There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet ...
- T.S. Eliot
I live my life as a fairly insular individual, at least as far the social world outside my house is concerned. This isn't to say that I don't engage in lots of different activities outside that space, just that most people don't know about them. And why would they care to, anyhow? The existence of a Floridian graduate student is not something many people would find immediately compelling as a plot teaser. As self-evident as this statement might appear, it doesn't really square with the reality of having immediate access to a massive population of individuals whose day-to-day and even moment-to-moment activities can be easily observed on the Internet. In this brave new world of digitally enabled anti-privacy campaigns, an increasing number of people can be found asking themselves a common question, "Am I interesting enough for others to want to keep track of my life course?"
The term "broadcasting" has its origin in the practice of sowing crops by scattering seeds over a wide field. Midwestern radio engineers with backgrounds in farming adopted the term to refer to an analogous dissemination of media signals across the frequency spectrum and geographic areas. The opposite of broadcasting is "narrowcasting", alluding to the size and scope of more specifically targeted audiences. The practice of "lifecasting" (no, not the faux-sculptural practice, but that is an interesting metaphor) which has emerged on websites like Justin.tv are the result of new media producers tapping perhaps the narrowest audience and content available: people interested in a mostly obscure individual's everyday life. Who are these people? Voyeurs? Fans of The Truman Show? The same sort of folks that like to watch aquariums? Or perhaps reality TV fans looking for more reality, like teenagers switching from WWE to UFC.
The medium of lifecasting is largely audiovisual content streamed over the Internet, complemented by other web-accessible text and graphical materials. The expansive nature of information transfers online allows these to be mostly unmediated, in the sense that they are more or less constant and not edited before "publication". It used to be difficult to strap on equipment with the ability to provide the perspective of a first person shooter in the real world, lesser yet have the recorded content simultaneously uploaded online. Now these tasks can be accomplished with a cell phone and a few choice accessories. The software is free and the necessary mobile data service is now widely accessible in urban areas. The ability to document one's own existence in situ with reasonably high fidelity of perspective is at last available to the masses. A question many media scholars are asking is: "What they do with these newly accessible powers?" In classic recursive form, the other one they simply must progress towards is "What will these tools do to them?"
Looking at photos of evolving on-person camera gear through the years has the effect of making one want to shout, "The cyborg cometh!" in a fit of anticipatory dystopian terror. Still, we can hope for better if this movement's more artistic roots are taken into account. Jean-Luc Godard said, "Cinema is not a dream or a fantasy. It is life." For cinema verite and the direct cinema movements, that meant something more nuanced than what we see online today. Andy Warhol, a fan of such approaches, gave them perhaps their most honest assesment when he intoned, "I like boring things." Lifecasters don't seem to be much interested in avante garde film or art, though. Instead, they seem very straight forward, narcissistic, technophiles. Even with growing public awareness of streamable first-person accounts of thousands of individuals lives, the most popular dozen among them today generates less than fifty simultaneous viewers on average at any given time. The experience of watching them certainly unique, but very different from what we have come to expect in recent years from "reality" entertainment.
It is quite possible to assert that the general concepts behind lifecasting are not so new at all. The precursor term, "lifelogging", can easily be applied to diary writing, an activity of common people going back at least a few hundred years in the West. Over the last century, this practice became a more conscious form of self-exploration practiced in greater or lesser sincerity by a number of prominent intellectuals interested in their own minds, such as Carl Jung and Aleister Crowley. The psychological effect of feigning an audience for self expression has not been particularly well explored, but there is circumstantial evidence that diarying can produce greater feelings of control and calm in adverse circumstances, perhaps most famously demonstrated in the case of Anne Frank. There is also the possibility for this activity to become more compulsively oriented, as in the case of Jerry Davidson, a man busy keeping record of every action he's taken since 1955, no matter how insignificant.
A decade ago, we might have looked to zines to find the most individually oriented forms of published expression. Their amateur "do-it yourself" ethos often hinged on particular subcultural styling that incorporated personal narrative and emotive, hand-drawn representations of the writer, their friends, and their often trying life circumstances in a particular scene. Zines as a popular media format began to fade in the late 1990s as the Internet opened up cheaper and easier ways to express oneself to larger audiences. Today, it is fair to say that the phenomena has been vastly overshadowed by the rise of webblogs, a format which has gained incredible traction in the interceding years. There are just so many of them, perhaps 200 million by now! However, while blogs have certainly played a role in changing reading habits and altering many broadcasting practices, their overall cultural impact is more difficult to assess.
Diaries, zines, blogs, and lifecasting are all very different forms of individual expression. Though the diversity of individuals engaging in the activity of creating them has arguably grown, the diversity of topical matter has become exponentially higher still. Greater access to the means of production has ensured that people all across the globe can participate, but this has also ensured that individuals will attempt to differentiate themselves by delving into topics outside themselves. For this reason, blogs today often only feature the lives of their authors in a tangential fashion, akin to what readers of might expect of the lifestyle columnist in their local newspaper. It is difficult to find a topic or subtopic or even a concept that does not have at least one blog more or less solely dedicated to its exploration. It may still be possible to find an empty demographic box for an ambitious lifecaster to fill, given they have the requisite time and technology at their disposal.
The race to stake a claim to one of the vast number of possible themes is not yet over, but it can be said to have entered its last (never-ending) lap, much like the simpler scurry for Internet domain names did at the time of the .com bust. For better or worse, this has bred a certain kind of reluctance to get into the game late. In asking my students to create personal websites for themselves as part a senior seminar, I often hear the complaint, "But everyone already has a blog... so what's the point?" I try to impress upon them that there are stark differences between blogs and websites, but alas, their premise is basically correct. The expansion of blog software has succeeded in making every website a potential blog, and produced many poorly-attended efforts in the process. Blogging is an especially consuming practice mostly because it is important to remain vigilant in always considering what topics to write about in order to entertain others - that is the main difference between the nature of blog content and diary content.
Many people just don't have the compositional ambition to sustain such a project. One does have to write in a very well defined fashion, a task that would stress many people's skills, young ones especially. They are much more comfortable with the medium of instant text messaging. The technology that has sprung up to embrace this level of competency and urge for immediacy is called "microblogging". The preeminent service in this field is called Twitter. It allows users to post short messages (limited to 140 characters) from mobile phones or using chat software on their computers. Many commentators initially regarded the flood of so-called "tweets" as an unending and unnecessary string of incessant banalities, but as higher profile users began adopting this service, it has come to be seen as something more than a silly web anomaly. Some have even begun to see this mode of communication as a means to produce the effect of "ambient intimacy". Leisa Reichelt, the term's inventor, writes
"It is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr (the most popular photo sharing website) lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight. Who cares? Who wants this level of detail? Isn’t this all just annoying noise? It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. Knowing these details creates intimacy and also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catch up in real life. It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch."
Proprietary microblogging technologies (like Yammer) have begun to be adopted by many technology firms to encourage groups of young workers members of product development teams keep better tabs on what they are working on or thinking about at any given time. This is the nature of cultural expansion in the Internet Age - many websites seem to have spawned their own social networks now as well. This trend clearly has potential negative side effects for employees since it can result in a form of sousveillance, whereby these workers feel compelled to justify most moments in their day as being productive. It can have a similar effect on individuals outside workplaces as well, in the sense that it makes them feel as though if they are not disclosing their activities to others, that they must not be doing anything meaningful with their time.
This kind of sentiment has great resonance among young people today and may help explain why so many describe themselves as "addicted" to their favorite social networks. Facebook has expanded its own use of microblogging technology and "feeds" of friends' activities updates. This leads us to the question: Is Facebook not the ultimate "lifelog" in the original sense of the term? Generically, the term "lifelog" or "flog" is used to describe a storage system that can automatically and persistently record and archive some informational dimension of a user's life experience in a particular data category. Isn't this is exactly what Facebook's design accomplishes through the systematic organization of activities (events, relationships, groups, etc) and descriptors (photos, ratings, comments, etc)? DARPA's short lived Information Awareness Office (created after 9/11 but cancelled in 2003 due to public outcry over its potential to invade citizens' privacy) had drawn up plans for a federally funded LifeLog program whose stated goal was to
"...tracing the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships by creating an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities... aiming to compile a massive electronic database of every activity and relationship a person engages in. This is to include credit card purchases, web sites visited, the content of telephone calls and e-mails sent and received, scans of faxes and postal mail sent and received, instant messages sent and received, books and magazines read, television and radio selections, physical location recorded via wearable GPS sensors, biomedical data captured through wearable sensors, The high level goal of this data logging is to identify "preferences, plans, goals, and other markers of intentionality."
Social networking sites are the largest repositories for personal information in existence today. Federal agencies would need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on investigation efforts to produce a individual dossier of comparable breadth and quality. Instead, in the spirit of Web 2.0, these materials are voluntarily generated by "users communities" - meaning people's friends, family, and coworkers. The range and depth of this information store continues to deepen as more sources for data become possible to integrate into their system. Silicon Valley is still abuzz about the recent launch of Facebook Connect, a service that allows users of various web services to register using their Facebook login credentials. This convenience also facilitates the transfer of information accumulated on ecommerce sites back into the Facebook data silos where it can be easily concatenated with the rest of the accumulated knowledge about a particular individual.
This has resulted much rejoicing among marketers, much salivating among rival information accumulators (Google especially), but a very muted outcry from privacy advocates. If corporate interests can gain access to demographics, attitudinal measures, and behavioral patterns, the theoretical trinity of targeted advertising can be achieved. Moreover, users are now increasingly encouraged to provide "status updates" as well as current geographic coordinates to these systems in the name of "helping you stay in touch". This mix allows actors working for business interests to generate what would on-demand and on-location multimedia stimuli that approach perfect predictive capacity of consumer desire and purchase potential. The virtual wishing well that was once only obliquely referred to as a "search engine box" has now been more honestly rebranded into "What are you doing?" and "What do you want?" prompts. With these tools in hand, it would seem impossible to not make a potential sale - they are "reading your mind" in the classic behaviorist sense. Allow me to offer a very near-futurist scenario:
I am walking through a shopping center that just happens to house an electronics store. My phone knows I am there because it has built in GPS capacity. It has all the awesome features of today's hottest gadgets, but both the device and the service have been given to me free of charge, on the basis of an agreement allowing the provider to show me a certain number of rich contextual advertisements every day. My dirty consumerist secret is that I want one of the new OLED display screens that have recently come out on the market. My phone alerts me to the fact that the store is carrying the specific model I have been looking at on some entertainment product review sites. The data accumulated though all my searching and surfing now becomes a tool used to sell me the item it has inferred I desire. It tells me that this store can offer a better deal or extra accessories or same day delivery. It offers statistics showing me how environmentally friendly the technology is compared to what I currently use and how much money it would save me on my utility bills. I see lists friends who have also expressed interest in these products or who have already bought and positively reviewed theirs.
What can I do? Marketers, these so-called "numerati" will have leveraged my desires and psychological weaknesses against my will to delay gratification. Currently, these people and their systems disparage people like me as "barnacles" - those with no real brand loyalty who buy whatever is cheapest. I am the cold hearted opportunist ignoring their ad campaign and sales efforts. Unluckily, retailers will eventually be able to shut the door on people like me, just by keeping track of what I have bought in the past and wisely choosing not to offer the same sort of tempting goodies that they do to more suggestible consumers. They will break down my attitudes and behavior with statistical software and predictive modeling, just like weathermen and day traders do today. They will continue to do their best to ingratiate themselves to us in the process. No one is immune to these siren calls, especially when they have been so whole-heartedly embraced as innovative, cost-saving, pragmatic, and entertaining. Moreover,We believe that these very democratic-seeming Internet technologies allow us to assume a greater presence than ever before, much as radio did for FDR and the American presidency.
From freedom comes profitability. It seems all but guaranteed. From whence comes resistance? The anti-consumerism movement still advocates the value of unique craftware and DIY creations over the mass produced, homogeneous products found in stores. However, what I think we find now is that the search capacity information technology affords us has lead to "the long tail" of more unique products sold to a smaller number of consumers. Sure, every hipster might be wearing a screenprinted T-shirt with an ironic message or band logo, but there are just so many different designs and homegrown ecommerce portals to be had out there. The mass customization that computer-aided design and manufacturing offers seems like a direct refutation of the traditional critiques, forcing them to dig deeper and try concepts like selling used T-shirts that come with personal stories. Shopping is so much more interesting and fast paced online than it ever was at malls. We flit around from site to site, almost instantly comparing products, prices, reviews with no checkout lines looming in the distance. It makes us feel like we are the pilot of our destinies, but this an illusion, we remain half-awake passengers tonight.
In the spirit of self-disclosure and its more genuine cousin, reflexivity, I must divulge now that I too keep blogs and presences on multiple social networks. Everyone seems to be feeding the beast these days. I like to tell people that these are mostly just there for research and other pragmatic purposes, but surrounding that kernel of truth is a common ego-centered deflection of many people using such technologies. We want to project ourselves out into the social world. I suspect this desire to be known is somehow linked with our desire for procreation and leadership, all well summed up in Nietzche's philosophical "will to power" ethos. I have said many times that my "dream life" entails traveling around the world, constantly engaging different people and activities, all the while documenting my experiences with a super-smartphone. It seems to me that such a life could never get boring, especially with the right tools to help me efficiently seek out the most interesting people and rewarding activities.
However, it seems fair to say that the person frantically clicking through hyperlinks in search of that next interesting article, blog post, or video has given themselves over to the crack pipe of novel discovery. Lifeloggers, in their attention seeking behavior, must turn this practice into a productive outlet, much like bloggers, but at a more constant rate. They are self-imposed slaves to other's entertainment whims. It is sad that to some extent, I too aspire to indulge in this practice. Yet, at the same time, I suffer from from the sense of shame associated with the lifelogging lifestyle. Why am I so arrogant as to think what I have to say is of any real value to others, and if it indeed is not, why do I contribute to readers' distraction and voyeuristic debasement? This is what Nicholas Carr describes as "avatar anxiety".
Your online self is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself - about which facts (or falsehoods) to reveal, which photos to upload, which people "to friend," which bands or movies or books to list as favorites, which words to put in a blog - is fraught, subtly or not, with a kind of existential danger. And you are entirely responsible for the consequences as you navigate that danger. You are, after all, your avatar's parents; there's no one else to blame. So leaving the real world to participate in an online community - or a virtual world like Second Life - doesn't relieve the anxiety of self-consciousness; it magnifies it. You become more, not less, exposed.
The eminent technology journalist Steven Levy recently wrote an article in Wired called "The Burden of Twitter", expressing similar sentiments.
As my participation increases, I invariably suffer another psychic downside of social networking: remorse. The more I upload the details of my existence, even in the form of random observations and casual location updates, the more I worry about giving away too much. It's one thing to share intimacies person-to-person. But with a community? Creepy. So now I'm feeling guilty—for being remorseful. Maybe I should complain about it in my next tweet.
So, who are my role models in this quest to become an omnipresent persona? I can think of only a few professions (if you can call them that) which have significant numbers of practitioners engaged in this kind of lifestyle: freelance journalists, technology entrepreneurs, and public intellectuals. The first and the latter actually overlap quite a bit in many of the examples which come to mind (Thomas Friedman, Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, etc). Ambitious journalists often end up writing books, some of which become wildly popular and earn them the honorariums and loose institutional affiliations which allow them time to try and write more of the same. As for the entrepreneurs, I am of course really only talking about the tiny portion of that community that has become fairly successful, at least enough to contemplate expanding their business into new markets or new applications. Then there is the quasi-entrepreneurial set of individuals who seem to be more interested [or successful] in ideas than money and more highly value their ties to the creative class and intellectuals. In this category you find the kind of people who populate the trendy cultural conference circuits like SXSW and schedule globe trotting lunch meetings using Dopplr.
Given my current inability to rise to the level of any of these practical affairs, I have spent more time thinking about the broader social implications surrounding these tools' usage. What I can't understand is why a cacophony of protest has not emerged in these circles over the potential negative sides of these technologies. This isn't to say that there has been total silence of these issues. There have been plenty of attacks on the mode of peer production, perhaps the most famous coming from Andrew Keen in a title so vitriolic I feel compelled to cite it in full here: The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, culture, and values. Perhaps it is needless to say that his work hasn't been very well received in web intelligentsia circles. However, there have been more well reasoned inquiries about the future of reputation online, mostly coming from Daniel J. Solove. Jonathan Zittrain's exploration of the consequences new "non-generative" (proprietary) technology platforms that have evolved as Internet media has become a more lucrative business is another important critique in this vein.
This still amounts to a paltry amount of work and attention from such an otherwise prolific group of people. Having myself contemplated the darker side of providing activity streams and extensive biographical information to the more popular web services, I have long had this qualm with the community I aspire to join. I'm scared to be a whistle blower in the traditional sense, so I spent my time envisioning the rise of a more open-source, secure set of networking protocols which would allow for always-on narcissism without the feeling of being used afterward. Such an alternative has not yet emerged, perhaps because the outcry over privacy infringements has not yet hit fever pitch or perhaps because most of the cool new innovations that attract users still come out of corporate R&D. This doesn't mean that such a development won't eventually happen, just that now might not be the most opportune moment to strike. We find that many of the "free" online tools afforded to us are actually quite useful, so seeing no danger in participation and no superior products elsewhere, users follow the standard cues. What I find more disconcerting is that so few prominent members of the techno-cultural elite express much interest in at least discussing these issues in earnest, lesser yet trying to find ways to develop or fund such initiatives.
I can forgive technology entrepreneurs for not wanting to offending their larger corporate patrons/partners by questioning the ethics of their business models. They make it so easy though when the simplifications boil down to credos like "don't be evil". The issues at hand might be a little too broad for journalists, so maybe they deserve a pass too. However, where are the public intellectuals on these issues? The most openly critical (though quixotic) may be Richard Stallman, a still active member of the Free Software old guard. The only other consistent critic I am familiar with is Nicholas Carr, and that is mostly through contact with his blog, "Rough Type." In the spirit of Marshall McLuhan, he has recently wrote a controversial essay entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", examining the potential negative impacts Internet technologies may be having on our cognitive capacities. He has also drawn attention to what he considers to be the "amorality of web 2.0", especially referring to the many websites adopting their user's contributions as the primary source for content and traffic. Carr also chooses to use farming metaphors here, describing them as "information plantations populated with digital sharecroppers." However, these critics are relatively minor players on the broader stage, and they too may not feel well enough equipped to deal with the scope or magnitude of these issues.
It is possible that some of the better prepared scholars could be found in the realms of cultural studies and social theory, especially in the areas concerning the representation of reality. Jean Baudrillard immediately comes to mind in this sense, but so do most other semioticians. Many of these commentators have taken a more ideologically oriented approach to these emerging issues, yet have also published much of their work as semi-technical academic treatises that are relatively inaccessible to lay readers. An author hoping to pick up where McLuhan left off is Thomas DeZengotita. His 2005 book, Mediated, asks tough questions about the nature of new media and viewer stultification stemming from "flattering field of represented options" it presents. This isn't the sort of inactivity we're accustomed to associating with the "couch zombies" trope so commonly employed in critiques of TV culture. Instead, it is the massive amount of preferences it offers to help us express or construct, drawing our attention and mediated actions in countless different directions (a process I refer to as falling or being sucked into "hyperholes") in any given sitting.
Of course, the underlying purpose of these media systems and their attendant devices is the encouragement of specific consumer purchases. This is a primary means through which to help us structure our identities. However, there is now such an enormous volume of disparate narrative materials floating around that new media has evolved means to provide their users with broader programming contexts - allowing them to interpret fragmented viewing experiences as being part of a unified cultural story. While the ability to specialize in targeting "types" of users has expanded, the tendency to strive for a one-size-fits all "hit" has remained intact. This has made new media more amoeba-like, intent on amalgamating cultural and demographic understandings into a pureed mush which can be more easily stomached by many different kinds of participants. Theorists of postmodernity have attempted to understand this process and how it affects our understanding of the world around us. If there has been anything approaching a consensus on these matters, it has been that what the public generally understands as "reality" has become more simulated, effaced, and seductive overall. The direction of increasingly fleeting attention towards the vast minutea of human life is part of what Baudriallard meant by "hyperreality".
In addition to spending time wondering how far this media "blob" (using Zengotita's term) will eventually infiltrate our world before sparking some sort of major backlash, I also look for more positive applications of the core technologies. For instance, Joe Edelman is developing a web application called GroundCrew that leverages many of the tools we have touched upon to good, charitable, and even artistic ends. It is designed to help users in a particular geograpahic area organize themselves into small groups capable of doing "good works" beyond any of their individual capacities. So, for instance, if a poor disabled boy living next door to you wanted an accessible treehouse, GroundCrew would help send messages to local users who might have appropriate design skills, surplus lumber, tools, and labor to donate to making this dream come true. The system facilitates the coordination of "squads" to get projects accomplished and the awarding of "Crew-Credits" based on services rendered. On the basis of this work, he has even been invited to attend some of the more exclusive conferences that allow him the opportunity to hobnob with powerful players and pitch his ideas to them.
However, this is still somewhat idealistic stuff. This kind of system has its best descriptive origin in the concept of "smart mobs" as articulated by Howard Rheingold, itself a study of flash mobs and mass performance art phenomena. Its best fictional origins can be found in the cyberpunk literature, particularly in a short story by Bruce Sterling called "Maneki Neko". It describes a world wherein corporate economies and governance structures are in an losing battle with a benevolent AI system that provides its users cues in their daily lives which allow them to help others achieve their desires in an unobtrusive and often entertaining fashion, all the while beguiling those opposed to this social structure. There have been other, perhaps even more obscure sci-fi literary devices dealing with gift economies and reciprocal altruism, but they often have more to do with ideology than information technologies. One notable example is the "Whuffie", a complex reputational currency conceived by Cory Doctorow in his novel Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom. Joe, being someone without a traditional for-profit business model who shuns the venture capital establishment, has still had difficulty rallying support for the project on the basis of whuffies and this motley cultural lineage.
I want to help build such a world, wherein self interest is at least partially subsumed within non-monetary transactions. One of the ways I came to be interested in these activities was through a website called Couchsurfing.com, a mechanism for sharing accommodations and hospitality between travelers registered in their system. I have been a rampant traveler throughout my 20s and have accumulated hundreds of connections on the site through the years. I had a chance to work with the creator of this system and some other hard core devotees during my research into their organizational model and usage patterns during 2006. I was always interested in the perennial discourse around the primacy of "meaningful personal exchange" and "resource sharing" in these kinds of systems, even as I have seen watched own attitude towards this ethos change as I got closer and further away from its core user community. At one point, I held a high position as an "global CS ambassador" in their semi-hierarchical governing structure, but began to feel less authentic as more and more people turned to me for sagistic advice on the nature of the system and its design.
Through this experience, I came to understand to some extent the allure of celebrity in online worlds. The feeling that random people care about your thoughts and actions is a powerful narcissistic drug. Still, the urge to turn one's own life over to the whims of these "watchers" certainly has a "ring of power" duality about it. There are good case studies of this chosen lifestyle producing burnout. At the turn of the new millenia, a "Big Brother" style website emerged called "We Live in Public", in which a man and his girlfriend installed a few dozen motion-sensor controlled cameras in their home to record every aspect of their daily lives. The experiment lasted a year and the relationship was in tatters by the end of it. Justin Hall, a blogging pioneer, hung up his keyboard in 2005 after having constantly written about his life for a dozen years and maintaining an audience of tens of thousands of readers. In both cases, the combined effort of producing "records of self" and tending to those interested in perusing proved too much for the content creators' well being.
Conventional wisdom has long since concluded that celebrity is almost a sure-fire route to emotional hardship and interpersonal train wrecks. Yet, young people growing up in a culture increasingly obsessed with such personalities find the prospect of such an existence to be uniquely compelling. Toby Young, whose father popularized the term "meritocracy", recently wrote about how young people in Britain have been "lulled by the celbritariat" away from embracing such an understanding of society, even if the conception has always been too ambitious to be considered realistic. National surveys of British teenagers have discovered that appearing on a reality television programme is often cited as a possible career option, with more than ten percent of respondents stating that they are "waiting to be discovered". More than a quarter believe that it is easy to secure a career in sports, entertainment, or media. Other than the recent ascent of many self-made political figures in the 2008 election cycle, is there reason to believe American youth would be an exception to these trends?
The calls for young people to aggressively market themselves have grown more fervent as the job market has deteriorated over the past year. My own efforts to encouraging students to develop a personalized web presence for themselves is surely part and parcel of this trend. I argue that the existence of such a managed online identity is necessary for them to be truly accessible to employers in this era, but I also hope that it will help to offset whatever nasty bits might be haphazardly scattered around their Myspace archives. What I am more interested in them producing, however, is a gimmick. I want them to offer onlookers something that will help set them apart from the competition. I exclaim, "Do something different! "Think anew!" If this means documenting a bicycle pilgrimage across America to visit bomb shelters and other artifacts of the Nuclear Age, so be it. However, this plays neatly into the hands of this very cycle of cutthroat performativity that micro-media culture already encourages. They'll probably then feel the need to document such a trip by the most exhaustive means available to them.
I remember having the same sorts of urges at that age. When planning to take a three month cycling trip of Europe in the Summer of 2004, I thought about the prospect of keeping a blog and also of trying to put some kind of thematic spin on the journey to attract greater attention: "Europe on Bicycles and Couches" or "Americans Apologize for Bush" or something even more radical. This tendency to want to package one's life experiences for wider public consumption is not new, but it certainly is a trend that has acquired newfound virility as the production and distribution tools available have become so scalable. I myself am not a prolific writer and my skills with cameras, words, and musical instruments are far from transcendent, but I do have a certain knack for expounding on social and cultural phenomena in an engaging fashion. As such, I have always aspired to become a public intellectual who could be valued for talking to groups of people about broad webs of ideas and issues relevant to their work or lifestyle. It seems I too am waiting to be discovered.
Perhaps the ultimate form of conceit is the urge to project oneself out into the world while never taking the time to intently follow others with the same gusto you'd expect for yourself. This brings us back to diaries - who are they written for exactly? Why do so many of their diarists give their books pet names? Are we communing with ourselves or hoping to leave a record of our existence for our descendants with which to enrich their otherwise dry genealogical narrative? We have hit reached a technological plateau of recording technology, wherein every objective aspect of the world can now be catalogued and stored. We just don't have the capacity to interact but with the tiniest proportion of it. So what is it lifeloggers are after? Don't they know they are on a channel so high up almost no one can be bothered to surf it? Yet we continue incessantly screaming into Plato's cave, vainly hoping our cries somehow echo into the ear of an interested soul. When will we tire of trying to lure others to listen to us?
Authors are asking the same line of questioning. A cartoon in The New Yorker reversed the usual picture of a literary fair by showing a line of writers waiting to see "The Reader", a lone figure seated behind a table awaiting autograph requests. The comic writer Polly Frost recently published a piece in the January 2009 online issue of The Atlantic that offers a self-help approach to this issue:
"DO ANY OF THESE SYMPTOMS FIT YOU?
• Blogaholism. Do you plot out your day so that it will generate as many blog postings as possible?
• Twitteritis. Did you Twitter this morning as you made your morning coffee? And then later as you trimmed your toenails?
• Reviewing Addiction. Do you spend every lunch hour pumping up your ranking as an Amazon reader-reviewer?
• RSS Dependency. Did you simplify your life by subscribing to RSS feeds only to discover yourself spending more time than ever commenting at blogs?
• Status Update Disorder. Have you made plans to self-publish a collection of your Facebook Status Updates?
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The argument is that all this commenting and "small writing" is taking up a greater proportion of writers' time that would be better spent on producing more ambitious works. The same charges are leveled at email. Couldn't this critique be extended to the expansion of media products (news, novels, music, television, film, etc.) in general? I often worry that my children will stand little chance of grasping anything close to an encompassing grasp of Western cultural products - the speed of production will simply outrun their efforts to catch up. On the other hand, so what? Isn't the point to interact with the best or most current materials rather than try to attain a monkish totality of awareness/knowledge? Also, doesn't the lifestyle being satirized here at least bear some resemblance to what some have referred to as the ultimate "life of the mind"?
As difficult as it is to find the proper read/write balance online, isn't the point to find means of opening the window on what was once our more closed in-head activities? I'll ask you this: Would you not want to know what your favorite author thinks about any given current issue? Isn't this at least some degree what the classic public (New York) intellectuals were exalted for doing? I don't want them to perennially bogged down in email or compulsively twittering their lives away, but I do want more insight into their minds. Following the death of Susan Sontag, a consensus seemed to emerge among esteemed commentators that public intellectuals in the traditional mold no longer really exist. Perhaps the problem is that there are now so many it appears there are not at all. Or perhaps the declining pay and fame of published authors has made it more difficult for them to remain institutionally unaffiliated - once a essential criteria for achieving this statis. Many have concluded that as academics become more well regarded as public intellectuals, their professional colleagues hold them in ever lower esteem, which provides a powerful means of social control. However, there is a counter-current running against this dominant discourse, perhaps best articulated by Daniel Drezner in an article entitled "Public Intellectuals 2.0".
"The growth of online publication venues has stimulated rather than retarded the quality and diversity of public intellectuals. The criticisms levied against these new forms of publishing seem to mirror the flaws that plague the more general critique of current public intellectuals: hindsight bias and conceptual fuzziness. Rather, the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing have partially reversed a trend that many have lamented - what Russell Jacoby labeled the 'professionalization and academization' of public intellectuals. In particular, the growth of the blogosphere breaks down - or at least lowers - the barriers erected by a professionalized academy."
The problem that contemporary public intellectuals have in common with academics is that they try to walk the fine line between trafficking in their expertise and seeking to inform policy makers. Too far in one direction and they'll be derided as tin-eared ivory tower dwellers, to far in the other and they'll risk being held to account for supporting public interventions with implications well outside their realm of desired responsibility. We may well live in a world with more public intellectuals than ever, but they are also much more specialized and less willing to venture too far beyond their area of demonstrated competence. This would seem to be a good thing. Moreover, whether for reasons of changing culture or technology, they seem to now be much more accessible to the public and responsive to criticism. I get the sense that it important in their circles to be seen to be a well-reasoned, down-to-earth, instigator of social change - a "generative actor" in Giddens' terminology of structuration.
However, the new generation of public intellectuals seem to be less fun to watch that their more "know-it-all" forbears. I see nothing today with which to compare the entertainment value of William Buckley squaring off against Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer. These men were at least closer to Emerson's idea of "The American Scholar", someone who had a measure of mastery and influence over such a wide variety of areas that they could serve as representatives of their particular "movement" at any given event. Despite their more overt political leanings, they seemed to be doing their work largely out of sense of obligation to themselves, to their own authentic calling, rather than out of a more abstract sense of duty to improve society or save the world. Al Gore comes to mind here. It also seems fairly evident to me that the brightest folks out there are also the most reclusive by today's standards, or perhaps it is just that the high profile engagements at which they are qualified to appear are now so numerous that they simply have limited time for other public venues.
On the other hand, there is the relatively new phenomena of the publicly accessible academic to consider. To be able to find a phone number through which one could actually reach a professor was a difficult process not so long ago. Today, it is common to find course materials and CVs available in their entirety through personal web pages. The Open Courseware Initiative at MIT (and sister projects at other prominent universities) has opened the gates to bringing some of the brightest researchers into our everyday lives. Some of the featured lecturers are so charismatic in their delivery that their courses have been professionally recorded, licensed, and packaged by entities like The Learning Company" and sold to the masses as portable higher education curriculum. Is this the future of the public intellectual? These charisma-sensei , as the Japanese call them, are still mostly found expounding upon somewhat less than contemporary topics, but market demands and the continued fixation on the "next thing" are almost certain to push them towards more current and controversial material.
One of the arguments in the business of finding explanatory factors for the cause of journalism's decline in the Internet era has been the increased accessibility and visibility of intellectuals through email and blogs. There was a time when academics needed print journalists to serve as translators of their technical research to the lay public, but as many researchers have found fulfillment in establishing blogs with the express intent of doing just that, the perceived need for the intermediary has declined. The same can also be said of the relationship between academics and other mass media outlets. A talented sociologist contemporary of mine, Danah Boyd, could once be found appearing on many network news and commentary programs to talk about her research into how youth use online social networks. This was in the midst of the first public outcry over the perceived vulnerability of children to pedophiles on MySpace. She was very safe in her position as a doctoral fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Information and had opportunities to appear on these programs as both a scholar and activist. As a technologist and well-known blogger, she was well known in the Internet community and was frequently hired to consult for companies pursuing projects in youth, media, and social networking.
Danah eventually ended up leaving academia to work for Microsoft Research in Cambridge, MA. The trouble she had navigating Institutional Review Boards during her PhD research was part of the problem, as was the academic imperative to publish in elite, subscription-only, disciplinary journals. I'm guessing remuneration was an issue as well. Will it be possible for her to assume the kind of scholar-activist role she strives to embody at a corporate research facility? Will she still have time to blog as prolifically and respond to her many fans and few detractors? Edward Said's lectures on the "Representations of the Intellectual" suggested that he thought it possible to balance such private and public worlds. He saw the goal of an intellectual to be advancing human knowledge and in the process, improving our collective condition. Perhaps this doesn't help us answer the tougher questions regarding how one can stand both in and out of society or stay committed to principles as myriad relevant issues constantly swirl around us. It seems that what is most important in confronting the onslaught of perspectives and possibilities is maintaining one's grip and focus on an ideal that has both personal and societal relevance. It isn't a perfectly encompassing prescription, but then again, those don't exist anymore either.
