Change for the sake of ChangeThis
: Something about ChangeThis has been bugging me. I was mulling over precisely what it was when Clay Shirky beat me to it and posted what bugs him about it. So I'll link to his nits and add my piks.
ChangeThis says in its manifesto (PDF) that it will publish the manifestos (PDFs) of others about changing things. So what problem could I have with that? Well....
: First, I don't buy change as a virtue in and of itself. That's something I would have expected to hear in Moscow (in the old days): Revolution for revolution's sake. But, of course, change can be for good or bad. 9/11 changed the world and not one bit for the better. I don't trust political candidates who only push change as a slogan without substance. I don't trust movements that do that, either. For them, change is the means and the end.
Wouldn't it have been better if they'd called the effort DiscussThis? But that's not what they really want.
: The effort is essentially undemocratic. It's snotty. "People are making emotional, knee-jerk decisions, then standing by them, sometimes fighting to the death to defend their position." Oh, yeah, what people? Name two. I distrust people who make such vague and damning generalizations about people, don't you?
: Whose fault is this? How did mankind get into this state? Who's the boogeyman? Media, damnit, it's all media's fault, big, bad media. The bold -- read: tabloidy -- headline on the site says: "THE PROBLEM LIES IN THE MEDIA". Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah:
In the old days, we had the time and inclination to consider the implications of a decision. Everyone wasn't in quite so much of a hurry. At the same time, most conversations (and most arguments) were local ones, conducted between people who knew each other.
In what old days? Mesopotamian old days? These are the sort of naive and vague blanket statements I'd expect to read in a fifth grader's paper. It continues:
Today, it's very different. Television demands a sound bite. A one hundred word letter to the editor is a long one.
Radio has become a jingoistic wasteland, a series of thoughtless mantras, repeated over and over and designed to fit into a typical commute.
Even magazines have lost their ability to present complex arguments that take more than a minute or two to digest. BusinessWeek would rather put another picture of Jack Welch or Bill Gates on the cover than actually teach its readers something new.
Well, we
are busy. You think media is doing this out of some secret, evil agenda: "Heh heh heh," cackle Murdoch and Redstone and Eisner and Welch in their secret lair, "we are meeting the prime directive of our master to shorten the attention spans of the world!" Says ChangeThis:
The winners are the media companies (that exist to sell ads and attract the maximum audience size) and the demagogues and fundamentalist leaders that gain in power when large numbers support them—regardless of the accuracy or usefulness of their position.
Hooey. Things are shorter because the market wants it that way. I just went to two focus groups (more on that later) where that was the one, clear, overriding message from the people: "Don't waste our time!"
Clay says:
Change This is one of the last stands for an idea of the Old Left — media = force. This belief, present since Marx and Engels put state control of media on the Communist Manifesto’s To Do list, says that media is a strong locus of control over the individual. In this view, when you alter media, you alter the public’s worldview, as they are both pliable and mute.
We're not mute anymore, are we? We're writing weblogs. Ah, but ChangeThis doesn't like that, either...
: Clay points out that when ChangeThis ascribes similar sins to weblogs, it only insults the audience, the people, the citizens again. ChangeThis kvetches:
Alas, blogging is falling into the same trap as many other forms of media. The short form that works so well online attracts more readers than the long form. Worse, most blogs stake out an emotional position and then preach to the converted, as opposed to challenging people to think in a new way.
Clay responds:
Look at the charge Change This lays at the feet of weblogging — people like to read short things they agree with more than long things they disagree with.
...if the most popular weblogs are trafficking in cant, that’s because of the readers, not the writers, since it is the readers who decide which weblogs are popular.
: So what is the ChangeThis solution? It will solicit and select and publish more manifestos as PDFs:
ChangeThis doesn't publish e-books or manuscripts or manuals. Instead, we facilitate the spread of thoughtful arguments…arguments we call manifestos. A manifesto is a five-, ten- or twenty-page PDF file that makes a case. It outlines in careful, thoughtful language why you might want to think about an issue differently.
Well that's the most ridiculous part of all, and the most ironic. ChangeThis decries the control of media but then reveals itself to be a media control freak. PDFs are all about control: You publish them
to an
audience who can only
read them, not change them, not react or interact with them. ChangeThis says don't changethat!
That's a pretty bad way to communicate with the world. Weblogs are better. But weblogs are uncontrolled. They scare ChangeThis the way their audience apparently does:
The problem, of course, is that in our electronic universe it's easier than ever for one charismatic demagogue to sway the opinions of millions of people—without resorting to rational thought, provable assertions or the longterm implications of their efforts. Television and the Internet haven't improved our ability to make rational decisions—to change our mind at the right time. They've made it worse.
Which is to say: We're all a bunch of stupid sheep.
No, I'd actually say the Internet has helped immensely at our ability to make rational decisions. We can find information from any source. We can discuss. We can fact-check even the big guys. Ah, but to buy that you have to have some faith in us.
: ChangeThis did start a blog but misunderstands the essence of the form: It puts the first post on top. That is a big-media way of looking at the world; it assumes that the first word is the right word and that the author doesn't learn and change.
And they don't allow comments on their blog, of course.
: This appears to be the work of Seth Godin -- which really shocks me, since he respects the power of the market -- and some interns, who have all set themselves as the ones to judge which arguments and manifestos are worth distributing and which are not.
That's the old world, folks. While you weren't looking, the world and media changed. Now -- via blogs and Technorati and the remote control -- we the people control more of media and will control more every day. We don't need editors and publishers to create our manifestos. We create them whenever we want on these newfangled things called blogs.
I'm sure there will be interesting, worthwhile things said in various of the PDF manifestos to come. But they all would be better said on blogs where we the people could link and interact with them... and where we all could ImproveThis.
: UPDATE: Ernie Miller piles on.
: UPDATE: Fred Wilson thinks I'm being mean. An email correspondent said I was ungenerous.
Perhaps. But that's my real complaint about ChangeThis: It is ungenerous and mean to the people. It's not about weblogs v PDFs (a battle damned easy to handicap). It's about top-down control vs. bottom-up control.
Software v. law
: Following my riff the other day on how society will change as former programmers take over the roles now filled by former lawyers (see also Rick Klau's better take), Clay Shirky pointed me to James Grimmelmann's riff on the essential morality of law v. software (which follows on Lawrence Lessig's thesis that code is law). I think this is looking at things through the wrong side of the prism: What's more interesting to me than laws or software is the people in front of and behind them: What do each say about their creators; how do each affect society? Still, Grimmelmann's essay is a provocative read and I like this thread of conversation -- a culture of lawyers v. a culture of programmers -- and hope it keeps going.
: UPDATE: Tomas Kohl respectfully disagrees about a programmers' utopia:
Programmers are chaotic. They constantly challenge the causal nature of programming languages and combat the impossible. They know that problems can be fixed only temporarily as they tend to resurface later and in greater numbers. When they make a mistake, they rarely admit it, and concentrate on shifting blame on Microsoft instead - remember that the word flamewar is synonymous with programming newsgroups (must have been invented there, actually). They do live in details, love details, and rarely see the big picture. They abhor transparency (of their code) as it makes them vulnerable (no one can fix it but them), and their cubicles, though theoretically open, are bastions, fortresses, bunkers; don't ever ask them about anything, use ICQ and pray that you'll be answered.
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