Sep/091
Another Example of Crowdsourcing Memory…
In a recent blog post, I talked about using the internet as a tool to “crowdsource memory.” A day or two later, I came across a perfect example of what I was trying to express, and it made me want to refine the notion a bit.
“Crowdsourcing,” for any reader lucky enough to not be thouroughly immersed in the world of New Media buzzwords, is something we all instinctively understand these days as web users: it’s aggregating the “wisdom of crowds,” using the knowledge of many and putting it into one centralized repository. It’s why Amazon has more reviews of a given book than anywhere else, and why Wikipedia has an entry on everything.
Anyone who keeps up at all with Digital History can name a few projects that attempt to crowdsource Historical Memory. CHNM’s September 11 Digital Archive or the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank are two great examples, projects that seek not to create consensus about Historical Memory, but to serve as repositories, places where those who have witnessed history can contribute their memories, their voices, to the historical record in a way that might serve to enrich the scholarship of future historians.
Which is a great and admirable mission. But while they are very different in impact and gravity, both 9/11 and Mozilla’s rising from the ashes of the browser wars as a viable Open Source alternative to Internet Explorer are Big Events, events that warrant the time, money, and effort that building an online database represents.
But one of the really great things about the internet is its ability, in its near-infinite expandability, to meet niche demands, to offer up a space for any topic under the sun. There’s no topic too obscure to find a home in some far corner of the World Wide Web.
This means that the internet presents an opportunity for groups of loosely affiliated people to navigate common memories. We can crowdsource the details of even small, personal memories.
I came across a really great example of this phenomenon when the multi-talented cartoonist Dave Sherrill recently posted a comic strip that loosely recreated the plot of a fondly– but vaguely– remembered children’s book from his youth in a LiveJournal community that helps people find the titles of half-remembered books.
Within a couple hours, a community member had recognized the description and pointed Sherrill in the right direction. The book was Grandpas Ghost Stories
The book seems to be out of print, but there is an animated version of the story on YouTube:
Sherrill’s description of the book seems to be decent but spotty. The comic is awesome, but I doubt Sherrill would have found the title if he had simply went to Google, or even to a children’s librarian, with the vague description he was able to produce from memory. But given the ability to access a large enough aggregate of people with disparate memories, he was able to quickly (if you don’t count the time taken to draw or color the comic) find someone else who was able to help fill in the gaps in his own personal childhood memory.
With the very deeply personal way we connect with our favorite books as children, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a small revelation to Dave, something that set him off even further into other memories he had not accessed in years.
Without having to even exchange introductions and niceties, Sherrill was able to harness the collective memory of a group of people in order to supplement and enhance his own, personal memories. That’s something you’d very seldom get from old-tech systems like the reference section of a library or calling friends to see if anyone happened to recall it. It’s certainly more efficient, and less place-dependent.
To anyone who enjoyed Dave’s comic, I would encourage you to click through to his LiveJournal account– I’m a big fan of his art. And check out his band, 100 Damned Guns, as well– they’re one of the rockin’est roots-country bands out there today.
Mar/080
The Great LJ Strike of 2008, Part 2
I actually didn’t manage to log on to LiveJournal during the strike, rendering my refusal to participate moot.
What can I say? I was busy!
I’m tempted to write it off as a familial ethic with regard to strikes, claim that my father growing up in a coal mining town somehow made it impossible for me to cross a picket line– but that would be taking the easy route. The fact was, and is, that I just had a busy Friday. And as many times as I’ve been on LiveJournal sixteen times in one day, there’s just as many times that I’ve failed to participate, for a day, two days, a week.
Social networks, especially text-heavy ones like LJ, are semi-sporadic in terms of participation, even among the most addicted.
Which led me to thinking: the real problem with the kind of hybrid work stoppage/boycott that can be one’s only recourse in social networking systems has a real problem: the unavailability of a picket line.
I’d always thought of picket lines as a spectacular display on the part of the striking party, as a spectacle of solidarity and protest. But they serve a further function: they serve to create a way that those striking, those most committed to the action, can actually stand up and be counted. A picket line separates group action from a day of spiked absenteeism.
If numbers come from the LJ strike, if one were to numerically assess the efficacy of the action, I would show up as a participant, despite my desire to, if anything, participate despite, to not participate in the group action. Looking at my friends, I actually had a few friends who seem to be posting as a direct response to the action, posting somewhat low-content posts, posts they otherwise would not have made, just to stand up and be counted as non-participants. I frankly just didn’t have the time. I made a couple Twitter tweets, but other than that, I was basically just not able to take the time to be online on Friday. My feed reader was likewise neglected.
So– if one wants to effectively signal the power of a mass action in the virtual world, one needs to create a virtual picket line.
In the future, when people are boycott/striking a particular SNS in order to prove a point, it might be wise for them to create an online picket line, in addition. It could function as a sort of one-day-only petition, and users could sign using their usernames on whatever SNS is under scrutiny– this would provide the people in charge, who need to be able to gauge the power and efficacy of such a mass action in order to actually evaluate if it should be taken seriously, a data pool for comparison.
Just a thought, but I think it could be beneficial for digital organizing.
Mar/086
The Great LJ Strike of 2008(?)
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.
Sep/072
The future of H-Net… LiveJournal?
Mills Kelly has started a real debate in the last few couple weeks about the future of H-Net.
(Follow-ups can be found here, here, here, and here… And to see some of the response this engendered, check here, here, here, and here. Also, check out the discussion on the Digital History podcast.)
Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that, despite the advice of many professors and colleagues, I am not and never have been a member of an H-Net community. I have my reasons, though. And they have everything to do with why I’m writing this.
Mills’s article brings up the notion of email bankruptcy. People have begun declaring bankruptcy on Social Networking Sites. for that matter, too. Now, when I first heard about this phenomenon, it seemed a bit silly. But then I realized that this was exactly the same thing that had happened to me years ago.
You see, around 1998 or 1999, I declared (without using the term) listserv bankruptcy. After three or four years of being very active on several listservs, I realized that deleting messages from my lists was taking so much time I was neglecting to reply to emails from friends and family. I quit them all, and though I’ve joined one or two briefly since then, I’ve been listserv free for most of the last eight years.
So I guess I have a vested interest in coming up with a new, viable direction that H-Net could go in– it’s for the sake of my own professional development that I’m thinking about this, because I really don’t think I could face the possibility of joining one of those things again.
But it hit me the other day: there’s already an existing piece of open-source software that could do everything H-Net does now and more, that can play to its existing strengths and help improve aspects that are less than ideal.
The answer is LiveJournal.
Those of you rolling your eyes, please hear me out.
LiveJournal is a somewhat beleaguered website, a situation that is partially fair and partially unfair. It’s definitely a site where a lot of people are doing the kind of unintellectual, quotidian blogging that some opponents of leaving the listserv format seem to feel dominate blogging. So yeah, LJ is to a certain extent contributing to blogging’s bad rap. The site’s earliest adopters and most dedicated users have historically skewed young and female, too, and I think that this has also brought the site detractors within certain male-dominated circles of geekdom.
But the most important thing for this discussion is the software’s architecture– LiveJournal’s software is largely open-source, making it relatively easy to pick it up and throw it on another server. That’s definitely a plus for a nonprofit project like HNet.
More importantly, the LiveJournal framework combines elements of blogging, message boards, and SNSs. Transmitting H-Net to this new system would give it much more functionality.
Let’s imagine what HNetJournal might look like. The H-Net Communities that currently exist as listservs could easily exist as communities like those on LJ. Various levels of moderation can be set up on these communities, so the moderated gatekeeper function that the lists currently serve could be mirrored there.
On the other hand, communities that wanted to become more open could allow more openness in their membership and posting policies if they wished. New communities could even be set up that might be more open to those who feel excluded. There could be an H-History-Undergrad community, for example. Similarly, professors could set up a community that was limited to students in a specific, encouraging discussion out of class and getting students into the habit of seeing the learning community as an important part of education.
Beyond the community feature, however, there’s the personal-journal element– the BLOGGING element of this framework. If blogging was done by the same process as posting a new item or a comment on H-Net, I’d wager a lot more academics would begin at least occasionally blogging. And those of us who already blog could easily set up our HNetJournal blog to simply be an RSS feed of our blogs elsewhere. More eyeballs, more hits, greater readership.
These blogs, like the communities, can be as open or as closed as you want them to be. Anyone afraid of prying eyes, and using that as an excuse not to blog, could blog for a closed community of colleagues that he or she has already established contact with. On LJ it’s called your "friends list." Something more professional sounding would be necessary, but the idea’s a good one.
The friends list does several things. It allows for the above-mentioned level of control over readership for those who’re still a bit weary of being "all over the internet." It’s a blog aggregater that’s less scary than dealing with RSS feed readers for the technophobic. It allows for community building across interests, as well. You may encounter a fascinating French Medievalist whose work you want to track, even though your research in 20th century Japan isn’t really relevant. You wouldn’t need to join a French Medievalist community to maintain that contact. HNetJournal could be good for interdisciplinary discussion.
There’s the fear of losing even more readership to contend with, though. This concern is understandable and real. However, I think it could be overcome. First off, LiveJournal is actually fairly user-friendly and intuitive. I’d challenge anyone reading this with skepticism to set up an account, and play around on the site for a little while. It may have a learning curve, but it’s definitely no harder– and I’d argue it’s actually easier– than navigating WebCT, Blackboard, or PeopleSoft. Changing software and re-acclimating has simply become a part of being an academic anymore, and people eventually come around.
Another thing that could be done to curb this loss of eyeballs– and here I’ll defer to anyone with a knowledge of Perl– would be to set up email notification. LJ as it exists today already has a comment notification feature, where users can have (HTML or Plain Text) notifications of any responses to posts or comments they’ve made. I’d imagine it’d be doable to set up a periodic notification email system that simply relayed information about major activities on all of a user’s subscriptions. Thus those who want to have the information put in their inbox to peruse or ignore could continue to have this done.
…I’m sure I’ve got more to say on the topic, but I’m afraid that this post is already too long, and nobody will read it. Assuming it generates any interest, I’ll continue to ruminate and offer a follow-up post soon.
