it is created and received in a different environment than paper text. It also serves a broader range of functions. We use instant messengers to “chat”, basically writing in many ways like we normally talk. This is especially true for synchronous communication such as chats, but blogs are also like conversations regarding their interactive context. What is interesting is that blogging may seem very conversational on the surface but that a lot of planning goes into composition, much more than is possible in a conversation. You won’t find a lot of glaring grammar mistakes in blogs because obviously a blogger can (and will, in most cases) check what he has written before publishing it. Thus blogs actually mimic conversations rhetorically but the circumstances of their production and reception are quite different.
Writing as it is practiced in blogs is characterized by shorter pieces, the emulation of spoken discourse, the centrality of the author as an actor and intertextuality, i.e. frequently referring to other texts. Just as such a style hardly works in traditional paper-based texts the old style of writing won’t work in the new environment. In other words, traditional genres such as the op-ed are like fossils in the new ecology of blogs, wikis and other forms that are adapted to the environment. They may still be well-written and informative but the surrounding discourse situation - a permanent, time-shifted and physically unrestrained conversation - works against them. Journalists, marketers and others who have worked hard to make communication a profession need to unlearn parts of what they know and return to the basics of how people interact. Composition is still a valuable skill - more valuable than ever, perhaps - but how you write is now more dependent on situation and addressee than in the slow-moving paper age.
I wonder how this will change our reading habits in the long run. Most expository texts are still largely written without any visible actors - the author remains in the background to make the text seem more objective. Yet in a world of interactive texts this approach may eventually fall out of style, at least to a certain extent. It seems we are closing the gap between spoken and written communication - or finding a third way of getting our point across.
Acting like you’re an institution
One thing that never fails to astonish me is how the blogosphere can make the most casual comments turn viral in a completely unpredictable way. When I was deleting spam comments earlier today, I noticed incoming links from Adriana Lukas and Kristine Lowe. Of course it’s always flattering to be quoted, but I think beyond that it perfectly demonstrates the potential of blogs when a comment you’ve left three months ago in someone else’s blog suddenly shows up in a new context. The comment that Adriana and Kristine quoted relates to the Edelman flog incident. I found it hard to grasp at the time that Edelman apparently needed to exert some form of control over the sponsored bloggers and that this control was assumed to be worth the risk of having them exposed as fakes. Or, to be more precise: the impact of them saying something negative about Wal-Mart was deemed greater than the impact of a possible exposure.
As we found out later, this was a pretty major miscalculation.
In that vein exactly, Adriana concisely notes in a recent entry:
On the internet you are not an institution. If you want to be and behave like one, you get isolated and bypassed. So a media/communications/PR strategy makes little sense. It’s back to communication between human beings, communities and sometimes mobs. The rules of social interactions apply - if people challenge you on something you have done or said and you don’t respond, expect a commensurate impact on your reputation or credibility. If people make fun of you or try to embarrass you, the choice is to remain silent in hope of appearing dignified or to shoot back, with indignation or with humour. It depends. Different responses will be appropriate at different times and different circumstances. That is why etiquette is so complicated. Media and communications strategies don’t even come close. The main difference is that you don’t need to be ‘trained’ for online communication, it’s the one that you already know. And whether you are good at it or not has nothing to do with communication skillz but with respect for others and some good manners.
Brochures, press releases, ads, etc are always produced by a number of stakeholders inside an institution, sometimes even with the additional support of others from the outside (think advertising campaigns). All these people collaborate to make a piece of communication perfect, i.e. to give it a form that will appeal to as many people as possible. In the process of vetting the communication, any recognizable connection between the individuals speaking and those who are being addressed is severed. The voice is that of the company and not that of any particular individual working for it. What I’m describing isn’t some evil scheme of corporate communications either - it was simply the most effective way to mediate between an institution and the anonymous public around it… in the pre-Internet age.
But since individuals now see eye to eye with institutions in terms of their power to communicate and publicize ideas, they increasingly demand that institutions act like human beings in a communication. The rules of social interactions apply, as Adriana keenly observes, and like the uncool kid on a playground a company may be teased, ridiculed and embarrassed by its peers. Now think about Adriana’s statements that a media/communications/PR strategy makes little sense and that media and communications strategies don’t even come close (to solving the problem) in such a situation. Apart from the fact that they’re devised for a different kind of communicative situation (one-way), what else is problematic with such strategies? Two things, in my opion. Firstly, strategies are planned. The troublesome part is that people know this and usually deduct that the goal of a strategy must be to deceive them (think about the Wal-Mart/Edelman issue). After all, I might come up with a strategy for a lecture, a job interview or a political speech, but if I developed a strategy before chatting with my friends what kind of person would that make me? Secondly, strategies are static in the sense that they make general, fixed assumptions about what works and what doesn’t and, more narrowly, about how to achieve a positive effect. But they are useless if you need to adapt to a new situation because they offer a single recipe for everything.
So what’s PR good for in world where fixed messages are passé? A lot, in my opinion, if you put the emphasis on relations and not on public. Because although I agree with Adriana that manners and respect for others are the foundation of communicative competence, I think there is such a thing as skill involved. It’s why some kids are more popular than others and why being a talented writer also makes you a more effective blogger. Helping institutional clients to learn interacting with individuals - provided they bring manners and respect to the table - is what PR may be about in the future. Because apparently that’s no easy feat when you’re a insecure and introverted bureaucracy that usually addresses others by shouting at them through a megaphone.
JP Rangaswami and the NewTailBlog avalanche
Edit: David N. Wallace picks up the idea and mentions previous actions with the same basic concept…
Edit #2: …and Dominic Sayers is the first to tag a NewTailBlog, his pick being Emma Kennedy. I like the idea of calling my CV page Everything I have ever done.
Yesterday JP Rangaswami proposed what you could call a grassroots initiative to generate more interest in new and yet-unnoticed bloggers. I love the idea (well, I admit, partly because I suggested it) and I’m looking forward to presenting a few of my daily reads here soon. JP’s own blog, by the way, is one that you should definitly be reading if you’re interested in what the unboxed digital society looks like.
What really got me thinking was this part of JP’s suggestion:
Every now and then, choose a blog that, in your opinion, doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Introduce it to your community. Keep the intro short. Tag it NewTailBlog.
Blogging allows you to start conversations with people that you normally might not get in touch with, people who sometimes share common interests but approach them from different angles. Business blogging is such a topic for me: I’m a linguist, but obviously my research into corporate blogs as a new text type would be silly if I didn’t talk to the people who actually produce business blogs. So I’m really talking to both the academic and the business community (or, possibly, just to myself - you decide), two communities that communicate far less with each other than I would like.*
So what I’ll try to do is to create connections between these two cultures by linking to bloggers with different backgrounds. Hmm, maybe I should link to two different blogs (one edu, one biz) concerned with a similar topic and match them up? Who knows what interesting conversations might happen…
What do you think?
* Sadly, this is especially true regarding the humanities. Linguistics is generally practiced as an empirical social science, but understandably non-academics don’t care a whole lot about that distinction.
