Stowe Boyd
S.E.C. Scrutinizing Stock Trading in Facebook and Twitter - NYTimes.com →
dealbook.nytimes.com
Looks like trading in these high-flying ‘private’ companies is going to be curtailed.
December 2010
Part-Time Career?
The Netherlands has transitioned very quickly to a worl culture where many people — professionals included — work 4 day weeks. Is this likely to happen in the US and other advanced economies?
Katrin Bennhold, Working (Part-Time) in the 21st Century
For reasons that blend tradition and modernity, three in four working Dutch women work part time. Female-dominated sectors like health and education operate almost entirely on job-sharing as even childless women and mothers of grown children trade income for time off. That has exacted an enduring price on women’s financial independence.
But in just a few years, part-time work has ceased being the prerogative of woman with little career ambition, and become a powerful tool to attract and retain talent — male and female — in a competitive Dutch labor market.
Indeed, for a growing group of younger professionals, the appetite for a shorter, a more flexible workweek appears to be spreading, with implications for everything from gender identity to rush-hour traffic.
There are part-time surgeons, part-time managers and part-time engineers. From Microsoft to the Dutch Economics Ministry, offices have moved into “flex-buildings,” where the number of work spaces are far fewer than the staff who come and go on schedules tailored around their needs.
The Dutch culture of part-time work provides an advance peek at the challenges — and potential solutions — that other nations will face as well in an era of a rapidly changing work force.
“Our part-time experience has taught us that you can organize work in a rhythm other than nine-to-five,” said Pia Dijkstra, a member of Parliament and well-known former news anchor who led a task force on how to encourage women to work more. “The next generation,” she added, is “turning our part-time culture from a weakness into a strength.”
On average, men still increase their hours when they have children. But with one in three men now either working part time or squeezing a full-time job into four days, the “daddy day” has become part of Dutch vocabulary.
Obviously, the culture must actively support such a shift, and I believe that some parts of US society are ready for permanent part-time, especially as many people begin to defect from conventional notions of full-time employment, and working several part-time jobs.
Strangely, as companies turn to reducing jobs to contend with a down economy, few look to job sharing, or permanent part time.
Part-Time Career?
The Netherlands has transitioned very quickly to a worl culture where many people — professionals included — work 4 day weeks. Is this likely to happen in the US and other advanced economies?
Katrin Bennhold, Working (Part-Time) in the 21st Century
For reasons that blend tradition and modernity, three in four working Dutch women work part time. Female-dominated sectors like health and education operate almost entirely on job-sharing as even childless women and mothers of grown children trade income for time off. That has exacted an enduring price on women’s financial independence.
But in just a few years, part-time work has ceased being the prerogative of woman with little career ambition, and become a powerful tool to attract and retain talent — male and female — in a competitive Dutch labor market.
Indeed, for a growing group of younger professionals, the appetite for a shorter, a more flexible workweek appears to be spreading, with implications for everything from gender identity to rush-hour traffic.
There are part-time surgeons, part-time managers and part-time engineers. From Microsoft to the Dutch Economics Ministry, offices have moved into “flex-buildings,” where the number of work spaces are far fewer than the staff who come and go on schedules tailored around their needs.
The Dutch culture of part-time work provides an advance peek at the challenges — and potential solutions — that other nations will face as well in an era of a rapidly changing work force.
“Our part-time experience has taught us that you can organize work in a rhythm other than nine-to-five,” said Pia Dijkstra, a member of Parliament and well-known former news anchor who led a task force on how to encourage women to work more. “The next generation,” she added, is “turning our part-time culture from a weakness into a strength.”
On average, men still increase their hours when they have children. But with one in three men now either working part time or squeezing a full-time job into four days, the “daddy day” has become part of Dutch vocabulary.
Obviously, the culture must actively support such a shift, and I believe that some parts of US society are ready for permanent part-time, especially as many people begin to defect from conventional notions of full-time employment, and working several part-time jobs.
Strangely, as companies turn to reducing jobs to contend with a down economy, few look to job sharing, or permanent part time.
The evanescence of Twitter debates - Felix Salmon →
blogs.reuters.com
Observation about Twitter’s role in the recent Wired/Greenwald fooforaw:
At some point, I hope that Twitter will roll out easily navigable and searchable archives of all public Twitter streams. But for the time being, Twitter is a stubbornly evanescent medium, for all its increasing importance.
The evanescence of Twitter debates - Felix Salmon →
blogs.reuters.com
Observation about Twitter’s role in the recent Wired/Greenwald fooforaw:
At some point, I hope that Twitter will roll out easily navigable and searchable archives of all public Twitter streams. But for the time being, Twitter is a stubbornly evanescent medium, for all its increasing importance.
He's Got A Gregarious Physiology
I have long maintained that the Dunbar Number — we supposedly can only maintain a small number of close relationships, and only remain connected to 150 people in total — isn’t a constant: it’s a variable. I have been on the look out for research that supports this premise, and something new has come to light.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, working with a team at Mass General Hospital in Boston, has new research that suggests that the size of the amygdala correlates strongly with the number of close friendships that people maintain:
Ian Sample, Social whirl of a life? Thank your amygdala
Researchers have found that part of the brain called the amygdala, a word derived from the Greek for almond, is larger in more sociable people than in those who lead less gregarious lives.
The finding, which held for men and women of all ages, is the first to show a link between the size of a specific brain region and the number and complexity of a person’s relationships.
The amygdala is small in comparison with many other brain regions but is thought to play a central role in coordinating our ability to size people up, remember names and faces, and handle a range of social acquaintances.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to measure the amygdalas of 58 people aged 19 to 83 and found the structure ranged in size from about 2.5 cubic millimetres to more than twice that.
As part of the study, each of the volunteers completed a questionnaire giving the number of people they met on a regular basis. They also commented on the complexity of each relationship. For example, one friend might also be a boss, meaning the person had to adapt their behaviour with the person depending on the nature of their encounter.
The team, led by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, found that participants with larger amygdalas typically had more people in their social lives and maintained more complex relationships.
Those with the smallest amygdalas listed fewer than five to 15 people as regular contacts, while those with the largest amygdalas counted up to 50 acquaintances in their social lives. Older volunteers tended to have smaller amygdalas and fewer people in their social group.
Writing in the journal, Nature Neuroscience, Barrett’s team cautions that the finding is only a correlation, meaning they cannot say whether there is a causal link between the size of the amygdala and the richness of a person’s social life. However, previous studies with primates show that those that live in large social groups also have bigger amygdalas. “People who have large amygdalas may have the raw material needed to maintain larger and more complex social networks,” said Barrett. “That said, the brain is a use it or lose it organ. It may be that when people interact more their amygdalas get larger. That would be my guess.
“It’s not that someone with a larger amygdala can do things that someone with a smaller amygdala cannot do. People differ in how well they remember people’s names and faces and the situation in which they met them. Someone with a larger amygdala might simply be better at remembering those details,” Barrett added.
Barrett’s conjecture about brain plasticity is supported by many other studies, like Eleanor Maguire’s research on London taxi drivers, showing that gaining ‘the knowledge’ of the city’s streets leads to the growth of the hippocampus.
Relative to Dunbar’s Number, it seems that general brain plasticity is at work again: those that exercise the amygdala — by having more close relationships, or by putting themselves in the context of meeting and knowing more people — are likely to ‘exercise’ the amygdala, allowing them to broaden and deepen their social awareness about larger numbers of people. This suggests that ‘theory of mind’ is a deep skill, like martial arts or playing an instrument.
If you want to become more deeply invested in a larger number of relationships, you need to work at it, and use tools that make it possible to do it at all.
I maintain that streaming apps like Twitter serve amplifiers of our social awareness: our theory of mind. Just like cooked food allowed early hominids’ diet to change, freeing them from the requirement of chewing for hours every day, streaming apps make it possible to remain meaningfully involved with a larger number of people than formerly possible, and probably increasing the size of our amygdalas.
Of course, these are deep skills, and will require 10,000 hours of practice before we will have achieved mastery. Roughly ten years of practice for a few hours daily.
Maybe I should have my amygdala scanned.
“
It’s when West switches the conversation from infrastructure to people that he brings up the work of Jane Jacobs, the urban activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Jacobs was a fierce advocate for the preservation of small-scale neighborhoods, like Greenwich Village and the North End in Boston. The value of such urban areas, she said, is that they facilitate the free flow of information between city dwellers. To illustrate her point, Jacobs described her local stretch of Hudson Street in the Village. She compared the crowded sidewalk to a spontaneous “ballet,” filled with people from different walks of life. School kids on the stoops, gossiping homemakers, “business lunchers” on their way back to the office. While urban planners had long derided such neighborhoods for their inefficiencies — that’s why Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York, wanted to build an eight-lane elevated highway through SoHo and the Village — Jacobs insisted that these casual exchanges were essential. She saw the city not as a mass of buildings but rather as a vessel of empty spaces, in which people interacted with other people. The city wasn’t a skyline — it was a dance.
If West’s basic idea was familiar, however, the evidence he provided for it was anything but. The challenge for Bettencourt and West was finding a way to quantify urban interactions. As usual, they began with reams of statistics. The first data set they analyzed was on the economic productivity of American cities, and it quickly became clear that their working hypothesis — like elephants, cities become more efficient as they get bigger — was profoundly incomplete. According to the data, whenever a city doubles in size, every measure of economic activity, from construction spending to the amount of bank deposits, increases by approximately 15 percent per capita. It doesn’t matter how big the city is; the law remains the same. “This remarkable equation is why people move to the big city,” West says. “Because you can take the same person, and if you just move them to a city that’s twice as big, then all of a sudden they’ll do 15 percent more of everything that we can measure.” While Jacobs could only speculate on the value of our urban interactions, West insists that he has found a way to “scientifically confirm” her conjectures. “One of my favorite compliments is when people come up to me and say, ‘You have done what Jane Jacobs would have done, if only she could do mathematics,’ ” West says. “What the data clearly shows, and what she was clever enough to anticipate, is that when people come together, they become much more productive.”
West illustrates the same concept by describing the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary research organization, where he and Bettencourt work. The institute itself is a sprawl of common areas, old couches and tiny offices; the coffee room is always the most crowded place. “S.F.I. is all about the chance encounters,” West says. “There are few planned meetings, just lots of unplanned conversations. It’s like a little city that way.” The previous evening, West and I ran into the novelist Cormac McCarthy at the institute, where McCarthy often works. The physicist and the novelist ended up talking about Antarctic icefish, the editing process and convergent evolution for 45 minutes. Of course, these interpersonal collisions — the human friction of a crowded space — can also feel unpleasant. We don’t always want to talk with strangers on the subway or jostle with people on the sidewalk. West admits that all successful cities are a little uncomfortable. He describes the purpose of urban planning as finding a way to minimize our distress while maximizing our interactions. The residents of Hudson Street, after all, didn’t seem to mind mingling with one another on the sidewalk. As Jacobs pointed out, the layout of her Manhattan neighborhood — the short blocks, the mixed-use zoning, the density of brownstones — made it easier to cope with the strain of the metropolis. It’s fitting that it’s called the Village.
In recent decades, though, many of the fastest-growing cities in America, like Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., have given us a very different urban model. These places have traded away public spaces for affordable single-family homes, attracting working-class families who want their own white picket fences. West and Bettencourt point out, however, that cheap suburban comforts are associated with poor performance on a variety of urban metrics. Phoenix, for instance, has been characterized by below-average levels of income and innovation (as measured by the production of patents) for the last 40 years. “When you look at some of these fast-growing cities, they look like tumors on the landscape,” West says, with typical bombast. “They have these extreme levels of growth, but it’s not sustainable growth.” According to the physicists, the trade-off is inevitable. The same sidewalks that lead to “knowledge trading” also lead to cockroaches.
Consider the data: When Bettencourt and West analyzed the negative variables of urban life, like crime and disease, they discovered that the exact same mathematical equation applied. After a city doubles in size, it also experiences a 15 percent per capita increase in violent crimes, traffic and AIDS cases. (Of course, these trends are only true in general. Some cities can bend the equations with additional cops or strict pollution regulations.) “What this tells you is that you can’t get the economic growth without a parallel growth in the spread of things we don’t want,” Bettencourt says. “When you double the population, everything that’s related to the social network goes up by the same percentage.”
West and Bettencourt refer to this phenomenon as “superlinear scaling,” which is a fancy way of describing the increased output of people living in big cities. When a superlinear equation is graphed, it looks like the start of a roller coaster, climbing into the sky. The steep slope emerges from the positive feedback loop of urban life — a growing city makes everyone in that city more productive, which encourages more people to move to the city, and so on. According to West, these superlinear patterns demonstrate why cities are one of the single most important inventions in human history. They are the idea, he says, that enabled our economic potential and unleashed our ingenuity. “When we started living in cities, we did something that had never happened before in the history of life,” West says. “We broke away from the equations of biology, all of which are sublinear. Every other creature gets slower as it gets bigger. That’s why the elephant plods along. But in cities, the opposite happens. As cities get bigger, everything starts accelerating. There is no equivalent for this in nature. It would be like finding an elephant that’s proportionally faster than a mouse.”
” —- Jonah Lehrer, A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation
(via underpaidgenius)
“
After buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies, Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when he shows me the linear regression charts. “Look at this bloody plot,” he says. “It’s ridiculous how well the points line up.” The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end.”
The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. As West puts it, “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.”
For West, the impermanence of the corporation illuminates the real strength of the metropolis. Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it alive.”
” —- Jonah Lehrer, A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation
Consider this idea: the most successful companies of the future will be those that operate more like cities. ‘More of a village than an army’, as I wrote in Defining Social Business:
Metaphorically, a social business will seem more like a village than an army, and where a lot of 20th management approaches will be obsolete. We can expect these features:
- ubiquitous use of social tools, and social networks,
- greater levels of personal autonomy,
- self-organization of groups and projects,
- very porous boundaries with the world,
- high reliance on non-financial motivation, or personal meaning and purpose,
- internal marketplaces for ideas and talent,
- and senior management operating more like Hollywood producers or investors than autocrats.
Or perhaps a CEO operating like a mayor? Would senior management actively create a context in which their control was limited and much of the company’s activities were not directed by top-down commands?
As Gibson said, ‘The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.’ Many companies have some of these characteristics, but very few have all of them.
I will be pursuing these ideas, and topics related to them, in my Future of Work research initiative this year. Stay tuned for a manifesto in the early new year.
“All great discoveries are made by people whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.”
— Charles Parkhurst
S.E.C. Scrutinizing Stock Trading in Facebook and Twitter - NYTimes.com →
dealbook.nytimes.com
Looks like trading in these high-flying ‘private’ companies is going to be curtailed.
“Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, presents companies with what he calls the three-box framework. In Box 1, he puts everything a company now does to manage and improve performance. Box 2 is labeled “selectively forgetting the past,” his way of urging clients to avoid fighting competitors and following trends that are no longer relevant. Box 3 is strategic thinking about the future. “Companies spend all of their time in Box 1, and think they are doing strategy,” he says. “But strategy is really about Box 2 and 3 — the challenge to create the future that will exist in 2020.” He recommends to clients what he calls the 30-30 rule: 30 percent of the people who make strategic decisions should be 30 years old or younger. “The executives who’ve been there a long time, they grew up in Box 1,” he says. “You need voices in the room that aren’t vested in the past.”
— David Segal, In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm
“Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, presents companies with what he calls the three-box framework. In Box 1, he puts everything a company now does to manage and improve performance. Box 2 is labeled “selectively forgetting the past,” his way of urging clients to avoid fighting competitors and following trends that are no longer relevant. Box 3 is strategic thinking about the future. “Companies spend all of their time in Box 1, and think they are doing strategy,” he says. “But strategy is really about Box 2 and 3 — the challenge to create the future that will exist in 2020.” He recommends to clients what he calls the 30-30 rule: 30 percent of the people who make strategic decisions should be 30 years old or younger. “The executives who’ve been there a long time, they grew up in Box 1,” he says. “You need voices in the room that aren’t vested in the past.”
— David Segal, In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm
“We’re in the abstract-expressionist era of management.”
— Dev Patnaik, cited by David Segal, In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm
“In any system as complex as the economy of a developed country, the statistically insignificant events, the events at the margin, are likely to be the decisive events, short range at least. By definition they can neither be anticipated nor prevented. Indeed, they cannot always be identified even after they have had their impact.”
— Peter Drucker
“
What are the characteristics of the Net? First of all, the Net is a place where communicative action establishes its own plane of meaning. There is no world pre-existing the moment of communication. There is no coextensive world. Every interruption in communication corresponds to the turn-off of that particular public world. Secondly, the Net is a circuit where the contents of the exchange – messages, products, the objects of the public sphere – can go from one point to another without passing through any center, and without constituting an area of belonging. Finally, in the Net the agents don’t bear an identity, or rather, it is a place where identity and the flow of enunciation don’t necessarily coincide.
Let us not talk about the Internet, and all the time that it makes us waste looking at a screen that flashes mostly useless data at us. I am not interested in talking about the Internet, but about the Net, that is, the paradigmatic model that it implies. The Internet is only a laboratory for experimenting ways of communicating that will become ever more concrete, involving, and fast. The Internet will assume unforeseeable characteristics, tied to various possibilities: it might connect to television and thereby to the transmission of presence; it will plug into virtual Reality and the production of immersive worlds of experience; or, maybe, it will become a supermarket. In any case, this will not prevent the model of the Net from producing new forms of social relationships.
” —Franco Berardi (Bifo), Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination, 1998Working Toward Life Balance
An interesting twist on the work/life balance meme caught my eye:
Mitch Joel, The Myth Of Work Life Balance
Don’t do it. There is no such thing as work/life balance. By even saying there is such balance, you’re making an internal agreement that work is not a part of a healthy life, and I just don’t buy it. Like you, I put a good chunk of my waking hours against the work I do. I can’t accept that it doesn’t constitute an important and real part of my life. In the end, I’m not looking for work/life balance… I’m looking for life balance.
I have said for years that I’ve given up on finding a balance in life, I’m going for depth instead. But it’s not really the case. It’s just that I am looking for something larger.
I have said for years that I’ve given up on finding a balance in life, I’m going for depth instead. But it’s not really the case. It’s just that I am looking for something larger.
I agree with the spirit of Joel’s post, in which he deftly turns the work/life balance on its ear. But his rejoiner is all wrong for me.
He’s right when he says we need balance in our lives, including whatever it is we are doing as ‘work’. But his three categories — personal, business, and community — simply create a slightly more complex balancing act, and don’t go far enough. It’s too small.
Instead, consider the contour of a well-ordered humanism laid out by Claude Levi-Strauss:
A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self.
So, for me, balance can’t be self-centered, it must be world-centered.
We can’t find balance while the world is so out of balance. And any balance must come from putting the world and its living creatures before mankind, and then others before ourselves. Yes, those others include community and family, but can’t limited to only those that are closest to us. We must put all others before oursleves.
I don’t mean that we need to hand over all our worldly possessions to the first homeless person on the street. But we need to put the collective interests of the world ahead of our own ease and comfort. That means trying to correct injustice, diminish our carbon footprint, work to strengthen social ties, and so on.
We are obliged to accept the curtailing of our personal freedoms — the right to pollute, to waste, to look away — for the sake of helping to balance our collective relationship to each other and the world.
In the sphere of our relationships with others it is not enough to be available, or to make time for others: we have to respect others’ needs, and to work to gain their respect, in return.
It’s the high holidays, New Years is around the corner, and the self-help marketing machinery is going full-bore. Millions of people will buy exercise equipment and health club memberships, hire firms to clean up their closets, get liposuction, and acquire shiny cross country ski equipment: all chasing the dream of self-perfection.
All of that is the lesser path.
It’s fine in a way, but if those acts pull us away from the primary obligations we have to the Earth and its inhabitants, then it is just narcissistic play.
So the real myth of work/life balance is the subtext that Joel has accepted implicitly: that balance — happiness and fulfillment — can be achieved if we restrict our attention to our immediate circle of friends and local community. It’s wrong, and untrue. We can start there — where we live and who we live with — but we have to be aware of the larger circle we are connected to.
If there is something universal we can learn from our experience in social networks, it is that we are only a few connections away from everyone in the surprisingly small world we live on.
We must commit ourselves to a well-ordered humanism, and if we are ever to find balance, it must mean a balance for all.
Working Toward Life Balance
An interesting twist on the work/life balance meme caught my eye:
Mitch Joel, The Myth Of Work Life Balance
Don’t do it. There is no such thing as work/life balance. By even saying there is such balance, you’re making an internal agreement that work is not a part of a healthy life, and I just don’t buy it. Like you, I put a good chunk of my waking hours against the work I do. I can’t accept that it doesn’t constitute an important and real part of my life. In the end, I’m not looking for work/life balance… I’m looking for life balance.
I have said for years that I’ve given up on finding a balance in life, I’m going for depth instead. But it’s not really the case. It’s just that I am looking for something larger.
I agree with the spirit of Joel’s post, in which he deftly turns the work/life balance on its ear. But his rejoiner is all wrong for me.
He’s right when he says we need balance in our lives, including whatever it is we are doing as ‘work’. But his three categories — personal, business, and community — simply create a slightly more complex balancing act, and don’t go far enough. It’s too small.
Instead, consider the contour of a well-ordered humanism laid out by Claude Levi-Strauss:
A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self.
So, for me, balance can’t be self-centered, it must be world-centered.
We can’t find balance while the world is so out of balance. And any balance must come from putingt the world and its living creatures before mankind, and then others before ourselves. Yes, those others include community and family, but can’t limited to only those that are closest to us. We must put all others before oursleves.
I don’t mean that we need to hand over all our worldly possessions to the first homeless person on the street. But we need to put the collective interests of the world ahead of our own ease and comfort. That means trying to correct injustice, diminish our carbon footprint, work to strengthen social ties, and so on.
We are obliged to accept the curtailing of our personal freedoms — the right to pollute, to waste, to look away — for the sake of helping to balance our collective relationship to each other and the world.
In the sphere of our relationships with others it is not enough to be available, or to make time for others: we have to respect others’ needs, and to work to gain their respect, in return.
It’s the high holidays, New Years is around the corner, and the self-help marketing machinery is going full-bore. Millions of people will buy exercise equipment and health club memberships, hire firms to clean up their closets, get liposuction, and buy cross country ski equipment: all chasing the dream of self-perfection.
All of that is the lesser path.
It’s fine in a way, but if those acts pull us away from the primary obligations we have to the Earth and its inhabitants, then it is just narcissistic play.
So the real myth of work/life balance is the subtext that Joel has accepted implicitly: that balance — happiness and fulfillment — can be achieved if we restrict our attention to our immediate circle of friends and local community. It’s wrong, and untrue. We can start there — where we live and who we live with — but we have to be aware of the larger circle we are connected to.
If there is something universal we can learn from our experience in social networks, it is that we are only a few connections away from everyone in the world.
We must commit ourselves to a well-ordered humanism, if we are ever to find a balance, and it must mean a balance for all.
G.O.P. to Open House to Electronic Devices - Michael Shear →
nytimes.com
I hadn’t realized that it was against congressional rules to use electronic devices on the floor of the House. As usual, 10 years behind the rest of the world.
The New Who Thing - Khoi Vinh →
subtraction.com
My biggest complaint, by far, has bothered me for some time but has taken me only until recently to put my finger on. Tumblr discourages identity. Or, to be more specific, it promotes shallow identity. Moreso than other blogging systems like WordPress or ExpressionEngine, Tumblr blogs frequently offer only scant few details about their authors. I can’t recall how many Tumblr sites I’ve visited where it wasn’t clear who was behind the posts, what their background was, or what their intent was. Many of these sites are artful, well designed and are actually quite engaging, but I guess I’m old fashioned in that I like to know who’s behind them.
WHO DID THIS?
Everyone praises the power of anonymity that the Internet makes possible, and I’m firmly in that camp. At the same time, I prefer it when people use their real identities. It just makes for a better experience. When you post or contribute anything online and you use your real name, and you provide authentic details about your station in life or your passions, it works as a multiplier of the value of your contribution — and for the richness of the network, too.
That’s what was so compelling, I think, about the first few waves of blogs. By and large, they weren’t just venues for the publication of content. They also served as outposts for your identity, a representation of who you were on the World Wide Web. By contrast, Tumblr blogs often seem more like something dishonest — well, dishonest is too strong a word. But when I browse through many of these tumblelogs, they feel as if their authors are trying to get away with something, trying to sneak something past somebody. There’s a sense of evasiveness, or vagueness, of no one really standing behind what’s been published, or no one being sufficiently committed to the content to offer up their name.
Before readers here post vociferous defenses of this approach, let me clear, I don’t think that Tumblr’s dynamic of shallow identity is wrong. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, the highly fungible nature of identity that Tumblr makes possible is a welcome ballast against the deeper identity dynamic that Facebook makes possible — or that Facebook makes inevitable, depending on how you look at it. The Tumblr approach is much more tolerant of ambiguity, of irony and artfulness, and that’s a good thing. I only wish that particular quality was also a bit more conducive to its users putting forward their real identities. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m still not jealous as heck I didn’t come up with the whole thing.
Vinh falls into the Zuckerberg Fallacy, arguing that Tumblr promotes ‘shallow’ identity, where users’ ‘real’ identities are absent, and only fragmentary details may be available.
But if a person is exploring a single node of their networked identity in a Tumblr blog — for example, a foot fetish, or an obsession with piercings — the experience for the poster or the reader is changed drastically by the imposition of a ‘real’ — meaning monolithic — personality.
And the nature of the blog’s material may be in conflict with other nodes in the networked identity, or cause conflict by bringing together contacts in non-overlapping contexts.
