Tynan's Anger

Last week there was excellent discussion on the increasingly essential On the Media last week about the Internet's tendency to promote homophily.

A lot of issues got swirled about (Moldova, Iran, swine flu, etc.), but the one that struck me most was about music:

People feel extremely tribal and passionate about their music. And once they've figured out what they like, they don't go very far outside it. The music industry is worried about this form of homophily because they'd sell more music if they can expose people to a slightly larger array of music than they would listen to. And so they've worked really hard on collaborative filtering technologies which basically look at bouquets of people and say, well, you know, Clive, you are like this and you listen to these 10 things.

This is the theory behind iTunes Genius, Pandora, and last.fm. The only problem? The lack of broad thinking:

They're all based around a model called collaborative filtering, and collaborative filtering essentially says if I enjoy listening to these five punk bands, it’s going to find 10 other people out there who like these five punk bands and it’s going to recommend some other musicians I've never heard of. So even though I say I really like the Ramones, someone in there likes John Coltrane, and I'm going to get a John Coltrane recommendation.
[...]
But we're not thinking nearly broad enough. When we think about this problem, we tend to think about, how do I bridge the huge gap between punk and jazz or the huge gap between left and right in U.S. politics? There’s much, much bigger gaps we need to be thinking about.

Say for instance, you're a big fan of the song "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" by X-Ray Spex.


Musically, you may like it because it's a great first wave British punk song, with sing-shouty vocals and a brilliant use of a saxophone and nontraditional punk instruments. In that case, recommendations like the Damned, Wire, and the Stranglers are excellent recommendations. Or you may like it because you're a radical militant feminist. In which case, you may not appreciate Genius picking out songs like "Peaches," "Orgasm Addict," or 25 other punk songs that probably don't feature another female vocalist.

If music is not the driving force in your life, your tastes will be dominated by what political, economic, and cultural pressures tell you to like. It also tells you what movies to buy tickets to, what TV shows to watch, and what politician to vote for.

That's not fun to think of as a fan of any art form, and especially for music, when today there's a virtually unlimited supply of choices on the internet. Still, you have to be really vigilant to avoid homophily on the internet for music; that means reading more than just one music website, looking beyond the ratings on metafilter, and finding entire universes of other types of music that are not as frequently found on the internet. Even Google doesn't work; better websites with more traffic and more resources are going to rank higher on most music searches, whether or not they actually have the most valuable input to the individual searcher. And that assumes that a searcher knows what he or she wants to search for.

There may be no other place on the internet where race, age, class, and politics have been so cleverly applied, intentionally or not, to aesthetic taste as the indie rock music blogosphere. I discovered Pitchfork in high school froma  Google search for The Darkness when I was in a serious Queen listening phase. I was interested in musically generally, and had enough of a bullshit detector to take what I was reading with a grain of salt. Other 17-year-olds may not be so lucky.

Labels: blogs, echo chamber, homphily, indie rock, internet comments, pitchfork media

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?
-Henrik Ibsen, "An Enemy of the People"

The Internet, as we've heard thousands of times, is the ultimate form of democracy. It puts the common man on the same ground as the elites, and destroys the gatekeepers and roadblocks to having your voice heard. On the Internet, the opinion of Roger Ebert matters as much as the ordinary film fan with a blog. Sure, internet comments can be awful, but if we like democracy, we have to take the good with the bad.

Labels: athenian democracy, Democracy, fascism, internet comments, new media, politics, Reductio Ad Hitlerum

Image via WikipediaWhich blog has the best commenters on the Internet? It’s not Deadspin or Gawker or any other Gawker Media blog. Those blogs have arguably the funniest commenters, but the real purpose of blog commenting is to enhance the discussion created by the original blog post. Instead, the best comments on the Internet come from one of the Internet’s most unlikely proactive bloggers: Roger Ebert. The Chicago Sun-Times film critic and longtime television star constantly poses difficult, challenging propositions on his blog, and consistently gets some of the most enlightened, reasonable responses. Most of Ebert’s comments sound more fitting for a college-level film class or expert panel discussion than an internet blog.


What makes the intelligence of Ebert’s comments all the more amazing is the relative lack of a filter Ebert puts on them. Comments are moderated for spam, but all the blog requires is a name, an email, and an optional URL. The standards to avoid getting filtered out are shockingly minimal; there are numerous angry rants mixed in with the enlightening comments. Ebert also posits very controversial questions, such as a set of rules for film critics. Perhaps most notably, he launched a debate over reviewing a movie that he stopped watching after 8 minutes. Those kind of tactics would normally produce all sorts of flame mail, especially considering the weakened authority of the mainstream media film critic as a result of blogs. Ebert’s comments, however, have enough Dear Roger, Dear Mr. Ebert, and even Dear Sir openings that it sounds more like The Economist than the blog stereotype.

Through reading the comments on Ebert’s blog, as well as its sister blog, Jim Emerson’s Scanners, I’m convinced that all bloggers can learn a thing or two from Ebert’s success. Ebert has put considerable craft and care into constructing his blog, and Ebert’s blog can be taken as a model for inspiring intelligent, reasonable blog comments in the future. Here are some ways the Ebert model can benefit us all:

1. Have authority on and off the web. For film snobs as casual fans alike, Ebert has been one of the faces of film criticism for decades. Unlike most movie bloggers, Ebert has a extended track record that goes back decades before the Internet and blogs ever existed. Whether it's due to nostalgia from his fans, the clout of his resume, or his pure skill and knowledge, Ebert and his authority makes people feel like they need to treat him with respect online. Ebert has also struck a chord with the blogging demographic by crossing the generational gap. It’s one thing for someone to make their name writing on the Internet. But when a writer from a previous generation devotes himself to new media, his popularity on the web skyrockets. It’s the same phenomenon that makes any story of a 106-year-old blogger almost guaranteed to hit the Digg home page every time.
2. Write well, and with respect. When former New York Times sports columnist Murray Chass started writing online, he refused to call himself a blogger, and spent a significant portion of his early “online writing” bashing the entire concept of blogging. As a result, Murray Chass was seen as a cranky old fart essentially writing Get Off My Lawn blog posts in denial. Most importantly, these “online articles” weren’t all that good. A general rule for blogs—and writing in general—is that hastily written rants will not win you a respectful, insightful audience. Usually, it will lead to even more offensive speech in comments. Ebert, however, takes his blog extremely seriously, and has never once questioned the legitimacy of the writing he is doing online. If he has ever done something he considers unfair in his blog, he has corrected himself. Furthermore, as Ebert has noted himself, the fact that he has lost the ability to speak in real life may have made his writing better. For years, the majority of people who knew of Roger Ebert only knew his television persona. Now, people are getting to know him for his gifts in writing, an area where he has surprisingly been underrated.
   
3. Always be interested in what your commenters have to say. One of the best qualities of Ebert’s blog is that just about every blog post is poised as a question to his readers. Ebert’s open-ended questions are the perfect utilization of his authority to promote discussion online. It wouldn’t all that out of line to argue that Ebert’s blog has produced some of the best critical discussion of the film you can find anywhere in the past year. That only works because Ebert’s posts are specifically designed for commenter feedback. His particular style leads to more intelligent feedback precisely because it is so open to that feedback. It’s one thing to have authority and blog: Murray Chass has authority, as do NPR blogs or New York Times blogs. But those blogs don’t get the same kind of intelligent comments—the kind you could hear in a classroom as well as a web forum—because they don’t treat the reader like a peer. Ebert's blog does.
   
4. Find time to recognize and praise your commenters—even the bad ones. Of course, very few of the people who comment on Ebert’s blog are Ebert’s peer, both in terms of status and skill. No doubt many of the comments he gets are hurtful, or often just plain stupid. But Ebert has still maintained excellent blog comments because he has repeatedly and overwhelmingly praised his commenters. He has cited other bloggers who recognize the strength of his comments (which he now includes in his blog's sidebar), and talks repeatedly about how the commenters on his blog have given him personal satisfaction. Ebert’s blog is a success story of the blogophere, and part of the reason for his success is that Ebert makes it so his readers want to maintain a the high level of discourse Ebert praises his commenters for, whether or not they always meet that standard. It’s hard to respond nastily to someone who is being so nice and respectful of your right to comment.

Granted, based on rule #1, it would be hard for just anyone to start a blog and acquire the same level of comments. But by catering to your niche and following the other guidelines, most blogs can eventually develop a level of discussion much higher than what we’re seeing now.

Labels: Blog, Chicago Sun-Times, film criticism, Gawker Media, internet comments, Murray Chass, roger ebert

My dad's been on All Things Considered Twice talking about Jews. I have now been on once on On The Media, talking about Internet comments. Jews control the media. Therefore, my dad controls me? (You can imagine the sarcasm traded between us over this tautology.)

Also, true to my University of Chicago roots, this debut was sufficiently meta. I leave an internet comment on a segment about internet comments and argue that comments serve the same purpose as Letters to the Editor. That comment is mentioned on a segment called "Letters." +1 for me.

[UPDATE] Just wanted to make clear that that comment about the Jews and the media was sarcastic. If any right wing bloggers are looking to pin something on me or my dad, you can understand sarcasm, right? M'kay.

Labels: internet comments, npr, on the media, shameless self-promotion

When a new medium emerges and we don't know how to deal with it, it's helpful to compare it to the older media it is updating or replacing. Blog comments are as controversial of a new medium as we've seen since the emergence of the Internet. The above On The Media NPR segment addressed the obscenity, racism and hatefulness that can be found on Internet comments and Internet forums. But what purpose do comments serve, when compared with other media of the past?

Only a truly naive person could argue that the Internet has made us more hateful. It's certainly made it easier to be hateful, and convenience has a long history of advancing hate speech. But hate goes to a much deeper part of the human psyche than a place that can be touched by 10-15 years of technology. Furthermore, hateful responses to published material is not a new phenomenon. It's best to think of Internet comments are as unregulated, uncensored letters to the editor.

Letters to the editor have been a part of the American media since there's been an American media; you could argue that the Federalist Papers were letters to the editor. But anyone who's worked on a paper can tell you that there are dozens of crazed, hateful screeds written all the time that don't get published. For every letter The New York Times has ever published, there are at least 20 letters that are not put in print, and most of them don't have a chance of making it to paper because of their offensiveness. If blog posts are published materials just like newspaper articles, they can inspire the same heated, infuriated responses that have always existed. The Internet doesn't encourage this kind of speech any more than angry letters to the editor do.

What the Internet has done is make it much easier to write a letter to the editor, and made it exponentially easier to have that letter made public. Most blogs, and even most print publications that allow online comments, don't try to restrict what commenters say. Anyone can post whatever they want, and as long as they can prove they're not a spam bot, it will be published. Let's compare that to what a person who wished to comment on an newspaper or magazine article would have to do before. The New York Times lists the following guidelines to letters to the editor:

Letters to the editor should only be sent to The Times, and not to other publications. We do not publish open letters or third-party letters.
Letters for publication should be no longer than 150 words, must refer to an article that has appeared within the last seven days, and must include the writer's address and phone numbers. No attachments, please.
We regret we cannot return or acknowledge unpublished letters. Writers of those letters selected for publication will be notified within a week. Letters may be shortened for space requirements.

Today, the Times also has tips to getting your letter published, the emails of the editors, and phone numbers to call. Up until a few years ago, that wouldn't be there. The only way to know where to send a letter would be one sentence in the masthead of a paper. Then you had to follow those guidelines, use your own paper and ink, lick the stamp, pay postage and go outside to stick the letter in a mailbox. All those steps have now been eliminated. The Internet has democratized the stupid, hateful speech writing process, just like it has democratized everything else in the media. Democracy, as I think we can all attest, doesn't make people smarter.

What's particularly frustrating is that newspaper journalists get up in arms over Internet comments. They're stressing over the same kind of response that they throw in the trash in the newsroom. Journalists are already supposed to have thick skin, but with the Internet, they just need to add extra layer or two.

The purpose of comments differ depending on the type of publication. If you're a small blog like this one, comments are the best way to create discussion and gain attention to your site. If you're the website of a major paper, I'd advocate treating online comments like letters to the editor and heavily regulate it. It's true that people will complain that you are stifling free speech. Just like everyone who hasn't gotten their letter published in a paper thinks their opinion is being stifled.

Labels: internet comments, msm, new media, npr