BookBlog

A book review in the age of the internet is very different from its pre-net predecessors, though it may look superficially the same. A conversation with science blogger Bora Zivkovic, as he wrestled with deciding about books to review, prompted me to write these thoughts down.

Back in the day, before it was easy to trivially easy to search for reviews, a reader depended on their local paper or favorite magazine. So each each newspaper or magazine would cover the same books and movies. Each review would summarize the book for the reader. Readers relied on their reviewer, and the reviewer in turn strove to be an authoritative voice and “tastemaker”, helping readers choose and shaping the criteria for choice.

The old constraints that shaped the genre are gone. In the age of the internet, it is trivially easy to search for reviews. So there is less need for an basic summary of popular books – the reader can find it on Amazon. When a reader can find multiple reviews from multiple perspectives with an easy search, the old authoritative tone of voice sounds pretentious.

So, to review books in the age of the internet you need to consider: what in particular do you have to add to the reviews the reader can already find. Why do you think the work is good, based on your own expertise or perspective, what did you learn from it, why do you think your readers might or might not like it, based on your knowledge and assumptions of your audience.

Now, a book review that includes too much of the perspective of the reviewer can turn into a personal essay that takes a book as its starting point, or a meditation on the subject that says more about the book the reviewer would prefer to be written than the book that she read. These essays may be worth writing, but an essay that tells the reader more about the reviewer than the book is not a book review. The challenge is to include enough of one’s own perspective to make the review interesting and distinctive, while keeping it mostly about the book.

Another difference is timeliness – reviews on the internet don’t need to be about new things. Before good search engines, reviewers focused on things that were new, and there’s still value in timely discussion of current topics. The internet makes it easy to find discussion of books that aren’t new, and so rewards writing about them also. A review of an older book can add context since the book was written, and reevaluate what it sounds like now than earlier. Summary and recommendations are more important for older books than newer books, since the information is harder to find, and a reader needs reasons other than currency to read the book.

BoraZ, in fact, uses these principles in a review of Bonobo Handshake, a book by Vanessa Woods, about the differences between bonobos and chimpanzees, the two closest primate cousins to humans. The summary neatly analyzes the multi-threaded structure of the book, links to related sources on competition and cooperation, and puts the genetic kinship of humans, chimps, and bonobos in the context of an argument against genetic determinism. The review also touches on the reviewer’s friendship with the writer, and personal background to describe the joy of reading books that teach you about the world and get you engaged in subjects you didn’t know before. The review tells the reader about the book, what’s good about it, why they might like it, from the professional and personal point of view of the writer. It’s a strong example of a good book review in the age of the internet.

Andrew Hoppin tweeted from a session at foo camp: “software products instantiate philosophies; developers need to consider philosophy so software can have a conscience.” This is a good start but an incomplete conclusion. It is true that software embeds a lot of assumptions about the world and about people. People who practice software development often take the assumptions for granted. It is a big step forward to think about those assumptions deliberately and question those assumptions.

Considering these assumptions is particularly relevant with social software whose affordances affect the way people act with each other – consider the impact of Facebook’s poke feature or privacy policies. Exposing assumptions is good. danah boyd does this when she explains that online transparency is easier for the privileged. O’Reilly’s Designing Social Interfaces section on section on Reputation does this when it talks about the way that the use of reputation features relates to and affects the cooperative and competitive dynamics of an online community.

Hoppin’s quote says that philosophy will help software developers incorporate conscience in their work. Plato thought that philosophical reflection, if done right, would lead people to be good. But since Plato there have been a great many thinkers who come to differing conclusions about human nature and society, and there are many societies and subcultures that make differing choices. People who think through their assumptions will have different moral philosophies. Considering assumptions is a good thing to do, but it won’t lead to a single “conscience.”

And then, if tools reflect better thought-through assumptions, the “conscience” is still not in the software, but in the people who use the tools. A car can be designed to use less fossil fuels, but a driver can still use it to run over a pedestrian. Comments sections can be designed for better moderation, but people can still choose to be mean to each other – the use of “tummelling” to facilitate good conversation is a practice done by people, not software.

Thinking about the assumptions in software is a good start. It would be great to have more of it. It won’t make software “good.”

Earlier this week, I wrote about the opportunity to realize a vision of social experiences connecting people in the physical world, across application boundaries. Similar problems, and similar opportunities, are present in the business world.

As Eugene Lee described in his Enterprise 2.0 keynote the business benefits of enterprise 2.0 are realized when more people have access to information and are able to work together to solve problems across organizational silos. But if “social” is just a feature of each business application separately, the organization cannot make use of the social network for people to find information and solve problems.

Many of the standards and protocols to make this vision a reality also apply in the business world, connecting people across application silos. I describe the opportunity in the business world with more detail, on the Socialtext blog.

I went to a wedding last night. It was the first ceremony where I’d seen “you may now update your FaceBook status” as part of the ceremony. Someone mentioned that it has been done before, they’d seen videos on YouTube. Now, one might think this is a bit ironic, a nudge and wink about the omnipresence of social media in our daily social lives. But upon reflection, there’s something fitting about it. A wedding, in a world of diverse relationship choices, is (among other things) making a public statement to one’s friends and community to acknowledge that relationship. Updating Facebook status is a gesture that does exactly that, including people who are not present at the ceremony, and enabling well-wishers to chime in for public view, like the older traditions of toasts and video commentary at the wedding.

It’s when things get less public that things get more complicated in Facebook-land. Standing by the bar, a new acquaintance griped that his new girlfriend was insisting that he update his Facebook status to say he was dating her. In the world before social media, but after the cultures of arranged marriages and chaperones, there was a continuum of disclosure, where the first people to hear about a new beau/belle were one’s closest friends, and one selectively disclosed relationships in small social circles until the desire for acknowledgement and/or the power of gossip disclosed to a broader social circle. Decisions could be made ad hoc – should we go to xyz party together, and when to bring the belle/beau for the family renunion. Of course, slips in people’s desire to shape the informal information flow have long been material for comedy.

But Facebook doesn’t do a good job of that more informal disclosure. Instead of ad hoc, situational decisions, people are forced to make explicit decisions, with clumsy affordances to handle the distinctions. It’s mostly brute force – tell everyone you know about the relationship status. Which is awkward, as my reluctant conversationalist complained. Tools like LiveJournal/Dreamwidth, for example, have done a better job at facilitating selective disclosure, and their users take advantage of this capability.

The relationship between tools, and the customs and social norms people weave using the tools, is always complicated.

I’ve been writing a series of posts exploring connections between Rabbinic and contemporary thought. This page lists the posts in the series for convenience.

Socrates and the Fat Rabbis by Daniel Boyarin
Arguing with God by David Frank
The Burnt Book by Marc-Alain Ouaknin
The Mind of the Talmud by David Kraemer
Fragments of Redemption by Susan Handelman

Early conceptions of online social experience envisioned “cyberspace” as a separate world. John Perry Barlow imagined the residents of cyberspace as declaring independence from the physical world. As the use of the internet spread, it became clear that most people use the net in a way that is much more integrated to physical location. A recent study out of Hebrew University shows that most people’s Facebook friends physically closeby, among 100,000 Facebook users. Now, you might think that this is related to Facebook’s bidirectional model and reputation as a site for friends and family. But the study also found that most people also correspond by email with people in the same city (out of 4455 email messages). People’s actual social networks include many people close by.

This research is interesting, but it doesn’t capture other relevant relationships between online and face to face interactions. The email data captured location only within a city, and modern metro areas have sprawl. Among people in the same city further than walking distance or a quick drive, how often do they meet f2f, and what is the correlation between correspondence and meeting? Among a person’s overall social network, how many of the people, far AND near, are visited f2f some of the time? Is there a positive correlation between staying in touch online and getting together offline?

One of the hottest trends in social software is location services such as FourSquare and Gowalla, which tell users where their friends are. Less flashy but similar tools like PlanCast and TripIt tell people where their friends and business associates are going to be. Do these sorts of tools affect how often people connect in person? Do people meet more often? Might these tools provide vicarious experiences that displace meeting, and do people who use them actually meet less?

My anecdotal experience is that online and offline connections go together. With people who live more than, say, 10 minutes away in the same metro area, and people who live in different cities, I’m more likely to meet up face to face with the people who I see and correspond with online, and more likely to be out of touch with people I don’t see online, and meet up with them more rarely. Mark “Cheeky Geeky” Drapeau expands on this observation in Social media is useless in isolation. Drapeau observes that the set of people he corresponds with in social media extends the number of people he stays in touch with at a distance, and some of these become contacts he will periodically see in person.

I would argue that while there is such a thing as a “social media relationship,” those relationships have three main classes: (1) thin relationships, (2) thin relationships with potential, (3) relationships reinforced by real-life interactions (however infrequent). This third class is where most of the value is generated – One can generate “leads” through social media, take some relationships to the next level, create meaningful real life interaction in some form, and then strengthen the real-life relationship through interim social media use. This positive feedback loop is critical; IRL reinforces social media, and vice versa.

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The Israeli researchers study showing that people have the most frequent interaction between friends and family who live nearby is not so surprising. It would be very interesting to see if the correlations that Mark Drapeau and I observe anecdotally are quantitative trends, or is the opposite true. Are there segments and psychographic patterns for the ways that people connect online and offline use – people who are clan-centric, spending most of the time with kin, network builders like Drapeau who have many online/offline relationships, and digital hermits, whose social life consists mostly of online correspondence? The evidence shows that online and offline sociality is connected – it will be interesting to learn even more about the connections. Links to other research would be most welcome.