Architecture for civic participation

Last week’s brainstorming session on the use of social media for voter education got me thinking about the architecture that is needed for civic participation. The underlying concept is that the government provides basic infrastructure services and data. Citizens can participate in oversight and decision-making, and build tools for additional engagement, through access to services and data.

To facilitate participation, openness is needed in several layers.

  • open code and open data. These are two related families of practices that engage the community in the development and review of technology; and that make public information available to the public. Open data includes basic availability, as well as support for standards and licences that enable re-use and participation.
  • open APIs. Application programming interfaces enable developers to build on basic government infrastructure services, creating a broader ecosystem of applications that deliver value to the public without additional government funding, and that provide services that the government can’t.
  • Effective practices for social participation. Several attendees noted the problems with simple comment systems that devolve into anti-social anarchy, driving away constructive citizen participation. There are many techniques, tools, and social practices to overcome these problems. Solutions are context-dependent – there is no one-size-fits all solution.

It is exciting to participate in discussions such as the Social Media for Voter Education, the Hacking Open Government session at OSCON, and Transparency Camp West, coming up this weekend in Mountain View, that are helping to spread these ideas and encourage their implementation.

On Terence Brown’s bio of Yeats

I just read a book that I had wished existed when I was in college, but wasn’t published until later. Terence Brown’s biography of Yeats put into context the work of a poet I’d found compelling but baffling.

Reading Yeats, one can become captivated by sound, and images, and then the meaning, and back to sound and image. From The Wild Swans at Coole:

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

Dead gorgeous. And what is this Coole place, which returns again and again in Yeats’ poetry, and how is it important to the poet’s sense of the regret at the the passing of time? Who are the various women who appear and reappear as characters and muse figures in the poetry. What was up with Maud Gonne? Many of Yeats’ poems are political, and deal with events of the time. Where was he coming from, and what was he trying to say? Many of Yeats’ poems are based on some sort of mythological and/or spiritual system. What was that that about? At least for me, endnotes in anthologies provided factoids that didn’t add up to a coherent picture.

Terence Brown is a professor of Irish literature and cultural history at Trinity College in Dublin. His knowledge of historical, social, and literary background fills in the context for Yeats writing. The book is enlightening, helpful in getting more out of the work, and in some respects very discomfiting. Here is a summary of what I learned:

I just read a book that I had wished existed when I was in college, but wasn’t published until later. Terence Brown’s biography of Yeats put into context the work of a poet I’d found compelling but baffling.

Reading Yeats, one can become captivated by sound, and images, and then the meaning, and back to sound and image. From The Wild Swans at Coole:

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

Dead gorgeous. And what is this Coole place, which returns again and again in Yeats’ poetry, and how is it important to the poet’s sense of the regret at the the passing of time? Who are the various women who appear and reappear as characters and muse figures in the poetry. What was up with Maud Gonne? Many of Yeats’ poems are political, and deal with events of the time. Where was he coming from, and what was he trying to say? Many of Yeats’ poems are based on some sort of mythological and/or spiritual system. What was that that about? At least for me, endnotes in anthologies provided factoids that didn’t add up to a coherent picture.

Terence Brown is a professor of Irish literature and cultural history at Trinity College in Dublin. His knowledge of historical, social, and literary background fills in the context for Yeats writing. The book is enlightening, helpful in getting more out of the work, and in some respects very discomfiting. Here is a summary of what I learned.

Politics

In the mists of history, Yeats has a reputation as a quintessential Irish nationalist. But in his time and place he was an advocate of a highly idiosyncratic and minuscule faction in the midst of a popular movement. The center of gravity of Irish nationalism was the Catholic majority, with a rising middle class. Yeats came from a Protestant family. Though his grandparents’ family were sea-merchants, and his father rejected law practice for a life as an impecunious painter, Yeats disdained his middle-class roots and idolized the aristocracy. Yeats affiliated with the tiny minority-within-a-minority of Nationalist-sympathizing Protestant aristocrats; the Protestant landowning class had implemented English rule and were largely loyal to England.

In his poetry and plays, Yeats reached back to Celtic myth and folklore from the pre-modern past and not-yet-modern countryside, where the world of the spirit was present to people, in an attempt to forge a new culture that would rescue Ireland from the stultifying mediocrity of middle class prosaic realism. Yeats found few followers for his cultural movement. The Abbey theater company, which he co-founded in 1904 and managed in his 40s, with the goal of helping to create the cultural voice and shared self-understanding of a nascent nation, played to uncomprehending and often angry audiences. And even his own theater presented most of its plays in more modes that were more realistic than Yeats’ high ritual style.

With his aristocratic preferences and non-Christian spirituality, Yeats was often viewed, from the perspective of contemporary Nationalist perspective, with suspicion and worse. As theater-manager, and a public figure, Yeats became embroiled in a variety of controversies which didn’t go very well. Later in life, with the reputation of a literary lion, he was appointed to the Senate of the new Irish parliament. There, he advocated for freedom of speech, for separation of church and state, for legal divorce, as well as support for the arts. His goal was to prevent censorship by the Church and the philistine masses, not to facilitate democracy.

Yeats loathed the middle class. His favorite epithets include “shop-keeper” and “greasy till”. Typical examples of the contempt can be found in lines such as: “Indignant at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite/Of our old Paudeen in his shop” (Paudeen), and “What cared Duke Ercole, that bid His mummers to the market place, What th’onion-sellers thought or did/So that his Plautus set the pace For the Italian comedies (To A Wealthy Man, Responsibilities 1916). Given the hostile reception Yeats’ experimental plays received from religious censors and convention-loving audiences, I can sympathize a little bit, but not all that much. James Joyce dealt with the provincial nature of Dublin with more humor, which made for better art on the topic.

In keeping with nostalgia for the old-fashioned social structure dominated by the very rich and very poor, Yeats’ Responsibilities celebrates beggars; in Brown’s words, these representations “as a metaphor of the spiritual freedom the Irish materially minded moneyed class so signally lacks, are without purchase on much beyond the literary salon’s version of mendicancy.” As a reader, Yeats’ prejudices make me want to reach for some good healthy Whitman.

In the 1930s, Yeats looked optimistically to Fascist Italy as a potential model for a dictatorship that would spare Ireland from chaos and rule by the inferior classes. Toward the end of in his life, in the late 1930s, when he had retired from public service and the need to maintain a minimal level of social acceptability had gone, Yeats openly advocated eugenics as a way to purify the declining Irish race. Some of his very late poems look forward to a bloodbath that will purge the race of impure elements. Read without the political background, the poems are dark, disturbing, chilling, nihilist. With the political background, they are worse, and Terence Brown rightly calls them for what they are.

Spirituality and psychology

Yeats’ attraction to Celtic myth and the world of mysticism, came from a rejection of the rationalist mindset that valued Darwin, math and commerce – he considered science the “opiate of suburbia.” The focus of folklore, dominant in his early work and persistent throughout, fits squarely in heart of romantic ideology which has had incarnations ranging from late 18th century Germany through mid-20th century US. What’s distinctive in Yeats is the focus on the spiritual and psychological content of the myths. Brown writes about Yeat’s changelings as an expression of the poet’s lifelong theme of multiple and contradictory aspects of the self.

Yeats was drawn to enact his attraction to the world of spirits in personal experience. In this, he was part of a trend toward mysticism and spiritualism in late Victorian/Edwardian society. He joined the “Theosophist” sect led by Madam Blavatsky in 1887 at the age of 22, and not long after helped found the Order of the Golden Dawn. Things in his poetry; roses, birds, cats, sun, moon, oceans, trees, colors, are all pointers to symbolic meaning in these mystical systems. When the Golden Dawn fell apart due to this-worldly-infighting (Brown has a rather funny story in which Alstair Crowley shows up at the door in regalia as an enforcer for a feuding faction), Yeats turned to the creation of a personal system of mysticism. Yeats and his wife George engaged in automatic writing, where the medium dictated words from a multi-tier cast of shades. Out of this exploration, they created a detailed mystical/psychological system, which is explicated in Visions (annotated online here for those who have the patience. The system surfaces in poems – the well-known “Turning and turning in a widening gyre” from The Second Coming comes from a complex pseudo-geometrical scheme of recurring spirals of time, predicting an impending new messianic cataclypse.

Reconstructing a system of meaning out of scraps of the past was the modernist game to remake meaning in a world where old structures of meaning and social order were collapsing – Eliot captures it with the famous quote, “these fragments I have shored against my ruin.” Yeats literally lived in his rebuilt castle – he created his fantasy-role-playing game and moved in.

As a reader, the explication (and a little Wikipedia) helps me more parse more patiently through Yeats’ allusions. And as a reader, I find that the mythic skeleton works unevenly in adding depth to the poetry. Yeats uses place names, character names to give an incantatory quality and local flavor; so does Newark, Rahway, Metuchen, New Brunswick, and Trenton. When Yeats says the word Rose, or the color Yellow, it has a specific experiential meaning for a Golden Dawn adept. (Sometimes it’s just sound and decor, and I’m not the first to observe this; James Joyce parodies this tendency in early Yeats, when Yeats was live and mid-career.) Yale Prof. Langdon, in the name of the editor of the Norton Anthology says you don’t need to know the mystical correspondences to get the poetry. I think you shouldn’t, but you should get more out of it if you do, and with Yeats I’m finding that that can be more or less the case.

Yeats’ system also included a complex taxonomy of character types which puts the Enneagram to shame. The taxonomy of personality fleshes out Yeats’ psychology of masks, the idea that people, and artists in particular, act out various typed roles. This believe is rather different from the psychological myth of romantic authenticity, that one can unify, reconcile, and find the essential self within conflicting impulses and aspects of identity. Mid-life, Yeats fell hard for Nietzsche. The neurotic, conflicted poet was drawn to Neitzsche’s philosophy whereby a complex and timid man can become a hero by daring to be an asshole. And in fact, in Brown’s telling, this attitude helped Yeats be successful by enforcing his will in the management of the Abbey Theater (but, I suspect, hindered his efforts to play an ongoing role because he made so many enemies.) I appreciate Yeat’s perspective as an esthetic, and see how it helped create depth in his poetry; but not necessarily as a psychologist, moral philosopher, or politician.

Women

With regard to women, the story, at least the way Terence Brown tells it, is somewhat more sympathetic than the mental image that I had. Like many modern writers, Yeats mined his life for his poetry. The love of his life was Maude Gonne, a nationalist radical. She consistently rejected his repeated marriage proposals. The current interpretation of available evidence is that they only had a brief physical affair in a relationship that lasted decades, instead, they had an “occult marriage” where they collaborated in spiritual exploration, state that left Yeats in a state of perennial longing that his poetry saved for us in poems including the Song of Wandering Aengus:

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Out of a combination of infatuation with Gonne and rather more prosaic poverty which made him an unsuitable partner for women who sought financial stability and weren’t independently wealthy, he didn’t lose his virginity til the age of 31 with a married woman, Olivia Shakespear, who chose him as a refreshing change from her dull husband. As Brown tells the story, having actual sex had a positive influence on Yeats’ his mental health and writing.

Another influential woman in Yeat’s life was Lady Gregory, one of the tiny cadre of nationalist aristocrats. She became a patron to Yeats and her financial support took the edge of his poverty (Brown provides the numbers in Yeat’s annual budget). Brown was a bit dismissive of Gregory’s patronage: “she collected a poet” is the phrase he uses. In an era when financial models for art are up in the air, it is hard to dismiss basic patronage as a model. Coole, the place in the Wild Swans, Coole Park and Ballylee, Seven Woods and other poems, is the Gregory family estate; Yeats spent part of each year at Coole for many years. The poem at the top has the poet in his 50s feeling rueful about the passage of time, and perhaps indirectly here, about a form of life that is slowly dying. Yeats admires the feudal social structure in which peasant are tenant farmers for landlords, but that opinion was not universally shared. During Lady Gregory’s life she had recurrent problems with renter strikes that threatened to become violent. In 1927, the house was sold to the state, and after she died the house was razed to the ground.

At the age of 51, after a strange courtship and proposal to Maude Gonne’s daughter Iseult, Yeats met and married 24-year-old George Hyde-Lees on the rebound, and the marriage was surprisingly successful. The poet had met the young spiritualist through occult circles; as described above, the two collaborated on spiritual exploration and cataloging their discoveries from their ventures into the afterlife. Brown also reads the record of their spirit-world experiments as working through the psychosexual dynamics of their marriage. This story is not near the center of the bell curve, but given the variance of human relationships, it seems churlish to criticize.

Yeats’ relentless pursuit of new lovers to stimulate his libido and artistic creativity, appears, at least in Brown’s telling, to have be a pattern only in the last five years of his life. Before doing the homework, the stereotype that I had of Yeats was of a poet who deliberately and periodically picked his muses, and then stalked them for their impact on his psyche and writing. Perhaps other biographies would support this impression, but Brown does not. Yeats’ early and mid-life romantic unhappiness was transmuted into poetry, but in a less calculated version than my stereotype.

If anything, Brown may be a bit too literal about reading sexual frustration into Yeats’ images of unfulfilled yearning. To use a rather unrelated example, Jewish literature of exile carries a perennial theme of God’s distance; and the rabbis were all married, and their ideology was (often) in favor of regular, pleasurable sex. Yearning for something that is beyond one’s grasp and beyond human life is a human spiritual state, and not entirely reducible to sexual frustration.

If anything, Brown is not quite tough enough with regard to Yeat’s take on women. In the context of Yeat’s modernist peers, Brown praises Yeats’ symbolic representation of the power of female sexuality, compared to Eliot’s “mandarin mysogynistic lament.” But Yeats’ valorization of the spiritual feminine principle is not all that much better – it would take more homework to evaluate, for example, how much George contributed to his late work, unattributed. Yeats saw his lovers and muses as icons of beauty; it would be interesting to find out (and there is probably more in the record) what these interesting and accomplished women thought of him.

In A Prayer for My Daughter, Yeats expresses the hope that that she would stay away from the world of intellectual and political discourse:

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

The thought in this late poem did not appear for the first time here; Yeats expressed these ideas earlier, for example in a 1910 diary entry, and an essay on the Death of Synge, published in 1928 in which he refers fairly explicity to Maud Gonne on the unseemliness of political opinion in women. To his credit, Yeats had longstanding friendships and collaborations with interesting and accomplished women throughout his life. It’s not fair to judge by contemporary standards (although there were real live feminists at the time; the choice was available for those who sought it). Given Yeats’ opinion expressed above, it shows good judgement on Maude Gonne’s part to have refrained from marrying the poet.

As feminist, with consciousness raised early by Jane Austen and George Eliot, I can’t simply let it slide when there is a body of art that constructs women as the principle of beauty, and denies women other roles, at least in theory. Unfortunately, a history of art pruned to include only works that take for granted the subjectivity of women would be sadly short.

Summary

I found Terence Brown’s biography of Yeats really helpful. I have much better comprehension of the poems, coming out of a basic understanding of the context. If you are interested in the topic, and don’t already know the core context, I strongly recommended the book. Other bios I haven’t read include Ellman’s classic (which I suspect is more personal and poetic, and less historical), and Roy Foster’s magisterial two-volume biography, which has excellent reviews but is over 800 pages long; it was hard enough to make the time for Brown’s 400. There is an entertaining and informative book talk by Foster online, which I also recommend.

And what does this all mean to me. To be honest, I’m troubled by the politics. For an historian, the worst sin for a student of history is present-mindedness – reading and evaluating the past as if the actors were in our world. But art is a bit different. People who experience the social context of art for granted are experiencing indoctrination and propaganda – take cowboy and Indian movies for a start.

It is particularly different when one is not in school, where understanding and explication is the goal, far ahead of the experience of art. Great art hacks upon the operating system of your mind, and when that happens you are better off having a sense of what it is doing, with its ideas and its esthetics. This isn’t to advocate for the kneejerk expression of emotional reaction, the statements of nuance-free subjectivity you’ll find in, say, YouTube comments (wow, that that was the best song ever, I cried all week). Fine for a diary, but communication-free unless you’re the poster’s BFF.

Which is to say that I’m attracted to the writing, still. The early work is seductive, and the later work is terrifying. In a post-post modern era it is considered dubious to be attracted to beauty. For Yeats, who was trying in this respect to be un-modern, beauty conveyed eternity and apocalypse. To us, beauty can imply esthetic cover for conservatism, sometimes in the context of political or commercial kitch. Or romantic sincerity that we’ve learned to distrust and mock. And if not that, it’s opiate receptors and dopamine. Understanding what Yeats is doing, with his symbols and masks, his politics and psychology, helps this reader of his work feel less entranced and more like a partner in the dance.

The Kindle debacle, DRM and SaaS

A blogger who’s a library professional gives more wonderful examples of a subscriber losing access to digital content. But these examples conflate the issues with DRM, and with “software as a service” contracts.

  • Due to an oversight, a bill for an e-book service was paid one day after the due date. As a result, access to about 1000 titles was denied for the entire calendar month.
  • The Library subscribed to an e-journal for a few years, then cancelled the subscription. The publisher removed access to the entire journal; the Library could no longer access even the volumes that it had paid for.
  • An e-book publisher went out of business; the Library lost access to hundreds of titles at once.
  • Sometimes, technical/connection problems occur that make hundreds of titles (they are usually bought in packages) temporary unavailable.

However, these examples conflate several related issues with digital content – DRM and the software as a service model. Part of the problem with the Amazon 1984 is DRM and the associated metadata. When I purchase mp3s from Amazon, I can back them up, and play them in different players. If the file is a generic file without source metadata or locking capability, Amazon couldn’t take the files back if they tried.

This issue is related but different to purchasing content as a service. A better analogy to the library’s digital subscriptions are the “web songs” from lala.com. The online music service enables you to access music in three formats, CDs, mp3s, and “web songs”, which are available for 10 cents and can be streamed only. I expect that web songs would not outlast Lala’s corporate lifespan, and might go away any moment. Digital subscriptions are more like web songs. They are perpetually dependent on the existence of the provider and the terms of service.

The final issue is contract terms. There is a long tradition of contracts that give you temporary access to you don’t own. This is called “renting” or “leasing”. The library contracts are clearly rental contracts where the agreement is that service will continue as long as the library pays its bill. Rental contracts, of course, can apply to physical objects. You can lease a car, and the leasing company expects the car back when the lease is done, or if you stop paying your bill. If the lease terms are “in perpetuity”, this practically means “for the lifetime of the provider”. And even perpetual lease terms typically allow the provider to change the terms, too.

With “content as a service” buyers need to be especially aware if the service supports content they themselves contributed. When I upload content to a photo sharing service, for example, I explicitly want the right to get my content back at any time.

The issues of DRM and SaaS go together, in that it’s easier with DRM to turn contracts that seem like purchase at first glance into conditional rentals. This is what Amazon appears to have done with the Kindle. When a contract is explicitly a rental contract, the subscriber should expect to be tied to the lifetime and the changing discretion of the provider. When a contract is for downloaded, non-DRM content, it’s at least possible to create a traditional agreement of sale.

When I’ll get a Kindle

The current Kindle debacle, in which Amazon deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from the devices of people who thought they bought the book, highlights one of the three main reasons that I haven’t bought a Kindle yet.

DRM is first. The 1984 scenario shows in a dramatic fashion that when you “buy” DRM’d product you don’t own it. DRM fragments the bundle of rights you have when you buy a paper book – you can lend it, sell it, read it outloud, take it wherever you go. DRM enables the provider to set the terms, for example restricting the use of an audio feature that reads the book outloud. DRM prevents one of the main reasons that I buy books to begin with – the ability to share books with friends. The 1984 example shows the limitation clearly. In a DRM world, users do not have rights to stuff that historical experience leads them to mistakenly think they own. I’m not at all fooling about staying away from DRM, I avoided digital music until the industry walked away from DRM as the norm.

The second reason is social. If I’m getting books online, I want to be able to choose to share them. The internet makes it possible to create wonderful social applications for reading books together, commenting, annotating, creating clubs and discussion groups, discovering other peoples’ collections. LibraryThing goes a little of the way there. The Kindle experience is isolated – it’s even less social than physical books that you can at least lend to a friend. It’s less social than the bookshelves that disclose the history of your reading interests to your friends. After (and only after) the DRM is gone, good social capabilities would make it much more compelling to use a Kindle-like device – paired with a service for sharing.

The third reason is inventory. One of the big benefits of digital music is that publishers have digitized a large portions of back catalog. This means that one can search and acquire a wide variety of music, ranging from the hyper-popular to the moderately obscure. Almost everything I want to listen to, with a small number of exceptions, is available digitally. This isn’t the case for books. Kindle inventory is clustered at two ends of the spectrum. New popular books are all on Kindle. Old, classic, public domain works are on Kindle. But there’s a large number of moderately obscure, somewhat older books that aren’t. And this sort of book represents a good portion of the books I buy. The last two books I bought: an biography of an author, published in the early 90s. A music tutorial (thanks Tracy for the recommendation). Turning around to look at my bookcase – “Merchants of Desire” – a superb history of retail and mass merchandising, published in 94. More Work for Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s brilliant classic on the history of household technology, published in the mid-80s. Not on Kindle. Until the large majority of books I want to buy are on Kindle, it’s not so helpful for me.

So can I see having a Kindle-like device. Eventually. After DRM is gone. And I believe it eventually will be, just as it’s gone for music. When the social experience is better than reading printed books. And when the majority of books I want to read, including a couple of decades of back catalog are online. These things will eventually and I can wait.

Update. A blogger who’s a library professional gives wonderful examples of losing access to digital content. But these examples conflate the issues with DRM and with Software as a Service content. I unpack these issues in a separate post.

Update 2. Same reasoning for when I’ll get an iPad. The iPad will have a greater variety of content for it. But I’m not much of a gamer. Seems like a nice platform for graphic novels but seems like an expensive investment to read comic books. I’m not as opposed to consumption devices as, say, Cory Doctorow – I’ll get one when DRM is gone and when the experience can be social.

Music critic curmudgeon tells blogs & twitter to get off his lawn

The familiar complaints of old media curmudgeons bemoaning the rise of the unwashed, pajama-clad blogger tribe, have now reached the rarified domain of music criticism, with a much-forwarded entertaining rant about how blogs and twitter are ruining music.

Christopher Weingarten, a critic at the Village Voice and other publications runs through every curmudgeonly cliche in the book, raising arguments that have been swatted down for a decade by Jay Rosen and other internet-age thinkers: bloggers in pajamas, echo chamber, 140-character essays, nostalgia for savviness, all of it. Critiquing Weingarten’s arguments is like shooting fish in a barrel (in the words of some original internet ranters). I kind of hate to contribute to the negative energy, but Weingarten’s rant is getting an undue level of cheering given the retro content. So here goes.

Bloggers in pajamas
Weingarten’s first complaint is that swarms of bloggers came from nowhere to do for free, and with less quality, what music critics used to do for money. This is the “bloggers in pajamas” argument, thousands of people posting rumors and blather on the internet from their parents’ basements. Sure, the internet enables people to post junk, but also provided a platform for new projects and voices – Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, Marcy Wheeler a superb investigative analyst who blogs at Firedoglake, strong local voices such as West Seattle Blog and more. The fact that it’s easy to publish doesn’t negate or prevent powerful new voices from arising.

The echo chamber
One of the early critiques of the blogosphere is that the internet would give rise to an echo chamber where people would listen only to the voices that re-inforced their pre-conceptions. There’s a similar concern that on the internet, people self-segregate into groups for hiphop, reggaeton, viking metal, and then don’t cross the boundaries. The thing is that hasn’t turned out to be true with respect to news and politics. A Pew Internet and American Life study in 2004 found “Wired Americans are more aware than non-internet users of all kinds of arguments, even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions.”

With online music, my personal experience is that the social network helps extend preferences as well as re-enforce them. Plus, I don’t see why it’s bad thing to go to a reggaeton expert for reviews of reggaeton music. It is delightful to search the internet and find people who know about the topic they are discussing. All too often, general-purpose mainstream critics write reviews of musicians and types of music that they don’t know well and/or don’t like much.

Fans are fans!
A more interesting critique is that people who aren’t professional critics write like fans. In music blogs, “You can find out about new bands without cranky snarky stuff.” The jaded tone of the professional critic is a music-world analog to the news journalism “church of the savvy” as described by Jay Rosen. In an attempt to be “objective”, news journalists adopt a savvy, cynical attitude that can keep them from seeing the real story – for example, when “horse race” coverage predominates over actually covering the differing records and policies of politicians. Internet-style journalists don’t pretend to be dispassionate and free of opinion. They disclose their beliefs and desires, and are more credible for it.

Now, simple-minded music fandom is not very interesting. Look at youtube or last.fm shoutbox comments and you can see fans saying unedifying things like “awesome song!” and “best solo evar!”. Educated fandom on the other hand, involves discussing the sound, emotion, influences, performances – from the perspective of someone who continues to be excited and moved by the music. It’s interesting that when musicians talk about their heroes, mentors, who they’re listening to, they sound like fans, not like jaded critics.

Weingarten alleges that there has been a loss of venues to explain *why* a piece of music is good or bad is nonsense – “google: band review” will often find informed and insightful reviews and opinions about pretty obscure acts. What is actually missing is is better tools and venues for fans to have intelligent discussion. Currently, the intelligent discussion seems to be fragmented in harder-to-find online forums.

Loss of elite status
Music criticism was dominated by a handful of elite voices back when you needed an expensive printing press or radio license or TV channel to get the word out, just as opinion columnists like Tom Friedman and David Brooks used to have more exclusive status. These days, there’s no longer an exclusive club of arbiters. I understand why Weingarten cares that his elite status is devalued, but not why anyone else should care. There was also nostalgia when the rise of printing enabled members of the hoi polloi to read and write. From the view of history, there is very little sorrow for the monks’ monopoly.

Crowd sourcing killed punk rock
The reason to lament the loss of the elite, says Weingarten, is that “people have awful taste.” If opinions about music are left up to people who aren’t professional critics, then the only thing left will be mediocrity. The thing is that the internet isn’t just “people” it’s a ton of individuals with widely varying tastes, backgrounds, and expressive skill. The beauty is that on the internet, you are not forced to pay attention to people you think are mediocre or dull. On Twitter you choose who to follow. You choose which blogs to read, based on your evaluation of taste. Unlike the mass media world, you’re not stuck with a handful of magazines and radio stations.

Not only that, the argument that he makes is applies even more strongly mass market hit-based model that’s being replaced. “All this music that rises to the middle – boring, bland white people with guitars.” Remember the good old days of clearchannel radio? You couldn’t possibly get any more bland than that. It was the mass market model that drove extreme homogenization of music, and it’s the “long tail” on the internet that is facilitating the recovery of things that have audiences smaller than mega-popular.

Down with Guitars!
To prove his point about value of being jaded and opinionated, Weingarten makes a point of trashing “guitar bands”. Now, I have to admit that I’ve never been particularly fashionable. Clearly I missed the memo to purge guitars from my iTunes, and can’t say I regret it. This probably puts me into one of the many categories of listeners that he disdains. (To be a slightly less snarky, there is plenty of boring music with guitars, synthesizers, fiddles, horns, you name the instrument used in popular music. Picking on an instrument as the epitome of dull seems philistine to me.)

Shakespeare in 140 characters
If you can’t beat them join them – Weingarten is taking his music criticism to Twitter. There, Weingarten subscribes to the absurd fallacy that writers now need to compress their writing into 140 character chunks. Following this fallacy, Weingarten is spending this year writing 1000 reviews of albums on Twitter in 140 characters or less. Social media savvy folk know that Twitter is the new headline — when you have something extended to say, you don’t write 100 tweets, you write an essay and post a link to it from Twitter.

Compressing his reviews to 140 characters this limits Weingarten to the tone of savviness and snark that bedevils the critic tribe. Recent examples of snark:
473: Major Lazer/Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do: Bug-style dancehall dumbed down for people that wear scarves in the summer.#4
472: Cheap Trick/The Latest: There’s more to power-pop than just hooks.#3

Let’s say out of those 1000 recordings he likes 50. I’d much rather he write longer posts on the 50 and link to them. Unless there’s some really interesting reason he doesn’t like something, I don’t want to read it.

Discovery and aggregation
So, what to do now that new bands are being discovered by people on blogs and Twitter. One of the roles that critics can continue to play is to aggregate information discovered around the web. This, too, is displeasing to Weingarten, who looks back fondly on the time that critics helped spot bands.

Web-savvy journalists from Dan GIllmor to Josh Marshall and others take happy advantage of the state of affairs where, in Gillmor’s words “My readers are smarter than I am”. They realize that their readers include people with information and expertise, and rely on their broad community for tips, fact-checks. If Weingarten respected his audience more, he might be happier about picking up information from readers.

Summary
Weingarten’s rant applies to music criticism the full range of fallacious, self-interested arguments by old media journalists lamenting the decline of their once-privileged position. The arguments are even inconsistent — the internet is somehow leading bland homogenization and narrow specialization at the same time. Critics on the internet don’t bother to explain “why”, and the response is 140-character reviews.

There are real challenges and opportunities in the new world of social media influenced music. I don’t see Christopher Weingarten articulating compelling problem definitions or solutions. In a world where everyone is trying to understand and adapt to new conditions, I don’t want to be too hard on Weingarten. It would be easier to be more generous if his rant didn’t take aim at the listening public and many of its subcultures. Attacking fans instead of adapting only increased the depth of the music industry’s woes. In music distribution, initiatives like Trent Reznor’s to reach out to fans are working a lot better than strategies attacking fans. Hopefully as more people engage and innovate, we’ll see the music commentary equivalent of this superb presentation by Michael Masnick on Trent Reznor’s innovations in music distribution.

Updated last paragraph to sound less hard on Weingarten and harsher on fan-bashing.

Social and conceptual models for Google Wave

Over the last decade, wikis, blogs, social networks, social messaging, social sharing apps, google docs and other tools have been providing lighter weight, faster vehicles for collaboration and communication that the old lumbering battleships, office documents and email. Now Google’s Wave is a depth charge aimed at the battleships. Google Wave is based on a powerful technical concept, using a realtime chat protocol and stream model as the foundation for communication and collaboration applications. For these reasons, Google deserves a lot of credit for pushing innovation, rather than simply cloning the old models using servers in different closets.

Fundamentally, Google Wave is technology-driven innovation. And Google Wave raises some pretty large questions about the cognitive and social models that people will need to understand and use Wave-based tools.

Conceptual model

The first big set of questions relate to the conceptual model. Wave attempts to mash up email threads, documents, and streaming communication. Each of these is familiar and not that hard to understand. The combination seems a bit mind-bending.

Email and forums are clunky in many ways, but they mirror conversational exchanges in an understandable way. Albert says something, and Betty replies. However, when replies are interspersed between paragraphs, and the conversation digresses, it can get difficult to follow. Wave uses a collaborative document-like model to make the changes visible in real time. This is cool and clever. It also needs a rich combination of social conventions and features to not get completely incomprehensible. Communities using wikis rely on rich social conventions and gardening tools to dispense with the need for inflexible pre-defined workflows. Wave is a toolset with even more flexibility than a wiki, with even more interactive content. This poses even greater challenges to help people understand how to use it and be productive.

The model of time has perhaps the greatest potential for confusion. In an email or forum thread, the latest contribution appears at the top of the thread. In a document, including a collaboratively edited document, there is a “face” to the document that appears as a working model of a final version. In a chat room, the latest comments appear at the bottom of the screen. In a rich “Wave”, it’s harder to tell which items in the wave are newer, older, more or less definitive, without scrolling through the whole process from the beginning. It is easy to imagine getting seasick.

Another conceptual innovation is “replaying” a wave. In the conventional model, there are known techniques to reflect the current state of understanding. When there are comments interspersed between paragraphs in email/forum threads, it can be difficult for newcomers get the gist of what has occurred. But there is a time-honored way to bring people up to speed – summarize the conversation to date. The summary has a social purpose, too, it steers the discussion toward a state of current understanding. A document or PowerPoint presentation can look deceptively finished, and close off potentially warranted conversation. A document is an artifact that reflects the end of a collaborative process. But a document can also be summarized and skimmed.

The presenters kvelled, and the audience cheered, when the demonstration showed new participants using “playback” to recap a wave to date. But this seems like world’s most inefficient way to get up to speed – to understand the end result of a conversation, you need to spend nearly as much time as the initial participants did in getting to that point. A streaming audio/video/screencast presentation, or a realtime chat, can be quite rich, and can be played back, but it isn’t skimmable or summarizable. It’s not clear that introducing that model to summarizeable documents and threads is a great thing.

My biggest areas of doubt about the Google demo in particular is that in some ways the hybrid combines the worst traits of its parents. Does the result have hybrid vigor or mutant weakness? What mental models are needed to understand this psychedelic blend of realtime, threaded, and document content?

Missing social model

The second set of questions relates to the social model. The Google Wave demo truly begged a large number of questions about social models for wave-based tools. The demo seemed to use a fairly primitive concept – an individual’s address book that lets that person add a new person to an email thread.

As someone involved in designing social models for tools used by organizations, this model is an intuitive way to start, but does not go very far. First of all, who has the ability to add people to the conversation? Is it everyone, or only the person who created it? Can invitation be delegated? Can a person add himself or herself? Do these permissions vary by wave? What about existing group and networks? In social sharing tools like Facebook, sharing a message or object shares it with one’s social network (or a defined subset). Twitter, sharing is easly visible to followers, and visible with a little more effort by everyone. In organizations, there are pre-defined groups (say, the marketing team) that one might want to share with. The differences between these models make a vast difference between how the tools are used and what they are good for.

Another issue is social scale. Adding people and making interspersed comments could be intuitive in small groups, but could easily get confusing or chaotic in large groups. Long ago, Roberts Rules of Order were invented to facilitate orderly conversations with large groups of people to debate contentious topics. Group blogs and forums have developed reputation and rating tools to address the signal to noise ratio on large groups. What sorts of rules, tools, and processes will be needed to have socially effective communication and collaboration in larger groups when Wave is used in the world?

What the world saw in May was merely a demo. The Google team was up front about the state of affairs. They weren’t doing FUD-style theater claiming to have already created a completed application to scare competitors and stop other developers in their tracks. They were describing a prototype application built on a new platform, and encouraging developers to explore and extend the concepts they demonstrated.

Next exploratory steps

The reality of open-ness has not yet lived up to the promise. In order to join the developer program, you need to tell Google exactly what you plan to build with their new platform. Which is rather hard to say when you haven’t had the chance to play with it yet. Google is also promising to open source the technology. Open source works well when there’s a community engaged with the technology and contributing. It will be interesting to see if Google can be successful in turning its as-yet-private code and process into something that others participate in.

In order for the social practices and designs to be worked out, people need to be using the technology. Google needs to get this technology out of the lab and into the hands of users and developers so people can start to figure out how and whether the conceptual and social model issues can be addressed.

But it’s early days. As someone wisely observed on Jerry Michalski’s Yi-Tan call, an audio online salon that addresses emerging technology topics, it took three years for Twitter to get to critical mass, and Twitter has an extremely simple usage model and a trivially easy model for extensibility. Google Wave isn’t even out in the world yet, and is a lot harder to grok for users and developers. One of my favorite quotes is from Paul Saffo, “never mistake a clear view for a short distance.” Like hypertext did, the concepts embedded in Google Wave could take decades to make their way into common usage. As with hypertext, there may be many years of tools that instantiate concepts of real-time blending before achieving mainstream adoption. Google’s tools and apps may or may not be the catalyst that gets us there.

In the mean time, this is pretty deep food for thought about how and where to integrate real-time communication and collaboration into regular work and life. Much praise is due to Google and the Wave teams for pushing the boundaries instead of cloning familiar models.

Of course Twitter is conversation

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Drapeau wrote a post that alleged that Twitter was not a tool for conversation, but for broadcast. It’s a provocative point, and is clearly false. Twitter isn’t a very good medium for extended conversation – but it’s obviously used for both conversation and broadcast.

The article uses statistics about the number of posts per Twitter account to infer that most Twitter activity is publishing. This isn’t a good interpretation of the facts for a couple of reasons. The low number of posts per account is almost surely evidence of a high rate of “dabbler” use. People sign up for Twitter, look around, and go away. The data about number of posts per account doesn’t say anything about people who are active on Twitter but use it primarily to consume content produced by others. There isn’t any evidence about the relative ratio of reading vs writing.

The second misreading relies on the Pareto principle – the highest volume of posts comes from a few people. This is true but irrelevant. Let’s say CNN has a service that publishes 100 updates per day on news stories. And two people have a conversation consisting of 5 posts each. These are two different, valid use cases. The existence of high-volume broadcast messages doesn’t somehow negate the fact that some people are talking to each other.

Direct evidence that that Twitter is conversation can be seen in Tweet Tweet Retweet a research paper by danah boyd and fellow researchers studying the use of Twitter. According to the paper, “36% of tweets mention a user in the form ‘@user’; 86% of tweets with @user begin with @user and are presumably a directed @reply.” The data uses on “a random sample of 720,000 tweets captured at 5-minute intervals from the public timeline over the period 1/26/09-6/13/09 using the Twitter API. This sample includes tweets from 437,708 unique users.” Another study with over 1 million tweets shows the same pattern – 39% tweets have an @user mention and 19% contain questions. (Thanks, Juan Carlos Muriente, founder of )

That looks like conclusive proof of the conversational use of Twitter. This surely dovetails with my own experience. In the last week, I’ve had conversations on distributed social networks, music, and Bay Area public transit. In these conversations I learned new information, met new people, shared ideas, and set the stage for follow-on activity. Twitter works for conversation, and the open nature of twitter sparks conversations that might not occur otherwise. It is true that Twitter is a not a good medium for in-depth, extended conversations. Messages are restricted to 140 characters. There isn’t visible threading (although thread info is kept in the data, allowing for threaded views such as Tweetboard.) The richest conversations sparked by Twitter often take place on Friendfeed, where replies are threaded in FriendFeed.

Twitter is good for short, fun and/or productive conversations that bring in often-unexpected relevant people through the social network. Deeper conversation and deeper collaboration need to segue into other modes. The next frontier for development, being pushed in different ways Google Wave,Citability, and other tools and concepts, will be means to connect shorter, real-time conversations with more in depth conversation and collaboration.

WordPress MU, BuddyPress, and distributed community

Over the 4th weekend I did a test install of WordPress MU and BuddyPress. There are several community projects that I’m involved with that could use this sort of technology, and I wanted to explore how far these new tools get there. The answer, I think, is not quite that far yet.

WordPress MU allows you to create a multi-blog site (for example, a blog hosting service, multiple blogs for local food in different communities). BuddyPress lets you set up a social network with profiles, a “shoutbox-like” feature, activity streams, and groups. In theory, this could let you connect a social network of social networks. In theory, the “open stack” of standards would enable independent sites to hook into the network, too. But we’re not there yet.

Here’s the vision that would mirror the structure of existing communities in the world. Say, the SF Bay Area environmental community. There is a large loosely connected overall community. There is no way to get a big picture of what’s going on. Individuals have closest ties to a number of smaller groups in their town, subject matter area, political group, affinity groups. I’m using the environmental community as an example, but see this model everywhere – in politics, music, sports, many places people get together.

So, imagine:
* a main site that aggregated posts, calendar events, and a view of the overall people network, giving an overview of the community.
* “chapter” sites that have their own posts, discussions, calendar items, and social ties
* independent sites, with existing urls and applications, that register with the central community and have their news, calendar events, and activities aggregated into the main site view.
* each “chapter” and independent site has substantial power to communicate with its group of users (unlike the FaceBook model.)

An individual has a single login for the main site and its chapters. Oauth is used to bridge authentication for people whose primary identity is kept at an independent site.

The OpenStack conversation is currently focused on solving authentication technical and usability problems. These are needed and useful. But authentication is just convenience. We’re saving people from typing another username and password.

Distributed communities are about killer applications – about doing powerful, bottom up community organizing and political campaigns, about building hyper-local news sites with a sense of community that reflects how people affiliate and feel, about enabling networks of people who engage with music, sports, gardening, some sort of culture. I’m really eager to see progress at the functional end of the stack – the standards and sample apps that actually let you bridge and aggregate social networks.

I wrote a bit about this topic earlier here, focusing on distributed profile aspect.

Facebook community fail

The devil’s promise with Facebook Connect was websites and communities wouldn’t need to worry their pretty little heads about user management and communication infrastructure. There was one true social network; and it lived in Facebook. All the site needed to do was cede their member login and identity to Facebook. In exchange, Facebook would bring to the site the real social network – all of your users, and all of their friends who use Facebook to share your good word. But it doesn’t work that way. I’d written about this in principle, but got bit by it in practice about a month ago.

I’m co-organizing an event on Social Media for Voter Education with California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. The event was originally scheduled for May 27, but the Secretary came down with strep and cancelled on the afternoon of the 27th. I used Facebook to manage the RSVPs. When I got the call from the Secretary’s office, I tried to use Facebook to notify the eighty-ish people who had signed up and said they would or might to come to the event that night. Unfortunately Facebook adds a delay if you want to send email to “many” people. That message didn’t get out until later that night. I used Twitter, an email to co-organizers, and old-fashioned social networking got the word out, but there were still some people who traveled to the event, only to find the “Postponed” sign on the door.

Facebook was the intermediary between our event and the participants, and when it came to crunch time, Facebook didn’t come through, and didn’t have a reliable way to reach people. Facebook has no obvious interest in making it effective for organizers to communicate effectively with the community. For an organization that needs reliable communication, outsourcing community management to Facebook isn’t a good deal. Groups are much better off with systems that let them manage and communicate with their own communities, using social network services as overlay but not as a core component.

If you are interested in the event itself, it has been rescheduled to July 29 at 7pm in San Francisco. I’m still using Facebook, because that’s the only way I can reach the people who signed up for the original event. And for the next event, I’ll want alternatives to Facebook with reliable communication.

Punk icon loves Elton John – fashion is out of style

Earlier this week, record label head, old skool LA punk Brett Gurewitz tweeted that he loves Elton John. He’s not kidding. His Last.fm playlist is linked on his bio. The queen of pop piano is number 3 in the most-played artists list, next to the Killers, the National, David Bowie, Hot Chip, and LCD Soundsystem.

Back in the day, the punk ethos was aggressively opposed to middle of the road, safe, pretty, pop/rock music that got radio airplay and commercial success. If you were cutting edge, then you liked things edgy, dark, weird, ugly, distorted. Either brutally curt or meandering.

The thing is that when you are a rebel, you are defined by your enemy. In retrospect, maybe the taste of the avant garde was harmed by the dominance of the commercial. To be hip, you needed to sneer at music that was popular, pretty and well-structured. That eliminated a lot of mediocre and well-forgotten schlock, but also cut out a lot of music that, in retrospect, was great or good.

So Gurewitz saying he loves Elton John comes across a radical statement. Now, Bad Religion the band always liked melody, and maybe they were never as punk-elitist as the Bad Religion fans I knew back in the day. Publicly coming out for Elton John, or Crosby Stills, Nash and Young (or pick your fashion poison) is an expression of the spirit of the time right now.

By contrast, Jim O’Rourke, the Chicago avant-guitarist who completed the studio production of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, appears to have hipster contempt honed to a fine art. While Wilco is less avant garde than it thinks it is, O’Rourke on his home turf is a master of truly “out” experimental improv. In 1999 and 2001, he made a couple of albums, Eureka and Insignficance with stripped down and much more straight structure and melody.

Seemingly in exchange, the lyrics are misanthropic edging at times into sociopath territory (seriously, I’m not gonna link to 3-way, having friends with disabilities who’ve had problems with fetishist stalkers). These albums seem like they’re intended to be a rude joke on bourgeois fans of artful music who’d love the elegant spare guitar and not bother to listen closely to the lyrics until it’s too late.

But the joke is on O’Rourke – the economic structure that drove the hostility is crumbling. The message from Gurewitz is that in age after the fall of the megahit, you don’t need to hate on things that are pretty and people who fall for the pretty. You can pick and choose, because pretty doesn’t mean selling out anymore.

As the big hit model fades these days, a lot of people are listening to older stuff. Only 35% of 2008 album sales were for 2008 releases; the lowest ever measured. Some of the older stuff is deep back catalog that never was popular. And some of it is music that once was both very popular and very unhip.

So we’re going through older stuff to find the things that were good even though they were popular. Part of the difficulty here is that the popular stuff was way overplayed – we’re retrieving it not from obscurity but from seemingly knowing it too well. The catchy tunes are stuck in our heads and our guts whether we like them or not, whether they ever were good or not.

When Cake covers Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, people think the band is being ironic, but they say they’re not, and I believe them. Sincerity is the new sincerity. Art-guitarist Bill Frisell covers Streisand’s People because he likes the tune (there it helps that he’s an instrumental guy and leaves out the words). The cool thing is to find what speaks to you and what you think is genuinely good, and rescuing songs from decontexualized top 40, where all you heard was fashionable sound.

p.s. Epitaph is a Socialtext customer.

p.p.s. Edited to cut a few paragraphs on my personal explorations of the tensions & relationships between the popular and the specialized. Folks who are interested can find that thread on Last.fm and occasional link notes on FriendFeed.