Is it Really Time to Pony Up, Daniel Lyons?

I saw Daniel Lyon's editorial in Newsweek this morning and simply had to reply.

It's Time to Pony Up - Daniel Lyons

Back in the last downturn, in 2001, Jason Katz realized he was in trouble. His fledgling Web site, Paltalk, was trying to make money by giving away a free service and selling advertising. But suddenly advertising was drying up. So Katz—whose site operated chat rooms in which you could not only send text messages but also talk, the way you would on a phone—did something radical: he started charging people to use a premium version of his software, which offered some extra features. Guess what? Since 2004 he's been making a profit, and he's come to believe that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, people really are willing to pay for online services. "I think some companies are scared that they will cede users to the competition if they deign to ask someone to pay for a subscription to something—but that is obviously a mistake," Katz says.

Lyons is arguing that for internet-driven companies to survive, they will have to charge for their services. As major social media sites money-making schemes have proven profoundly unsuccessful, the hordes of users who depend on these services to make some sort of sense out of their lives will happily pay up to use them. As he notes, "If the service is so useful, surely people would pay." Further: " The really passionate members are kids in their teens and 20s. They spend hours every day on Facebook, and would be lost without it. You think they won't pay five bucks a month?"

Lyon's idea may sound both innocuous and delightfully capitalist, but he shouldn't be anywhere near so confident that people will pay. (Further, I've never heard a thing about this Paltalk service he's touting). As an un-elected representative of my Facebook-humping generation, I'm unconvinced. People my age have spent their entire lives seeking the newest and shiniest Free Thing, and social media sites are simply the latest expression of such. Lyons is making the fatal assumption of assuming that we are in any way loyal. We, the young twinkies of the Internet, are not.

Fact is, if Facebook or Twitter began charging to use their services, I am certain that some enterprising little punk would simply create a cunning (or improved) duplicate of same. Coding a Facebook or Twitter copy isn't that hard, and a mass exodus won't be that hard to orchestrate either - note how pretty much all of Myspace's casual users migrated with a quickness to Facebook a couple years ago. Face it, Mr. Lyons, I don't think we will pay five bucks a month. We'll just go elsewhere.

Facebook's owners get it. Facebook's head of marketing, Elliot Schrage, has said as much: ""Facebook is a free service, and we have no plans to change that."

There's a lot at stake: a pay schematic for a monster like Facebook would totally destroy what makes it so valuable: its monolithic penetration (teehe) into almost every market everywhere. Minus that incredible power to attract everyone, it loses a ton of its appeal, it's ability to bridge the entire world in poking and drunk-photo-posting unity. Without total access, Facebook is nothing special. The same goes for Twitter. Do you really think those Iranian protestors or those Mumbaiker civilians would have ponied up to use Twitter? The incredible capabilities of Twitter as a real-time journalism service would be completely lost.


That's true - but it still makes money.

Can social networking sites really make money? Yes - Myspace offers a model of how making a buck off humanities exhibitionist streak could be achieved. I have confidence that Facebook will also figure out how to use its zeitgeist in the pursuit of capitalism, without losing the universality that makes it so special in the first place. Turning to a pay schematic is not , the answer - no matter how apparent it may seem to Daniel Lyons.

Oh Dear Lord We're Becoming the Internet

Is the Internet making us dumber, a nation of ignoramuses, eventual patsies for the rise of our computer overlords? Are we outsourcing our brain functions to the machines that live on our desks, and is this outsourcing not even bothering us. That's the thesis of Robert Carr's widely read article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", anyway. According to Carr, his constant Internet use is chipping away at his "concentration and contemplation." Carr suspects (with plenty of evidence) that we as humanity are actually being reprogrammed by the Internet, programmed away from the lengthy books that we’ve contented ourselves with for the past few millennia. At the end of his essay, Carr arrives at the source of his discomfort with Google's attempt at creating an "artificial intelligence":

It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Therefore, Google is sapping us of our ingrained contemplation and reasoning power and replacing

According to Peter Suderman at the American Scene, however, Google may be doing the opposite: it may be making us smart The Internet may indeed be teaching us to think like it does - but is that necessarily a bad thing? To quote:

Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access, and cross reference.

So instead of making us stupider, the internet is making us smarter in a different way, changing us from encyclopedias to comprehensive indexes. Therefore, we may simply need to change our definition of what an intelligent person is. Instead of putting up a smart person as someone who can summon up the kings of Poland back 400 years or the subspecies of lemur or whatever, we might have to start being impressed by the person who can find the salient information the fastest, a society where brilliant Google-fu will become more important then total recall. Concentration and contemplation may start to lose their import, as uncomfortable as that sounds to us now. Deep reading and contemplation may begin to lose out to wider (and shallower) skimming. But odds are good we will know more stuff on the whole.

People who have an ability to both find the stuff and aggregate it will, then, be at a serious advantage in the future. Fast readers and thinkers used to have a leg up in the past, but I think they’ll have an even stronger foothold now – after all, the most successful bloggers spend their entire working day scouring the web for info, contemplating it,and putting up real time analysis and opinion. As Sunderman points out, making connections between material and adding to the universal index and cataloguing the world’s information will become of imperative importance – simply absorbing a whole lot of information will no longer be “enough”. Old school rumination may lose out to online consensus building, collection, and contextualizing – but is that necessarily going to ruin us all? We used to “become” books and think like they did: now we are quite literally “becoming” the Internet.

Newsweek’s new model, interestingly enough,is a sort of capitulation to the new speed of journalism – they’ve decided to focus more on in-depth analysis and less on reporting simply what happened. Let’s see how their model works for the future of print journalism. Will people be willing to divide their time between shallow and instant information and deep analysis? Or will people simply pick one?

I also take umbrage with Carr’s belief that the internet somehow stifles ambiguity and contemplation. I’d argue the opposite. We’re now able to access pretty much any information we might possibly want at any time. I don’t know about you, but I think that that sort of access has increased the quality of my contemplation. Further, if we’re talking ambiguity and fuzziness, I think being allowed access to pretty much every possible side and aspect of an argument actually increases our ability to see the all-important grey area. (Of course, this precludes some convincing arguments that people simply use the Internet to read about stuff they already agree with.)

Still, there’s gotta be some drawbacks to trusting all our knowledge to the internet. There’s always the chance that the internet could be destroyed or temporarily knocked out, bringing some future generations internet-centralized knowledge crashing down to earth with it. I do not think the model of being Internet or index smart only is in any way sustainable as the world is now: the internet’s penetration into most of the world is still incomplete or vague, and even my high-speed connection goes down inexplicably now and again. We’ll need to be pretty much certain the internet can 1. reach us all and 2. is extremely reliable, like turning the light on, before we can rely upon it for most of our knowledge and chuck a lot of the hard memorization our educational system currently relies upon.

I don’t think it is possible to retard the flow of thinking-via-internet vs. thinking via-books. My generation is already pretty finely tuned to getting our information via internet indexes, and future generations will only be more so. We’re simply going to have to figure out how we can most effectively blend stationary information and mobile/internet based information. And I don’t think we’ll have to chuck out ambiguity and contemplation in the pursuit of knowing more and knowing better.

california ungovernable (surprise), transsexual childrens, riaa lawsuits ahoy

Is California Impossible to Govern? - The Economist



According to this editorial, California's troubles may be bigger then we think: hell, we may be ungovernable. California's direct government system, two-thirds rule. and profoundly bizarre districts have turned the sunshine state into America's most sterling cluster-fuck, with the worst bond rate of the 50 states and a 42 billion dollar gap in revenue and spending. Arnie, meanwhile, spends much of time promulgating dire results if the ballot measures don't pass: fling open the prison doors! Sell our children to Thailand! Turn Yosemite into a Chinese mall!

I love my state, but it's impossible *not* to conclude that we're in serious trouble. I suggest we seriously considering splitting up into Hippie California and Silicon California and make the problem a little bit smaller. I'm certain 2/3rds would vote for that - right? Right?



14 Most Ridiculous Suits Filed by the RIAA and MPAA - Brainz.orgc

Brainz explores the most bone-ass stupid lawsuits put forth by the RIAA and MPAA, including measures targeting a 42 year old senior mother who didn't know how to use file sharing software, a retired dyslexic schoolteacher who could barely email, a 12 year old, and a homeless guy. Real nice, guys, real nice. The RIAA and MPAA claimed in December that they have stopped putting forth lawsuits to individuals, but apparently that may also be a bucket o' lies as well: according to this Wired article, the lawsuits are alive and well. (The RIAA claims the lawsuits were "already in the pipeline," which doesn't strike me as very compelling - how many cases do they have in the pipeline?)

My objection to the RIAA's behavior isn't so much for their reaction to music pirating - it is illegal - but the ridiculously excessive nature of their claims. Whacking someone for $600,000 dollars for downloading a few movies is simply obscene - and if the RIAA really wants to stop file sharing and convincing people it's bad news, they shouldn't make themselves look absolutely ridiculous in the process. Let's hope the RIAA's claim to change the course of their anti-file sharing strategy will hold water.


Omaha Boy to Live Publicly As a Girl - KETV

An Omaha family has decided to allow their 8 year old son to live publicly as a girl - drawing the ire of his Catholic school. Although the school hasn't outwardly said that allowing a boy to live as a girl sorta squicks them out, they have claimed that "having the child attend the school for three years as a boy, and then presenting as a girl would not be a good learning environment for the child or other students." I can just see a parent suing the school because that goddamn trannie made it impossible for little Bobbie to learn long division. As for the child in question, she/he is pretty happy about the decision: she notes, "“Now I can wear nail polish, get rid of all my boy clothes and not worry about that name."

I think it's kind of a fascinating cultural sea change that parents seem to be accepting transgender kids, rather then attempting to "change" them or sweep them under the proverbial carpet. Still, parents should (and I imagine do) understand that a kid is facing a pretty difficult road ahead if they choose to present as transgender early on - although sex-change surgeries are getting more advanced and are beginning to be done earlier. I wonder how long it'll take before transsexualism is accepted to the extent homosexuality is? (Not being an identified gay kid is a safe road to travel either, but its onset does tend to happen after puberty, unlike transsexualism...)

Journalism Reimagined, Circus Freaks, And Other Fun

Ye Olde Journalist

Pay Walls Alone Won't Save Newspapers - NYTimes

The newspaper industry is once again making noises about making customers pay for content: even Grand Poobah Richard Murdoch claims free online papers are a "malfunctioning" business. That may be the case, but as Eric Pfanner points out, that doesn't mean people will pony up if pay walls are reinstated - as was found back in the day when all online papers were paysites (remember that?) most people just went elsewhere for news. Pfanner argues that newspaper might want to take a page from the music industry playbook, which is now packaging song catalogs with broadband and mobile phone services. Could newspaper content be packaged with other tasty delicious incentives and thereby make a buck or two?

I say maybe, but those incentives and those packages are going to have to be pretty bitching awesome to get people to shell out for them. If papers are able to band together with magazines and other media outlets to create cool, attractive, and valuable content that can be packaged as a whole, then more power to them - but I currently have little faith in these old media outlets ability to recognize what new media consumers actually give a rat's ass about. Special subscriber-only photos of Paul Krugman's nose-hairs aren't going to cut it.

Still, the prospect of the internet being turned into a pay-to-play service is a really distressing one. What I (and I presume most people) adore about the internet is its totally egalitarian nature -the internet handily allows anyone with a computer and a connection to access the vast majority of the species knowledge, news, and entertainment nearly instantly. This is absolutely revolutionary, a mind blowing boon in human history (indeed, I think we do not appreciate it enough,) and I believe the preservation of this freedom and openeness must be preserved at all costs.

Will this freedom come at the price of the old media outlets, who (despite their antiquity) produce good, professional content? Hard to say and difficult to answer. The optimist in me hopes we can find a solution that will preserve both. The pessimist hopes that citizen journalists will be able to fill the gap the newspapers will leave - and I don't have a hell of a lot of hope in that, either.


The Human Marvels

Have you ever found yourself wondering, secretly and perversely, what it would be like to attend one of those circus-freak shows of long ago? What it might be like to tweak the curling mustache of the Bearded Lady and compare your own height to that of Tom Thumb, to pretend to be aghast beyond belief at the Elephant Man (rendition 300) and ply the Fat Lady with salami? Was that only me?

I am exceedingly embarassed. In any case, if you do share that particular affection, you must visit the Human Marvels website, which provides interesting, skillfully writing, and fascinatingly human profiles of the circus freaks that populate our history. Many of the so-called freaks lived rather epic lives: Mademoiselle Gabrielle, the "half woman" married three men and led on many others with her shapely half-a-body, while the one foot tall plus change Pauline Musters became an acrobat, accomplished performer, and fashionista toast of New York for a glittering (if brief) period.

Perhaps most impressive of all was the career of the midget Lord Minimus, member of the court of King Charles - a tough as nails little bastard whose exploits included capture by pirates, killing a man who impugned his honor in a duel, and commanding cavalry in raids orchestrated by Prince Rupert.

Check out this video of the magnificient Viking Giant, once the world's tallest man (and a dude with a more robust constitution then poor Mr. Robert Ladlow).

Also: Most Spiders on a Human Body.
Industrious Aussie child Thomas Buchanan lies in a box and has 125 golden orb spiders put upon his bare chest. I am, admittedly, more impressed that such a record category as Most Spiders on a Human Body exactly exists, but props Tom, all the same. I kind of would like to break the record myself however since I happen to really quite like spiders, even the huge ones that eat birds and wayward toddlers.