The Leisurely Historian…

As I’ve mentioned several times here, I’m a fan of LiveJournal. I’ve been using it for around four years now– I’m not exactly an early adopter, but I’ve been on for a long time– I got my account pretty soon after they stopped giving out accounts on an invite-only basis, and I’ve been on long enough to have had time with each of the owners: LiveJournal, Inc., Six Apart, and now SUP. Four years of involvement and community building can make you pretty invested in a social website.

That said, I won’t be participating in the one-day strike tomorrow.

For readers who aren’t LJ users or haven’t heard of this whole to-do, the above link lays it all out pretty well. The Readers’ Digest Version goes something like this: LiveJournal started ad-free, on a donation basis. They added paid accounts with extra features. Then, under Six Apart, they added a middle account level, with some extra features, still free, but with advertising on your page. Now, SUP is eliminating the traditional “Basic” (ad-free and free of charge) account level, giving new members only the ad-based “Plus” or ad-free “Paid” memberships. Simultaneously, there was some sort of omission of terms like “bisexuality” and “depression” in the list of LJ’s most popular interests, which has since been resolved, but rubbed some people the wrong way in the wake of Strikethroughgate.

There’s several reasons that I’m not planning on participating:

Not to sound like a pessimist, but I saw this coming. I assumed when the Plus account was introduced that the next step would be a pay-or-get-ads model. It makes sense to make money off every user, from the point of view of a company like Six Apart or SUP. It looks to me like Six Apart set the wheels in motion with this one– especially when you look at the evidence that active user numbers were in a three year decline before SUP’s buyout. (Although there is also evidence that these numbers are leveling out, now.) I’ve been braced for this for a while now, and this lessens my sense of righteous indignation.

I’m a fan of the noncommercial and the open: open-source, open-architecture, open-access. I like things free as in beer and free as in speech. That said, I don’t think that SUP fully grasped the nature of the LJ community– especially its American component– before the purchase. This is their first taste of the Drama that can ensue when you alienate or upset the site’s user base. Despite SUP’s Anton Nosik’s recent ranting diatribe of an interview where he described the action as “blackmail,” I think that they’re trying, or I’m at least willing to give the benefit of the doubt for now.

The recent announcement of an Advisory Board that includes LJ inventor Brad Fitzpatrick, Lawrence Lessig, and danah boyd is definitely a step in the right direction– at least if they’re given a real role and allowed to actually advise. So far, while not endorsing the strike themselves, both Brad and danah have publicly spoken out and stated that they are against the change. danah’s hinted that a new policy will be decided upon in the next couple weeks.

Finally, as with Strikethroughgate, I’ll admit, I don’t care too much because it doesn’t much effect me. I’m a paid member, and will likely continue to be. And I use the Adblock Plus plugin in Firefox, so my web surfing experience is pretty much ad-free as it is.

And let me take this exact moment to evoke Godwin’s Law before anyone even has a chance to say “First they came for the Communists…” I’m sick of that (rather offensive) analogy being made every time someone’s mad at whatever company is running LJ at the moment. They’re corporations that run social networking software– they’re not Nazis! This propensity of the LJ community to overreact should probably be added to the reasons I’m not participating.

Having said all this, if any of my LJ friends who are participating read this, let me say that I do see why this is problematic, and I support your decision. I just ask you to respect mine.

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For me, what’s really interesting about this strike is the the action itself, and how it highlights the sometimes problematic nature of social media. Putting aside the difficult question of the efficacy of one-day and limited-timeframe strikes, it raises some even bigger questions: is this actually a strike? Would it be better described as a boycott? Are LiveJournal users better described as customers or content producers?

This is an issue with all social media, where users are both the content producers and consumers. But I think LiveJournal is probably the richest of all the emerging social media sites, in terms of content. Livejournal Communities reproduce the rich sense of community I remember feeling when I first started posting to Bulletin Boards in the 90s. The Journals themselves are essentially blogs. And the “Friending” feature, and the “Friends-list” page provide networking that creates a real sense of texts interacting. Memes and other such viral material can sweep through your friends quickly. It’s an ongoing dialog, one that can sometimes be very public, and other times be intensely personal. Features like friends-only posting and filters allow for a lot of control of who can or cannot access what information.

By comparison, sites like Myspace and Facebook seem rather, well, shallow in terms of content, and weak in terms of access management. Myspace is about pictures, short snippets of text, shallow dialog. Facebook seems to becoming more and more about snapshot statements, “pokes,” and applications that let you know whether your friends would rather be vampires or ninjas. There’s a place for both of these, of course, just like there’s a place for blogs and a place for Twitter. But for deeper, more personal, or simply more lengthy dialog, LiveJournal’s pretty close to the fabled “killer app” for social media.

So when LiveJournal users refuse to log on, don’t write or read for a day– or longer– they are both refusing to produce content and refusing to consume. The former can be seen as a strike– it’s a work stoppage, of work that people do for free, or even pay for the privilege of performing. But they’re also denying the site hits, hurting ad revenue (which is obviously becoming an integral part of their business model)– a good old fashioned boycott. Boycotts that coincide with strikes are a proven, effective tool– social media provide an environment where they are one in the same. No wonder Anton Nosik sounded more than a bit apoplectic.

Where this becomes problematic, however, is that there are only two parties involved in any dispute that comes to the point of such a blackout– the company, which does own the servers, provide the service, and have a profit incentive, and the users. Basically, besides SUP’s investors, the only people who care if LiveJournal disappears are the users. I would be sad if LiveJournal was taken off-line or became a ghost town the way Facebook has. But most people wouldn’t bat an eye, as they don’t use the service. The same reason that social media are self-sustaining and democratic make them very vulnerable. Too much resistance on either side, and the whole house of cards can collapse. (All the more reason for LJ users to think about getting around, eventually, to using LJBook and turning their journal into something a bit more permanent.)

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I agree with Lisa Spiro that social scholarship is a trend on the upswing in the humanities, and I’m excited by the possibilities it presents. But it’s important to also keep in mind the potential pitfalls of social media as we move in that direction.

The democracy and openness are exciting, but in the end, servers are pretty seldom communally-owned. Conflicts can arise easily when the folks hosting the material and the people producing and consuming the material see themselves as separate, opposed groups with different interests. We can talk about the wisdom of crowds, and that’s exciting, too. But there’s a real question of how well social media– let alone social scholarship– scale.

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff that touches on American political history during the second party system.

Jacksonian Democrats intrigue me, I have to admit. In part, because it’s a party that attracted a lot of the people I’m most interested in studying– the urban workers of the Northeast. I also have a soft spot for any group that evokes the Jeffersonian mythos of the yeoman farmer– something I internalized at a very young age, this romantic image of autonomous self-reliance. I’m always interested when political movements gain momentum that want to diminish the power of monied elites. And there’s such characters in the Democratic party of that time– people have spent whole careers trying to piece out what was going on in Andrew Jackson’s head.

But at the same time, the Democratic party was more adamantly pro-slavery– this was the party of Jefferson Davis– and more bellicosely expansionist– the party of Jackson, who as a general invaded Florida without any real presidential or congressional mandate, and James K. Polk, author of the Mexican-American War, the first real war for Empire America undertook.

Daniel Walker Howe, in his book What Hath God Wrought wears his heart on his sleeve, and his heart belongs to the Whig party, in particular John Quincy Adams. While his appreciation for Adams verges on hagiography at times, Howe definitely does offer some strong reasons to like the Whig party: they were more open to abolitionists and anti-slavery people, it was the party Lincoln began with, they were for a strong national government that invested prudently in infrastructure and improvements, they opened up to organizing by women, even if they didn’t call for women’s suffrage. It was the more progressive party.

And usually, that will bend my ear. But I have a hard time loving the Whigs.

I finally figured out why, today. The Whig Party had a good, sensible, progressive platform. But they weren’t sexy enough. Their issues just don’t grab me or excite me the way that the Democrats’ do. They don’t excite the passions, and their leaders seem to lead less passionately. While progressive, they were voices of moderation, industry, and self-discipline.

It’s just hard to get excited about the party whose rallying cry seems to center around banks, canals, paper currency, and temperance.

Andrew Jackson looked– and acted– like a wildman. In terms of the politics of his time, he was a rock star.

John Quincy Adams just looks like he wants you to turn down that noise you call “music” and go clean your room:

I never would have thought I’d write a post with this title. In my scholarship, I tend to veer toward qualitative cultural analysis. I avoid numbers whenever possible. Though I’m a big fan of maps, I detest charts– they take forever to make and half your readers won’t even give them a glance.

That said, I’m addicted to reading my web statistics, monitoring my online presence. I’m obsessive about it. Every night, I check my flickr stats, go to Google Analytics to track how this page is doing, and since joining Yelp last month, I’ve begun checking that almost daily, to see how many page views my profile’s gotten, and how my reviews have been rated. Once a week, on Sunday evening, I go to last.fm to find out what music I’ve been listening to, and see what people with similar musical tastes might have uncovered that I haven’t. I’m awash in statistics.

It’s not that I do much with them. I mean, I’d definitely argue that these stats, along with frequent self-googling, keep me aware of who’s seeing me online, and how. But that, to be completely honest, is a second-order perk.

The main reason I do it is… I don’t know. It’s visceral, it’s almost a form of introspection. (Although it’s outwardly-focused introspection…) The net, now that we’re in the “Web 2.0″ days, is an intensely performative medium. From the initial hypertextual concept of infinitely linked texts, we’ve moved on, to an internet that’s all about the (multiple, contingent, intertextual) construction of the self. And stats let us know how we’re constructing ourselves, to a certain extent. They’re a mirror to our online identities, that allow us to do a bit of reader-response criticism on ourselves…

Because as much as we all know that it’s “just the internet” and that “on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog,” as much as it’s widely reiterated that online virtual personae are separate from actual identity, that’s only half the truth. In a world where people spend as much time as many of us do in refining and crafting our identities online, these things get fuzzy. You invest your selfhood into these projects. The work of molding a performative identity can never be alienated labor. Which we all know– that’s why everyone gets into a tizzy when, say, LiveJournal changes hands again or Rupert Murdoch buys MySpace. Because when users switch from “people using a service” to “people creating content,” there’s an investment made, and a bit of your identity is intermingled with that of the platform you use.

When I migrated this blog from Typepad to my own Wordpress blog last month, I was changing camps– making an identity shift. And part of that identity shift involved having to find a way to track my stats. The stats provided by Typepad were quite good. Those provided by Google Analytics, however, are far richer.

…This entire post has been a protracted lead-up to this: given that it’s been a month since I’ve migrated my blog, I decided to share some figures, here. Let’s look at who’s been reading, and how.

• So far, my numbers are down, but barely. My average number of pageviews per day has gone down from 7.5 to 6.7. I’m frankly surprised that the damage hasn’t been worse, although since moving, I’ve been doing more things consciously to boost my google juice, like using trackback urls, pinging sites like Technocrati, and (simplest of all) posting more frequently.
• Here in the states, the majority of people who visit my sites seem to be in Northern Virginia, Southern California, and Texas. Besides Texas and one hit each from New Mexico and Kansas, I haven’t had a single person visit my site from the area West of the Mississippi and east of the Pacific Coast States. Maybe I need to post more things of interest to the Plains States and Rocky Mountain Region.
• While the vast majority of people viewing my site are in the US, (with Aglophone nations like the UK, New Zealand, Ireland, and Canada filling in a large number of the other unique users) I’ve also, somewhat surprisingly, had hits from: Switzerland, the Netherlands, India, Romania, the Czech Republic, Spain, South Korea, and Malaysia.
• 70% of you are NOT using Internet Explorer. Good on ya! And most of you use Firefox. This makes me happy.
• Far and away, my most popular post this month has been my review of Tom Smith’s site, “Let’s Play Ukulele.” At this rate, it’ll quickly out pace my all-time most-viewed post, a mini-essay on the china and china cabinet in John Lewis Krimmel’s “The Quilting Frolic”. This has gotten me thinking. I’m shocked that an ukulele post generated such interest– although the post also related to my notions of the potential uses of Web 2.0 technology for digital pedagogy, let’s face it… Digital Pedagogy and Cultural History are pretty limited-interest topics. I wonder if expanding the scope of this blog would encourage readership by making a bigger umbrella, or discourage readers by being a bit scattershot. If everyone and their mother is now engaging in Friday Cat Blogging, I figure a semi-weekly ukulele post might not hurt me. And plus, it’d be fun, and my roommates are getting sick of hearing me talk about ukes.

Well, this may be just of interest to me, but it gave me some things to think about.

Now if someone could just explain my flickr stats to me: I understand why this picture of Barak Obama is my most popular:

But why on earth is this picture (of my roommate’s friend Ron, when we went on a ski trip) my second-most popular?

Aparently a lot of people click on it when they do a Yahoo Image search for “jeans and blazer”…

So I’ve been loving the Kala KA-S Mahogany soprano uke that I bought over Christmas. I’m learning– still not great, but improving. But the ukulele bug has apparently bitten me HARD.

I went to Guitar Center today, just intending to get a strap so that I can play standing up. Instead, I walked out with a strap, and also with a Mitchell MU70 concert uke. It’s quiet– surprisingly, quieter than my soprano. But the sound is really rich. I’m going to have to replace the strings, though– I really prefer the sound and the action of the Worth CM strings on my Kala.

But overall, it’s shiny. It’s new. I like.

A picture of my two ukes, with my roommates’ Les Paul-style Guitar Hero controller: