I wrote an op-ed for NJ.com and the Star-Ledger in New Jersey proposing that the soon-empty Bell Labs should become a Museum and School of the Internet. Here, for those outside the Garden State, is the text:
Bell Labs, the historic headwaters of so many inventions that now define our digital age, is closing in Murray Hill, its latest owners moving to more modern headquarters in New Brunswick. The Labs should be preserved as a historic site and more. I propose that Bell Labs be opened to the public as a museum and school of the internet.
The internet would not be possible without the technologies forged at Bell Labs: the transistor, the laser, information theory, Unix, communications satellites, fiber optics, advances in chip design, cellular phones, compression, microphones, talkies, the first digital art, and artificial intelligence — not to mention, of course, many advances in networks and the telephone, including the precursor to the device we all carry and communicate with today: the Picturephone, displayed as a futuristic fantasy at the 1964 World’s Fair.
There is no museum of the internet. Silicon Valley has its Computer History Museum. New York has museums for television and the moving image. Massachusetts boasts a charming Museum of Printing. Search Google for a museum of the internet and you’ll find amusingdigitalartifacts, but nowhere to immerse oneself in and study this immensely impactful institution in society.
Where better to house a museum devoted to the internet than New Jersey, home not only of Bell Labs but also at one time the headquarters of the communications empire, AT&T, our Ma Bell?
I remember taking a field trip to Bell Labs soon after this web site, NJ.com, started in 1995. I was an executive of NJ.com’s parent company, Advance. My fellow editors and I felt we were on the sharp edge of the future in bringing news online.
We thought that earned us kinship with the invention of that future that went on at Bell Labs, so we arranged a visit to the awe-inspiring building designed by Stephen F. Voorhees and opened in 1941. The halls were haunted with genius: lab after lab with benches and blackboards and history within. We must not lose that history.
We also must not lose the history of the internet as it passes us by in present tense. In researching my book, “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and its Lessons for the Age of the Internet,” I was shocked to discover that there was not a discipline devoted to studying the history and influence of print and the book until Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote her seminal work, “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,” in 1979, a half-millennium after Gutenberg. We must not wait so long to preserve memories and study the importance of the net in our lives.
The old Bell Labs could be more than a museum, preserving and explaining the advances that led to the internet. It could be a school. After leaving Advance in 2006, I became a journalism professor at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism, from which I am retiring.
I am less interested now in studying journalism than in the greater, all-enveloping subject: the internet. My dream is to start a new educational program in Internet Studies, to bring the humanities and social sciences to research the internet, for it is much more than a technology; it is a human network that reflects both human accomplishment and human failure.
Imagine if Bell Labs were a place where scholars and students in many disciplines — technologies, yes, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, ethics, economics, community studies, design — could gather to teach and learn, discuss and research.
Imagine, too, if a New Jersey university could use the space for classes and events.
There is a model for this in New Jersey in what Montclair State University is doing in Paterson, developing and operating a museum devoted to the history of Negro League baseball in the historic Hinchcliffe Stadium. This is the kind of university-community collaboration that could enrich the space of Bell Labs with energy and life.
There is some delicious irony in proposing that the internet be memorialized in what was once an AT&T facility, for the old telephone company resisted the arrival of the internet, hoping we would pay by the minute for long-distance calls forever.
In 1997, David Isenberg, a 12-year veteran of Bell Labs, wrote an infamous memo telling his bosses they were wrong to build intelligent networks and should instead learn the value of the stupid network that anyone could connect to: the internet.
Isenberg’s web site says the memo “was received with acclaim everywhere in the global telecommunications community with one exception — at AT&T itself! So Isenberg left AT&T in 1998.”
How wonderful if, in the end, Bell Labs could claim to become a forever home for that network that has changed the world.
I increasingly come to see that we are not in a crisis of information and disinformation or even of misguided beliefs, but instead of belonging. I wonder how to reimagine journalism to address this plight.
Belonging is a good. The danger is in not belonging, and filling that void with malign substitutes for true community: joining a cult of personality or conspiracies, an insurrection, or some nihilistic, depraved perversion of a religion.
What role might journalism play to fill that void instead with conversation, connection, understanding, collaboration, enlightened values, and education?
Hannah Arendt teaches us that amid the thrall and threat of totalitarianism, some people belong to nothing, and so they are vulnerable to the lure of joining a noxious cause manufactured of fear. InThe Gutenberg Parenthesis, I quote her:
“But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation but destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” For Arendt, to be public is to be whole, to be private is to be deprived; to be without both is to be uprooted, vulnerable, and alone.
Arendt found in Nazi and Soviet history “such unexpected and unpredicted phenomena as the radical loss of self-interest, the cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes, the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense.” The lessons for these populist times are undeniable as Trump’s base shows a loss of self-interest (what did he accomplish for them over the rich?), an indifference to death (defiantly burning masks at COVID superspreader rallies), a passionate inclination toward abstract notions (are abortion and guns truly more important to their everyday lives than jobs and health?), and contempt for common sense (see: science denial and conspiracy theories).
Later in my book, I call upon the theories of sociologist William Kornhauser, who contends that the solution to such alienated mass society is to support a pluralistic society of belonging, in which people connect with communities — they “possess multiple commitments to diverse and autonomous groups” — and are less vulnerable to, or at least feel a competitive tug away from, the siren call of populist movements. I write:
A pluralistic society is marked by belonging — to families, tribes (in the best and most supportive sense, which Sebastian Junger defines as “the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with”), clubs, congregations, organizations, communities. A pluralistic society is more secure and less vulnerable to domination as a whole, as a mass. In such associations we do not give up our individuality; we gain individual identity by connecting, gathering, organizing, and acting with others who share our interests, needs, goals, desires, or circumstances. When that occurs, in Kornhauser’s view, elites become accessible as “competition among independent groups opens many channels of communication and power.” Then, too, “the autonomous man respects himself as an individual, experiencing himself as the bearer of his own power and as having the capacity to determine his life and to affect the lives of his fellows.” In short, a pluralistic society is a diverse society.
Of course, it is diversity that most threatens the autocrats, populists, racists, and fascists who in turn imperil our nation and democracy around the world. That is why they condemn “identity politics.” The internet, I theorize, enabled voices too long not represented in so-called mainstream — i.e., old, white — mass media to at last be heard. That is what the would-be tyrants and cultists use to stir fear and recruit their rudderless hordes, preaching that the Others — Blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQ people, immigrants, “woke mobs,” and lately trans people — will come steal their jobs, homes, history, security, society, and even children.
Journalism brings information to the fight for their very souls. We stand outside reactionary revival tents with slips of paper bearing facts, thinking that can compete with the heart-thumping hymns of fear within.
In 2022 in Paris, a group of scholars gathered at the International Communication Association for a preconference that asked, “What comes after disinformation studies?” In a paper reporting on the discussion, Théophile Lenoir and Chris Anderson conclude: “Fact-checking our way out of politics will not work.”
Journalists want to believe that we are in a crisis of disinformation because they think the cure must be what they offer: information. The mania around disinformation after 2016 led to what Joe Bernstein in Harper’s calls Big Disinfo, a veritable industry devoted to dis-dis-information. I was part of that effort, having raised money after 2016 to support such projects. I’m certainly not opposed to reporting information and checking facts! But we need to concede that these are insufficient ends.
If the problem is not disinformation, then it must be belief, we say, pointing to opinion polls in which shocking numbers of citizens say they ascribe to insane ideas and conspiracy theories. Regarding such polls, I will forever return to the lessons of the late James Carey: “Public life started to evaporate with the emergence of the public opinion industry and the apparatus of polling. Polling … was an attempt to simulate public opinion in order to prevent an authentic public opinion from forming.”
Polls are fatally and fundamentally flawed because they reflect the biases of the pollsters, who insist on sorting us into their buckets, leaving no room for nuance or context. Worse than that, polls have become a mechanism for signaling belonging in some rebellious, defiant cause. Writes Reece Peck, another scholar at the ICA Paris preconference, “Political scientists have come to understand that voting is less a cool-headed deliberation on how specific policies help or hurt the voter’s material economic interest and more an occasion for expressing the voter’s cultural attachments and group loyalties.” Fringe opinions are a means for these citizens to tell pollsters, media, and authority: ‘You can’t sort us. We’ll sort ourselves.’ As researchers Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux have found, people who circulate hostile political information do so out of a “Need for Chaos,” a desire to “‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.” In the hope, that is, that they will find a place to belong in their posse, their institutional insurrection. See again: Arendt.
I believe there is only one true hope to cure vulnerability to such performative belief: education. By that I do not mean media- or news-literacy, the hubristic assertion that if only people understood how journalism works and consumed its products, all would be well. I mean education, period: in the humanities, the social sciences, and science. As I write in my upcoming book, The Web We Weave, I taught in a public university because I believe education is our best hope. But universities — particularly their humanities departments — are being starved of resources and attacked by populist, right-wing forces that view education as their enemy because it is through education that they lose voters and power. This is where our underlying crisis and solution lie.
What can journalism do? I am not sure.
In any discussion of the crisis in democracy, someone will pipe up with banalities about the internet segregating us in filter bubbles and echo chambers. But research by Petersen and Axel Bruns shows that — as Petersen says — “the biggest echo chamber that we all live in is the one we live in in our everyday lives,” in the towns, jobs, and congregations we seek out to be around people like us. Journalist Bill Bishop said it well in the subtitle of his 2008 book, The Big Sort: “The clustering of like-minded American is tearing us apart.” The internet doesn’t cause filter bubbles, it punctures them, confronting people with those they are told to fear. The internet does not cause division. It exposes it.
Thus I have argued that one mission for journalism (and, for that matter, social networks) should be to make strangers less strange. At the Tow-Knight Center, I funded research to that end by Caroline Murray and Talia Stroud, who found 25 inspiring projects in newsrooms attempting to do just that; look at their list. I find that work heartening, yet still insufficient.
Journalism is flawed at its core. It is built to seek out, highlight, and exploit — and cause — conflict. Political journalism is engineered to predict, which does nothing to inform the electorate. Instead, in the words of Jay Rosen, it should focus on what is at stake in the choices citizens make. Journalism has done tremendous harm to countless communities that have never trusted its institutions. Journalism — just like the internet companies it criticizes — is built on the economics of attention.
I do not, of course, reject all of journalism. Yes, I criticizeThe TimesandThe Post because they have been our biggest and best and we need them to be better. I also praise excellentreporting there and support it with my subscriptions. I think it is important to understand our history sans the sacred rhetoric publishers use to lobby politicians and courts for protection against new competitors, from radio to television to the internet to AI. James Gordon Bennett, the early newspaper titan said to be the father of modern journalism — thus mass media — once said to an upstart in the field: “Young man, ‘to instruct the people,’ as you say, is not the mission of journalism. That mission, if journalism has any, is to startle or amuse.” There are our roots in mass media. Hear Carl Lindstrom writing in The Fading American Newspaper:
In its hunger for circulation it has sought status as a mass medium to the point where it is a hollow attempt to be all things to all men. It has scorned competition as an evil, and cultivated monopoly as a virtue. While claiming a holy mission with constitutional protection, it has left great vacuums of journalistic obligation into which competiting mediums have moved with impunity and public acceptance. Today journalism is on the move at an ever-accelerating rate with the daily press showing no apparent concern. This indifference is in accord with its incapacity for relentless self-examination. In this vacant place self-delusion has built itself a nest.
Journalism is terrible at listening. We train reporters to hit the streets with premade narratives and predictions, looking for quotes to fulfill them. In Engagement Journalism, we teach journalists instead to hear the communities they serve. That does not mean we must listen to every cultist’s crazy theories and fears concocted for media attention. Journalists give them plenty of oxygen already. No, I mean that we need to allow people to be heard regarding their real lives and actual circumstances and concerns. That is a necessary start.
How do we then reimagine journalism built around helping people understand that they can belong to positive communities of understanding and empathy, they can build bridges to other communities through listening and learning, they can find fulfillment in their own identities without excluding or denigrating the identities of others?
A few years ago, I participated in valuable diversity training. In one exercise, our trainer told each of us to reflect on our own cultures. I demurred, saying that I had no culture as I am of boring, generic, white-bread, American, suburban stock. She told me I was wrong. Upon reflection, I saw that she was right. She forced me to recognize the power of the cultural default. I’ve learned that lesson, too, from André Brock, whom I quote in The Gutenberg Parenthesis:
In Distributed Blackness, his trenchant analysis of African American cybercultures … Georgia Tech Professor André Brock Jr. sought to understand Black Twitter on its own terms, not in relation to mass and white media, not in the context of aiming to be heard there. “My claim is ecological: Black folk have made the internet a ‘Black space’ whose contours have become visible through sociality and distributed digital practice while also decentering whiteness as the default internet identity.” That is to say that it is necessary to acknowledge the essential whiteness of mass media as well as the internet. “Despite protestations about color-blindness or neutrality,” Brock wrote, “the internet should be understood as an enactment of whiteness through the interpretive flexibility of whiteness as information. By this, I mean that white folks’ communications, letters, and works of art are rarely understood as white; instead, they become universal and are understood as ‘communication,’ ‘literature,’ and ‘art.’”
Brock helped me see where journalism is “whiteness as information.” So have Wesley Lowery and Lewis Raven Wallace in their criticism of journalistic objectivity (works I assigned and taught every year).
Brock also made me see how the internet has helped me belong. I long was a loner; journalists fancy themselves that: separate, apart (and let’s admit it, above). I live in a town disconnected from many of my neighbors. But on the internet, I have found myself connected with many communities.
Every year in the Engagement Journalism class I had the privilege of teaching with Carrie Brown, we would ask students what communities they belong to. The answers inevitably began with the obvious: “I’m a student.” “I live in Brooklyn.” But then someone might say, “I struggle with mental health issues.” A few students later in the circle, another students would echo that. Thus a connection is made, empathy established, a community enabled. Not all communities are bounded by geography; online, they might exist in any definition, anywhere.
Such conversation and connection can occur only in an environment of trust, but today we live in an environment of distrust — and that is the fault, in great measure, of media and politics manufacturing disconnection and fear. That is what journalism must fight against: a darkness not of information but of the soul. I return to Lenoir and Anderson in Paris:
Technical solutions to political problems are bound to fail. Historical, structural, and political inequality — and especially race, ethnicity, and social difference — needs to be at the forefront of our understanding of politics and, indeed, disinformation. The challenge for researchers, and our field broadly, is to engage in politics by generating ideas and crafting narratives that make people want to live in a more just world, not just a more truthful one.
The same should be said of journalism. How might we do that?
Journalists might see ourselves as conveners of conversation (see, for example, Spaceship Media).
We might see ourselves as educators, defenders of — yes, advocates for — enlightened values of reason, liberty, equality, tolerance, and progress. It is not enough to expose inequality, we must defend equality.
We might see it as our task to build bridges among communities — to make strangers less strange, to help people escape the filter bubbles in their real lives.
We might understand the imperative to fight — not neutrally amplify — the dark forces of hate, fear, and fascism.
We must pay reparations to the communities our institutions have damaged by finally assuring that their stories are told — by themselves — and heard.
We could reject the economics of attention and scale of mass media and rebuild journalism at human scale, valuing our work not through our metrics of audience but instead as the public values us.
As I leave my last job and the last year, I am reflecting on where to turn my attention next. I spent a dozen years at the end of my time in the industry working to make journalism digital, a task that should be self-evident but even so, is far from done. I spent eighteen years in a university exploring new business models for news, though I fear that trying to save established journalism ends in protectionism. My proudest work has been teaching and learning Engagement Journalism and it is there — in listening to communities — where I wish to devote myself.
I also believe it is critical that we understand journalism now in the context of a connected world and call upon other disciplines — history, ethics, psychology, community studies, anthropology, sociology — to understand the internet not as a technology but as a human network. That is the subject of my next book. That is what I have been calling Internet Studies: examining how we interact now and what reimagined and reformed institutions we need to help us do that better. Somewhere in there, I believe, is the essence of a new journalism, a journalism of education, a journalism of belonging.
Ben Smith picked just the right title for his saga of BuzzFeed, Gawker, and The Huffington Post: Traffic (though in the end, he credits the able sensationalist Michael Wolff with the choice). For what Ben chronicles is both the apotheosis and the end of the age of mass media and its obsessive quest for audience attention, for scale, for circulation, ratings, page views, unique users, eyeballs and engagement.
Most everything I write these days — my upcoming books The Gutenberg Parenthesis in June and a next book, an elegy to the magazine in November, and another that I’m working on about the internet — is in the end about the death of the mass, a passing I celebrate. I write in The Gutenberg Parenthesis:
The mass is the child and creation of media, a descendant of Gutenberg, the ultimate extension of treating the public as object — as audience rather than participant. It was the mechanization and industrialization of print with the steam-powered press and Linotype — exploding the circulation of daily newspapers from an average of 4,000 in the late nineteenth century to hundreds of thousands and millions in the next — that brought scale to media. With broadcast, the mass became all-encompassing. Mass is the defining business model of pre-internet capitalism: making as many identical widgets to sell to as many identical people as possible. Content becomes a commodity to attract the attention of the audience, who themselves are sold as a commodity. In the mass, everything and everyone is commodified.
Ben and the anti-heroes of his tale — BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington, investor Kenny Lerer, and a complete dramatis personae of the early players in pure-play digital media — were really no different from the Hearsts, Pulitzers, Newhouses, Luces, Greeleys, Bennetts, Sarnoffs, Paleys, and, yes, Murdochs, the moguls of mass media’s mechanized, industrialized, and corporate age who built their empires on traffic. The only difference, really, was that the digital moguls had new ways to hunt their prey: social, SEO, clickbait, data, listicles, and snark.
Ben tells the story so very well; he is an admirable writer and reporter. His narrative whizzes by like a local train on the express tracks. And it rings true. I had a seat myself on this ride. I was a friend of Nick Denton’s and a member of the board of his company before Gawker, Moreover; president of the online division of Advance (Condé Nast + Newhouse Newspapers); a board member for another pure-play, Plastic (a mashup of Suck et al); a proto-blogger; a writer for HuffPost; and a media critic who occasionally got invited to Nick’s parties and argued alongside Elizabeth Spiers at his kitchen table that he needed to open up to comments (maybe it’s all our fault). So I quite enjoyed Traffic. Because memories.
Traffic is worthwhile as a historical document of an as-it-turns-out-brief chapter in media history and as Ben’s own memoir of his rise from Politico blogger to BuzzFeed News editor to New York Times media critic to co-founder of Semafor. I find it interesting that Ben does not try to separate out the work of his newsroom from the click-factory next door. Passing reference is made to the prestige he and Jonah wanted news to bring to the brand, but Ben does not shy away from association with the viral side of the house.
I saw a much greater separation between the two divisions of BuzzFeed — not just reputationally but also in business models. It took me years to understand the foundation of BuzzFeed’s business. My fellow media blatherers would often scold me: “You don’t understand, Jeff,” one said, “BuzzFeed is the first data-driven newsroom.” So what? Every newsroom and every news organization since the 1850s measured itself by its traffic, whether they called it circulation or reach or MAUs.
No, what separated BuzzFeed’s business from the rest was that it did not sell space or time or even audience. It sold a skill: We know how to make our stuff viral, they said to advertisers. We can make your stuff viral. As a business, it (like Vice) was an ad agency with a giant proof-of-concept attached.
There were two problems. The first was that BuzzFeed depended for four-fifths of its distribution on other platforms: BuzzFeed’s own audience took its content to the larger audience where they were, mostly on Facebook, also YouTube and Twitter. That worked fine until it didn’t — until other, less talented copykittens ruined it for them. The same thing happened years earlier to About.com, where The New York Times Company brought me in to consult after its purchase. About.com had answers to questions people asked in Google search, so Google sent them to About.com, where Google sold the ads. It was a beautiful thing, until crappy content farms like Demand Media came and ruined it for them. In a first major ranking overhaul, Google had to downgrade everything that looked like a content farm, including About. Oh, well. (After learning the skills of SEO and waiting too long, The Times Company finally sold About.com; its remnants labor on in Barry Diller’s content farm, DotDash, where the last survivors of Time Inc. and Meredith toil, mostly post-print.)
The same phenomenon struck BuzzFeed, as social networks became overwhelmed with viral crap because, to use Silicon Valley argot, there was no barrier to entry to making clickbait. In Traffic, Ben reviews the history of Eli Pariser’s well-intentioned but ultimately corrupting startup Upworthy, which ruined the internet and all of media with its invention, the you-won’t-believe-what-happened-next headline. The experience of being bombarded with manipulative ploys for attention was bad for users and the social networks had to downgrade it. Also, as Ben reports, they discovered that many people were more apt to share screeds filled with hate and lies than cute kittens. Enter Breitbart.
BuzzFeed’s second problem was that BuzzFeed News had no sustainable business model other than the unsustainable business model of the rest of news. News isn’t, despite the best efforts of headline writers, terribly clickable. In the early days, BuzzFeed didn’t sell banner ads on its own content and even if it had, advertisers don’t much want to be around news because it is not “brand safe.” Therein lies a terrible commentary on marketing and media, but I’ll leave that for another day.
Ben’s book comes out just as BuzzFeed killed News. In the announcement, Jonah confessed to “overinvesting” in it, which is an admirably candid admission that news didn’t have a business model. Sooner or later, the company’s real bosses — owners of its equity — would demand its death. Ben writes: “I’ve come to regret encouraging Jonah to see our news division as a worthy enterprise that shouldn’t be evaluated solely as a business.” Ain’t that the problem with every newsroom? The truth is that BuzzFeed News was a philanthropic gift to the information ecosystem from Jonah and Ben.
Just as Jonah and company believed that Facebook et al had turned on them, they turned on Facebook and Google and Twitter, joining old, incumbent media in arguing that Silicon Valley somehow owed the news industry. For what? For sending them traffic all these years? Ben tells of meeting with the gray eminence of the true evil empire, News Corp., to discuss strategies to squeeze “protection money” (Ben’s words) from technology companies. That, too, is no business model.
Thus the death of BuzzFeed news says much about the fate of journalism today. In Traffic, Ben tells the tale of the greatest single traffic driver in BuzzFeed’s history: The Dress. You know, this one:
At every journalism conference where I took the stage after that, I would ask the journalists in attendance how many of their news organizations wrote a story about The Dress. Every single hand would go up. And what does that say about the state of journalism today? As we whine and wail about losing reporters and editors at the hands of greedy capitalists, we nonetheless waste tremendous journalistic resource rewriting each other for traffic: everyone had to have their own story to get their own Googlejuice and likes and links and ad impressions and pennies from them. No one added anything of value to BuzzFeed’s own story. The story, certainly BuzzFeed would acknowledge, had no particular social value; it did nothing to inform public discourse. It was fun. It got people talking. It took their attention. It generated traffic.
The virus Ben writes about is one that BuzzFeed — and the every news organization on the internet and the internet as a whole — caught from old, coughing mass media: the insatiable hunger for traffic for its own sake. In the book, Nick Denton plays the role of inscrutable (oh, I can attest to that) philosopher. According to Ben, Nick believed that traffic was the key expression of value: “Traffic, to Nick … was something pure. It was an art, not a science. Traffic meant that what you were doing was working.” Yet Nick also knew where traffic could lead. Ben quotes him telling a journalist in 2014: “It’s not jonah himself I hate, but this stage of internet media for which he is so perfectly optimized. I see an image of his cynical smirk — made you click! — every time a stupid buzzfeed listicle pops on Facebook.”
Nick also believed that transparency was the only ethic that really mattered, for the sake of democracy. Add these two premises, traffic and transparency, together and the sex tape that was the McGuffin that brought down Gawker and Nick at the hands of Peter Thiel was perhaps an inevitability. Ben also credits (or blames?) Nick for his own decision to release the Trump dossier to the public on BuzzFeed. (I still think Ben has a credible argument for doing so: It was being talked about in government and in media and we, the public, had the right to judge for ourselves. Or rather, it’s not our right to decide; it’s a responsibility, which will fall on all of us more and more as our old institutions of trust and authority — editing and publishing — falter in the face of the abundance of talk the net enables.)
The problem in the end is that traffic is a commodity; commodities have no unique value; and commodities in abundance will always decrease in price, toward zero. “Even as the traffic to BuzzFeed, Gawker Media, and other adept digital publishers grew,” Ben writes, “their operators began to feel that they were running on an accelerating treadmill, needing ever more traffic to keep the same dollars flowing in.” Precisely
Traffic is not where the value of the internet lies. No, as I write in The Gutenberg Parenthesis (/plug), the real value of the internet is that it begins to reverse the impact print and mass media have had on public discourse. The internet devalues the notions of content, audience, and traffic in favor of speech. Only it is going to take a long time for society to relearn the conversational skills it has lost and — as with Gutenberg and the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Thirty Years’ War that followed — things will be messy in between.
BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Huffington Post, etc. were not new media at all. They were the last gasp of old media, trying to keep the old ways alive with new tricks. What comes next — what is actually new — has yet to be invented. That is what I care about. That is why I teach.
In The Gutenberg Parenthesis (my upcoming book), I ask whether, “in bringing his inner debates to print, Montaigne raised the stakes for joining the public conversation, requiring that one be a writer to be heard. That is, to share one’s thoughts, even about oneself, necessitated the talent of writing as qualification. How many people today say they are intimidated setting fingers to keys for any written form — letter, email, memo, blog, social-media post, school assignment, story, book, anything — because they claim not to be writers, while all the internet asks them to be is a speaker? What voices were left out of the conversation because they did not believe they were qualified to write? … The greatest means of control of speech might not have been censorship or copyright or publishing but instead the intimidation of writing.”
Thus I am struck by the opportunity presented by generative AI — lately and specifically ChatGPT— to provide people with an opportunity to better express themselves, to help them write, to act as Cyrano at their ear. Fellow educators everywhere are freaking out, wondering how they can ever teach writing and assign essays without wondering whether they are grading student or machine. I, on the other hand, look for opportunity — to open up the public conversation to more people in more ways, which I will explore here.
Let me first be clear that I do not advocate an end to writing or teaching it — especially as I work in a journalism school. It is said by some that a journalism degree is the new English degree, for we teach the value of research and the skill of clear expression. In our Engagement Journalism program, we teach that rather than always extracting and exploiting others’ stories, we should help people tell their own. Perhaps now we have more tools to aid in the effort.
I have for some time argued that we must expand the boundaries of literacy to include more people and to value more means of expression. Audio in the form of podcasts, video on YouTube or TikTok, visual expression in photography and memes, and the new alphabets of emoji enable people to speak and be understood as they wish, without writing. I have contended to faculty in communications schools (besides just my own) that we must value the languages (by that I mean especially dialects) and skills (including in social media) that our students bring.
Having said all that, let us examine the opportunities presented by generative AI. When some professors were freaking out on Mastodon about ChatGPT, one prof — sorry I can’t recall who — suggested creating different assignments with it: Provide students with the product of AI and ask them to critique it for accuracy, logic, expression — that is, make the students teachers of the machines.
This is also an opportunity to teach students the limitations and biases of AI and large language models, as laid out by Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, Margaret Mitchell, and Angelina McMillan-Major in their Stochastic Parrots paper. Users must understand when they are listening to a machine that is trained merely to predict the next most sensible word, not to deliver and verify facts; the machine does not understand meaning. They also must realize when the data used to train a language model reflects the biases and exclusions of the web as source — when it reflects society’s existing inequities — or when it has been trained with curated content and rules to present a different worldview. The creators of these models need to be transparent about their makings and users must be made aware of their limitations.
It occurs to me that we will probably soon be teaching the skill of prompt writing: how to get what you want out of a machine. We started exercising this new muscle with DALL-E and other generative image AI — and we learned it’s not easy to guide the machine to draw exactly what we have in mind. At the same time, lots of folks are already using ChatGPT to write code. That is profound, for it means that we can tell the machine how to tell itself how to do what we want it to do. Coders should be more immediately worried about their career prospects than writers. Illustrators should also sweat more than scribblers.
In the end, writing a prompt for the machine — being able to exactly and clearly communicate one’s desires for the text, image, or code to be produced — is itself a new way to teach self-expression.
Generative AI also brings the reverse potential: helping to prompt the writer. This morning on Mastodon, I empathized with a writer who lamented that he was in the “I’m at the ‘(BETTER WORDS TK)’ stage” and I suggested that he try ChatGPT just to inspire a break in the logjam. It could act like a super-powered thesaurus. Even now, of course, Google often anticipates where I’m headed with a sentence and offers a suggested next word. That still feels like cheating — I usually try to prove Google wrong by avoiding what I now sense as a cliché — but is it so bad to have a friend who can finish your sentences for you?
For years, AI has been able to take simple, structured data — sports scores, financial results — and turn that into stories for wire services and news organizations. Text, after all, is just another form of data visualization. Long ago, I sat in a small newsroom for an advisory board meeting and when the topic of using such AI came up, I asked the eavesdropping, young sports writer a few desks over whether this worried him. Not at all, he said: He would have the machine write all the damned high-school game stories the paper wanted so he could concentrate on more interesting tales. ChatGPT is also proving to be good at churning out dull but necessary manuals and documentation. One might argue, then, that if the machine takes over the most drudgerous forms of writing, we humans would be left with brainpower to write more creative, thoughtful, interesting work. Maybe the machine could help improve writing overall.
A decade ago, I met a professor from INSEAD, Philip Parker, who insisted that contrary to popular belief, there is not too much content in the world; there is too little. After our conversation, I blogged: “Parker’s system has written tens of thousands of books and is even creating fully automated radio shows in many languages…. He used his software to create a directory of tropical plants that didn’t exist. And he has radio beaming out to farmers in poor third-world nations.”
By turning text into radio, Parker’s project, too, redefines literacy, making listening, rather than reading or writing, the necessary skill to become informed. As it happens, in that post from 2011, I starting musing about the theory Tom Pettitt had brought to the U.S. from the University of Southern Denmark: the Gutenberg Parenthesis. In my book, which that theory inspired, I explore the idea that we might be returning to an age of orality — and aurality — past the age of text. Could we be leaving the era of the writer?
And that is perhaps the real challenge presented by ChatGPT: Writers are no longer so special. Writing is no longer a privilege. Content is a commodity. Everyone will have more means to express themselves, bringing more voices to public discourse — further threatening those who once held a monopoly on it. What “content creators” — as erstwhile writers and illustrators are now known — must come to realize is that value will reside not only in creation but also in conversation, in the experiences people bring and the conversations they join.
Montaigne’s time, too, was marked by a new abundance of speech, of writing, of content. “Montaigne was acutely aware that printing, far from simplifying knowledge, had multiplied it, creating a flood of increasingly specialized information without furnishing uniform procedures for organizing it,” wrote Barry Lydgate. “Montaigne laments the chaotic proliferation of books in his time and singles out in his jeremiad a new race of ‘escrivains ineptes et inutiles’ ‘inept and useless writers’ on whose indiscriminate scribbling he diagnoses a society in decay…. ‘Scribbling seems to be a sort of symptom of an unruly age.’”
Maybe we’ll look back and see that Elon Musk did us, the civilized citizens of the net, a favor by forcing us off our cozy if centralized, corporatized, and corrupted internet to find and build an alternative future grounded in the founding principles and dreams of this networked age. How’s that for looking on the bright side?
Well, optimist to a fault that I am, I see a better future. Come along…
Twitter will fail — for all the reasons Nilay Patel’s mic-drop foretells — ending up in the sewer where journalists claim it has been all along, in bankruptcy, in the hands of Saudi princes, or — who knows — in Yahoo!, where all good things have gone to die. I’m not leaving Twitter, I’m still on Facebook, and I’m enjoying TikTok’s honeymoon. But I am packing my go-bag to travel to an internet built on protocols over platforms. Here, I’ll explore some of the opportunities afforded by the likes of Bluesky, Scuttlebutt, the Fediverse, and Indieweb — not to mention good, old, reliable RSS. Nowhere better to start getting one’s head around this distributed vision than with Mike Masnick’s epic explainer, Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech.
To start with the present, I am on Mastodon and already enjoying it. Come on in; the water’s fine. For me, it is already reaching critical mass — not mass media, mind you; let us leave scale and its debasements behind — with folks I know from Twitter and new and interesting conversants, particularly academics and journalists. Don’t let unhelpful reporters dissuade you with their arm-waving about complexity; you are smarter than they think you are.
It’s really quite simple: Join any server, set up your profile (say who you are, please), and start looking for folks to follow: search for friends and follow whom they follow, or click on the local (your server) or federated (every server) timeline to see who’s strolling by the front porch, then follow hashtags to interesting conversations and people. A few tips from my vast experience of days: Go to the settings and switch to light mode (really, it makes a difference; it’s not just my dark-mode phobia) and enable the advanced web interface (it’s like Tweetdeck). Boost posts you like (no quote tweets here). Use the verb “to toot” at your option. If it slows down for a bit, just remember Twitter’s Fail Whale of yore, know that your server is run by volunteers (led by the amazing Eugen Rochko), and chill; it’ll speed up speedily.
There are more than 3,000 Mastodon servers, all built on and connected via the ActivityPub protocol. There are also related services you can connect to (e.g., Pixelfed, an Instagram that doesn’t Zuck). You may follow folks from any server, so where you start isn’t all that important. Later, if you want, you can move yourself to another server (you’ll keep your followers but lose your posts).
Here’s the most important thing about this open architecture: No one owns it. Musk can’t buy it (not that he can afford to buy a bagel anymore). I predict this will give censorious and authoritarian governments fits when they realize that a federated, distributed conversation is impossible to control (just as the printing press was; I have a book about that coming out soon). That immunity from control is a reason to love it — and also to be concerned, for there is no central authority to verify identity or kill bad accounts.
Which leads us to the next most important thing about this Fediverse: It’s adaptable. Look how already academics are gathering to create groups and lists of folks you can import and follow all at once. I’d like to see journalists and COVID experts and my beloved book-history wonks do likewise. See also Dan Hon’s excellent suggestion for news organizations— or universities, companies, or any organization or institution — to set up their own Mastodon servers to verify and control their users. Say The Guardian set up a server and created accounts for all its journalists, then when you see someone coming from that server, you know for certain who she is. That is a new blue check of verification (now that Twitter’s blue check becomes the mark of the $8 shmuck). Again, if someone leaves the paper, she can take her identity and social graph with her elsewhere. Because it’s open and federated.
I want news organizations to not only set up their own servers but also to start adding share-on-Mastodon buttons to story pages. That will send a message to Elon et al, endorsing an alternative.
With me so far? Now is where it gets exciting. In an open, federated, distributed, and/or peer-to-peer ecosystem, folks can come and build services atop it. As both Masnick and Daphne Kellerexplain — see also Cory Doctorow and Jonathan Zittrain — this might allow you to pick the level of algorithmic and human curation and moderation you want as companies or organizations offer such services. Say you want the Disneyfied social feed, cleansed of all nastiness and filled with unicorns; Disney could provide that and charge for it. Ditto a Guardian liberal feel; you could donate to help them. Or, yes, you could get your crazy Uncle Al’s feed of nothing but conspiracies from Q’s Pizza Parlor. That’d be up to you.
In this distributed future, other services can be offered. Institutions, entrepreneurs, or individuals could provide services including curation and recommendation (of users and content), verification (of users), and authentication (of content). See also our founding webmaster, Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for data vaults that would allow you to hold and control your information; he’s building a service called Inrupt based on the protocol he proposes, Solid. We will see new means to help pay for and support the services and creativity we want. I anticipate new kinds of clubhouses where folks of like interest, need, or circumstance can gather to connect or collaborate.
Then no longer are we caught in an endless, hopeless game of Whac-a-Mole against the bad shit on the net. Now, at last, we can concentrate instead on finding the good shit — and get help doing so. This is precisely what happened when print emerged. See the story of Nicolo Perotti asking the Pope to censor the press in 1470, when what he really wished for was the establishment of the new institutions of editing and publishing: to find, improve, support, recommend, verify, and authenticate the good shit.
What institutions need we create now, in this new reality? Note that I did not say what new technologies. We have lots of technologies; more than enough, thank you. What we need are human standards, norms, and means to discover and support quality and credibility, talent and utility.
This is not to say that there is not more technological work to be done. It is underway. I have long been enthusiastic about the prospects for Bluesky, a protocol for an open, distributed social ecosystem proposed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and now run by Jay Graber. Bluesky is funded independently of Twitter and Musk (thank God and Jack). They just released the first version of their protocol and an app will follow soon. Here are Bluesky’s principles:
Account portability. A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph.
Algorithmic choice. Algorithms dictate what we see and who we can reach. We must have control over our algorithms if we’re going to trust in our online spaces. The AT Protocol includes an open algorithms mode so users have more control over their experience.
Interoperation. The world needs a diverse market of connected services to ensure healthy competition. Interoperation needs to feel like second nature to the Web. The AT Protocol includes a schema-based interoperation framework called Lexicon to help solve coordination challenges.
Performance. A lot of novel protocols throw performance out of the window, resulting in long loading times before you can see your timeline. We don’t see performance as optional, so we’ve made it a priority to build for fast loading at large scales.
My fondest hope is that @jack, who still owns his chunk of Twitter — thus saving Musk $1 billion! — might convince Elon to open Twitter to Bluesky. Imagine if we could control our identities and social graphs and take them wherever we want, choosing the curation we desire, and interacting with folks on many other services. That might just save Twitter and Musk’s own hide, for then his users would not feel so trapped there.
I’m also excited by the work of rabble, an early employee at Twitter, on the Scuttlebutt protocol. Leo Laporte and I had an enlightening conversation with him about the app he is building, Planetary, and about his fascinating collaboration with the Maori of New Zealand, learning from their social structures and enabling peer-to-peer communication off the grid. I’ll let him explain (the conversation begins with Twitter tales, then gets to the meet of Scuttlebutt, and Rabble returns at the end for more):
And lest we make the mistake of once again being dazzled by only the new, shiny things, also follow the ongoing work of pioneers including Dave Winer ☮, a creator of RSS (and podcasting atop it) and a pioneering blogger. Blogging is a model for the conversation we want and we can still have it there. See also Kevin Marks, a champion of the Indieweb. See also our This Week in Google conversation with Matt Mullenweg about the virtues of open source. The things that work online, that give you choice and some measure of control, are the things built on open protocols: the net itself (TCP/IP), the web, email, and next those explored here.
Mind you, this is not a net without corporations and capitalism; they can use the protocols, too, and I’m glad Google gives us usable email and spam protection. But it need no longer be a net corrupted by the business model of mass media imported online: the attention economy. And it need no longer be a net under sole corporate control — and thus, potentially, the influence of malign actors, whether Musk or his pals Putin or Trump.
If we gain this promising future, if we return to the net’s founding principles, keep one thing clearly in mind: It won’t be so easy to blame the bad shit on the corporations and nasty nerd boys anymore. The net will be ours along with the responsibility to build and enforce the expectations and standards we wish for. The net is us, or it can be at last.
