The Federal Trade Commission has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted “staff discussion draft” on “potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism,” it makes its bias clear: The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media.
If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here. The clearest evidence: the word “blog” is used but once in 35 pages of text and then only parenthetically as an example of buying ads on topical sites (“e.g., a soccer blog…”); otherwise, it’s only a footnote. The only mention of investing in technology — the agent of disruption — comes on the 35th page (suggesting R&D for tools such as “improved electronic note-taking”). There’s not a hint of seeing a new ecosystem of news emerge – the ecosystem we study and support at CUNY — except as the entry of nonprofit entities that, by their existence, give up on the hope the market will sustain news.
If the FTC truly wanted to rethink journalism and its new opportunities and new value in our democracy, it would have written this document from the perspective of the people it is supposed to represent: the citizens, examining how we can benefit from news that is newly opened to the opportunity of collaboration and greater relevance. Instead, the document is written wholly from the perspective of the companies and institutions of the industry.
The document, like good government work, does a superb job of trying very hard to say very little. From its hearings and research, the staff outlines proposals I find frightening, but many of them are as politically absurd as they are impossible — e.g., what I’ll dub the iPad tax to put a 5% surcharge on consumer electronics to raise $4 billion for public funding of news — and the document doesn’t endorse them.
Still, it’s the document’s perspective that I find essentially corrupt: one old power structure circling its wagons around another. Change? That’s something to be resisted or thwarted, not embraced and enabled. The FTC’s mission in this administration of change — its justification for holding these hearings and doing this work — is to foster competition. Well, the internet is creating new competition in news for the first time since 1950 and the introduction of TV. But the commission focuses solely on newspapers, apologizing that it ignores broadcast — but not even apologizing for ignoring the new ecosystem of news that blogs and technology represent.
“This document will use the perspective of newspapers to exemplify the issues facing journalism as a whole,” the FTC says. And later: “[N]ewspapers have not yet found a new, sustainable business model, and there is reason for concern that such a business model may not emerge. Therefore, it is not too soon to start considering policiies that might encourage innovations to help support journalism into the future.” That is, to support newspapers’ survival. There’s the problem.
Among the ideas the FTC presents:
* “Additional intellectual property rights to support claims against news aggregators.” The document even takes on the language of Rupert Murdoch and company describing aggregators as “parasitic.” It espouses their perspective, that search engines and aggregators “use” content when, from my perspective, such use promotes and adds value to that content (and we’ll soon see how Murdoch’s properties do without it). The FTC doesn’t broach the concept of the link economy and the value and distribution created by aggregators — not to mention (and they don’t) that created by recommendations from readers via Twitter and Facebook (neither word appears).
The FTC looks at extending copyright and corralling fair use and also outlines the dangers, ending up with no recommendation, thank goodness. It also looks at proposals to extend the “hot news” doctrine of a 1918 court case by the Associated Press but doesn’t begin to grapple with the definition of hot (Tom Glocer of Reuters says his news has its highest value in its first three miliseconds) and it does acknowledge that news organizations “routinely borrow from each other.” Rip ‘n’ read, it’s called.
What disturbs me most in this section is that the FTC frets about “difficult line-drawing being proprietary facts and those in the public domain.” Proprietary facts? Is it starting down a road of trying to enable someone to own a fact the way the patent office lets someone own a method or our DNA? Good God, that’s dangerous.
* Antitrust exemptions. The FTC looks at allowing news organizations to collude to set prices to consumers and with aggregators. Isn’t that the precise opposite of what an agency charged with protecting competition for the benefit of customers should be considering? Shouldn’t the FTC recoil in horror at such sanctioned antitrust to protect incumbents’ price advantages? Not here.
* Government subsidies. After saluting the history of government subsidies for the press — namely, postal discounts, legal notice publication, assorted tax breaks, and funds for public broadcasting — the agency looks at other ideas: a journalism AmeriCorps paying journalists; increased funding for public broadcasting; a national fund for local news suggested in Columbia’s report on journalism; a tax credit for employing journalists; citizen news vouchers (a la campaign checkoff); grants to universities for reporting. It also looks at increasing the present postal subsidy (which would only further bankrupt the dying postal service in the service of dying publications); using Voice of America and Radio Free Europe content (aka propaganda) in the U.S.; and enabling the SBA to help nonprofits.
* Taxes. At least the FTC acknowledges that somebody’d have to pay for all this. In one section, the FTC looks at licensing the news: having ISPs levy a fee on us that the government then dolls out to its selected news purveyors — call that the internet tax. It’snothing but a tax and it would support incumbents surely. In another section, it examines the aforementioned iPad tax; a tax on the broadcast spectrum; a spectrum auction tax; a tax on ISPs and cell phones; and a tax on advertising (brilliant: taking a cut of the last support of news in America).
* New tax status. The document spends much space looking at ways to make journalism a tax-exempt activity and suggests the IRS should change its regulations to enable that. It also looks at changing tax law to enable hybrid corporations (“benefit” and “flexible purpose” corporations that can judge success on serving a mission and not just maximizing profits) as well as L3Cs.
* Finally, the document looks at the one thing that should be in its purview as a government agency: getting government to make its information open and accessible to view and analyze. Well, amen to that.
I’m quoted in the document from my testimony saying that I am “optimistic to a fault about the future of news and journalism. The barrier to entry into media has never been lower…. But what we do need is a level playing field.” And in a footnote: “If you’re talking about surviving, you’re talking about the perspective of the old, legacy players who had a decade and a half to get their act together, and they didn’t The future of journalism is not institutional, we now know, it is entrepreneurial.”
But this document does nothing to enable that entrepreneurial future. If you want to give somebody tax breaks — and I wouldn’t — give them to those who invest in innovation — whether as disruptors from the outside or as visionaries from the inside. I certainly would not change laws to favor incumbents over those innovators. I see no reason to provide tax subsidies to support an activity that is now a hundredfold more efficient than it used to be. Rather than restricting the flow of information by making it proprietary, I’d argue that it is in the interest of democracy to make it yet freer.
The real problem I see here, again, is the alignment of the legacy institutions of media and government. Here, the internet is not the salvation of news, journalism, and democracy. It’s the other side.
The real advice I gave the FTC is not quoted in the document. It’s this: Get off our lawn.
: DISCLOSURES: This is on my disclosures page, but it can’t hurt to repeat here that I hold stock in (but am not paid by) a platform that aggregates and is used by publishers to link to more content (Daylife). I am advising the company run by the afore-linked visionary, John Paton at Journal Register. I run the project at CUNY that is researching new business models for news. And I blog.
: I cross-posted this on Business Insider and Huffington Post; see also the discussions there.
: Thanks to Scribd, the full document is after the jump…. (more…)
At last, Google is revealing its split on AdSense: 68% to publishers for content ads, 51% for search ads.
I had two primary complaints about Google in my otherwise admittedly and obviously wet-kiss book, What Would Google Do?: Google’s policy aiding government censorship in China and its opacity on advertising relationships. The first is pretty much fixed and this morning, Google is addressing teh second. so is the second. (Uh-oh, now I have fewer excuses not to be a fanboy.)
At a press meeting with Google execs in Davos in January, I pressed them about the advertising openness, having discussed the issue with publishers at DLD in Munich right before. In Davos, Google’s president of global sales, Nikesh Arora, replied that the company was reconsidering its transparency on AdSense. This morning, they’re revealing the deal in a blog post (to which I’ll link as soon as it’s up; this news was embargoed for 10a ET). From the post:
Today, in the spirit of greater transparency with AdSense publishers, we’re sharing the revenue shares for our two main AdSense products — AdSense for content and AdSense for search. . . .
AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.
We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.
We also offer additional AdSense products including AdSense for mobile applications, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games. We aren’t disclosing the revenue shares for these products at this time because they’re quickly evolving, and we’re still learning about the costs associated with supporting them. Revenue shares for these products can vary from product to product since our costs in building and maintaining these products can vary significantly. Additionally, the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search also can vary for major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts.
Of course, we can’t guarantee that the revenue share will never change (our costs may change significantly, for example), but we don’t have any current plans to do so for any AdSense product. Over the next few months we’ll begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface.
They’re also not revealing splits for YouTube, a program that just started. Note also that big publishers, such as the New York Times Company, have long known — and negotiated — their splits, which also aren’t revealed. A Google spokesman told me last night that these splits hold for classic AdSense pay-per-click ads and also for newer display, CPM ads. They also hold globally.
How do the splits compare? It’s not uncommon for ad networks to take 50% or more. BlogAds, one of the more generous networks, customarily takes 30% on sales it makes and has other models (if sales come through a publisher site, only 14%; they also offer networked sales).
: LATER: On Twitter, I noticed some confusion about agency commissions vs. sales commissions. Agency commissions are on the buy side as ad agencies take a commission — often, 15% — for placing media. That’s not what we’re talking about here. This is a sell-side commission and I know, for example, that when it started, DoubleClick took at least 50% for sales. DoubleClick also serves ads and that’s a separate fee. I don’t have the latest numbers for these separate tasks; if you can add figures, I’d be grateful.
Zappos division 6pm.com screwed up and then manned up, making a mistake that capped all prices at $50 but honoring the sales and losing $1.6 million. The company blogged about it — apologizing, even — and then Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh tweeted about it. The king of customer service — whose book, Delivering Happiness, is coming out in only two weeks — set the bar high for screwing up publicly.
: I note that the original 6pm post was on May 21 and Hsieh’s tweet was today, the 23rd. Hmmm. Thinking they wanted more PR to make the mistake pay off.
Here’s video of my talk to the Nordic Media Festival on what I think comes next in media:
: Oops. Sorry. The video was embedded here but the player had damned auto-play and no way to turn it off. Why the hell do they do that? o here’s a link.
: Now here’s video of a very similar talk I gave this week in Ottawa to the Public Policy Forum.
That’s the title of my next book about the end of privacy and the benefits of publicness. I’m delighted to tell you that I’ve just agreed to write it for Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, my publisher for What Would Google Do?, working again with my brilliant editor there, Ben Loehnen. It will come out, muses willing, next year [fall 2011].
In Public Parts, I’ll argue, as I have here, that in our current privacy mania we are not talking enough about the value of publicness. If we default to private, we risk losing the value of the connections the internet brings: meeting people, collaborating with them, gathering the wisdom of our crowd, and holding the powerful to public account. Yes, I believe we have a right and need to protect our privacy — to control our information and identities — but I also want the conversation and our decisions to include consideration of the value of sharing and linking. I also want to protect what’s public as a public good; that includes our internet. We have plenty of privacy advocates. I want to be a publicness advocate.
This is a hot topic that’s going to get only hotter. This morning, I talked about publicness and “privacy in the time of Facebook” on public radio’s The Takeaway. Here’s the audio:
We are discovering in this new realm that public exposure is not just a matter of egotism or idle voyeurism. This past year, several friends of mine have blogged their way through their battles with cancer. By taking their ordeal to the valley, they got valuable advice from strangers who posted comments and helped form an online support group — and an archive that could help future patients who happen upon it via cancer-related queries on Google. One of my friends — writer Jeff Jarvis, now happily in good health — talks about his experience as a lesson in the virtues of publicness. The Constitution may not contain an explicit reference to the right to privacy, but the notion that privacy is worth cherishing and protecting needs little justification. What Jarvis suggests is that the opposite condition needs its defenders: oversharing, in a strange way, can turn out to be a civic good.
I love this topic. I’ve learned a great deal about publicness since my life became an open blog and I’m learning more as I do my research — some fascinating stuff, which I’ll share with you here as I go. I’ll continue discussing the ideas here on the blog and will ask for your help … often.
(Some of you may remember that I was planning to write another book called Beta. Many of the ideas from that — about opening up processes — will be part of this book but I hope this one is bigger, about profound changes in society and the opportunities that come from them, a la WWGD?.)
: LATER: Here’s the extended, original version of Steven Johnson’s Time piece, before editors and scarcity got hold of it.
Also, in answer to some tweets, yes, my title is a bit of an homage to Howard Stern. It was after appearing on his show that I got the inspiration. His publicness itself is an inspiration for the book.
In March, 2007, for a Guardian column, I asked the then-head of now-PM David Cameron’s web strategy whether the man would continues making his personal, folksy videos if he moved into No. 10. Sam Roake replied: “If it suddenly stopped, that would be seen as a very cynical move . . . You can’t stop communicating.” This, he argued, is “a new stage of politics” that is about “sustained dialogue with the public.”
We shall see.
The new No. 10 moved to new YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter addresses. They are putting up press conference videos and linking to photos of the PM.
Yes, but will he talk with the people from the kitchen, as he used to? His last Webcameron video asks people to vote (you’d think he’d at least have one saying thank you). We haven’t yet seen the PM buttering toast. Will he? Can he?
Barack Obama got to office using the internet to be human and then he took on the imperial form of the office, mostly giving pronouncements. And he now inexplicably tries to paint himself as a techofuddy. Nicolas Sarkozy also got to office using video to present himself as human. Now, I suppose, he’s more human than ever — though inadvertently; when I search YouTube for his name, the first video is of him drunk at the G8. Germany’s Angela Merkel, who frankly never came off as terribly warm and human, nonetheless make a podcast.
Can a politician who takes the highest office stay human? In this age, can he or she afford not to? I think Roake was right: not to continue communicating eye-to-eye makes the persona of the campaign into theater or it makes office into theater.
Here’s a video I did of Cameron in Davos in 2008 asking him about talking to small cameras:
Since some have asked — from media and Twitter — here’s my take on Google collecting too much data via its Street View car — not just wi-fi addresses but “payload data” that went over those networks:
Google fucked up.
It’s pretty much as simple as that. And their screw-up sure doesn’t help me when German media come to me asking how I can defend the Google they love to hate. I got a bunch of conspiracy-laden questions from a German reporter this morning: Google says it was a mistake and the reporter asks — not without betraying a considerable bias — “Is that really possible?” I responded: “Yes. Google is not perfect.” The reporter asked: “What will Google do now? Is there a chance to completely recover?” There’s wishful thinking in that question, eh?
Let’s analyze the situation: To what conspiratorial use could Google have possibly put a trace smattering of random data caught in one moment on a given street? I would challenge anyone to take that data and find a business purpose for it. In one second on one street in Hamburg one unknown user read a story on Focus.de. Yeah, so what?
Somebody fucked up. It was sloppy and stupid of them and sure doesn’t help their PR problem in Germany. But I struggle to see how this story shows anything more than that.
Well, it does show one thing: The bias that German media have toward Google. When I was at re:publica in Berlin, I got questions like these from many German reporters: “Isn’t Google too big?” they’d “ask.” Show me the law that defines “too big,” I responded. I contend that German media are merely jealous: Google understood how to make money online better than they did. And they are reflexively running to government to regulate it and can’t find a reason why. So when something like this screwup happens, they get their hopes up.
But this also shows how out of touch German media is with its audience on this point, for the German populace clearly does not mistrust and hate Google the way media do. They use Google more than just about any country on earth, giving Google search a 97.26% share of market. Was gibt? Was geht?
I taped this show months ago and didn’t even know when it aired on PBS. It’s a not-bad discussion of the future of news with me, Steve Coll of the New America Foundation (ex of the Washington Post) and John Sturm of the Newspaper Association of America:
BTW, When I taped the show, I was not told that it was backed by the George W. Bush Institute. Didn’t affect the show, so far as I can see, but it would have been nice to know.
“Almost everything you see in Twitter today was invented by our users,” its creator, Jack Dorsey, said in this video (found via his investor, Fred Wilson). RT, #, @, & $ were conventions created by users that were then—sometimes reluctantly—embraced by Twitter, to Twitter’s benefit. Dorsey said it is the role of a company to edit its users.
Edit. His word. I’m ashamed that I haven’t been using it in this context, being an editor myself and writing about the need for companies to collaborate with their customers.
I have told editors at newspapers that, as aggregators and curators, they will begin to edit not just the work of their staffs but the creations of their publics. But that goes only so far; it sees the creations of that public as contributions to what we, as journalists, do. And that speaks only to media organizations. Dorsey talks about any company as editor.
I have also told companies—it was a key moral to the story in What Would Google Do?—that they should become platforms that enable others to take control of their fates and succeed.
Twitter is such a platform. As Dorsey said in the video, it constantly iterates and that enables it to take in the creations of users. Months ago, when I wished for a Twitter feature, Fred Wilson tweeted back that that’s what the independent developers and applications are for. Indeed, Twitter enabled developers to create not only features but businesses atop it. But then when Twitter bought or created its own versions of these features created by developers, it went into competition with those developers, on whom Twitter depended to improve—to complete, really—its service. That’s a new kind of channel conflict—competing with your co-creators—that companies will also have to figure out as they become not just producers but editors.
Anyway, I like Dorsey’s conception of company as editor because it requires openness—operating and developing in public; it assumes process over product; it values iteration; it implies collaboration with one’s public; it still maintains the company’s responsibility for quality. An editor has nothing to edit if others haven’t created anything, so it is in the editor’s interest to enable others to create. And the better the creations that public makes, the better off the editor is, so it’s also in the company-as-editor’s interest to improve what that public creates through better tools and often training and also economic motives.
* It would find the Apple-elegant way to express its privacy policy rather than its current Talmudic tangle, something like: “Everything you put into Facebook is shared with your friends but in each case you may limit who sees it or choose to share it with the public. That is always your choice.”
* It would find the Apple-elegant way for us to execute that choice: let me make it every time I do something.
* It would find easy ways to show us how the world sees us through Facebook (and help us change that).
* It would not change its privacy settings and policies constantly. Set it. Explain it. Stick with it.
* It would not attempt to hoover up and share my implicit activity on the web. It should share only that which I explicitly choose to share. Execs should recognize that that’s what set users off; that was the line too far, the straw too many.
* It would recognize how much their defaults matter because, even if their privacy policies and functionality were elegant, they know most of us wouldn’t bother — and many of their users are young and not necessarily savvy about how their information can be used in the future. They would see their defaults as a responsibility.
* It would define evil. I said that on the latest This Week in Google: Google, by enabling its employees to ask whether it is evil, defines evil every day and that’s only for the good of its business: If it oversteps a line, if it does evil, it will lose trust and lose business. Facebook must make the similar calculation. It should define that line openly and let us and their employees challenge it constantly.
* It would use today’s meeting as an opportunity for soul-searching, enabling employees and unhappy (would-be) former users to criticize and thus help Facebook find its way.
* It would open-source and federate and put in users’ control any data and functionality about their identity online. That is, it should use open-source standards. It should allow me to extract and host my own identity and data. It should enable other companies to build atop this, with my consent.
* Facebook should decide whether it is in the relationship or the identity business and should learn that trying to be in both put it in conflict with itself and us. It was and likely needs to stay in the relationship business and that is precisely why it can’t become the host and publisher of our public identities.
* As I suggested here, it should study 16th century history about the origins of the public and private and understand that it is playing with bigger, more powerful and profound forces than even it knows. I just wrote in my next book that we are undergoing a similar shift in how society organizes itself with similar tools. Mark Zuckerberg says that he is enabling big change in society. I say examine that belief.
Facebook is smart. That’s why I remain surprised that it is blundering so. When Peter Rojas killed his Facebook identity (as Leo Laporte did last night on TWiG), he said in a Twitter conversation we had that Facebook may be blinded to its problems by its meteoric growth; it can’t see people leaving for all the people joining. I think he has a point. Any and every company would be wise to hear from unhappy and former customers, no matter how many new customers they have.
James Fallows writes an important cover story for The Atlantic on how Google wants to help save the news. It doesn’t break a single new nugget of news. It’s the piece’s attitude that makes it must reading for everyone in the news business, in the U.S. and even moreso in Europe.
Google is not the enemy. But don’t take my word for it if you don’t want to. Take Fallows’.
Fallows, who has been admirably forward-thinking and curious in his coverage of technology and media (see his test of Bing v. Google, for example), comes at the question of Google’s relationship to news as neither enemy nor fanboy. He simply wants to understand what Google’s attitude is toward the news and then what the company is doing to back up its expressed sentiments about helping save (or I’d prefer to say, advance) news. He writes:
Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects…. But after talking during the past year with engineers and strategists at Google and recently interviewing some of their counterparts inside the news industry, I am convinced that there is a larger vision for news coming out of Google; that it is not simply a charity effort to buy off critics; and that it has been pushed hard enough by people at the top of the company, especially Schmidt, to become an internalized part of the culture in what is arguably the world’s most important media organization. Google’s initiatives do not constitute a complete or easy plan for the next phase of serious journalism. But they are more promising than what I’m used to seeing elsewhere, notably in the steady stream of “Crisis of the Press”–style reports.
Fallows says that the three pillars of a new online business model for news, in Google’s view, are “distribution, engagement, and monetization.” My equivalents are the conveniently alliterative engagement (for the public), effectiveness (for advertisers), and efficiency (in the operation). That is to say, Google doesn’t touch — nor should it want or need to — the fourth and vital leg to sustainable business models for news: cost. That’s what will make it easier to get Politico’s local product, TBD.com, to profitability more easily than the competitive Washington Post can stay there. That’s why I am looking more at the entrepreneurial than institutional future of news. That’s why I think this quest Google and others are on is about more than saving newspapers and more than saving news; it’s about finding new opportunities. But nevermind that.
What Fallows finds inside Google is people who care about news, who are working to try to create new forms for news and structures for the companies that produce it, who are indeed making it a priority. He finds people who want to work together. I say news companies are fools not to at least listen.
I think Facebook’s problem lately with its disliked like button (and Google’s problem with the start of Buzz) is that they confuse the notion of the public sphere—that is, all of us—with the idea of making a public—that is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle inbetween that is about the control of our own publics. Allow me to explain….
Flickr: taberandrew
I’ve been trying to understand the vitriol I’ve seen in some quarters about Facebook’s latest moves—because I don’t fully get it. Oh, I understand the confusion Facebook’s privacy changes and settings cause—as Business Insider said, “Online privacy is the new programming a VCR.” Read EFF’s disquieting timeline of the mutation of Facebook’s privacy policy and look at this brilliant visualization of how Facebook has made the private public. I understand the problem.
But why is the reaction to Facebook’s latest move—the like button—so swift and so fierce, so last-straw-on-the-camel’s-back to some? Gizmodo dyspeptically listed 10 reasons to quit Facebook. Gizmodo and Engadget founding editor Peter Rojas quitFacebook, as did Google’s Matt Cutts, and my This Week in Google boss Leo Laporte disabled his account for awhile. Three heavier heavyweights in our world it’s hard to find and when they lose trust—which is what happened—that’s a big deal, bigger than Facebook seems to realize.
Clearly, there’s something more going on here, something fundamental. Facebook overstepped a line and so I want to try to find that line. I think it may lay here:
Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it’s public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private. Therein lies the confusion. Making that public public is what disturbs people. It robs them of their sense of control—and their actual control—of what they were sharing and with whom (no matter how many preferences we can set). On top of that, collecting our actions elsewhere on the net—our browsing and our likes—and making that public, too, through Facebook, disturbed people even more. Where does it end?
Facebook has been playing this tension since its early days. Remember the hubbub over News Feed: When Facebook aggregated our updates into feeds, it freaked users, even though Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that all these updates were already visible to us among our friends on their pages. Zuckerberg’s vision was right in the end; the News Feed is critical to Facebook’s utility, value, and growth and it presaged the appeal of Twitter. But even in the public Twitter, even though we are publishing to the world, we still have a measure of control; we decide whom to follow—that is, which publics to join.
So let me repeat: In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone. Yet Facebook is pushing us more and more to publish to everyone and when it does, we lose control of our publics. That, I think, is the line it crossed.
The irony in all this is that I think Facebook has been profoundly redefining our notion of a public in ways that—judging by its actions—even it does not fully grasp. I am listening to a fascinating radio series (and podcast) on the CBC based on the work of a project called Making Publics. This group of academics began five years ago with Jürgen Habermas’ belief that the public sphere—the counterweight to the state as heard through public discussion and opinion—did not emerge until the 19th century. They also agreed that prior to the Renaissance and the 16th century, “public” referred to people with public standing in the social hierarchy—the elite—rather than to all of us. But then the Making Public team saw that during the 16th and 17th centuries, the printing press, theater, art—that is, the means to publish and present—as well as markets enabled people to create and join their own publics.
I am struck with how similar that moment of change is to the internet’s upheaval today. Gutenberg’s press—and the arts of painting and theatre and the skill of map-making—enabled a still-small elite to create publics; indeed, their hold on the public stayed in place until only a decade ago. Today, the web enables all of us to publish and thus to make publics and also to join new publics (and destroy the old, elite definition and control of the public). The three key inventions of the early-modern era that enabled this change were the compass, gunpowder, and the press. Our equivalents are—what?—the net, the web, and blogs. Berners-Lee is our Gutenberg. Or is it Ev?
Facebook refined the gross sense of publicness that blogs put in the hands of us all: everyone publishing to everyone. Its social network gave us the tools to create and join our own publics and gain control over what we make public and who can join it. That was a powerful gift that shifted the basis of interaction online from flaming to friendship, built on real identity and real relationships. Facebook helped civilize the internet. Yet I don’t think Facebook understands the value of that control because it continues to try to make us entirely public.
See once more Matt McKeon’s visualization of Facebook’s public evolution. Hear, too, Zuckerberg’s Law: “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”
People accuse Zuckerberg of killing privacy and of wanting it dead. I think that’s likely unfair. I think instead he does see a profound cultural shift, one that existed before him but one that he took advantage of and then served and refined: We connect by sharing. In his view, I’ll bet, he’s not killing privacy; we are. He’s fine with that. And to an extent, so am I, as I argue the value of publicness. But both of us miss this subtle but profound distinction between the public and a public at our peril. That’s the lesson I’m trying to learn here as I start to write a book about publicness (more on that later).
I will argue that we face choices today about keeping something private or sharing it with our public or with the public at large and that we need to see the benefits of sharing—the benefits of publicness—as we make that calculation. I will argue that if we default to private, we risk losing the value of the connections we can make today. I will argue that we need institutions—companies and governments—to default to public. And I will argue that the more we live in public, the more we share, the more we create collective wisdom and value. I will defend publicness. But I will also defend privacy—that is, control over this decision.
I would not be surprised to hear that Zuckerberg shares this gospel. I think he’s sincere when he says he sees Facebook as a tool to enable us all to change our world through connections. I think that’s why he’s pushing us to be public; it’s more than just a cynical commercial motive. Yet I think he gets in trouble when he doesn’t see these distinctions, which I’m trying to discern in our new definitions of private, public, publics, and identity. And so he risks blowing it. But I still think it’s not too late.
I don’t believe Facebook has gone evil—or gone rogue, as Wired insists. The problem for Facebook is more likely that it never defined evil—as in “don’t be evil.” Google is aware of its line, which is about losing value if it loses trust. Facebook seems almost unaware of its line and perhaps that’s because its is harder to find. I suggest they study 16th century history and the origins of the public as they reinvent the public.
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Flickr: Matthew Burpee
All this is related to the question of identity online—related but different. What I publish can add up to my identity and with different publics I have different identities. So identity is a key component of our notions of publicness.
The admirable Diaspora Project is trying to build an open and distributed version of Facebook to let us publish, aggregate, and control our own stuff to make up our own identities. That’s great, but I think that, too, conflates the ideas of a public and the public; it does what Zuckerberg is doing by having us publish everything to all, except it gives us ownership of that. I’m not criticizing the effort at all; I think it’s great. I’m just saying that this isn’t a substitute for Facebook; it’s something different, something more public.
Having captured what it thinks is our identities online, Facebook now wants to be the enabler and controller of our identities. But because we don’t want our stuff on Facebook to be completely public, Facebook cannot be that hub of public identity. The Diaspora Project can. But I wonder whether the Diaspora Project—like ClaimID and OpenID—can succeed because I wonder what our motivation is to keep our identities updated. I have a reason to update Facebook for my friends there or this blog for you all or LinkedIn for my professional contacts or Twitter for my instant ego gratification. But I haven’t had a reason to keep ClaimID (on this page) up to date. That’s the trap the Diaspora Project needs to avoid.
And this is where I think that Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani collaboratively stumbled on a big idea related to identity on the latest This Week in Google. Gina talked about our motive to update Facebook and Leo said the equivalent for identity would come if Google put our profile pages on the top of the search results for our names. If the first result for Leo Laporte in search were Leo Laporte’s profile page, he’d be motivated to keep it up to date, to make it the canonical Leo page. Brilliant, I think. Google, are you listening? Facebook?
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Other notes…. The problem with the launch of Google’s Buzz was related but not so subtle: By mixing our email with its Twitteresque platform, Buzz, Google mixed our private and public. It not only mixed our email connections with the idea of publishing to the world, it also robbed us of the chance to create and control our own publics. In another of its Snuffaluffagus moments, I imagine that Google thought it was doing us a favor by making a public for us: our readymade society. But that was precisely the wrong move, for we want to make and join publics on our own. That is the essence of controlling our worlds.
