Note: This post is also available in audio format (.wav file, 2.9MB).
"Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline" announced the headline at the National Endowment for the Arts website on 8 July 2004. On that day the NEA published a report entitled "Reading at Risk" (PDF), which outlined the findings of a 2002 survey of the reading habits of 17,000 Americans. The survey was also done in 1982 and 1992. The resulting trends? According to the report, literary reading (i.e. novels, short stories, poetry, plays) has declined by 10% since 1982, with 18-24 year olds declining the most - 28%! Or as the preface to the report summarized it:
"...literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young."
I read through the report and although the analysis was a bit too alarmist in tone, the numbers are indeed sobering. However the analysis of Internet and digital media trends was very thin - Grand Text Auto did a good write-up of this particular aspect.
In this post I want to put the NEA report in a new light. A light that shines from the 21st century. I think the changes in reading habits that were reported are directly related to digital media and the Internet. But, unlike the NEA, I don't think the Internet is a "culprit" or that it "competes" with reading (those are both words used on page 30 of the report). No, what's happening is that reading is changing, metamorphosing. Reading is no longer just a paper-based, solitary activity that people do for leisure. Reading in the 21st century is increasingly digital, social and creative.
Some background about me and where I'm coming from... I'm an English Lit major from the early 90's, so literacy is one of my core interests (along with web technology). One thing I've always been uncomfortable with regarding literature is the snobbishness exhibited by many Literary Types. It may be because there isn't much consumer demand for Literature and so literary types feel they have to defend their niche by emphasizing its worth as an intellectual and cultural activity. In other words: sure studying literature doesn't make money, but it makes you more intelligent and a more rounded individual.
That's the theory anyway and it's backed up by my own experience as an English Lit major. Back when I was at University, all my mates were doing Commerce or Computer Science degrees. I was the only one doing a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree... and yes I was the 'artsy-fartsy' one in my crowd. The standing joke amongst my friends was that I was actually doing a BFA - a 'Bachelor of Fuck All'. And in hindsight unfortunately it's true that my BA has counted for next to nothing in my career. Nevertheless I'm glad I did it for the things I learned, plus I think it gave me an excellent grounding for analytical work.
So yes, Literary Types do have a snobbish and elitist attitude. A recent example of this is in the comments posted to a popular blog post over at 2blowhards.com. The post was entitled Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book and it attracted a huuuge number of comments. One of the interesting sub-threads was 'blogs vs books' and here's a selection of comments about that:
1. "When I've been doing mostly surfing, I'll start to miss the coherence and focus and depth of a good book. On the other hand, lordy it's fun to surf the web, and it can be mighty nourishing in its own way."
2. "Books are the meat, pototoes and vegetables of my internal intellectual life. Reading blogs on the web is like coffee and dessert--ok for a treat but not something I expect to nurture or sustain me."
3. "I find blogs definitely dessert! But am an avid reader of almost any mystery fiction."
4. "There is a certain sense of satisfaction I get from reading a book that I don't get from keeping up with my favourite blogg, or even Salon.com for that matter."
5. "I prefer reading novels over reading blogs because I like dropping into other worlds that have been crafted to make a whole, coherant sense. I do like reading blogs, too. Mostly in the morning, before I write. They're like the morning paper or something."
6. "With regard to the book versus blog debate. I found myself analogising it with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as opposed to the three-minute pop song. Pop songs are great - entertaining and mood settling - but they'll never go anywhere near the spiritual depths, the intellectual and emotional fulfilment, and sheer power, of Beethoven."
7. "Blogs are fine, a nice cup of coffee, but for sustained thought, phrased in sentences that you'd read by choice, developed, extended, subjected to intense self-scrutiny, wrought with a consciousness of what has preceded them in the culture - for that you need a book. And for a book you need a mind. Life without books is just televison upstairs." (RM: that's the pretentious pick of the bunch - and it was written by a New Zealander no less!)
8. "I would agree that surfing the web and Blogging are very entertaining. I would also agree blogging will never replace a well written book, though Chat rooms can be very deep and help someone put concepts into words."
9. "Re blogs vs books - One thing I've always noticed when working with computers and children, is that children (especially young children) will nine times out of ten respond far far better to a book than to a screen full of writing."
Now... I'll give you a moment to digest that, as frankly it is a bit rich! (ho ho, another food pun!) The gist of it is that those people think of blogs - and text on a computer screen in general, it seems - as fun and entertaining, but shallow and not filling or nourishing. A 3-minute pop song, as opposed to a symphany. Whereas reading proper paper books - according to these pundits - is an activity that is deep, profound, spiritual, nourishing.
What all those people are missing is that books aren't necessarily an object you consume. Electronic text - including blogs and ebooks - enables a true two-way reading experience. Ebooks for example often have exactly the same words as a paper book - but you can do so much more with them. Note that in the previous sentence I used the word "you" (as in the reader) and "do" (as in produce something). With a paper book you can scribble in the margins and make some notes of your own, I suppose. But there's not a whole lot else you can actively contribute to the reading process, because a paper book is an object that is pretty much static. An Ebook, on the other hand, is dynamic - you can cut and paste text, add notations, re-format it, search it, electronically send it to your mate on the other side of the world, converse with other people reading the same text, contribute to the story, and many many other creative acts that we haven't even discovered yet.
A word on the last comment I quoted from 2blowhards - about children responding better to books than "to a screen full of writing". I agree that books are very important for children - my own daughter (who is going on 3) loves it when we read books together. But she's just as keen on multimedia on the computer, because she can interact with it, make choices, create things. I'd suggest that this future generation will want to have their cake and eat it too - they'll want books, but in a format more suited to creativity and 2-way communication.
To return to the NEA 'Reading at Risk' report. While it is disturbing that reading is apparently declining, there is a new kind of literacy that I believe is rising to take its place. It's like media literacy, but there's more to it as well... The new generation of readers aren't content to be passive consumers of books. They want to be able to interact and communicate with words and other media. The NEA report actually has a little clue that helps confirm this trend: it states that creative writing has increased over the last 20 years (almost the only thing that did increase!).
I've noted before on this blog that Generation Y is very community-oriented. They use media to form social bonds and reading books doesn't necessarily meet those needs. Maybe that explains the 28% drop in readership among 18-24 year olds.
Two-way media such as blogs and ebooks are the future of reading, because literacy is no longer a one-way consumer culture of 'we write, you read'. Creativity is half the equation now and the new generation want reading books to be a social and productive activity. Digital media and the Internet are the enablers of this new kind of read/write literacy.
One good thing about audio on the Web is that I can listen to things while I'm working. Which is precisely what I did this morning with Tim O'Reilly's keynote speech at the Open Source Convention currently being held in the US. The audio was done by IT Conversations, rapidly becoming one of my favourite websites. O'Reilly's speech was 45 minutes long and I jotted down some brief notes while I worked (stretching my multi-tasking muscles). I may as well write them up into a blog entry now, then I'll come back to them later on when I have more time to reflect. So these aren't definitive notes and I expect I'll be editing the quotes later. Here goes...
Tim O'Reilly is one of my tech heroes. He's got a great strategic brain and he's happy to share his insights. In particular I've been following what he's been saying about e-publishing, as that's a niche I'm getting into in a big way right now (more on that in a later post).
The first thing O'Reilly said today that made my ears prick up was: "We don't publish books." ("we" meaning his company O'Reilly Media). He said their aim is to "capture knowledge" (ack, I hate when the word 'capture' is used with the word 'knowledge') and to "spread the word". This touches on what Cory Doctorow and others have said about e-books: they're a practice, not an object. Which ties in with the Social Media stuff that Ross Mayfield in particular has been writing about lately. Publishing and books (and music) are increasingly a social activity carried out on the network, rather than a physical thing you hold in your hands. I've got some posts coming up in which I explore this further...
Anyway back to Tim O'Reilly's speech. He talked about "new transformative technologies", which we're using to "find the future - little pockets of it - and move along with it". His point here, I think, was that innovation is done at the edges and you can see the mainstream future by seeking out these currently minority "pockets" of technology. He then talked about companies like Google, Amazon and eBay being applications, which he's discussed at length before.
One quote I liked from this part of the speech (about 14 mins in) was when he said the likes of Amazon take "the intelligence of all its users...and put it in the interface". (ps I may have his words slightly off, I'll fix later). He referred to it as "added value is the data". As an illustration, he compared Amazon to Barnes & Noble - concluding that user participation is roughly 10 times more at Amazon than at B&N, and that this is reflected in the search results (Amazon being 10 times more comprehensive). He talked about incorporating "user added value" and that you need a "participatory layer around the data". All of this is on the theme of people as producers and consumers - the read/write web. So of course I'm lapping it up :-)
At around the 21 minute mark, Tim (if I may be so bold as to be on a first-name basis with him!) talked about social software. I must admit that whenever people start talking or blogging about social networking, like Friendster and Orkut, my eyes glaze over. I'm just not into that stuff. But I did like what Tim said about social networking apps needing to use more peer-to-peer technologies - because "we own the data". He went on to talk about Apple and the iPod/ITune/iEtc - that it's a seamless integration from "the handheld to the server". As he put it, it's the "get out of the PC and into the network" metaphor.
Back to books, he said that books should "get out of the physical object and into the network" (may have to check that quote, not sure I wrote it down exactly right). The upshot is that it's about "taking our content and using it as a network data source". In this regard he referred to the O'Reilly Safari software as a "set of services" rather than a single app. As an example he talked about a print-on-demand project that he did recently, which showed the Safari experience is "more participatory" than other such services.
He ended his speech by discussing stats visualisation tools and "hardware hacking". Re visualisation, as an example he showed that PHP is increasing its popularity, while Java is going down (which he said Paul Graham would like! See an IT Conversations interview with Paul Graham for background on that).
Tim O'Reilly signed off with this nice little catchphrase: "You guys are our radar."
So there are my very rough and quick notes. I apologise if I've misquoted Tim in places, I will probably have another listen and tidy up this post later on. Stay tuned for more Read/Write Web posts on the themes that have been expressed here. I'm also currently in the middle of preparing a new topic-focused blog. I bought the domain name for it last night, before I listened to Tim's speech. It took me well over 2 hours last night to find a suitable (or more to the point, available!) domain, but I'm happy to report that my choice has been vindicated even more today after listening to Tim's keynote! More soon...
As I was browsing the Web, looking for inspiration, I discovered a work by John Baldessari - a conceptual artist from America. He transformed the library space at UCSD (University of California, San Diego) into a beautiful work of art... the photos online are enough to make me want to go to UCSD and soak it up in real life. I wonder if it's still there (as the website is dated 2001)? I was moved enough to cut a piece of one picture and paste it into the header of my weblog. It complements my own themes and aspirations. Here's a description from the Stuart Collection website:
John decided first to transform the library doors and then to incorporate the entire lobby space, choosing students as his subject. The entrance to the Geisel Library is comprised of a wall of eight ten-foot high glass panels flanking two pairs of automatic sliding doors. Onto each of these panels John has placed photographic images of UCSD students standing atop a row of shelved books. They become part of the architectural structure ñ like a Greek temple using the figures as columns, the books their bases.
The existing clear glass of the doors was replaced with glass in primary colors, perhaps suggesting primary sources of information. As the doors open and close, the colored panes cross over each other, visually mixing into new colors. Above the doors the words READ, WRITE, THINK and DREAM echo the exhortation Baldessari gave his students to remember that beyond the day-to-day grind comes the chance to contemplate the unexpected and envision new worlds.
Emphasis mine. I wish I could go and view this in the flesh, over on the other side of the world. One day...
Yesterday I did my first audio blogging post. I think audio has the potential to be a key part of the so-called Social Web, or Social Media as it's being called now. And I like the term 'Social Media', over the more tradional term 'Social Software'. It emphasizes that the current revolution of the Two-Way Web is all about multimedia. That is, publishing on the Web in whatever form of media most suits you. For a lot of folks it's weblogging, predominantly a textual media but increasingly photos and audio. For other folks it's music, using tools such as Garageband to publish their compositions on the Web. There's also video, which will become increasingly viable as broadband becomes a ubiquitous and cheap commodity (it's still a ways away). And of course mixing all those medias together is where the real excitement is.
Which brings me back to audio blogging and how it complements textual blogging. The reason I published an audio recording of myself was to connect a little more intimately with my audience. I've only heard a few other bloggers in audio format - Dave Winer, Jason Kottke, the Gillmor Gang, plus Andrew Chen did a test audio post recently. In all those cases I've felt I've got to know a little more about those people, just by hearing their voices. And isn't that what the Social Web is all about - getting to know people better?
Audio blogging hasn't really taken off yet. Dave Winer and Steve Gillmor are the only two of my subscriptions that I can think of who audio blog regularly. I can't help feeling that it would be great if more of my loosely-joined community published audio recordings. I'd like to hear all those accents - French, English, American (and all the sub-accents - West Coast, East Coast, etc), Italian, Russian, Indian, Canadian, etc. Heck, even Australian ;-) It would increase my appreciation I think of the truly international flavour of blogging. It still amazes me that someone from a little country on the wrong side of the world, New Zealand, can connect to so many people in other countries - just by publishing a weblog. Hearing your voices would add an extra dimension to the virtual community we're all part of (btw I'm reading Howard Rheingold's classic early 90's book The Virtual Community at the moment).
Having said that, there are still technical barriers with audio blogging. For one thing, the file size of each audio post will be measured in megabytes instead of kilobytes. I don't know about you, but I'd have to upgrade my current web server package if I want to continue audio blogging. I only have 16MB of space left right now (enough for about 6-7 audio posts) and my bandwidth transfer allowance would need bumping up. There are potential bandwidth-saving solutions out there - e.g. Freecache, which I'll be looking into.
The other major obstacle for bloggers to overcome is the actual recording. I'm still finding my way in this regard. I recorded yesterday's post on the built-in Voice Memo software on my Palm PDA, which only records in .wav format. I understand MP3 provides a more compact file, plus it is far and away the preferred format of Web users (hat tip to Lucas Gonze for that bit of info). I've yet to discover how to record in MP3 on my PDA, which I'd prefer to keep using as my recording device. And I haven't found a decent software app that converts wav to MP3 on my PC. So I've got a lot to learn before I get to grips with audio blogging.
But technical issues aside, audio blogging is a good way to get to know more about a person. Textual blogging is still the best way to outline ideas and structure your thoughts. And of course you can't link to people (yet!) in an audio post. So text blogging is and will continue to be the foundation of the Social Web, which is good news for people like me who love to write! But text blogging can be augmented by audio blogging and photos (which is something I also intend to do at some point). In the future maybe even video.
Don't take my word for it... I'd like to hear your feedback. Did my audio post last night help you get to know me better as a blogger? When you heard my kiwi accent reading The Fractal Blogosphere article, did it alter your perception of me as a blogger - or of the article itself (assuming you'd read it before)? I'm interested to know your thoughts on audio blogging and whether you will take it up.
Tonight I recorded my first audio blog post, a reading of my January 2004 article The Fractal Blogosphere. Quite topical, given my recent posts on subscriber statistics and weblog popularity.
The audio file is .wav format, which you can play in Real Player and probably other audio players as well. I tried to convert it to MP3, but it ended up a larger file (MP3's are supposedly more compact). Shows how new audio recording is to me - any advice appreciated.
Download My Audio Post (2.17MB and about 9 minutes long)
I've just hit a century, 100 Bloglines subscribers. I was on 79 only 4 days ago, when I posted my article about Bloglines subscriber stats. Mind you it helps when the creator of Bloglines links to you :-)
To put this into perspective, I also noticed today that Boing Boing has 8,025 Bloglines subscribers! Wow! I'd previously not seen anyone with more than 3,000. I'm still in C-List territory compared to the likes of Mark Pilgrim (who's increased by 33, to 2133, over the last 4 days).
Dear readers, can you please leave a comment if you know of other blogs that go over the 3,000 mark in Bloglines subscribers? Also I'd be interested to know if any other RSS Aggregator keeps tallies of its subscribers and makes them publically available.
PS I'm like this in my day job too - I can't help myself when it comes to web statistics. It's part of my job as a Web Producer, so I have an excuse. Also, back in the day, I was the sort of kid who created his own Top 10 lists of music... Duran Duran seemed to be number 1 a bit too often in my charts :-0
You can see where some of the inspiration for Sylvian and The System came from ;-)
In yesterday's post I mentioned The 3 C's: Create, Communicate and Collaborate. The 2nd one could just as easily be 'Converse', as in conversations. All of these C's are things I strive to achieve in my weblog. In an effort to strengthen the 'Communicate/Converse' prong, I've finally gotten around to converting my Comments system (hey, another C!) to Inline. That is, comments are now on the same page as my individual entries.
One of the things I admire about the web designer community is the way they all comment on each others blogs and have these wonderful back-and-forth conversations. Often you'll find 30 or more comments appended to an entry on a web designer's blog. And one of the main reasons for this is that nearly all of them have inline comments systems (and beautifully styled ones, I might add). Inline comments do promote conversations, because when folks click through to your weblog from their RSS Aggregator they'll most probably scroll down to the comments at the end of the page, which prompts them to leave a comment too, which then causes the others to respond, etc. Whereas if you have pop-up comments, you need to click on the link at the end of the page to see who's commented and what they said.
And as I wrote a couple of months ago when I first raised the topic of inline comments, it's in line with the two-way web philosophy I promote. Why not mix my content with my readers on the same page? It should also foster some sense of community - we're all mingling together, reading and writing on the one page. I almost feel like breaking into a U2 song: One page, but we're not the same, we get to carry each other, carrrry each other, One... Er, <cough>!
There's already a good conversation started up in my post from yesterday: Analysing Bloglines Subscriber Stats. Want to join in?
I love Bloglines. It's a browser-based RSS feeds aggregator that almost singlehandedly proves the case that web applications can be better than desktop-based ones. I say this in the context of Joel Spolsky's already classic essay on why web browser apps are winning the war against so-called rich or smart clients. "The new API is HTML" quoth Joel. There were some good follow-up articles too, including one by John Gruber that I read today called The Location Field Is the New Command Line. The pros and cons of both sides have been hashed out often before, including by me. In a nutshell: browser-based apps are easier to use, don't require installation, and probably most importantly of all are accessible on any computer hooked up to the Internet. Rich clients can offer better (richer/smarter) functionality and are not constrained by the limitations of the browser. So there are trade-offs both ways.
The other pro for web-based apps is that you can access your data from any device hooked up to the Internet. As we use our PDA's and mobile phones more and more to create, communicate and collaborate (the 3 C's as far as I'm concerned), we'll see increased benefits to having our data available in one location - the web server.
Bloglines has recently undergone a facelift and added some more features to its service. One of the most interesting to me, because I requested it back in February, is that you can now view how many people subscribe to your RSS feed. I'm surprised nobody has said much about this, because it's potentially a launching pad to a community-based stats network (read my Feb post for more details). My own subscriber stats have jumped from 32 in February to 79 as of today. And I hasten to add it's not just my stats - Mark Pilgrim's subscriber number was 839 in February, but now it's 2100! So in both cases our number of subscribers has more than doubled in just 5 months.
I think this is a reflection of how much Bloglines the service has grown - it's undoubtedly the number 1 browser-based RSS Aggregator out there and possibly even the top aggregator overall including the smart clients (that's debatable). But I think it's also a reflection of how popular blogging is getting among "normal" people - i.e. not just geeks. And in this respect, one of Bloglines' best features is a "one-click" method of signing up and getting started in the blogging world - there's no software installation required. Incidentally, that's why I added a "Subscribe with Bloglines" button to my menu last week - to make it as easy as possible for normal people to subscribe to my RSS feed. I'm sure normal people don't want to see my ugly XML code and Bloglines hides those details as much as possible (except it doesn't appear to have RSS feed auto-discovery yet).
On the subject of subscriber stats, we can also start to put numbers on the so-called A List phenomenon. It's pretty much accepted now that blogging popularity is distrubuted as a power law - whereby a small number of bloggers get a large number of readers, while the majority of bloggers get a small number of readers. So let's check out the Bloglines subscriber stats of the A-Listers that I subscribe to:
Jason Kottke: 2184
Dave Winer: 2652
Mark Pilgrim: 2100
Anil Dash: 884
Tim Bray: 1517
Mitch Kapor: 924
Lawrence Lessig: 2794
Jon Udell: 1619
Those are just web technology A-Listers, nevertheless it seems that 1500 Bloglines subscribers is a good cut-off point. This would mean Anil Dash and Mitch Kapor wouldn't be classified as A-List (I'm kind of surprised Dash doesn't have more subscribers, maybe it's because he doesn't post that often and when he does it's usually not techy stuff...certainly not like the good old days when he wrote about microcontent clients and so forth). Of course this figure, 1500, will steadily increase over time as Bloglines and blogging both gain popularity.
For research purposes, I decided to briefly subscribe to the 10 "most influential reporters and bloggers on the web" according to Blogrunner back in March 2004 . Here's what I found:
001. Glenn Reynolds instapundit.com --> 1737 Bloglines subscribers
002. Andrew Sullivan www.andrewsullivan.com - daily dish and The New Republic --> No
RSS feed!!?
003. Kevin Drum Political Animal (ex-Calpundit) --> 742
004. Joshua Micah Marshall Talking Points Memo: By Joshua Micah Marshall -->
1964
005. Tim Blair Tim Blair --> 164
006. Dana Milbank The Washington Post --> couldn't find an RSS feed
007. Michele A Small Victory --> 52(!)
008. Kos Daily Kos --> couldn't find an RSS feed
009. Eugene Volokh The Volokh Conspiracy --> 125 + 50 (headline and full content
feeds)
010. Atrios Eschaton --> 1361
Well, some surprises there! Only 3 of them have over 1000 Bloglines subscribers. Not being familiar with any of the above 10 weblogs, when I did a quick browse of them this evening I came away with 2 impressions: 1) RSS feeds were either hard to find or in 3 cases non-existent; 2) they mostly blog about politics.
I don't want this to seem like I'm obsessing over subscriber stats. There are drawbacks to knowing how many subscribers bloggers have. And funnily enough this was one of the themes I explored in the short story I published last week, called Sylvian and The System. It's a futuristic look at what blogging may be like in 20-30 years time.
Basically my story was a glimpse into a world where people operate avatars that contribute content/information into a Web-like structure called The System, which is ruled by popularity/reputation. The dominant ranking method is a tool called "Popster", which I likened to a Billboard Top 40 of the Blogosphere. Now to my mind, this is not far from the "A-List" phenomenon that we currently have right now in the blogosphere. My story was in a sense cranking that idea up a few notches and exploring the possible consequences. If you're a regular reader of my weblog, I'd encourage you to read Sylvian and The System. As pioneer bloggers at the beginning of the 21st century, I'd genuinely like to know your reaction to the ideas I explored in that story.
Which brings me back to the possible drawbacks of Bloglines' subscriber stats. One is obviously that popularity (or number of subscribers) may become the main goal for bloggers. But does a need for popularity affect your content? Will we strive to produce "mainstream" content to appeal to a large number of readers?
For example my publishing a 2700-word work of fiction to my weblog is likely to alienate some of my subscribers, those that don't like to read fiction ("just the facts ma'am"). I think it was a risky move for me to publish Sylvian and The System, because it's not the type of content that some - maybe even a majority - of my readers signed up for when they subscribed to my RSS feed. I'd go as far to say that if I continued to publish just fiction on my weblog, my Bloglines subscriber count would decrease pretty quickly.
I myself enjoy reading "risky" (or perhaps non-conventional is a better term) content in weblogs. Often those blogs have low subscriber stats - but then they're not "mainstream" in content. Perhaps that is the point I'm trying to make - that getting popular does require some mainstreaming of your content.
There is good to be had in Bloglines subscriber count too. Here's a revelation: community and collaboration are more important to me than I let on. I often say that publishing and creativity are the most important aspects of blogging to me. While that's still true, I enjoy being part of a community of like-minded people and I think we can make some interesting deductions about who is influential in our little communities by looking at Bloglines stats. Notice I didn't say important, I said influential - which is to say, these are people that I consider to be on the same 'level' as me intellectually but often have more influence than me in the community. e.g. Marc Canter has 417 subscribers, Sébastien Paquet has 563, Lilia Efimova has 744, Dina Mehta has 134, Paolo Valdemarin 149. There are many others I could mention. I don't mean to embarrass anyone, but these people are pretty influential in the social software/new school tools community - a community which I like to think I'm a part of.
There are some people who have fewer subscribers than me who I'd consider to be influential in the quality of their ideas. So don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying subscriber count is a good indication of quality. But it is one measure of influence in a community, although the list of supposedly influential political bloggers I analysed above perhaps refutes that.
What's your take on all this?
This is a Short Story by Richard MacManus. It takes a speculative look at what the blogosphere might be like in 20-30 years time.
My name is sylvian and this is my story of The System. Twenty years ago it was called the Web. Back then people were making it up as they went along. Some of them attained a degree of popularity on the Web, with devices they called "weblogs". We call those people "webheads" - they're mostly old white guys now. Still, it was a cute scene. One of my favourite activities in The System is to travel back 20 years, using Wayback 3D, and immerse myself in that old world. It was relatively primitive, but you can see similarities to The System as it is today.
The System is ruled by popularity, you see, or "reputation" as they called it back then – before the term got so over-used it became a cliché. There's far more of us now on The System, but some of the Webheads survive. In fact they make up a good proportion of The Establishment. But now there are lots of normal people too.
I used to be quite popular in The System. I've had eight number 1 memes in total. I was one of the first girls to achieve more than 5 chart-toppers. Well, after the founding Webhead women that is. And hey, I'm not just talking about any old meme engine here - I'm talking about Popster. Everyone uses Popster for searching and ranking. Of course its creator, known as sysadm to the World but I also know him as Sidney Mellon, is one of The Establishment's most influential members. I knew him back when he was just another programmer in college.
I used to go out with one of his real-world friends, much to Sidney's amusement. He thought his friend was a player and was using me. I guess he just didn't want to see me get hurt. But Sidney never cottoned onto the fact that I was a player too, in those days. In fact I ended up dumping his friend. I got Sidney's respect for that.
But then our worlds forked off into different directions. Sidney had a new software product out in the System and he was spending all his time on it. He moved to New York a few years ago. Of course I've been subscribed to his avatar since it began. I was a subscriber before he hit it big with Popster and I used to remind people of this fact a lot. Sidney's avatar is called simply "sysadm" – a not particularly subtle geek inside joke that, even now, he still thinks is amusing. I've always thought it was pretty lame.
My own avatar is named after my actual real-world name, sylvian. In the real world I'm a Junior Systems/Adverts Designer and I work for a design company here in London. It's a small but prestigious firm, or so it says in our ads. My day job keeps me busy and some of my clients do recognize my name from The System.
When Sidney created Popster, he never imagined it would one day become the dominant ranking mechanism of The System. I think he just wanted to get the respect of his nerdy friends and perhaps earn a little cash on the side with Gmoney™, the Google currency. And for the first few years, that was pretty much what happened.
Popster's innovation was to marry the latest in search engine technology to a pop music chart concept. In the early days of his software, Sidney liked to call Popster the "Billboard Top 40 of the System". All his geek mates – typically males, of course – loved this concept. It allowed them to crow amongst each other about who was number 1 that week, or who was number 4 with a bullet, etcetera. Geeks in Mud, is how I like to describe the phenomenon. Give those boys a new tech toy to play with and they're like pigs in mud.
Anyway when The System hit the mainstream, to everyone's surprise and not least Sidney's, Popster became the search and rank tool that all the punters used. Partly this was because Popster was so easy to use and partly it was because the pop chart format was fun and familiar to people. But mostly it was for the same reason The System got popular – people got a kick out of building up an online persona and, human nature being what it is, they wanted a way to gauge their relative popularity. I won't bore you with the technology details, because God knows it's boring to me. Suffice to say that The System found in Popster a way not just to rank popularity of content, it also created a star system for avatars. There are lots of different "charts" in Popster – as many types of charts as types of people. The System is all things to all people, and Popster is the same.
My number ones were in the so-called Pop Charts, which is about as mainstream as it gets in The System. I started out a few years ago with what was once quaintly known as a "linklog". I used to link to loads of cool stuff – especially arcana and automata of the 2020's and beyond. I was very hip. I then split my avatar into two different identities. One half, the one that drew the most crowds, was a link machine. I called it sylvian-links (but most people continued to refer to it as just "sylvian", a little to my chagrin). The other half was original content, stuff from my head and nowhere else. They were essays, if you like, but included not just text but pictures and vocal vignettes too. What was that word they used in the 1990's – "multimedia", that's it. That's what I did in the other half of sylvian, which I called "sylvian-me".
My proudest moment in The System was when I got to number 1 with a sylvian-me entry. That was my fifth number 1 - the four previous chart-toppers dated back to before I split my avatar into two parts. After achieving that first sylvian-me number 1, I made it my goal to get more of the same.
I looked down at my console and saw that Prue was pinging me. I set my avatar to 'smile', even though I felt more like 'sanguine'. But it's too much work being sanguine around Prue.
"Hey there Grace Kelly, I've got a cool link for you!" Prue sounded breathless, but at least she wasn't doing her Bette Davis impressions.
Prue and me were in the habit of referring to each other using the names of old Hollywood actresses.
"All right Sharon Stone, don't be a tease. Hand it over, bud." I said and smiled despite myself.
Prue grinned and flashed the link to me. Immediately I zeroed in on it with my console.
"Hey, c'mon Madonna – I see that 6 people have already jumped on this. It's like number 108 with a bullet on the Soul-Urban-Age19 chart!" I shouted in mock hysteria.
"Yeh I know that, but it's got some twists that nobody has caught onto yet. Run it through your state-of-the-art Trend Analyser". Prue then added sarcastically "What is it, like 18 months old now? You'll see that there are at least 9 threads that haven't been –"
I interrupted, as I'd just received the results and was excited to discover it was a Greta Garbo link. My all-time favourite Hollywood actress!
"Hey thanks Prue! This thing could be a sleeper. I better post it quick, before a Copyist gets onto it."
Prue was silent. I knew that expression – it meant Prue didn't know what avatar mode to use and that meant she was hiding something.
"What is it?" I demanded.
"Well," Prue belatedly switched to her chipper mode, "I didn't know whether to mention it. But the link came from sysadm. He told me to pass it on to you."
Now I was the silent one. I turned back to the console and did some further analysis on the link. It was now necessary to cross-reference it not just to 100 generations, but as many as possible. Perhaps up to half a million generations. If this link came from Sidney, then it had some arcane reference in it that encoded a personal message. It was a habit Sidney had gotten into, mostly to keep his Establishment mates on their toes. I hadn't received a message from Sidney since about two years before, when he'd sent a formal note of congratulations to me after one of my early chart toppers. So I was curious what his message was.
The Garbo link turned out to be a new hyper-montage of the Garbo film Ninotchka, a comedy. Garbo wasn't known for doing comedies and there was a rumour that in Ninotchka, the director Ernst Lubitsch was dissatisfied with Garbo's attempts to fake (or act) a laugh. So he dubbed in another woman's voice to provide the laughter. I'd known of this fact – there's very little I don't know about Greta Garbo, at least when it comes to things about her that were written, spoken or merely implied in the media. That's to say, I know all the arcana of her public life. But despite it not being a new revelation about Garbo, the Ninotchka hyper-montage was a nice piece of work. It played on the 'fake laugh' motif – there were lots of ghostly laughs and flashes of smiles throughout the piece.
But the results from the Trend Analyser were puzzling (and yes it is over 18 months old, as Prue had said, but I'd gotten so in tune with this particular machine that I'd lose more than I'd gain by upgrading – it would take me at least another 12 months to re-tune). The strange thing about this link was that it was a couple of years old, yet a month previous there were only a few references to it on The System. Even though Garbo is a minority topic, the odds are over 97% that a 2-year old quality Garbo link would be referenced at least 500 times – probably closer to 1000. And those aren't odds I've plucked out of the air, I've calculated this many times on my Trend Analyser. It doesn't lie.
I also could find no trace of Sidney Mellon in the back-references. I'd cranked the Trend Analyser up to 499 degrees of separation, but even then there was not the slightest hint of Sidney. At this point I was getting a little anxious, as I'd spent over an hour analysing the Ninotchka link and I still hadn't published it onto sylvian-links. If I didn't hurry up, a copyist would swoop in like a magpie, unravel the untouched threads and pinch the glory. So despite my uneasy feelings about what the link meant, and why Prue had mentioned Sidney, I decided to release it to my hungry audience.
I opened the door to my room and saw that my console was paging me.
"Sylvian, you have a message from The Establishment", said the console. I had it programmed to be the voice of Rowen Atkinsen, a British comedian from the 1980's. This meant the console always sounded comical, even when relaying serious messages. And this was serious, because how often did I get a message from The Establishment? Almost never, that's how often.
I sat down and waved the console's monitor into action, expecting to see a bland-looking emissary avatar from The Establishment.
I was surprised to find the visage of Greta Garbo looking back at me! My first thought was that it better not be Prue or Haley playing games with me again. But how could they fake a message from The Establishment? They couldn't, nobody can do that. The Establishment has rock-solid security and nobody has ever managed to crack their broadcast message code. Which means nobody has ever managed to spoof a message from The Establishment.
The Garbo avatar was looking me over, with a typically hard to read expression on her face. I double-checked that the transmission was coming from The Establishment. It was.
"Hey Syl, how's it going babe?" The voice was that of Greta Garbo, complete with Swedish accent and a slight 1930's background hiss that you get on those old movies. But the words were unmistakably that of Sidney Mellon.
I eventually recovered from my shock of seeing a Garbo avatar and belatedly set my avatar to 'sanguine'.
"Sidney Christopher Mellon, that's got to be you. How the hell did you manage to get the Garbo avatar?!" It was impossible to keep the sanguine expression on my virtual face and my console automatically reverted to my actual state of surprise (most System avatars had the Reality Check™ plug-in installed, which prevented avatars from assuming expressions that were too far out of alignment with its owners words).
"I thought you'd be impressed, Sylvian." And the Garbo avatar smirked, just like Sidney's usual sysadm avatar.
I enjoyed hearing the Garbo voice pronounce my name and so I emitted a small peep of pleasure. Quickly I composed myself though.
"But Sidney, the Garbo avatar is covered in copyright. The Hollywood Cartel chained it up years ago… you'd be jailed if they ever found out you're spoofing it!" I was now genuinely concerned for Sidney, for the Hollywood Cartel is known to be especially ruthless in protecting their movie star's avatars. Just a month previous, a 16 year old boy had been jailed for 1 year for spoofing the action movie star Eli Bush's avatar.
"This [pronounced "Ziss"] is no spoof", the Garbo avatar beamed. "I bought the copyright." Sidney's avatar smiled that enigmatic smile characteristic of Garbo.
"You bought it! Why? It must've cost you a fortune!"
The Garbo avatar switched to scratchy black and white, purely to amuse the person controlling it – Sidney Mellon.
Adopting a dramatic expression, the Garbo avatar spoke: "Sylvian, I bought it for you."
A few weeks later, my popularity on The System had reached an all-time high and I was up there in the higher echelons of the charts with most of the old webheads. In that short time I'd gained 2 more number ones with sylvian-links and an especially gratifying number one with sylvian-me, my avatar that produced original compositions. The Greta Garbo skin was a goldmine and I have to admit I was enjoying my newfound fame. My personal life had improved too, again thanks to Sidney. We were pinging each other every few hours.
OK, I admit it – I'd fallen for Sidney.
But even at this relatively early stage of my newly acquired A-List status in The System, I felt uncomfortable about how much of it was due to Sidney's influence. The Garbo avatar seemed to be imposing itself on me too. I was assuming the characteristics of Greta Garbo as her legend portrayed it – aloof or shy, brooding, sensual. Even the Reality Check plug-in adjusted itself to my new personality - it didn't correct me when I assumed a Garboesque pose in The System. And I was posing as Garbo ever more frequently – in my IM conversations, in my postings in sylvian-links and sylvian-me, in my interactions with other avatars. The really strange thing was, even my friends didn't object. They accepted the new me, just as everyone else had.
Everyone except for me.
It's 6 months later as I write this. I've now lost myself completely to Garbo. When people see a sylvian-link or a sylvian-me post now, they identify it with a cult movie star who died a long time ago.
I ditched Sidney about a month ago. He complained that he'd made me part of The Establishment and a star in The System. How could I walk away from that, he'd whined. I told him then what I still believe now: I wanted out of the Garbo avatar and out of my relationship with Sidney for the same reason – I was an impostor in both.
I'm posting this story to my new avatar, just a couple of months old and temporarily called "sylvian-new". I haven't been able to think of a better name. Only 15 people subscribe to this avatar, which so far has been full of personal and rambling and chaotic stories. My highest pop chart position with sylvian-new has been 281.
That's all about to change though. When I push the button to publish this story, the name of Sidney Mellon will once again propel me to number 1.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
License.
There's an interesting meme doing the rounds: what webloggers are reading this summer. This, of course, is right up my street. So here's what I'm reading currently... although it's actually the middle of winter here in New Zealand.
I'm an eclectic reader, so I usually have a number of different books on the go at the same time. I'm also a fussy reader and if a book doesn't 'grab' me, I don't hesitate to ditch it and move onto something more exciting. A recent example of this was the Hemingway biography I was reading. It's a huge book and I got about 1/4 of the way through it, before I lost interest due to the leaden prose and snails pace narrative. I did manage to get past Hemingway's Paris period in the 1920's and into the early 1930's - of which the most interesting bits were the anecdotes of Hemingway's relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. But this is one of those biographies that spends too much time on the minutiae of its subject's life, at the expense of moving the narrative along. It's like riding a horse that stops every two metres to chew some grass and masticate on it, instead of galloping along at a brisk pace so you can check out the scenery.
I also just finished Cory Doctorow's second published novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. I read this book entirely on my Palm Pilot, as a Plucker file (Plucker being a form of e-book). Reading ebooks via my PDA is something I'm rapidly getting used to and enjoying. I also read Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture this way, via PDF in that case. I have more to say on the subject of ebooks in later posts. Incidentally, Janet Tokerud wrote a good overview today on why ebooks rock. Back to Cory's book, I enjoyed it although I felt his first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was better. Given the title of his latest novel, I wanted Cory to explore the "tribe" theme some more. It's something I'm very interested in right now in relation to Generation Y's tribal tendencies. Even so, it's well worth downloading EST onto your PDA.
I'm about 3/4 of the way through The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. It's about Australian Aboriginal people and their tradition of charting their ancestry, communities, and boundaries of the land via songs. From the back cover: "to sing the songs was an honoured duty and in each telling the stories would change and sing the world afresh." It's a fascinating book which I've heard a lot about from bloggers and new-age Knowledge Management types. I'm up to the part where Chatwin lists extracts from his old journals, which has sort of stopped the narrative in its tracks. So I've put it to one side for a while, but I'll definitely pick it up again later. And then I intend to go back and read all the blogs that have discussed the book, as it looks like there's a lot of fertile ground there (pun intended).
What else am I reading right now? A few books and various papers relating to a technology project I'm exploring. More on that later. I also bought and started Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, which he wrote for children but is charmingly imaginative for adults too (or at least this one!). Kipling drew some pictures to accompany the stories, which are included in this edition of the book. It's escapist fiction, but the first two stories (How the Whale got his Throat, and How the Camel got his Hump) made me glow with a calm happiness. I look forward to reading them to my young child soon.
I've also got Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community lined up, that should be next cab off the rank. There are also a bunch of books I got from the library or bought on special, that I will pick up when the time is right. Like Douglas Coupland's Polaroids from the Dead. I'm a Coupland fan - Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma were especially memorable. I got William Mitchell's book Me++ last christmas and I started it earlier in the year. However Mitchell is a bit frustrating to read. His ideas are wonderful - the book is subtitled 'The Cyborg Self and the Networked City', which is a good indicator of its themes - but his writing is often stilted and lacking oomph. But I must finish it. I've also got Joseph Heller's Catch as Catch Can waiting in the wings. It's a collection of stories by the writer of probably my favourite book of all time, Catch-22. I've read that at least half a dozen times over the years. This latest book has some "lost chapters" from Catch-22 and "further tales" of its main character Yossarian. Sure that was just a marketing ploy to get me to buy the book - but it worked.
So that's a summary of what this weblogger has been reading or is waiting to read. I do feel a bit uncool for not including a Neal Stephenson book. What kind of a tech blogger am I! ;-) But I did warn you I had eclectic tastes. Which is another way of saying that I've come to terms with being a Generalist. It is kind of fun being one after all.
