“Economics,” writes Edward Glaeser in the Tuesday New York Times, “should be seen as a discipline that has spent centuries chronicling the enormous gains that come from people connecting with each other.”
There is much to unpack in Glaeser’s thesis, but before we do so, let’s also bring the antithesis into play via an article published in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by Elizabeth Bernstein: “How Facebook Can Ruin Friendships.” Too much exposure to the trivial or unnecessary details of our friends’ lives, says Bernstein, “can hurt our real-life relationships.” When people connect with each other, they suffer losses as well as gains. Developing nation software engineers use new communication technologies to undermine the earning power of developed world programmers, while yet another status update about your cat’s latest hairball undermines the social contract.
Glaeser’s piece is smart, while Bernstein’s is dumb — a classic example of the handwringing that accompanies any new tech phenomenon. Woe is me, she declares, bemoaning the fact that people are too busy to “even write a decent e-mail.” Bernstein doesn’t want to know what her friends ate for lunch and she doesn’t want to be bored by their nonsensical one-liners: “Amidst all this heightened chatter, we’re not saying much that’s interesting, folks.”
But is that the point? Are we all supposed to be entertaining each other with dazzling repartee, or are we supposed to be connecting?
I joined Facebook a month or so ago, constructed a network of friends and family who are meaningful to me, and immediately recognized something I first saw when I joined the online conferencing system The Well in 1994. As a fulltime freelancer working at home with a new baby, I didn’t have much of a social life — and I found enormous value in an online community that allowed me to nurture relationships in an asynchronous, distributed fashion. Sure, there was plenty of fluff, of trivial interaction that offered no lasting value, but there was also a sense of community. Real friendships resulted from online contact — as did career opportunities, and exposure to new sources of information about all kinds of things.
Facebook, I realized instantly, was just like the Well, only with a slicker interface and far better integration with the Web. As a blogger who had been working at home for too long, I suddenly felt a much more vibrant connection to former colleagues, friends who had moved away, or even people who lived just across the Bay.
Maybe I mocked Bernstein too quickly for her nostalgia for the days when people took the proper time to compose their e-mails. Because the common thread between the Well in 1994 and Facebook in 2009 is the hustling nature of existence in an extraordinarily complex and competitive globalized world. Those awesome mechanisms of interconnection — the Internet and globalization — keep us constantly on the go. The barriers that previously separated work and home, work and play, Bangalore and Silicon Valley, are all been smashed to smithereens. We are too busy — we’re working parents without enough time for our kids, or wage-slaves being asked to do more for less, or students overwhelmed with homework and extracurricular activities.
Edward Glaeser writes about the benefits that accrue to humanity from trade and the division of labor, of how a group of people all cooperating with each other but at the same time specializing in individual tasks can be far more productive than a group in which every person strives to be a self-contained master of all trades. Communities undoubtedly become richer through interconnection.
But they also become poorer, when the connections metastasize, when entire populations are pitted against each other, when the possibilities offered by new communication technologies know no restraint — when the Twitter feed starts pumping into your mobile phone and the Blackberry e-mails can only be ignored at your peril, when technologically pumped-up forces of competition require us to be ever-more productive.
In that world, Facebook — or any other social media application — hardly ruins friendships. Instead its a coping mechanism throwing out a lifeline allowing us to maintain those friendships we’re lucky enough to have.
As newspapers and magazines shrink and shutter their book review sections, one could easily fret that with them will go that other great literary institution: the author-critic feud.
Fortunately, as Alice Hoffman’s weekend meltdown suggests, the form is still thriving — in 140-character nuggets. Smarting from a so-so review of “The Story Sisters” in the Boston Globe, the prolific novelist tweeted her fury to the world. She came out swinging, calling reviewer Roberta Silman “a moron,” quickly moving on to “idiot,” then expanding her repertoire to dis the newspaper and the city of Boston itself. But the real jaw-dropper in Hoffman’s two dozen plus tweets on the subject was her suggestion that “If you want to tell Roberta Silman off, her phone is [Silman's phone number and email address]. Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”
As of late Monday morning, Hoffman’s Twitter account — and with it, her petulant tweets — have disappeared. Did she have a pang of remorse about her actions, or a fear of a lawsuit? She issued a statement through her publisher that read, “I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion. Of course, I was dismayed by Roberta Silman’s review which gave away the plot of the novel, and in the heat of the moment I responded strongly and I wish I hadn’t. I’m sorry if I offended anyone. Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that’s the name of the game in publishing. I hope my readers understand that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I’m truly sorry if I did.” (Who better than Diana Joseph, author of the recent memoir “I’m Sorry You Feel That Way,” to point out that Hoffman’s “I hope my readers understand that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I’m truly sorry if I did” is a pretty passive-aggressive statement? Why is she apologizing to her readers but not to Silman? “Hoffman is still too perturbed about the review, still kicking and screaming that it ‘gave away the plot,’” said Joseph on Monday. “Translation: It’s Silman’s fault. She made me do it.”)
It hardly matters — the Twitter community has pounced on the dustup, and the response has been considerably less charitable than anything Roberta Silman could have dished out. While some folks have been expressing that they’re “disappointed in Alice Hoffman,” others are referring to her as a “a d-bag” and a “psycho.”
Authors generally try to stay classy in the face of negative feedback, bravely showing up for their readings and working the publicity circuit despite whatever Michiko and company proclaim. When they do respond to a critic, it’s more likely to present a clarification or correction of something the writer has apparently gotten wrong. Just last week, “Strip City” author Lily Burana took Katie Roiphe to task in XX for Roiphe’s dismissal of stripper memoirs, noting with both defiance and diplomacy that “criticism is only as solid as the author’s willingness to accurately represent the works in question.”
Sometimes, however, the quarrel is less about being right and more about lashing out. In 2001, Dave Eggers devoted 10,000 words (that’s a boatload of tweets!) on McSweeney’s to his e-mail exchanges and subsequent rebuttals of said e-mails to New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick, calling the journalist’s profile of him “a snippety little thing full of sneering and suspicion.”
A few years ago, Caleb Carr famously blew up at Laura Miller’s Salon review of “The Lessons of Terror” with a letter referring to her as a “bitchy wise-ass” and “REASON NO. 8 MILLION WHY THE SOUL OF NEW YORK CITY IS DYING.” More currently, “Liberal Fascism” author Jonah Goldberg, not one to dilute the ranting, devotes much of his blog to debunking his critics.
Some authors take it further, making the tweet tantrum look positively restrained. In 2004, Stanley Crouch responded to a chance encounter with Dale Peck (who’d written unfavorably of Crouch’s “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome” years earlier) at a New York City restaurant as an opportunity to slap him in the face. Twice.
Richard Ford had to wait two years after Colson Whitehead’s negative New York Times review of 2002 novel “A Multitude of Sins” to spit on the him at a Poets & Writers party. But that’s peanuts compared to what happened to another of Ford’s critics. After a less than stellar write-up of his 1986 novel “The Sportswriter” appeared in the New York Times, Ford’s wife took a pistol to a book the reviewer had written and blew a hole right through it. Ford later did the same honors with another copy of the same book.
Chilling though the message was, it didn’t stop the critic from continuing to dole out opinions. Her name? Alice Hoffman.
At a Government Web Managers Workshop held in Washington, D.C., in March, Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski, a corporate communications staffer for the World Bank, delivered a presentation about the challenges and possibilities inherent in “social media.” PowerPoint slide No. 22 depicted a graph with two lines — one tracked the number of times the World Bank had been mentioned in blogs between November 2006 and February 2007; the other recorded the same statistic for traditional news media.
If you guessed that blog mentions were more numerous than old media mentions and are growing more quickly, congratulations, a shiny new Web 2.0 trophy is waiting for you in your e-mail inbox. If you further surmised that the proliferation of discussion forums means that it is much harder for an institution such as the World Bank to control perceptions of itself, well then, you just passed Internet 101 with flying colors. “Social media” is many-to-many, all of us talking to each other, about everything.
And not always in the most flattering of terms. The Internet’s unleashing of a billion or two nattering nabobs of blog negativity presents a serious challenge for any marketing professional. But in the year of the Wolfowitz, the hubbub must have inspired much rending of flesh and tearing of hair at the World Bank.
Wielezynski outlined a strategy for engaging with this new world: Provided one has the right tools, the nature of online discourse makes it easy to track who is saying what about you, in very close to real time. Bloggers learn quite early on in their blogging careers that they can use services such as Technorati or their favorite blog aggregator software to alert them whenever anyone on the Web mentions their name or links to their blog. They can then immediately respond in kind. We call this “the Conversation.”
But Wielezynski was unsatisfied with the capabilities of the available tools. So, in best Net-geek tradition, he helped lead an effort to create BuzzMonitor, a “super-aggregator” that “allows users to aggregate all types of feeds (blog feeds, search feeds, news feeds) and collaborate around them. It provides tag clouds, Digg-like voting, Technorati and Alexa widgets, user tags and many other features.” (Thanks to the Private Sector Development blog, which is also affiliated with the World Bank, for the link.)
As explained on BuzzMonitor’s “about page” — “Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple platforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it.”
The World Bank contracted with the software firm Development Seed to build the new program, with additional input from the World Resources Institute. Development Seed relied on the popular open-source content management system Drupal for its core code. Last week the bank announced that version 1.0 of BuzzMonitor was available for free download to all comers, and suggested that it was particularly applicable to nonprofit organizations interested in monitoring what the Web was saying about them. (The decision to open-source BuzzMonitor need not be taken as some kind of altruistic move by the bank. By using base code that is protected by the free software GNU General Public License, my understanding is that the bank was required to make any modifications or add-ons freely available.)
You can get a brief glimpse of some of BuzzMonitor’s capabilities from a “tour” at the World Bank’s Web site. From the snapshot there, the program looks a lot like a souped-up blog aggregator, and it’s hard to evaluate just how potent a tool it will be for those trying to make sense of, and participate in, the global Internet chatter-fest. But it may be most intriguing, conceptually, as yet another data point of recognition as to what the Internet does best, which is to facilitate a hydra-headed dialogue on the affairs of the world that is as confusing in its diversity as it is exhilarating in its infinite reach.
BuzzMonitor purports to make ample use of state-of-the-art techniques for rating the authority, relevance and popularity of whoever is commenting on whatever. Because we don’t just want to know who is talking about us; we want to know if we should take them seriously, if we should respond or ignore or merely chuckle dismissively.
People who worry about the the future of journalism (and, for that matter, the future of marketing) should be paying very close attention to these developments. In the not-too-distant future, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that those nodes of conversation that are ranked with the most authority and relevance will be where eyeballs and advertising dollars and high search engine rankings congregate. Out of this swirling chaos, new hierarchies of trust will emerge (as well as new business models.) It might seem like anarchy now, but it isn’t. As we all watch each other, helped along by clever software programs that let us know whom we should be paying attention to and why, a new coherence is being born.
