Translating Online Life for the Tech-Avoidant
posted by Frank Pasquale
In a recent edition of On the Media, NYT law reporter Adam Liptak contended that many 4th Amendment cases involving computers challenge the technical understanding of appellate judges who favor faxes over email and pens over laptops. A couple of good articles have recently tried to bridge such gaps by explaining online worlds like MySpace and blogs to a print-bound public. Lauren Collins’ reportage on the Megan Meier scandal offers a pitch-perfect portrait of a brave new world of posing and self-promotion online. Sarah Boxer’s NYRB take on ten books on blogs covers more territory online, but less compellingly: the blogosphere is a much less “capture-able” phenomenon than one small corner of social networking.
Here, for instance, is Boxer’s attempt to capture the “essence of blog writing:”
[E]ven blogs that have few or no links still show the imprint of the Web, its associative ethos, and its obsession with connection—the stink of the link. Blogs are porous to the world of texts and facts and opinions on line. (And this is probably as close as I can come to defining an essence of blog writing.) Bloggers assume that if you’re reading them, you’re one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop. They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze.
So while the MSM brings a general public up to speed, blogs apparently are better designed to capitalize (and consolidate) small communities of the like-minded. I suppose I can accept that generally, but why blame the links? Aren’t they often a much better way of filling in readers on the whole story than the parentheticals and asides that can weigh down a print story? And aren’t poets the more perplexing perpetrators of puzzling obscurity?
But Boxer does offer a good critique of links reminiscent of Grimmelmann’s recent Lawyers, Blogs, and Money post:
When the blog boom came, the tone of the blogosphere began to shift. A lot of the new blogs—though certainly not all of them—weren’t so much filters for the Web as vents for opinion and self-revelation. Instead of figuring out ways to serve up good fresh finds, many of the new bloggers were fixated on getting found. So the very significance of linking began to change. The links that had once mattered were the ones you offered on your blog, the so-called outbound links pointing to other sites. Now the links that mattered most—and still do—are those on other blogs pointing toward your blog, the so-called inbound links. Those are the ones that blog-trackers like Technorati count. They are the measure of fame.
Now that fame and links are one and the same, there are bloggers out there who will do practically anything— start rumors, tell lies, pick fights, create fake personas, and post embarrassing videos—to get noticed and linked to. They are, in the parlance of the blogosphere . . . . “blogebrities.”
That’s a nice critique of the pressures something like Technorati can generate. But why close the article with the condescending litany “Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty”? I can think offhand of about 20 blogs that wouldn’t reflect any of those adjectives. And while the staid precincts of law blogs may make my perspective a rare one, I’m pretty sure you can find many other fields where the same could be said. In short, Boxer appears to fall prey to the same tendency she accuses the blogs of: looking for sensational and provocative content and giving undue emphasis to it.
Lauren Collins’ tech translation story has more realistic aspirations than Boxer’s portmanteau review, and succeeds in fulfilling them. In describing the tragic story of Megan Meier, she offers a partial but informative view of the social world MySpace can create:
MySpace, with its cluttered layout, can suggest an online incarnation of the broken-windows theory—surface disorder begetting actual chaos. It works like this: a person signs up (all he needs is an e-mail address) and then constructs a profile by choosing text, songs, graphics, wallpaper, and video clips. Often, when you open a page, the music’s already thumping, as if you’d stumbled into a party in someone’s basement.
The reigning aesthetic on the site is bulletin board meets lava lamp: tack up a bunch of stuff and set it blazing in bubbly neon. Black backgrounds with cramped, colored fonts are popular, as are blinking banners, cartoon characters, hearts, exclamation points, pictures of cars, and graffiti-style writing. MySpace has a pliant grammar, and its users manipulate lowercase and capital letters for visual effect. “Z”s trump “s”s, so that “Miss Honey Love” becomes “Mz.Hon3y Luv.” A boy named Shane writes his name “$h@NE,” in the pasteup style of a ransom note.
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[T]rying on identities is, in the fluid environment of the Internet, a riskier experiment than raiding Mom’s makeup bag. Squabbles that would take days to percolate in person can within seconds explode into full-blown wars. Disputes can also become painfully public. Sites allow users to rank their “Top Friends,” so that the ever-shifting alliances of a clique are posted, for all to see, in a sort of popularity ledger. . . ..
As for the popularity ledger: I believe one South Korean site (Cyworld) offers “popularity displays on the front page with fixe indicators for sexiness, fame, friendliness, karma, kindness, which increase as the number of visitors, gifts received and gifts made increase.” So the same Technorati quantifications driving blogs to seek more inbound links are now drilling down to the personal level. I expect new frontiers in the commodification of community–and I’m glad people like Collins and Boxer are explaining them to the public generally, even if no one review or story can hope to give a complete picture of what’s going on online.
January 29, 2008 at 9:55 am
Posted in: Blogging
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