I continue to muse on the great restructuring I wrote about recently: more than a crisis, a recession, or a depression, what we’re enduring is a millennial shift in the economy and society, the true start of the post-industrial age. What will it look like?
I got an email from a German reader of What Would Google Do?, Joachim Günster, suggesting that we are witnessing a shift from old systems – communism (fail), socialism (never realized), capitalism (now suffering fundamental challenges) – to something new. He said that’s what I chronicled in my book and so he called it Googleism (which sounds much more impressive and less grating auf Deutsch: Googleismus).
At the Brite conference – which I recounted in my last post – Umair Haque described an economy that is fueled by the ability of people to create, by the failure of models built on screwing people, and even by love (see also Clay Shirky on love). I said this sounded like a moral imperative: a new religion. Craig Bromberg called out that it sounded like dialectical materialism. I agree. It is a fundamental shift and that it is brought on, I’ve often said, by a shift in the control of the means of production and distribution (that does sound Marxist, eh?).
Now Bromberg blogs on the notion, saying that Haque’s idea of “constructive capitalism” bears close similarity to the “march of Marx’s dialectical materialism, the resolution of class conflict through various stages of history from feudalism to capitalism, socialism, and then finally to the ultimate of abundance, the big C (no, not Citibank, for Karl’s sake: Communism!).”
Right: the post scarcity economy, the economy of abundance. Religions couldn’t do it (no heaven on earth for us, not yet); socialism couldn’t do it (because, Günster argued in his email, our individual needs and desires simply are not shared); communism couldn’t do it (because, Günster said again, nobody, especially a dictator, is smart enough to plan three years ahead); capitalism isn’t doing it (because our abundance turned out to be a big lie, a balloon with a hole in it).
So will the internet get us to the promised land? Well, no. We still do have scarcities of food and energy. But our economy will soon not be built on them. It will be built, at least in part, on the abundance of knowledge. That is a fundamental, millennial, shift, a next phase perhaps in Herr Marx’s march.
Bromberg concluded:
But what most struck me in the days after Haque’s talk, was this notion that the raison d’etre of the new networked capitalism is Love: people’s love for information, for getting it right (or at least right enough), for connection. And that this newfound love of creativity for its own sake and not just Mammon is creating behavioral change in startups and perhaps even in the way we think businesses can and should be run. Et voila, Jeff Jarvis’s question: What Would Google Do (if it were running the hotels, restaurants, car companies, governments, utilities, shops, manufacturers, and even Apple.
So where Godard once proclaimed (some 45 years ago in Masculin/Feminin) of his generation that “We are the children of Marx and Coca Cola,” we now seem to think we are the children of Marx and Google. It doesn’t have quite the same poetry, and I’m not sure about all the squishy emotion (as Shirky calls it) here, but I am noticing it, and wondering if we’re heading towards another moment of massive cultural change conflating capitalism and eros. Anybody for a Godard film night? We can always download some torrents from that secret cinema site I’ve been hearing about.
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“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, do we?” a smart leader in a challenged industry asked me under a hot sun at South by Southwest.
Yes, we do, I said. The change we’re seeing is that fundamental. Our response must be equally fundamental.
That is my problem with trying to replant old business models, line by line, in a new economy. There are a million examples from media (why can’t we charge still, damnit? why can’t we sell scarcity anymore, damnit? why can’t we control the product even though we no longer control the means of production?) to manufacturing (why not the disaggregated car?) to retail (post-stores) to religion (see this post) to education (see Union Square Venture’s Hacking Education Session) to government (you ain’t seen nothin’ yet).
That is my problem with not seeing the imperative for change. It may be instinctual to cower from it, but that accomplishes nothing. Instead, seek out change, run to it, see the opportunities in it, learn from it. I’m tempted to end here with the obvious bromide: Change is good. But that value judgment is entirely irrelevant. Change is inevitable and right now change is seismic. It’s millennial.
I am the opposite of the guy in a beard (well, a long one) and rags (worse than mine) holding up a sign (or a tweet) proclaiming: The end is near! Doom is upon us. Instead, I’m proclaiming: The beginning is near. Call me a bloomsayer. (Or don’t.)
Of course, your view of this dichotomy depends on your perspective. If you’re trying to protect a past, then yes, that end is very near. It’s here. Last stop on the Cluetrain Express. Everybody off. But if you’re trying to innovate and experiment and create and build the future, then your time is now. That’s why, in the ever-more-emotional debate over the future of news and other industries, my confederates and I (see again: Shirky) are accused of trying to tear down, to destroy, to dance on graves.
But we’re doing the exact opposite: We’re heralding new opportunities in a new world. Hallelujah, comrade.
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In my own head, I keep fighting between the instinct to try to update the old or abandon it for the new. I keep thinking we can put the old wheels from the horse cart on the new truck. Except in this new economy, there are no wheels. Even the fucking metaphors don’t work anymore.
Pardon me for thinking out loud, but that’s what led me to my book. Like Bromberg and Haque and Shirky and new friend Günster – but not as smart – I keep mulling over the change and see and saying, it’s bigger than it appears in our rear-view mirror.
At CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism we just told the students that they no longer need to commit to a media track – print, broadcast, or interactive. We believe this is the next step in convergence. All media become one.
Since the day we opened our doors, CUNY has taught all students all media. In the first of three semesters (plus an internship), everyone takes the fundamental of interactive course and (as of this year’s class) a fundamentals of broadcast course. They all learn how to gather news and tell stories in audio, video, blogs, live blogs, wikis, Twitter, social tools, and whatever comes next. Of course, they also learn the eternal verities of journalism and techniques of reporting and writing. They are now exposed to the fundamentals of the business of journalism. As they progress through other classes in their subject specialties, they are required to create stories in various media.
We had still required our students to pick a track and I’ll confess that many people asked us why we did that. My answer was that employers would expect this specialization. It was, in truth, a dash of caution. But then we heard – particularly from adjunct faculty still working in the field – that this wasn’t necessarily so. We also watched our students from any track work in any track. And we’re getting better (and still need to get better) at requiring work in many media throughout the program.
From the day the school started, various faculty members – including, notably, the head of broadcast – wanted to find the way to tear down the walls between the tracks. Now we thought it was time.
So what we’ve really done is simply give students more choice. We still have the same media courses and department. We still have prerequisites for the ultimate course in each medium (you can’t take interactive III without having taken interactive II). But now we will advise students to select courses based on what they want to do professionally as well as what they already know (because many students enter the school proficient in various new media).
We’ve given the students various scenarios: Someone who wants to work in broadcast or online will likely take the courses they would have taken anyway. But now a student can take the full track in both electronic media. Or a student who comes in with good skills in those electronic media may choose to strengthen skills in what we used to call print (we’re not sure what to call it now so we’re calling that core). Electives that used to be offered mainly to students in a track – like my entrepreneurial journalism course – will now be open to all.
We also offer many workshops during our January academy between semesters and through the year: in photojournalism, Flash, copy-editing, VJ video storytelling, and so on. We’ll add more, especially as we also offer our graduates refresher courses as part of our 100,000-mile guarantee to keep them up to date.
Those are the details. The bigger point is that media is becoming singular. Especially as newspapers die and more people watch what we used to call TV online or on mobile, it will be absurd to separate the forms. In my day (picture me blogging that from a rocking chair), we had to pick our medium once for a career. Now, every time a journalist goes out to cover news, she must be equipped and prepared to gather and share it in any and all media. That’s what we mean when we say convergence.
We’re very lucky at CUNY that we’re new and don’t have the legacy of old media practices and turfs to deal with. I don’t say that to pile on other journalism schools that are struggling with how to change as fast as the media world around them, reflecting the same struggle in newsrooms (more than once, I heard the cry, “fuck new media”). Nor do I want to pretend for a second that we’ve solved the problem; we are constantly updating our thinking and our curriculum. It’s a never-ending discussion that we have in faculty meetings and training sessions on RSS, mobile, blogging, wikis, Twitter, new media architecture, new news business models, and so on. As Rich Gordon at Northwestern’s Medill J-school has long said, the most important skill we need to teach is change. And we can’t teach it fast enough.
Alan Mutter and I duke it out (well, not really) in an LA Times Dustup over the state and fate of newspapers for the next three days. Alan and I agree about a lot – except the wisdom and reality of charging for paper content. So I’m not sure we’ll be be kicking up a whole lot of dust. Here’s the first installment. The question: Are newspapers dying, or is it just a class of newspapers that isn’t sustainable?
The start of my answer:
Frankly, dear readers, I don’t give a damn whether papers survive. I care whether journalism advances and whether communities can get the information they need, which includes reporting. That is why I teach the craft. That is also why I’ve argued for years that newspapers should have planned for the date when they would turn off their presses so they would reinvent themselves. They didn’t.
I now realize, in my mind’s eye, that I had hoped — and worked, unsuccessfully — for an orderly transition from the old to the new: a Jan. 20 for newspapers when the print president would hand over control to the digital president. I now see that there will be no such smooth shift because, understandably, it’s hard to disrupt and destroy yourself. There will be destruction, voids and vacuums. Good people — not just reporters and editors but pressmen and drivers and classified sales people — will lose their jobs. In too many towns, news will fall silent.
But news will rise from those ashes. I am confident in that because I believe there is a market demand for quality news and information, and where there is a market, someone will meet the demand. . . .
Coming full circle, I’ve seen a fair number of religious folk responding to What Would Google Do? and wondering what its laws and lessons mean for their churches. What would, uh, Jesus do?
Ron Smith, pastor of a church in San Diego, took my rules about the new ethic and reinterpreted them biblically. The gospel according to Google:
Make mistakes well. As I write my Doctorate I am learning that one of the most detestable things about the church is hypocrisy. When we as “believers” make a mistake we should admit it. Admitting errors makes you believable.
Life is beta. Life is a test. We, Christians, of all people should know this one. Life is dress rehearsal, quit acting like you have it figured out. Marrissa Mayer, VP of Google stated, “Innovation, not instant perfect perfection.” That should be our message. Sanctification, not perfection. I have not arrived. I am still learning about faith, life, marriage, hope, joy, peace, love. Just when I think I have mastered the fruit thing, I find myself out of season. Then I have to wait for the next growth opportunity to sprout fruit.
Be Honest. No comment on this one. Tell the truth!
Be transparent. Admittedly I was hesistant to blog, Twitter or Facebook. I mean how far do you go telling everybody exactly what you are doing at every moment and how long can we post the most creative stuff for the social platform world to be amazed. Well, soon I learned that all knowledge may be helpful but it may not be appropriate. Point: Let people know you struggle, hurt, or that you just don’t have it all together. Let people know you are happy, full of joy, excited and ready to tackle the world.
Collaborate. The beauty of the body is the body working together. Thank you Lord my toes don’t compete to be fingers. Can you imagine the war when it came time to type, or eat?
Don’t be evil. Treat others like you want to be treated.
What would Google do? Well, I think Google just reinforced the teachings of Christ.
OMG.
Chuck Warnock, who blogs as a small-church pastor, has the courage to face what newspapers, book publishers, car companies, and other industries (is religion an industry? sure) won’t: their disappearance in current form and replacement in new form. Warnock could give this sermon to newspaper executives (sadly, they wouldn’t listen – and wouldn’t be saved); the impact of change is similar and the need for innovation exactly the same. He says:
I have been saying that we’re counting the wrong things in church (attendance) when we should be counting community engagement. I’ve also said that church attendance will decrease (this is not an original thought), and we’re moving rapidly toward a post-Christendom era like Europe. . . ..
We can be certain of this — we live in an age of discontinuous change and unexpected consequences. Nobody knows exactly what church will look like in the future because we’re not there yet. But I have a feeling it will be multiple models, not one predominant model like we had from WWII until about 1985. . . .
We’ll still have bricks-and-mortar churches, but also house churches, coffee shop churches, outdoor churches, churches that meet once a month, churches that meet online, churches that consists of groups which interact frequently, and churches that we can’t even imagine yet. We will also see ’single market’ churches that focus on the homeless or the physically handicapped or the poor or any niche group you can think of.
In other words, the same thing that is happening in the broader culture will happen in churches, too — more options, more models, a network of niches, rather than a predominant church form.
I am also certain that whatever emerges, church will not ever be the same again. By extension, neither will denominations, cross-cultural missions programs, or Christian education programs be the same again. These will all change radically, because the current models are unsustainable in today’s culture.
And then James (can’t find his last name), a Texas pastor, tries to adapt the rules of Google’s age to his Presbyterian church:
Free is a business model: . . . Still, many churches have a mentality in which they hoard the blessings which they have received. For example, a church building that remains empty most of the week is a waste of resources. Sermons, curriculum, writings and even music (within copyright restrictions) should be made available to the widest audience. . . .
Life is a beta: This speaks more to culture rather than policies and procedures, but a Church who expects mistakes fosters a spirit of forgiveness and humility. There is willingness to try new things, to ask tough questions, and to realize that we never achieve perfection. . . .
Your worst customer is your best friend: The Church should be willing to listen and respond to the misfits and the critics.
“Criticism of CNBC is way out of line,” NBC head Jeff Zucker said at the BusinessWeek media summit at McGraw-Hill’s headquarters just now. “Just because someone who mocks authority says something doesn’t make it so.” He argued that “you’re already seeing a backlash” against the backlash against news media “in terms of people saying, ‘let’s stop beating the press.’” The press didn’t cause us to go to war in Iraq, he said; a general did. The press missing the financial crisis didn’t cause it. “Both are absurd,” he said.
Really? I think that says that the press has no importance and no role in public policy. Doesn’t matter if we miss the story, he’s saying. It’s not our fault. Will he take no responsibility?
Over to you, CNBC bashers.
Later: Asked whether MSNBC is tainting NBC News, Zucker says, “I’m not worried about it.”
He does kind of look like Alfred E. Newman. Without the hair.
He says the answer is that NBC News is “probably in a more dominant position against its competition than it has ever been.” It’s also smaller than it has ever been.
He says David Gregory “frankly has done a fantastic job, something we’re very proud of, and reasserted his dominance on Sunday Morning.” (Over to you, Jay Rosen.)
On media facing the internet: “Newspapers didn’t face those questions fast enough. And they weren’t honest…. We can wish this were 1987 but it’s not…. Advertising is not what it was… We have to think about the model.” He acknowledges that NBC prime time has not had a good three or four years. “Sometimes you see the world more clearly when you’re flat on your back.” That is making them question the model, “question everything.” There, we agree. “Too many media organizations, especially newspapers, weren’t willing to question the model…. including the local TV news model.”
Zucker acknowledges that he will never be No. 1 in prime time (in response to a question about the Jay Leno strategy). He’s right about the changing role of live, prime-time TV. But there again, isn’t he surrendering?
“We’re in show business and the show is important and the business is important. It was easier to be in the show when the business was easier. The business is much harder today.” Has he been drinking out of Paula Abdul’s Coke glass?
Zucker says if they don’t adapt to changing media habits of young people, “we will become the Rocky Mountain News.” The Rocky in the coal mine, it is.
Asked about his comments about analog dollars and digital pennies, he says, “I think we’re at dimes now. We’ve made some progress.”
: Later: In addition to lots of juicy comments, see the LA Times Patrick Goldstein skewer Zucker.
My Guardian column this week is on the New York Times’ hyperlocal experiment with mentions of CUNY’s involvement, Patch, and Barisatnet. Snippets:
The New York Times is embarking on a test of blogging in two neighbourhoods and three towns around New York. So far, there’s nothing remarkable in that: another attempt by a newspaper to grab for the elusive golden fleece called hyperlocal – the ability to serve readers and small advertisers in highly targeted geographic niches. But what is new in this effort is that the Times is trying to create a platform to help others – not staff reporters, but community members – make journalism. A wall just fell. . . .
All these parties must collaborate, not compete. They must create complementary content that fills out their local news worlds so that each of them adds value and stands out for it. Writing the same story everyone else is covering does not do that; it never did. They also should work together to create a framework that supports all of the sites commercially – that is, an ad network – and promotionally – that is, with links.
The days of one news organisation owning a town and its news are over; no one can afford to do that any more. Instead, if these experiments succeed, they will do so by collaborating to create a new network – a new ecosystem – of local news.
Their work is vital because I believe such structures will be the building blocks of the future of news – of what will replace or at least supplement the services that will disappear as regional and city newspapers shrink and die. And die they will. In the US, UK and elsewhere in Europe, metropolitan papers and their over-leveraged owners are in dire trouble. We have little or no time to decide what can and will succeed them. These efforts around New York are attempts at an answer. Whether they will grab the fleece at last, it’s too soon to say. I’ll let you know.
I’ll be speaking at the Rotman business school in Toronto – a favorite city of mine – on March 25. The fee includes a copy of What Would Google Do?. Autographs are free.
Very cool to see a company change the way it does business as a result of the ideas in What Would Google Do?
In another first, Tower Systems launched Software Ideas on Friday, a facility at its website which gives its newsagent users a greater say in the direction of the software and delivers greater transparency over the product development process.
The Software Ideas initiative is as a direct result of several Tower team members reading Jeff Jarvis’ book What Would Google Do? The book struck a nerve with the Tower team which was already working on ways to give newsagents more say in development.
While we have always discussed changes with users, parts of the process have been behind closed doors. Now, all users – anyone coming to our website including competitors – will see the change requests and the votes. This transparency and our acting on requests from users will make the Tower software the most valuable software for newsagents. It is the only software where users have a self-managed, transparent, democratic role in determining the direction of the software.
(These Australian news agencies also sell books – so I hope this also inspires them to sell lots of WWGD?s.)
At the privacy panel at SXSW. danah boyd says the issue is control. I always say that but she says it better. Siva Vaidhyanathan (fellow writer of books about Google) wants to beat down the assumption that just because we share a lot we don’t care about privacy. He also wants to beat down the notion that there’s a zero-sum game between privacy and publicity. Alice Marwick of NYU says – bless her – that “there is a value to publicness.” That is my rallying cry. Publicness is social. But publicness, she points out, is also valuable to companies. Judith Donath of MIT Media Lab says public space implies common control; private is under individual control.
Donath discusses the idea of companies making transparent what they know about us. Isn’t that what Google is starting to do by giving us the option to see our profiles, the basis for its targeting of us. I worked on a business once and wanted to expost our targeting data for ads so readers could correct us (the Amazon/TiVo problem of one action haunting you forever) and tell us what companies they didn’t want and what companies they did want. In aggregate, this data – likely honest data in pursuit of an interest – would be many, many times more valuable than the targeting done now. A brave media company would tell advertisers how many readers didn’t want their ads and why (anonymously, of course).
Lovely phrase from Donath: “the digital mirror.” We look in our digital mirror, don’t we, with our ego searches on Technorati and Google and Twitter. But we also need the ability to look in the digital mirrors others hold. And then we need the power to primp.
She also says that the public sphere we are creating leads to more tolerance. I agree; see the snippets below.
boyd and Vaidhyanathan agree that our data is currency but she says it is currency not just in an economic sense – many of us in this room, she observes, got jobs from revealing ourselves online – but also in a social sense: we trade our bits of data.
On celebrity, Marwick says that it is a one-to-many relationship. Celebrity is having followers. Aha, so that makes Twitter a machine t hat makes us all celebrities, no? Everybody’s famous to 15 followers.
Back to Siva’s opening point: Just because someone opens up to the public it doesn’t mean they don’t deserve privacy and control in some areas. That, I think, is also key to the level of discourse online, the transposition of an old norm – hey, you put yourself o
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Here are snippets from What Would Google Do on privacy and publicness:
When the photo service Flickr started, its husband-and-wife founders, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, made a fateful if almost accidental decision. As Fake puts it, they “defaulted to public.” That is, while other online photo services made the assumption that users would want to keep personal pictures private—stands to reason, no?—Flickr decided instead to make photos public unless told otherwise.
Amazing things happened. People commented on each other’s photos. Communities formed around them. They tagged their photos so they could be found in searches because they wanted their pictures to be seen. They contributed more photos because they were seen. And as I will explain later, their usage of photos helped interesting ones to bubble up, which was possible only because they were all public.
Fake calls this condition “publicness,” which is becoming a key attribute of society and life in the Google age. I believe publicness is also becoming a key attribute of successful business. We now live and do business in glass houses (and offices), and that’s not necessarily bad.
Publicness is about more than having a web site. It’s about taking actions in public so people can see what you do and react to it, make suggestions, and tell their friends. Living in public today is a matter of enlightened self-interest. You have to be public to be found. Every time you decide not to make something public, you create the risk of a customer not finding you or not trusting you because you’re keeping secrets. Publicness is also an ethic. The more public you are, the easier you can be found, the more opportunities you have.
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Another snippet:
Google is changing our societies, our lives, our relationships, our worldviews, probably even our brains in ways we can only begin to calculate.
Start with our relationships. I believe young people today—Generation Google—will have an evolving understanding and experience of friendship as the internet will not let them lose touch with the people in their lives. Google will keep them connected. Admit it: You’ve searched for old girlfriends and boyfriends on Google (and wondered whether they’ve Googled you). Your ability to find those old, familiar faces likely drops in inverse proportion to age: The older you are, the harder it is to find old friends online. I went to Google—purely as an academic and technical exercise, understand—and searched for old girlfriends. I found my college girlfriend, now a philosophy professor. I couldn’t find my high-school sweetheart as she had left no visible Google tracks. But she later found me because, with my blog, I had left as many tracks as a herd of buffalo in snow. We live on opposite coasts now but when I was in her city on business, we got together and filled each other in on the last—gulp—30-odd years. We never would have had that chance to catch up and come to account without Google. Thank you, Google.
That won’t be the experience of young people today. Thanks to our connection machine, they will stay linked, likely for the rest of their lives. With their blogs, MySpace pages, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Seesmic conversations, Twitter feeds, and all the means for sharing their lives yet to be invented, they will leave lifelong Google tracks that will make it easier to find them. Alloy, a marketing firm, reported in 2007 that 96 percent of U.S. teens and tweens used social networks—they are essentially universal—and so even if one tie is severed, young people will still be linked to friends of friends via another, never more than a degree or two apart.
I believe this lasting connectedness can improve the nature of friendship and how we treat each other. It will no longer be easy to escape our pasts, to act like cads and run away. More threads will tie more of us together longer than in any time since the bygone days when we lived all our lives in small towns. Today, our circles of friends grow only larger. Does this abundance of friendship make each relationship shallower? I don’t think so. Friendship finds its natural water level—we know our capacity for relationships and stick closest to those we like best. The so-called Dunbar number says we are wired to pay attention to about 150 relationships. I think that could grow with relationships of various kinds that are easier to maintain online. But remember the key insight that made Facebook such a success: It brought real names and real relationships to the internet. It’s about good friends.
Won’t our embarrassments also live on? Our missteps, youthful mistakes, and indiscretions will be more public and permanent, haunting us for the rest of our lives because the world, thanks to Google, has a better memory. True. But here the doctrine of mutually assured humiliation enters to shield us. We will all have our causes to cringe. The tarnished flipside of the golden rule becomes: I’ll spare you your shame if you spare me mine. Or to put it more eloquently, I once again quote author David Weinberger, who said at a conference (according to the Twitter feed of blogger Lisa Williams, who was there): “An age of transparency must be an age of forgiveness.” Our new publicness may make us more empathetic and ultimately forgiving of each others’ and even of public figures’ faults and foibles. We see that already. Barack Obama said he inhaled and no one gasped. Who are we to throw stones when Google moves us all into glass towns? In Googley terms: Life is a beta.
But still, I hear, hasn’t life become too public? What has become of privacy? “Nothing you do ever goes away and nothing you do ever escapes notice,” Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet and most recently a Google executive, told an audience in Seattle. Then he added—please note, with irony—“There isn’t any privacy, get over it.” He’s right. I say privacy is one of the most overused fear words of the age. Privacy is not the issue. Control is. We need control of our personal information, whether it is made public and to whom, and how it is used. That is our right, at least for matters outside the public sphere.
The ethics and expectations of privacy have changed radically in Generation G. People my age and older fret at all the information young people make public about themselves. I try to explain that this sharing of personal information is a social act. It forms the basis of the connections Google makes possible. When we reveal something of ourselves publicly, we have tagged ourselves in such a way that we can be searched and found under that description. As I said in the chapter on health, I now can be found in a search for my heart condition, afib. That is how others came to me and how we shared information. Publicness brings me personal benefits that outweigh the risks.
Publicness also brings us collective benefits, as should be made clear by now from the aggregated wisdom Google gathers and shares back with us thanks to our public actions: our searches, clicks, links, and creations. Publicness is a community asset. The crowd owns the wisdom of the crowd and to withhold information from that collective knowledge—a link, a restaurant rating, a bit of advice—may be a new definition of antisocial or at least selfish behavior.
For all these reasons and one more powerful than any of them—ego—we will continue to reveal more of ourselves online. We will want to speak and to be discovered. Our online shadows become our identities. To stand out from our crowd, we need distinct identities. I’ll bet we’ll soon see parents giving children unique names so they can stand alone in Google searches. Wired editor Chris Anderson linked to an early indication of the trend: Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard, reported that in the 1950s, a quarter of all children got one of the top 10 baby names; more recently that has fallen to a tenth. I was about to predict that someday soon, parents would check to assure the .com domain for a name is available before giving the moniker to a baby. Then I searched on Google and, sure enough, the Associated Press reported in 2007 that it’s already happening: “In fact, before naming his child, Mark Pankow checked to make sure ‘BennettPankow.com’ hadn’t already been claimed. ‘One of the criteria was, if we liked the name, the domain had to be available,’ Pankow said.” At last check, young Bennett wasn’t blogging, but his digital destiny is set.
More than names, identity will be about accomplishments and creations, things you are known for that narrow your Google search. I am the blogger Jeff Jarvis who writes about Google and media, not Jeff Jarvis the jazz trumpeter, Jeff Jarvis who ran Segway tours in Thailand (drat—I think I’d like to be him), Jeff Jarvis who heads a mobile field service software provider (whatever that is), and certainly not Jeff Jarvis the high school athlete (sadly, I’m too old and too clumsy). I am the No. 1 Jeff Jarvis. In Google wars, it’s every
Jeff for himself.
This brings us to another argument against public identity: It turns us into egotistical exhibitionists. We share everything, down to the most intimate and mundane. Who cares what I had for breakfast? Why share it? London blogger Leisa Reichelt found that this “ambient intimacy”—reporting small signposts of life, sharing what we’re doing, who we’re with, when we get a new haircut or a new car—allows us to “keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.” Ambient intimacy is good for friendship. “It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.” And on a practical level, Reichelt said, “It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catch up with these people in real life!”
The other day, I was in a meeting of entrepreneurs who may well create a future for news when talk turned to the rise of the damned pay meme and one of the people in the room – who still works for a newspaper, for now – made a beautifully cynical gag, the kind we used to appreciate inside papers until they became hushed hospices. “We should start a company to facilitate micropayments and online subscriptions for papers,” he said, “and that will drive them out of business faster.” That’s one way to open up the opportunity.
The debate over payment has turned emotional, not to mention fact-free, unrealistic, and little more than wishful thinking – in short, religious.
Clay Shirky explains the conflict in just those terms in a wise post writing the history of the end of papers.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. . . .
When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
But more are trying. That is the tragedy of the pay meme. ‘Oh, if only we can get them to pay again, all our problems will be solved. We’ll have two revenue streams again!’ Or then talk turns to the ’shoulds.’ People should pay. We should have papers. We need papers. That’s the basis of the desperate ads papers are taking out, begging to be needed. Says Clay: “The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; ‘You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!’ has never been much of a business model.” Heartless, it’s said, but true.
Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.
Yes, and until we make those experiments and learn from them, the optimists – Clay, Jay, me – are also sounding vaguely religious: faith-based. I have faith that there will be a market demand for journalism and we will find the means to meet them. But we can’t get there until we try.
That’s why I was in that room the other day, the one with the cynical jokes. You know you’re amongst journalists when you hear them.
Other industries should not take comfort that this is all happening to papers and won’t hit them. It’s hitting them now. We are going through more than a revolution (or crisis or recession or depression). We are on the tip of an epochal change, like the one Clay describes from 1500, that is similarly upending every other industry and sector of society: the great restructuring.
What Would Google Do? just made the San Francisco Chronicle best-seller list. (I’m damned glad the paper stayed around long enough for that to happen!)
: LATER: Well, judging by the comments, it’s no longer PC to joke about newspapers. In my day, on the newspapers I worked for that folded (two died, one almost did), we engaged in gallows humor. But those were also the days when we drank a lot.
