Archive for May, 2008
Some Belated Thoughts on GTA IV
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 30, 2008
When Grand Theft Auto IV launched, I was mired in exam hell. In my mind, I assumed I would blog all sorts of interesting things about it after I had some time to sit down with the game but: a) I got caught up with other things; b) you can spend a lot of time in GTA IV doing absolutely nothing – walking in the park, driving around listening to Coltrane, getting into random fights or getting handjobs. So, since I’m now in that nebulous space where it’s too late to join the initial conversation and too early to reflect on ‘what it all means’, I’m just gonna’ put some random thoughts here. If you plan on playing the game but haven’t yet, there will be some early spoilers (I’m still only about 15% through).
What is Interactive Fiction?
An early mission in the game required me/Nico to kill Vlad, a character that Russian formalist Propp would call a ‘sender’ (i.e. s/he who sends the hero on their mission). It didn’t seem like a particularly great idea to me – killing him for cheating on someone? – but I seemed to have little choice as this is what the game had not only decided I should do but eventually, in a very graphic, disturbing scene, did for me. Depending on your perspective, this is either good or bad. The upside is that this sort of linear narrative structure forces you to empathise with your avatar; what he does is what you do and you undergo a weird sort of distanced, deferred sense of ‘being that person’. The downside is that robs you of that feeling of control that makes gaming, and sandbox games especially, appealing. I felt conflicted – I had no desire to ‘kill Vlad’ but I also respect the idea of telling a story in a particular way. This question is huge, so I’d be interested to know what others think.
Reality, Fantasy and Desire
Speaking of that exam I wrote, one of the things that came up over and over again was the function and implications of re-presenting reality. I tend to argue that the space of the aesthetic produces our reality as much as it reflects it i.e. art becomes an inescapable lens through which we see such that all apprehension of ‘reality’ is always going to be somehow ‘tainted’ by the aesthetic. So, what sort of reality is being reflected in Liberty City? And what is being produced? The game obviously has a satirical edge. It attempts to not only present New York as cutthroat and dog-eat-dog but also puts the centrality of money in the foreground of both the world and the story. I suppose that much is obvious though. Perhaps the more interesting question is, if we consider fantasy as the space to act out the unconscious, what are we to make of the sheer mayhem that you can perform in the city that isn’t even part of the narrative? I mean, I took a big rig and drove it onto the runway of the airport and got it stuck under an airplane’s wing – and it felt great, largely because in a virtual representation of New York, it was about the worst thing you could possibly do. So what, if any, are the links between capitalism, New York and the fantasy of enacting violence? (Also, feel free to psychoanalyse, but the one glaring omission in the gameplay for me was the inability to walk up to a bench and sit down. You can jump over it, you can seek cover behind it, you can shoot at it – but you can’t sit on it and just watch stuff pass by. This sucks.)
Yes Kids, This Game is Sexist
There was a point in Shaun of the Dead when Nick Frost‘s character pulls up in a car and says ‘S’up niggas?!’. I couldn’t really take offense to it because Ed has at that point been painted as someone who doesn’t really care about propriety or much of anything really. It’s funny because he has the gall and is obliviousness enough to say it. So it’s easy to have characters with unlikeable qualities and not have a story promote those characteristics. But GTA IV takes things a step further. Yes, Roman and Nico are, if not sexist, then ‘manly’ in a very usual way – they talk about ‘titties’, getting laid and other things you’d expect to hear from adolescents and adolescent men. Fine. But the game also uses women as a sort of currency. You can, after all, hire a sex worker to quite literally ‘boost your health’. The reason that Vlad is killed is because he has cheated with Roman’s girlfriend – Mallory’s role is never brought up, as if she was a silent witness to the proceedings rather than an active participant. But more to the point, so far, women only exist in these functions. I’ve been told that strong female characters come later and even so, I don’t think there’s anything inherently sexist about having a story that deals mainly with men. But when female characters become things to be passed around and used or property to be defended, we have a problem. There is nothing in either the mimetic or diegetic world (mimesis=representation, diegesis=storytelling) that seems to provide any other perspective. And if this were some sort of isolated occurrence, it would be no big deal. But the fact that this sort of misogyny is common and that GTA IV is such a major cultural event is disturbing to say the least.
I might, if and when I finish the game, record some more thoughts. Right now though, I’m more interested to hear yours. Whaddya’ think about GTA IV?
Theorizing Twitter Pt. 2: Emily Gould and Making Texts of Identity
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 28, 2008
For reasons I have yet to pin down, I have been struggling to theorise Twitter. While I am an avid user and an unabashed proponent of the service, I’ve found myself at a loss to explain why Twitter is so compelling or what some of its cultural implications are beyond the usual accusations of narcissism. In my previous attempt, I tried to think of Twitter in terms of a space for producing a personal narrative and I still think there’s something useful there to work with. But I remain perplexed.
Funnily enough, it was the recent Emily Gould brouhaha that got me thinking about this again in similar but slightly changed terms. Most reactions to the NYT Mag piece have generally fallen into two camps: Andew Keen-esque rants that declare that it is meaningless and narcissistic; or pieces discussing the importance of the revelations about the underbelly of Gawker, blogging and the NY media scene.
But one of the things Gould grapples with in the article – and this is where I believe the importance of both the piece and its reaction lie – is the manner in which identities are produced, ‘textualised’ and branded online. And I would argue that this occurs through the linking of selves to ‘presences’ on the Web. By presences, I mean persistent ‘texts of identity’ that exist ‘out there’ and are not simply expressions of ourselves – i.e. taking what is inside and telling it to the outside – but are, rather, places to almost literally ‘put ourselves’. To that end, this is what Gould says of blogging:
“I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there’s a place where a record of their existence is kept — a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you.”
The two previous paragraphs essentially say the same thing and I’ve just been too stupid to recognise it before. And I think this sense of ‘putting yourself somewhere’ is what makes Twitter work as a microblogging tool, a record of identity and a place to create a story about yourself – and indeed, to deliberately be a bit exaggerative, ‘create yourself’.
But identities have always been ‘texts’, if by text one means ‘something that can be read’. When I wear a certain piece of clothing, hold my body in a particular way, use certain slang and so on, you use a code in order to interpret or read those actions. Sure, the frame of reference is always shifting – a trucker cap meant one thing in the 50s, another in the 00′s – but the mechanism stays the same. I perform something in a particular way in relation to a number of cultural reference points and, in some fashion, it is interpreted.
The internet, in things like Twitter, changes this in a few important ways. First, it locates these performances of identity outside of the body and in doing so, breaks the connection between performing identity and time and place. Rather than having to enact a particular facet of myself at a moment in time – wearing a particular thing, behaving a particular way – I can place a part of myself at a given ‘location’ online and then orient myself in relation to it. Unlike the dependence upon a body, Twitter, blogging and other digital modes of expression become spaces to project not only who I am but who I want you to think I am, in a way that isn’t necessarily bound by place and time in the same linear sense. There is instead a non-linear back and forth and a weird simultaneity in which I exist both ‘here’ and ‘there’. Furthermore, I am in effect making a text of my identity for you to read ‘out there’ and in doing so, am also recreating myself and re-imagining myself ‘in here’, in relation to the me that I am constantly writing online.
Secondly, this text exists in a persistent but constantly shifting public space. Unlike expressing oneself in a book or in a song, in Twitter I quite literally inject my thought into a public timeline, a public space that does not exist in space at all. By ‘tweeting’, I put my thoughts into the ‘flow of ideas’ and the ‘stream of culture’, and indeed, when this sense of the stream is temporarily gone (in one of Twitter’s many downtimes), it is as if Twitter loses all its appeal.
These two things combined – the projection of identity into a virtual space and its reception into and persistent presence in the public sphere – are what I’ll argue form some of the reasons that Twitter is not only addictive, but important. But while I’ve so far spoekn in rather flattering terms, I think the Gould saga also points to the manner in which this ‘projective saying‘ involved in both Twittering and blogging is also potentially dangerous. There is, after all, a push to look after the brand that is oneself, whether that it is a brutal sort of honesty in one’s writing or a need to push the next story at all costs. But more to the point (as these problems are not unique to digital forms), is that the digital space still runs by and through economic models. While Gould wrote before Denton switched to the ‘pay-per-pageview’ model, the push for her to write such honest pieces came from two major places: a blogging culture that valued hits; and a blogging audience that linked an online persona to a real identity. As such, the production of this text of identity – this projection and movment of part of oneself online – is always prey to being subsumed by economic concerns that treat texts as commodities, the same mentality that lumps all forms, whether music, literature, film etc. into the term ‘content’. While this absolutely economically necessary – indeed, is the mechanism by which the digital economy works – that does not therefore make it good for individuals.
So there are obviously upsides and downsides to all this. The positives are that Twitter and similar services have created an entirely new sphere in which to to inscribe our identities; the negative is that this space is not our own and will not simply do what we want it to because we want it to. There is obviously more to be thought about in regards to Twitter specifically and online identities in general. For now though, if you’d like to add or challenge something, comments are (as always) welcome and appreciated.
Some (Not Very Serious) Things I Learned at the Mesh Conference…
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 24, 2008
I could write a lot more about the 2008 Mesh Conference. Whether Mike Masnick‘s great talk on the Economics of Abundance – in which he went through 322 slides in 35 minutes and still made sense – or the intriguing panel on privacy that, perhaps inevitably, was all over the place, the conference has left me with a lot to think about. But I think the time for more reflection has now passed and, frankly, I’m getting a bit sick of looking at my notes. So, to wrap things up, here are some of the (not very serious) things I learned at Mesh 08:
- The only acceptable justification for using a Windows laptop is that “work won’t let me have a Mac”. Use this excuse even if you, like me, don’t have a job. And for the love of God, do not say “I just prefer Windows” – you will be ejected from the premises immediately.
- If you are diffident or suffer from some form of social phobia, you will get much less out of a conference. While others say you should just muster up some confidence or just go get some therapy, my personal suggestion is simply to do a lot of drugs before each day.
- A tech conference is the only place in the world where anyone not multitasking is considered strange. Now stop reading this and get typing on that Blackberry!
- A tech conference is also one of the few places where you can use the word ‘frag’ with an audience of adults and not have anyone be confused. In fact, it’s likely people will instead break out their latest story about playing Halo 3 online.
- When someone shows up late, proudly carrying a Wii Fit box that they just lined up for – and everyone’s reaction is envy rather than derision – you, my friend, are in a room full of nerds.
- If Leah Culver is any indication, developers are more fun and down-to-earth than their bosses.
- Twitter can be taken down by a small Canadian tech conference. That or 500 Canadian nerds twitter a lot.
- Power outlets are the new water coolers.
- “How’s the wi-fi?” is the new “How’s the coffee?”.
- Actually, when you’re in a room full of internet geeks, everything is the new something.
- When the Red Bull is free, it suddenly becomes quite easy to dismiss the ‘dosage’ instructions on the can. I’d say more, but my hands are still shaking…
- Mathew Ingram, Rob Hyndman, Stuart MacDonald, Mark Evans and Mike McDerment sure know how to put on a show
Can’t wait ’til next year. If your sense of humour is better than mine – which it almost undoubtedly is – feel free to leave a “I learned this…” comment and I’ll add it to the post.
Mesh08: The Democratisation of News? Or Mob Rule?
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 23, 2008
“The New Front Page” session at Mesh 08 was perhaps the most entertaining talk I attended while there. Featuring Daniel Burka of Digg, Pema Hagen of GigPark and Candice Faktor of Ourfaves and Toronto.com, the panel talk largely focused on what I suppose you could call ‘crowd-sourced information gathering’, whether that information is the news or about products, services or locations. Now, there has been no end of virtual ink spilled about how the web is reshaping information and perhaps the clearest topic to arise was that of filtering: what are the limits, both positive and negative, of the democratisation of editing what information we are exposed to?
It was Daniel Burka – who is a funny, entertaining guy – who had to field most of the questions from an audience who, while not aggressive, was perhaps a little sceptical. Moderator Mathew Ingram asked whether or not Digg functioned as an echo chamber and Burka’s response was essentially based on both the wisdom and diversity of crowds – i.e. that having a divergent community like Digg means that a number of different interests and perspectives will constantly be represented. I think this tended to gloss over the criticisms of Digg as being both too tech-focused and too sympathetic to left-of-centre politics, but Burka also stated that there is continual work being done on Digg’s algorithms that is meant not only to diversify perspective but also to prevent the system being gamed. Ultimately, Burka made a convincing case that the multiplicity of topics and perspectives on Digg was indicative of its democratisation of information.
The one thing that did nag at me during entire thing, however, was the conception of democracy at work. In the model used, an individual has interests and inclinations and then, through the conscious activity of ‘digging’ or something similar, expresses these opinions and beliefs. The aggregation of these individual actions results in Digg being an accurate representation of what its community is feeling. My problem with this is the simple question of where an individual’s interests and inclinations come from. There is a solid case to be made that our interests are as produced by our immersion in mass culture as they are a reflection of ‘what is inside us’. Indeed, what is ‘inside’ has to come from ‘outside’ – i.e. is it ‘natural’ for me to want an iPhone or does my desire work in relation to a cultural context that values technology, aesthetics, conspicuous consumption etc. That’s not to say that I have no choice; but it does suggest that there is a force exerted on me by my cultural context.
To be frank, people don’t like it when you argue this. The reaction is generally that you are either extremely naive or just a conspiracy theorist. But the point is not to suggest that we are being indoctrinated by a group of old men hidden in a room somewhere. Instead, it is to argue that what we value is at best a combination of our beliefs and the information we are given. When part of that information is deliberately persuasive – i.e. advertising, both explicit and implied and our immersion in an ideological context – to argue that online crowds reflect their own interests is to suggest that those interests are produced in a vacuum, in relation to ‘purely internal’ needs. They are not. Instead, they work in relation to the ebb and flow of information that exists in the public sphere, to the production of individuals by the social and cultural contexts in which we live. So yes, Digg is an accurate representation of its community – the key point to keep in mind is that this does not necessarily defend it against the charge of being an echo chamber, if the chamber we consider is not just Digg, but its social context too.
Mesh08: “Does Location Matter?” Bill Buxton on Telepresence
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 22, 2008
One of the most challenging aspects of online communication is the replication of physical experience. While there are clear benefits to email, IM and Twitter etc., there is obviously a lot lost in electronic communication, whether body language or physical context, and the issue of how to ‘make oneself present’ in something like videoconferencing is both complex and difficult. This was the topic of the Mesh talk “Does Location Matter”, featuring Nora Young, host of CBC’s podcast Spark and Microsoft’s Principle Researcher, Bill Buxton. (I’ve linked to a video of the full thing at the bottom of this post).
Buxton, also an academic from the University of Toronto, argues that technology both cannot and should not replace face-to-face interaction. What must be improved as we move forward, however, is the recreation of the physical and social contexts that define communication. As an example, Buxton points to personal space. During physical communication, there is a social protocol that roughly determines the acceptable proximity of one speaker to another. If during a teleconference, the image of one party is captured with the camera only a foot or so from their face, then the technology has not lived up to the cultural mores it should work within.
As such, for Buxton, tech has to function as a proxy for identity and its context, creating a digital projection not only of the self but also as much of the social and physical context as is possible. And because this context is so difficult to convey across video, Buxton says that the relation of communication and context must be inverted in online connections such that the context is foregrounded and the communication made the ‘unnoticed’ background. An example of this might be additional monitors in a videoconference to convey the layout of a room or the physical distance between the various members there.
What wasn’t raised as much as I would have liked was the actual titular question of ‘location’. It would have also been interesting to hear some discussion of the relationship between one’s physical location and one’s identity. I, for example, still identify very much as a Torontonian, particularly when I am not here. How will this start to change as, for example, group identification starts to shift in relation to a virtual community, or the what is defined as the public sphere moves to the online world?
What was raised, however, was how things might differ in regards to media when the need to appeal to population centres potentially diffuses. After all, something like the Toronto-centric nature of Canadian media or the New York-centric approach of its American counterpart is very dependent upon not only physical location determining some sense of common interests, but also the economics of scarcity that dominate ‘old media’. And is new media taking advantage of the long tail effect when it continues to pitch TV shows with high production values and, consequently, a high cost of entry to the interests of its major population centres?
The emphasis of the talk, however, was ultimately the question of translation: of how one conveys the physical through the digital. Buxton’s provisional answer is to think of technology as a social prosthesis, an artificial replication that roughly approximates the function of the thing it copies. It’s an approach that could have a number of beneficial implications for how we interact with each other and technology itself.
Does Location Matter? from CBC Radio: Spark on Vimeo.
Mesh08: The Kaplan Keynote (“Labels Are Too Relevant!”)
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 21, 2008
One could argue that digital music has become emblematic of the shift to the internet as both distribution network and site of cultural experience. Perhaps for this reason, today’s Mesh Conference kicked off with a keynote talk with the head of technology for Warner Music, Ethan Kaplan. Kaplan, besides spearheading how Warner use of tech in its business, is famous for parlaying an R.E.M. website he first made when was 16 into the career he has now.
Kaplan is clearly a ‘theory guy’. He began the talk (moderated by Mathew Ingram) by suggesting that digital music places less emphasis on the ‘form’ of art because the distinctions between forms have become broken down by technology (think of a music video on YouTube or Vimeo being the only way to experience a song). More importantly, this shift puts more focus on content rather than form, which to Kaplan, results in ‘a freer artistry’ (this is debatable, but best saved for another time).
So, what’s the role of the label in all this? Unsurprisingly, Kaplan argues it is significant, and he suggests that the function of the label is to provide the infrastructure for artist promotion, whether that is websites, blogs or working as a liason to destinations like last.fm, iTunes or Amazon. So, this is a sort of consolidation of the relationship between label and artist, vertically integrating A&R, promotion and recording.
Ultimately, Kaplan argued that labels work because they are a filtering system. Interestingly though, he stated that a service like Myspace Music is not and could not be a label precisely because there is no filtering – and it is here that the speaker’s interests became clear. Sites like Myspace Music and last.fm do have a filtering system: their users. And as I twittered, Kaplan fails to see this as a valid filtering mechanism because it largely bypasses the labels by focusing on the democratisation of music distribution. And while I am never keen to uncritically valorise democracy – as an audience member at another panel put it, “there is a fine line between democracy and anarchy” – the situation seems infinitely better when users can collectively promote the music that connects with their tastes and interests rather than that chosen by an A&R person.
Where Kaplan ended up was essentially the same place as Kevin Kelly in his “Better than Free” post – that labels need to commodify and fetishise the authentic experience in order to still sell something of value to the consumer. To my mind, what this displays is an incompatibility between the labels’ mentalities and the new mechanisms of music discovery and distribution. While it’s certainly true that artists need to be compensated for their work, it seems Kaplan’s perspective is still, for the time being, rooted in an approach that requires skimming and selection on the part of the label.
So, while I was overjoyed to hear someone at a tech conference talk about Derrida and Deleuze, as someone behind me remarked, asking Kaplan to defend the record label was like asking Microsoft whether open-source software is viable: there’s just no way to get an honest answer. Overall, Kaplan is a very smart guy and an interesting speaker but, while the talk opened in an intriguing manner, the direction it took toward the end was, to me at least, somewhat disappointing.
The image used here comes from Flickr user hyku.
Blogging Mesh08
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 21, 2008
For today and tomorrow, I am going to be here at the Mesh Conference in Toronto, which is billed as ‘Canada’s Web Conference’. The conference is largely focusing on ‘Web 2.0′ (define as you will) and, from what I’ve seen so far, the crowd is pretty diverse which is interesting. So far the day has opened with an interesting (if perhaps troubling) keynote from Warner tech guy Ethan Kaplan, who focused upon the changing nature of the music business and the position and role of the record label. Up next is Michael Geist’s keynote, who will talk about digital activism. Over the next couple of days, I’m going to some talks on, among other topics: location and online identity; the economics of abundance; and cultivating community. You can check out the full schedule here. I’ll be more ‘formally’ blogging about some of the issues raised at the conference over the next few days, so I hope you’ll check them out.
The Hype Cycle: Hipsters, Art and the Commodification of Rep
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 19, 2008
When Vampire Weekend recently blew up, the backlash seemed to come as quickly as the explosive hype. As I watched the mess unfold – the hype, the backlash, the backlash-to-the-backlash – the pattern felt all too familiar: it was perhaps first cemented in the internet age by the massive hype (and backlash) that followed the Strokes and has only gotten more intense and more compressed since then. And today, I came across a very smart article called the “The Hype Circle” via Daily Meh that attempts to the think through some of the reasons for this cycle by focusing on the value of judgement as a status symbol.
The author (whose name isn’t attached to the piece) argues that ‘hype’ places art into a system of exchange in which the work of art becomes a commodity meant to augment one’s reputation. But this isn’t, however, the usual ‘art has just become something to buy’ schtick. Instead, the ‘market’ here is one of rep, of influence, of cultural capital and there are many ways to accrue this precious currency: being first to hype; being first to create the backlash; to claim all art is equal and immerse yourself in pop; or conversely, dismiss all pop and sequester oneself in a room reading Ulysses for months.
The point the article so cleverly makes is that rather than commodifying art, reputation has become an economy (definition: a system of exchange) that “transforms the use value of a would-be work of art into its exchange value”. Rather than a focus on what art can do to you, there is instead an emphasis on what function art can play in the construction and projection of a person’s identity, a self, a commodity that must be traded on a market that values reputation. This reputation works in relation to possessing knowledge so that s/he who knows not only has power but ‘owns’ the right to speak about what is good and what is bad. Art becomes a mechanism of marking out one’s ownership not only of culture but of cultural capital.
There are problems with the article – I’m not sure what the writer means when s/he speaks of judging a “work’s internal logic” (where does this logic reside? certainly not in the work of art?) – while I’m wary of the author’s suggestion that one’s ‘true aesthetic judgements’ are under assault from the outside (after all, doesn’t one’s ‘inside’ come from the ‘outside’?). But this is truly insightful stuff and let me quote the end of the article to demonstrate why:
“The hype cycle has become the emotional life of capitalism, an internalized stock market of aesthetic calls and puts. It testifies first to the power and then, almost as soon, to the impotence of mere culture. It’s how the public expresses faith in itself, and a still more unshakeable belief in its irredeemability: if we all like something, it can’t be good. The extent of the hype cycle’s corruption of our minds can be measured by the frequency with which you hear people complaining that environmentalism has grown so fashionable, so chic, so trendy. Try to imagine a similar complaint from another political era: “I was totally into democracy—before they extended the franchise. I was all about socialism—but it became so working class.”
That is convincing stuff – and speaks directly to the concern that the impact of capitalism is not simply that it creates financial inequality or is exploitative but that it is co-opting our potential to resist by incorporating the very avenues of resistance (i.e. art) into its logic.
Web 2.0 Invites: Brightkite, Evernote, Dropbox, Twine and Socialthing.
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 19, 2008
For someone who does his best to spend as much time alone as possible, I seem to have an awful lot of invites for social networks/web apps currently in closed beta. If you would like one, please leave a comment here with an email address or send me a note at the address listed on my about page. The invites are for:
Dropbox: I cannot say enough good things about Dropbox. It’s a file-sharing app that synchronizes files across different computers through the web. The small, unintrusive install works transparently in the background, simply notifying you when files have been changed. When preparing for my recent comprehensive exam, I would update notes at the library on my laptop and then come home and work on them on my desktop, all completely seamlessly. It also has an option for sharing files and folders with different users. (Yeah, I know Google Docs can do the same thing, but this allows you to use whatever application you want, which is handy when you’re working on long documents).
Brightkite: A location-based social network that connects people based on where they live and the places they visit. Haven’t used it much yet but it looks like it could have potential, particularly if you’re new to a city and are looking for people with similar interests.
Evernote: Like an online scrapbook, but way cooler than that. More than just a bookmarking service like del.icio.us, Evernote allows you to store photographs, notes and even has character recognition i.e. you can take a pic of handwritten note and it will digitize the text for you. So you could take a pic of a business card with your phone, email it your Evernote account and then access that information when you get back to your home or office. Cool huh?
Twine: For a while, people thought this was going to be the next big thing — Twine is supposed to be to one of the first ‘Web 3.0′ apps — but I’m not sure it’s panned out that way. Regardless, Twine is another social bookmarking tool that has a key difference: it tries to sort and classify articles based on the manner in which they’re tagged and then find similar articles for you. This cross-referencing across tags is what people are calling the ‘semantic web’. Can’t say it’s the easiest or most intuitive application to use, but it’s worth a try.
Socialthing!: This will only be really useful for those who use Twitter and Pownce, but Socialthing is a ‘lifestream app’ – i.e. it aggregates your activity across different networks like the aforementioned microblogging tools and sites like Facebook and Flickr.
Why Paying for Twitter = More Choice
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on May 17, 2008
While Twitter is by many standards a runaway success, the one minor problem the service seems to have is, um, the seeming lack of a business plan. Today, Dan Farber of CNET (err, CBS|Net?) proposed a rather radical solution to this issue when he suggested that people should pay for Twitter. And while it sounds like I am being snarky, I am in fact not. Quite to the contrary, the concept that all users should pay for a service goes against the dominant idea that ‘free is better’, one espoused by many of the ‘weborati’ including Chris Anderson and Kevin Kelly. And while it is common to have a paid premium service that offers additional features such as on Pownce or Flickr, as Farber notes, ‘free’ has become the startup model for at least developing a user-base.
There are practical reasons to admire Farber’s suggestion. First, as a paying customer, one could expect to have some recourse for the numerous outages and errors one currently experiences using Twitter; secondly, having a pay barrier does a lot to ensure a committed, active user-base – and indeed, many argue that this is why the level of discussion on metafilter (which requires a $5 signup fee) has never descended into the kind of stupidity you see on free sites like YouTube.
But another reason to at least consider a pay model for Twitter is that it places more choice in the hands of its users. Social networks are ostensibly about connecting with other people. In an ad-supported service such as Facebook, you pay for the platform and service through viewing ads. This model limits the choice you have as a consumer because you cannot determine where ‘your money’ goes. Instead, if you come upon an advert by a company you are ethically opposed to or learn that the company is funded (or funds) other companies or causes you disagree with, you have little choice but to continue using the service or to simply delete your account. But while this is a choice of sorts, your friends are using the service as are perhaps your business contacts and you, understandably, want to be there too. By basing the economics of a site on advertising, my capacity to ‘vote with my dollars’ is lessened considerably as I cannot actively choose what I support but, rather, have only two passive options available to me: support through viewing ads or not using the service at all.
Conversely, by paying a small user-fee, I actively support what I want to i.e. Twitter and the community I’ve developed there. That is not to say that the almost-coercive aspect of social networking disappears – i.e. when you don’t support a company’s politics or affiliations but you want to be in on what your friends are doing – but it is, in my opinion, a better option as it is creates a one-to-one relationship between a paying user and the company that provides the service. If you don’t like the service or the company, rather than quitting or begrudgingly using it , you don’t sign up in the first place. In contrast, in the ad-supported model, your only option in making sure that ‘your dollars’ are doing what you want them to is to keep daily track of what ads are being served and by whom – which isn’t really an option at all. None of which is to say that I actually want to pay for Twitter. And I’ll admit that the difference is quite small. But all individual’s actions in the face of large, well-funded companies are just that – small. If the only options available to me are viewing ads from oil companies who lobby against climate change legislation, or cosmetics manufacturers who work hard on making people feel bad about themselves – well then, I’d rather cough up $5 a month and at least know where my money is going.
