The charm of London Review of Books’ personals

A love letter to the quirky, romantic ads that spawned two books, a Twitter account and a few marriages

By Kate Harding

I smoke, I drink, I talk waaaay too much and think even more than that, I swear like a longshoreman, I’m usually covered in dog hair, I do not order salad as a full meal, I always want to Talk About It, I might be funnier than you, I want to be taken care of but hate feeling weak, I’m completely disorganized, I will keep cuddling until you pry me off you (and so will my dogs), I say “awesome” a lot, I don’t lie even if it’s easier, I tell my girlfriends everything, I expect to come, and I’ve been told repeatedly that I scare the crap out of men. If that sounds like your kind of girl, awesome.

That’s the last ad I ever ran on an online dating site, starting two months before I met the man who would become my husband. When I shared it with a trusted girlfriend (whose immediate critique was, “Well, I guess you only need to find one“), she tried to gently lecture me on selling myself, but I cut her off: “I am selling myself. Just to a very small niche market.”

I’d already proven I could attract a large number of responses by appealing to the lowest common denominator. At 19, I won a contest among my dorm-mates to see who could get the most replies to a free 25-word ad in a local alternative weekly, the only restriction being that you couldn’t lie. My ad was eight words long and included my age, bra size and the phrases “lapsed Catholic” and “needs excitement.” More than 200 men responded. But of course I didn’t pursue any of them; oddly enough, I wasn’t really interested in the kind of guy who would answer an ad that essentially said: “I am a busty, barely legal teenager, and I have no standards worth mentioning.” (My sole objective that time was winning a case of Milwaukee’s Best from the losers.)

Twelve years later, when I was actually hoping to meet someone I could fall in love with, I wasn’t particularly keen on the kind of responses I’d get with a garden-variety “Urban professional, 31, animal-lover” ad, either. At that point, after more than a decade of experience with dating and long-term relationships, I was far more interested in weeding out obvious Mr. Wrongs — guys who’d balk at the word “feminist,” or describe 5’2″, excessively cuddly me as “scary,” or interpret conflicting desires as hypocrisy — than in casting a wide net. What I was looking for above all was someone who recognized that a lover’s flaws only remain quirky and adorable for so long, but the right person is still well worth it. (Also, someone who would never characterize that nod to reality as “settling.“)

To the extent that one can take the London Review of Books’ famous personal ads section seriously at all, that type of thinking seems to be its raison d’etre. Although LRB advertising director David Rose — who recently published his second collection of personals, “Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland” — told GQ he originally envisioned the section merely as a place for people interested in the same books to connect, it quickly became something much funnier, darker and possibly even more successful at matchmaking. As one would expect from the LRB’s audience, the ads were witty and erudite — but also frequently self-deprecating to the point of absurdity, sometimes circling all the way back around to arrogance (at least of the infuriatingly charming sort that makes you picture George Clooney instead of a guy who just told you up front he’s ugly and lives with his mother). Consider the man who begins with a list of eyebrow-raising sexual conquests and past romances, including “2003-2006 — Evil Satanic Bitch Whore,” then concludes, “Don’t pretend your relationships have been any less incongruous and unsatisfying. Write to probably the most normal guy you’ll ever see in a lonely heart advert and maybe we’ll end up friends or lovers or despising each other and wincing every time we remember our awful one-night stand or maybe we’ll get married and have children.” Admit it: You kind of want to call that guy.

In a review of Rose’s first collection, “They Call Me Naughty Lola,” for Salon, Buzzy Jackson compared the London Review of Books style of self-promotion (“Things I won’t do for love include replacing corroding soil pipes and trepanning at home. Everything else is A-OK. Eager-to-please woman [36] seeks domineering man to take advantage of her flagging confidence. Tell me I’m pretty, then watch me cling” ) to the truly shameless sort found in its New York counterpart — e.g., “LITHE, LOVELY. Vivacious, passionate, successful concert singer (Lincoln Center, Carnegie) … Cool (but not cold) blonde with an enviably high metabolism — witty, classy, quick to smile — a mix of Angelica Huston/Cameron Diaz. Argentina-born, Paris (Sorbonne) educated and fluent in six languages…” Seriously, who would you rather date? If you’d pick a woman whose humorless, self-important ad describes her as “witty” over one who says she won’t debase herself for love by trepanning at home, well… you wouldn’t be the partner for me. Or for that woman, surely, which is the whole point.

“Those other personals are like resumes, and who’s ever turned on by a resume?” says Rose. “In the few words the lonely hearts advertisers have in the LRB, they still manage to capture a more complete essence of that person than anything you could find on Match.” Some ads, Rose points out, use quite sophisticated comedic and literary techniques in such a small space. Some brilliantly satirize the more expected type of ad. And as a bonus, “because they’re from that British intellectual class, you get a lot of Monty Python. There’s an awful lot of silly and outrageous and full on non-sequiturs.” What’s not to love — at least if already you love that sort of thing? And if you do, would you want to be with someone who didn’t?

If you don’t, then you can always go to one of the sites where people market themselves with all the humility and attention to detail of a used car salesman, as they’re often advised to do by what Rose calls “Dear Abby types.” Accentuate the positive! Conveniently forget the negative! There will be plenty of time for the other person to find out how fucked up you are – why would you give that away before the first date?

Maybe because after a certain point, you have a pretty good idea of what your worst yet most enduring qualities are, and you’re sick of wasting time with people who can’t handle them. The LRB’s average reader is fiftysomething, after all, and many of the ad buyers mention their divorces; these are people who’ve been around the block. They know what their dealbreakers are – both in the sense of what they won’t accept in a partner, and what other people are likely to find unacceptable in them. Rose suggests that part of the motivation for writing such silly ads is “lowering the stakes” – building in a plausible reason for rejection that isn’t directly related to your looks or, say, your very soul – and there’s probably a lot of truth to that. But as someone who published a much less witty variation on the same theme a few years ago, I can also tell you I was just plain sick of guys who would either react negatively to qualities I’m not ashamed of (Talking About It; telling my own jokes instead of just laughing at his; “pathological honesty,” in the words of one boyfriend) or try to shame me into changing qualities so entrenched that, even if I wasn’t proud of them, I knew anyone who might live with me someday had best get used to them (pottymouth, dog hair, disorganization, indiscretion, use of “awesome”). I figured I’d rather put it all out there and get no responses than be coy and end up dating a guy who hated half of what makes me me.

And it worked; I was introduced to my husband by a mutual friend, as it turned out, but in the interim, I fielded a couple dozen responses to that ad and went on several dates, some of which were even fun. Writing a self-deprecating personal may let potential partners know you’re imperfect (gasp!), but it also tells them you know who you are and have the confidence to say, “Take it or leave it.” And if you go far enough over the top (“Join me in my 36-bedroom mansion on my Gloucestershire estate, set in 400 acres of wild-stag populated woodland” writes an LRB reader who also notes he’s been called a pathological liar), it can even invert the usual concern about how truthful a personal ad is. Instead of wondering how much worse this guy is than he claims, you’re wondering how much better.

So, even if one of those “Dear Abby types” told Rose “This is not good! You’re ruining these people’s lives!” and the LRB’s own editor says they’re “not [her] thing,” the goofy, charming little personals section – not to mention the spin-off books and Twitter feed — continues to thrive. Partly because it works — it’s reportedly been responsible for at least a few marriages – and partly because it’s hilarious reading, whether you’re looking for love or not. (“Most partners cite the importance of having a loved one who will listen and understand them. I’m here to rubbish this theory. F, 38.”) If nothing else, it’s hard to get depressed about being single when you’re laughing so hard.

: Kate Harding is the co-author of "Lessons From the Fatosphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body" and has been a regular contributor to Salon's Broadsheet. More Kate Harding

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The latest Twitter revolution

Long-haul truckers gather in Mississippi to learn social media skills, burnish their image -- and fight regulations

By Irin Carmon

Disenfranchised truckers turn to twitter

(Credit: iStockphoto, karammiri / Salon)

Topics:Social Media, Editor's Picks

Rich Wilson is telling a roomful of truckers how to sound less like, well, truckers. “Intelligence, not ignorance,” he instructs. “If you have to, Google a few words. Refrain from words like ‘ain’t,’ ‘gonna,’ ‘y’all’ or ‘you-know-what bureaucrats.’”

Wilson, himself a former truck driver, is speaking at the first-ever Trucking and Social Media Convention, and he’s trying to get those assembled to formally register comments on a federal transportation site in response to new regulations. That these phrases he tells them not to use are all direct quotes from previous comments will not dampen his determination. “Until we learn where to start, we’re just going to end up with that angry attitude,” Wilson says. “But let’s fight the bureaucrats with bureaucracy!”

So it’s not the fieriest of rallying cries. Most of the 170 drivers and advocates gathered at the Gold Strike Casino in Mississippi’s second-tallest building (31 stories) are plenty fired up already: at new federal regulations and local traffic enforcement, at big carriers, at the perception that despite their toil, truckers don’t get any respect. Post-deregulation realities and the decentralized nature of their jobs have largely left them without a seat at the table. That leaves Twitter.

Once, truck drivers flashed their lights at each other in an over-the-road Morse code, and they still narrate woes over CB radio. It’s not that they’ve all jumped on Twitter, but the vanguard of social media enthusiasts gathered at the Gold Strike in Tunica is hoping that’s where it’s headed. And they want to take it to the next level: They trade notes on the best analytics provider and Twitter clients. Murmurs a redheaded woman in a “Keep on Trucking” T-shirt, “I love Hootsuite.”

Unity in this atomized industry is rare, unless you count the kind that comes with a “Truckers Move America” belt buckle. Wilson was part of the 1979 strikes, when a convoy of truckers circled the U.S. Capitol and 75,000 truckers hit the brakes, but he doubts it had much impact or that it could happen today. “You have company drivers and you have owner-operators, you have small fleets and you have big fleets,” he says. “Now let me ask you a question, can you see those people all sitting in a room saying, ‘I’ll tell ya, we’re gonna strike’?”

Everyone laughs and whoops in disbelief. And then they get back to updating their Facebook business pages.

Business is something of profound interest to the truckers here. Kenyan-born Eddie Gichuhi, a software engineer who took up trucking after getting laid off, is here to talk about his new trucking-aimed bookkeeping software. Beside him, event emcee Toby Bogard, the author of several self-published books on trucking, trumpets how much weight he lost through his trucker-tailored diet and exercise program, “Shattering the Stereotype.” (Get a preview of the DVD, complete with a view inside his truck, on his “Truck-Writer” YouTube channel.)

To a lesser extent, they’re also interested in activism. Desiree Wood became an activist after speaking out about the trials of trucking while female on Ask the Trucker, the site founded by conference co-organizers Allen and Donna Smith. Suddenly, scores of comments and emails poured in from fellow women truckers about sexual harassment, poor training and much more. Wood’s off the road because of an injury, but still rallies her 8,000 Twitter followers (her bio reads in part, “Pretty+Smart)/Entertaining)=Lethal”). Conference honoree Hope Rivenburg, who was pregnant with twins when her trucker husband, Jason, was murdered while waiting for a load, took to Capitol Hill and social media alike to rally support for a federal safe truck parking law, which remains pending in Congress.

Sometimes, the lure is simpler. Sue Noonan — @trukersue [sic] on Twitter — says she got into social media for one reason: “You can say anything you f—cking want to.”

- – - – - – - – - -

“I am so proud of the deaf truckers,” beams Donna Smith over dinner. “I told them, you can’t just care about deafness. You have to care about all the issues.” And the deaf truckers, who have their own table with a service dog and an amateur ASL interpreter and who solemnly nod along with the proceedings, agreed that they would. (The hot topic on the Deaf Truckers United Facebook group has been the possibility of Department of Transportation waivers of hearing requirements for commercial driving licenses, or CDLs).

The Smiths hoped for a bigger turnout, but it’s not easy for drivers to get their dispatcher to route them through somewhere in particular, let alone to take a day off.

The convention’s renegade spirit may not help. “You do know the trucking industry is against this,” Donna says, lowering her voice conspiratorially. The powerful lobby that is the American Trucking Association is no one’s favorite here. An invitation to the Federal Motor Carrier and Safety Administration, which issues safety and hours of service regulations for truckers, drew a cautious reply but never went anywhere.

Hence the lure of blogging and tweeting, which can be a platform for niche causes as well as a booster for morale and community. The problem is not just the stereotypes of truckers as ignorant, fat or even dangerous, though along with the official classification of trucking as unskilled labor, they hurt too. Since the deregulation of the trucking industry in 1980, drivers have paid some of the price for the fast, cheap products Americans enjoy. According to Michael Belzer, author of “Sweatshop on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Regulation” and a professor at Wayne State University, truckers’ real wages fell by 30 percent in the three decades after deregulation, as union membership cratered and carriers rapidly entered and exited the industry. (Even if the traditional anti-union sentiment among the truckers were to subside, the companies all have nationwide operating rights, and many are independent contractors, making it nearly impossible to organize long-haul truckers.)

The irony is that truckers themselves helped pave the way for all this. Those occasionally violent strikes throughout the ’70s were led by Mike Parkhurst, the editor of Overdrive magazine, who testified before Congress on behalf of deregulation: “If the mood of America is for a rebirth of free enterprise, there is no nobler cause than that of the independent trucker.” It was in keeping with tradition; the first long-haul truckers were farm boys who resented the government-planned food economy, railroad monopolies and union power all at once. Still, despite the romantic image of the trucker as the “last American cowboy,” the reality of an independent trucker’s life was more like a sharecropper’s, according to Shane Hamilton’s “Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy.” But there were few rural alternatives, and being a trucker carried the allure of being “a man in control of his time and possessing an untamed sexuality … the antithesis of the ‘organization man’ or the ‘man in the gray flannel suit.’”

The federal government is still cramping that style, imposing new safety and accountability standards and metrics on drivers — a sore point at the convention. Belzer says, “To blame the drivers is generally the rule,” but argues that instead of focusing on the individual trucker’s behavior, regulators should be looking at how the broader system incentivizes them to take risks, including violating required hours of service. Trucker pay is by the mile and the load, not the hour, but Belzer’s research suggested that truckers spend a quarter of their work time waiting, unpaid, for a terminal or warehouse operator who, in turn, has no incentive to hurry up. As Paul Taylor, an attorney who often represents truckers, puts it at the convention, “You work 100 hours a week, log 70, get paid for 40.”

At 50, Tony Hamilton can still remember the old days. “It seemed like it was a profession, like everyone was more dedicated. Now people fall back on this as a secondary job because it’s basically easy to get into,” he says, adjusting his suspenders over an American flag button-down. “You go to a school, you get your CDL, you’re put on a rig. Do you know what you’re doing? Probably not. Are you going to be around long enough to learn? You never know. Are the companies taking advantage of you? Yeah, probably.”

He says he’s making maybe 10 percent more than he did in 1985, without adjusting for inflation. In the last year, the carrier he worked for shut its doors without paying its drivers what they were owed. Hamilton’s trying not to let it get him down – he’s here representing a group that helps truckers in a jam as well as one that uses truck routes to transport animal rescues.

And the conference has encouraged him to join Twitter. “I’m a loner … so I’m trying to learn how to use it,” he says. But he already uses Facebook and call-in phone chat rooms for drivers. “Why [do you] have to talk to the one in front of you if you can talk to the one 3,000 miles from you? If you’re got the media, why not use it?”

: Irin Carmon is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @irincarmon or email her at icarmon@salon.com. More Irin Carmon

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Losing my husband, 140 characters at a time

After Kevin got cancer, all my rage and isolation went onto Twitter. Was I embarrassing myself, or rescuing myself?

By Lee Ann Cox

Losing my hubsand 140 characters at a time

Topics:Twitter, Social Media, Life stories, Cancer, Coupling, Real Families, Editor's Picks

There was a time when I kept private journals, chronicling stories of time with my husband as if words could nail down a life and build strong, warm walls around us. That was before cancer. A kind you’ve hopefully never heard of, a sure, slow killer. Once we’d slogged through a couple of years there, I logged into Twitter and didn’t grapple with whether or why. Rather than holding us together now, I was a spectacle of flying apart. Twitter unleashed my inner ranting-woman-on-the-subway. You know the one — no inhibitions, breaking the code of civilized silence.

Obsessed with idea of being alone in a room w/old unwanted glassware & crockery, obliterating things till satiated, then someone else sweeps 7:25 AM Aug 3rd, 2009 from web

Consider the supermarket sagas. It was a place I spent a lot of time, both because I had young children to feed and because that’s where the pharmacy was. I would wait in line to pick up the narcotics and antiemetics, trying not to look at the varied pleasure-enhancing condoms. If my husband Kevin hadn’t “followed” me, I would have whipped out my phone to share some bitter thoughts about ribbed strawberry rubbers. But when I wheeled my cart away after begging for one or two pills to get him through a Sunday night, I did tweet:

sobbing in Hannafords where pharmacist unmoved by pain of stage IV metastatic cancer. 4:38 PM Jun 14th, 2009 from mobile web

HE, unlike me, would be a more diligent caretaker of his loved one. He basically said this. 4:41 PM Jun 14th, 2009 from mobile web

With a bit of distance I see my tweets as a record of how stress and trauma affected me. Most times in my life, I surely would have headed to the car at any early sign of impending tears. But I just didn’t care. I needed juice boxes and cat litter.

When Kevin and I met, we uprooted each other. He was all Berkeley and blue eyes with lightning wit, crazy intellect, consuming passions — books, politics, computers, for some reason, me, even if I had to kiss him the first time, sitting on a beach in winter as a cold wind came off the Pacific.

But we lived on opposite coasts. I was seven years older. It was improbable and romantic, but he quit a good job, packed his belongings — with a bit of the grad student’s soul still — into a two-door Honda Civic and drove to my house in northern Vermont. Kevin missed his friends and the rhythm of the city, but we got a Newfie and we cooked, and when his favorite Latino band came from L.A., I danced like never before. Through it all I made notes of the absurd and the beautiful. The idea of tweeting that time would have felt as substantial as blowing bubbles into the sky through a child’s plastic bubble wand.

Yet soon enough we had both the child and the requisite plastic wand. Kevin would blow hundreds of bubbles — the signal that bath time really was over — to the sound of riotous laughter as they popped over sweet soaped toddler skin. I can still hear the giggles.

We had eight years together, a son and a daughter before cancer turned vibrant life fragile. It was mostly Kevin who fought to make the time count, even when it was hard, but I would try. Between rants I told some lighter stories on Twitter.

When taking a hot bath to relieve an aching back, allowing a 5 yr-old in is approx. as therapeutic as tubbing with a dolphin. Cheerful tho. 5:16 PM Jun 20th, 2009 from web

What’s most apparent, however, looking back over my tweets, is the isolation and the anger. No one in the supermarket ever asked if I might need help, at the hospital it was worse.

Why do people say things like “you don’t look too happy” to a woman standing alone outside surgery waiting room? 4:56 PM Aug 14th, 2009 from mobile web

I was almost always alone in hospitals, waiting for news from the operating room, waiting at Kevin’s side in the E.R. or by his hospital bed, often watching agonizing pain and struggle for breath. He had epithelioid sarcoma that originated in his pelvis then made its way through the lymph system to his lungs causing repeated collapse on both sides. The cancer itself was inoperable, but its side effects, along with radiation and various experimental chemotherapies, kept the specialists and the baby sitters busy.

Our social circles were small, our families far away. We were our own closest friends, content together, somewhat to our detriment I recognize now. Still, we were introverts not hermits. People are busy, I know. Medical drama is scary. But the ache and fatigue of relentless crisis gets etched in deep. I now view these dispatches as a defiant cry to be seen, to testify, bearing witness to suffering in 140 characters or less.

Kevin out. Surgeon-shoes splattered red-said it was hard but successful. Says he left him with two large tubes, minus couple cups of blood. 4:38 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

The surgeon had put in chest tubes to reinflate the lung, a procedure that gets trickier with repetition, we were told, as the penetrated skin grows thick and crinkly. Finally they let me into the post-anesthesia care unit to sit with him where the nurse drifts close as he slowly shakes off the bliss of unconsciousness.

Obvious I guess but hospitals r so gory. In PACU, neighbor dramatically swallowing blood. Then he laughs & wonders how the other guy (K) is. 6:37 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

Never did this become routine for me. I couldn’t read or surf the Net. I sat rigid with anxiety and sorrow, my eyes traveling from the beeping electronic monitors to the tubing that snaked from multiple parts of Kevin’s body to the strong arched cheekbones in his faraway face.

“The other guy” much more peaceful, tho im watching his blood gurgle disconcertingly thru tube. Thankful no twitter while I was giving birth 7:09 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from web

Dismissed to a room on the oncology floor, everything changes. Anesthesia is over. In less than two hours:

Peace turned to pain. Incomprehensible. 8:51 PM Aug 19th, 2009 from mobile web

There were friends and even loving daycare teachers who did take stints with our little ones, 5 and 2 when it all started. But I suppose I was hoping for more of a reaction from my tweets, maybe a SWAT team, though someone said that following me was like watching a distant train wreck through binoculars. What we got was a flurry of casseroles and “How can we help?” queries at the beginning and at the end of a nearly four-year ordeal. One person asked if we’d like bagels. Probably someone showing up with an assortment of poppy, pumpernickel and plain would have felt nice. We didn’t need bagels; we needed people. I didn’t know how to answer, and bagels never came.

I guess “tweeting” is too gentle, like a birdsong rising into the skies. Is there a shouting social network? 9:57 AM Sep 11th, 2009 from mobile web

Panic in the E.R. came in two forms. There was whatever-was-happening-to-Kevin, and there’s me, frantically walking from his curtained cubby to somewhere I could get cell reception, piecing together, while the battery lasted, a complicated plan to get the kids from daycare and school (at times in different towns) and through the evening until I felt OK leaving him. In the order of things, that had to be first. But just once, so early they hadn’t yet diagnosed the problem as cancer, Kevin was having a scary surgery on a Sunday night when the waiting room was ghostly quiet. A friend called. She’d made a plan with the other buddy in our triad. They showed up with knitting and a bottle of wine that we drank surreptitiously from paper cups. I actually laughed through the fear.

Hard being invited to a party, location: casa bon vivancy. People SHOULD celebrate life. But in casa de cancer, you’re living on an island. 9:51 PM Aug 6th, 2009 from web

I put us all in a shop window, and I didn’t make it easy to follow me.

One definition of heartbreak: 9- and 5 1/2-year-olds bending over a bed rail to give a last kiss & say, “I love you Daddy. I’ll miss you.” 5:34 PM Nov 17th, 2009 from web

Sometimes I ask myself if I regret the raw edge of this display. I read mocking reviews of “yet another cancer memoir,” and I wonder if the writer has walked those particular library stacks (that’s how we did it, pre-Amazon, back when I was 28 and my dad was dying of cancer) or paced those hospital floors.

Maybe I did get something I needed from Twitter. With no one’s permission, I gave myself a voice. Sometimes tender, furious or frantic, sometimes quivering with fear from bed in the middle of the night, listening to the too-labored breathing beside me. I needed to say these things and imagine some heart in the Twittersphere absorbing my crazed reality. My tweets may have merited the discreet, embarrassed looking away that we give the seemingly unreachable ranting woman on the train. I’m OK with that.

Since the first surreal days and weeks after Kevin died, my tweets have tapered to barely a trickle, though if I thought he would DM me I would tweet all day.

The first time his birthday came without him, I did post:

Kids and I just launched balloons into the night with glow sticks attached, green light disappearing into the sky. We love you Kevin. 9:22 PM Sep 28, 2010 from web

@leeanncox now turning off #cancer, #death, #widowhood.

: Lee Ann Cox is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times and other national publications. She is working on a memoir weaving her Tweets and excerpts from Card Blue, her late husband’s blog, into a tale of love and cancer, online and off. More Lee Ann Cox

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The Army is reading your Bradley Manning tweets

Military public affairs officials in WikiLeaks case use software that specializes in tracking Twitter

By Justin Elliott

A sketch of Private Bradley Manning during his Army Article 32 hearing. (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, U.S. Military, Social Media, Twitter

(UPDATED BELOW)

Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports on the extent to which the Army’s public affairs office is interested in public and media opinion of the Bradley Manning case, noting that P.R. staffers prepared daily summaries of the coverage of the ongoing legal proceedings. This bit jumped out at me:

The Army used a commercial service called VOCUS to track traditional and social media coverage of Manning’s hearing. The Pentagon pays close attention to the volume of tweets about the U.S. military during high-profile incidents, like the Air Force One flyover that distressed New York City residents in 2009 …

: Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott

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Klout is bad for your soul

The social media tool is being taken up as an actual measure of value and influence. And we should be wary

By Bonnie Stewart

The social media service that is bad for your soul

Are you your metrics? (Credit: Realinemedia via Shutterstock)

Topics:Klout, Social Media, Justin Bieber

You’ve heard of Twitter. Twitter is the contemporary canary in the coal mine of world events. A coup? An outrage? A celebrity death? Twitter gets the news out fastest, even mourning the loss of leading figures before they themselves hear they’re dead (sorry about that, Gordon Lightfoot).

You may not have heard of Klout — not yet.

But that doesn’t matter. If you’re on Twitter, or even Facebook, Klout has heard of you. And Klout has ranked you, with a single tidy number meant to sum up your influence and engagement in the social media sphere. Klout.com is a social media analytics company based in San Francisco. Three years ago, it began ranking Twitter users according to the splash their links and witty repartee made among their followers. Since then, it’s grown to include activity across social media platforms, and has established itself as a major arbiter of influence in social media circles. Klout, in effect, has clout.

Late last month, Klout altered its ranking algorithm. The Twitter canaries promptly launched into alarm mode, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. An #OccupyKlout movement even sprang up on Twitter.

The reaction pointed out three significant shifts now occurring in social media.

Klout defines influence as “the ability to drive action.” It claims to measure influence across social media platforms: it collects data on users’ engagement on Twitter, Facebook, G+, Flickr, etc., and collates them. You go up if you’re doing well, down if you’re losing influence. Or, say, if you spent a whole day offline. Merciful heavens.

If you’ve been in the habit of checking your Klout, you likely saw a change in your score last month. If you had Klout anywhere above, oh, 55 or so, you may have seen a drop. The system ranks out of an ostensible 100, but it grades on what my undergraduate professors affectionately called “the British system”: Basically, nobody except a superstar gets higher than 75. Justin Bieber, King of Klout, hovers close to 100. Ellen DeGeneres, that teacher’s pet, has an 87. Poor Jon Stewart only scores 73.

Klout had suggested before the shift that the majority of users would see their score stay the same or go down, but a straw poll of the canaries tweeting out sturm und drang on my Twitter feed on Oct. 27 suggests that the people clipped hardest by the new algorithm were the bigger fish in the non-celebrity seas, the ones who’d actually noticed they had Klout.

(Full disclosure: I went from an all-time high of 64 to a 58. Pass the hankies.)

The three shifts

Talking about Klout scores to a non-Klout-using audience sounds a bit ridiculous. Mind you, so did talking about Twitter in 2007. In the academic presentations I give, mentioning Klout is akin to bragging about the high score I got in Super Mario Brothers back in 1993. Except that unlike Super Mario, Klout and its ilk — the increasingly complex measurements of influence known as metrics — are poised for real-world impact far beyond social media. Like Twitter.

Social media has involved metrics from the beginning: comments, Technorati rankings, numbers of Twitter followers. These have always been visible measures of how big a fish one might be in the social media pond.

When Klout emerged, however, in 2008, it was something new. It was one of the first tools to measure both reach — how many people you influence — and scale — how much you influence them. Klout’s algorithms also take into account the influence of those you influence. Meaning, on the surface, if you engage with leaders in your community or little corner of the Internet, you yourself are more likely to exert leadership influence.

Klout has been embraced as an objective third-party tool for business to tell which self-promoting social media gurus actually have the know-how and influence they claim they have. Thus, even though many of us may not even be aware we have Klout, it’s already driving hiring in social media spheres. Its algorithm is being taken up as a factual assessment.

And that’s where three shifts in social media’s societal role become evident.

1. Social media has leaked beyond the boundaries of online interaction.

In truth, social media was never contained by the bits and bytes of computers. From the beginning, social media’s social-ness meant that it linked people in ways that stretched far beyond the boundaries of their digital lives. But as people’s Twitter and Facebook and blog identities become more and more central, integrated parts of their everyday living, and more and more people use these platforms, the actions and practices valued and reinforced online begin to bleed out into the larger society. Once a practice becomes normalized in one dominant environment of one’s life, it’s human nature to carry it over into others.

Social media is becoming a powerful force in society like the education system, or the corporate world. Social media has a profound influence on the daily practices of a majority of members of our global culture. As of July 2011, Facebook had 750 million users, a number far exceeding the population of most countries on the planet.

And as social media practices shift from their open source, peer-to-peer connection origins to an emphasis on summative rankings and metrics, we need to pay attention.

Why?

2. Because we’re being influenced by our own “influence.”

Klout isn’t only measuring us, it’s assessing us. It’s designed on behaviorist principles, with rewards and virtual pats on the head when we — ratlike, often not entirely sure what we did to warrant the praise — succeed on the terms its algorithm values, and framing losses in score with banners that proclaim, “Oh no! Your Klout has fallen -1 in the past 2 days!”

We are highly conditionable beings. Klout is conditioning us to care about Klout, and to value ourselves — in the identity economy of social media — in terms of it. It works to devalue the nature of many social media communities, particularly those whose networks and relationships aren’t based entirely in use value.

In the new Klout, I now get notices along the bottom of my screen about which of my contacts have gone down in score recently: in case I want to dump them, I assume, like dead weight. Bye, Mom! Farewell, shy cousin Ernie! Adios, infrequent Twitter user! It’s all business.

Social media wasn’t intended to be all business, especially business as usual. Social media is relational: Part of its phenomenal success is that it’s enabled people to connect on terms far beyond those of use-value networking.

But because Klout rewards use-value networking over other forms of engagement, it fosters an increasingly use-value environment. The peer-to-peer relationality of social media is undermined by the kind of behavior that cultivates status over relationships. Status is part of the game. But when it becomes the whole game, the broad, rhizomatic networks get boxed in and wither, and then we’re back to something a lot less interesting than social media. And like the new Google Reader, a lot less social.

Yes, there is a pattern here. We are gradually being directed away from sociality and toward businesslike behaviors by the business interests that design and profit from the platforms we use.

Social media, which was once a bit of a rogue blowing smoke at the establishment, is being taken in hand and given a tie and a briefcase. We’re like the rebel who’s been told s/he got the highest mark on a class test: We suddenly don’t know what to do with ourselves.

The problem: The test was rigged. And will always be rigged.

3. We’re allowing a metric to do a human’s job.

I’m not saying Klout isn’t trying, in terms of assessing influence and engagement fairly. The problem is, it can’t.

Klout attempts to boil down complex social interactions into a single, absolute number.

Systems of standardization, which is essentially what Klout is, have a particular potent history of this kind of reductionism. Until the 19th century, education systems didn’t use grades as we know them. As they became standardized within the broad societal push for public education, they became a shared language and currency for everyone enrolled in that system. You know what an A means, more or less. So does everybody else.

For over a hundred years, now, we’ve conditioned generations of kids to see themselves and their capacities in terms of these standardized letters: even though we KNOW that an A with sweet ol’ Mr. Wilson is just plain easier to get than an A with IronFist Ives, the history teacher.

Rankings are useful as relative assessments: My score on Klout in relation to yours, or on Mr. Ives’ history test this month as compared to last, can be indicative of meaningful change.

But my Klout score does not tell you — and cannot tell you — what kind of influence I have in my community, not really. Such scoring may be handy in a competitive neoliberal economy looking to quantify and compare abilities, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually valid.

On Babble.com, the day of the algorithm shift, Cecily Kellogg wrote, “Whether we love or hate Klout, the brands and agencies we work with utilize Klout scores to make determinations about our perceived value, so this is an issue important to us.”

It should be an important issue to anyone using social media. Unless, of course, you believe in a world where Justin Bieber is actually the most influential human alive.

What Klout is good for is giving people a reflective surface on which to see their own social media activities and interactions, relative to themselves and the context of their communities. Klout is good for letting you know whether you’re succeeding in your efforts to improve: It is not and cannot be a measure of success.

Klout is only valuable if one is embedded enough in the relational networks it claims to assess to know when to take it with a more than a grain of salt. We need to stop handing over so much power to metrics. They have a place. But it’s their use-value we need to assess, not the other way around.

: Bonnie Stewart is a Ph.D student at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, researching social media identity and education. She blogs ideas at http://theory.cribchronicles.com and creative non-fiction at http://cribchronicles.com. More Bonnie Stewart

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Intelligence agencies step up the Twitter and Facebook trawling

Department of Homeland Security works to catch up with the CIA in the social media monitoring department

By Alex Pareene

CIA actively monitors social media, DHS claims they don't

(Credit: VikaSuh via Shutterstock)

Topics:CIA, Homeland Security, Twitter, Social Media

A couple of days ago, the Associated Press reported that the Department of Homeland Security claims not to be “actively monitoring” social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. Lest you worry that status updates that present a threat to national security are going unread, the AP today reports that the Central Intelligence Agency is actively monitoring social media networks.

The story in the earlier article was that our sprawling intelligence and national security apparatus was caught off-guard by social media-fueled uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, and that they were going to take steps to be better prepared in the future.

DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the department was still trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook information for law enforcement purposes. And they seem to be starting completely from scratch:

Wagner said the department is establishing guidelines on gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes. Wagner says those protocols are being developed under strict laws meant to prevent spying on U.S. citizens and protect privacy, including rules dictating the length of time the information can be stored and differences between domestic and international surveillance.

(Hah, “strict laws meant to prevent spying on U.S. citizens.”) (Hah also at the idea that the laws would be respected even if they were strict.)

Speaking of international surveillance, there’s a government agency that is already on top of this Twitter-monitoring thing. The CIA has “several hundred analysts” (we are not allowed to know precisely how many) reading and translating social media content from all over the globe, for all sorts of reasons. And according to the CIA, these CIA analysts are totally cool, like the goth hacker lady in those books you like:

The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who “knows how to find stuff other people don’t know exists.”

Sure, translating Twitter messages from Urdu in order to gauge anti-American sentiment in Pakistan is basically the same thing as solving mysteries with hacking.

It’s not mentioned how the CIA’s social media department avoids “monitoring” the Internet behavior of Americans, which would be a violation of the agency’s charter. The reason that’s not mentioned is probably because they don’t avoid it.

What seems likely is that there are multiple government organizations monitoring your social media usage — the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the NYPD — even if they’re not coordinating their efforts. And sifting through and analyzing publicly posted information is just one piece of the monitoring. What I’m interested to learn is how much ostensibly “private” information — like real names and private messages and locations — these agencies are obtaining, and the means by which they’re obtaining it.

[Via Josh Sternberg]