After the Homepage

Where social media came from and how to live with it

In the beginning there was dial-up. Those warbling noises, the 56k connections that strained to load even text-only pages. And hovering parents, paying ISPs by the minute, just so that their kids can tie up the phone lines on silly things called websites.

Even then, it all seemed like an impossible miracle. The consultant and pundit class who bothered to give it any thought assumed the most important opportunities on the web would be for businesses cutting out middlemen.

Judging from the distant year 2019, they were wrong.

The most important opportunities were those for artists and musicians and writers and fans and anyone who has felt the keen sting of loneliness; it is from their efforts to find friendship and community, to share what they cared about, that the world of social media came to be, the world that dominates our present culture.

I was there in the ’90s with my ugly Angelfire website and my terrible poetry in white text on a black background. I was there picking flamewars in political and fan fiction forums alike. Connecting with new people over IRC and AIM and ICQ. When I reached high school, I graduated to LiveJournal, where my peers and I pioneered the subtweet before there was a Twitter, writing post after passive-aggressive post. We spent hours going down flash-animation rabbit holes on Newgrounds. The web felt both vast and deceptively small; we convinced ourselves we were the only ones who knew about this amusing site called Homestar Runner.

But I really began to pay attention in 2004, in college, when the blog burst onto the national scene as the vessel for Dan Rather’s humiliation. My father, a media analyst in the intelligence community, was deeply interested in how blogs were challenging the established, professional news outlets. Not wanting to be behind my own father on the technological curve, I dove in, spinning up a blog of my own mere months before he did the same. I chose a standard Blogger template which I made uglier and uglier the more I tinkered with the sidebar.

My father opted for Radio Userland, which was a desktop client for posting to the web. Unlike Blogger or Wordpress, you had to pay for this one.

I was 19 at the time and it felt like I was doing something that was changing the world, helping to tear down inauthentic bureaucracies and replacing them with authentic, personal media. Today we talk about elites and populists, or perhaps elites and publics. In those days the fights were between gatekeepers and citizen journalists, professionals and amateurs.

I thought we bloggers were going to replace the professionals entirely. The “bridge bloggers” who wrote in English from their homelands, like Iraq the Model, would replace foreign correspondents. Embedded bloggers like Michael Yon would replace embedded journalists in war coverage. Academic economists with blogs would replace financial journalists. Practicing scientists with blogs would replace science journalists. Those like myself without such impressive credentials could take comfort in Eric Raymond’s adage about open source software: “with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.” With so much information at my fingertips, I could grow, and in the meantime, I at least had my eyeballs, as good as anyone else’s. Open discussion among colleagues and after-the-fact error correction would replace gatekeepers and fact-checkers.

Parallel to the conflict between networked individuals armed with blogs and institutions in fact-telling industries were the conflicts between webcomics and printed comics, between podcast novelists and publishers, between indie game designers and the top game studios. There, too, the competing models as I understood them were before-the-fact quality filtering backed by institutional authority as opposed to unforced, authentic, after-the-fact persuasion by networked equals.

These simple models were subverted as media took a different path from the one I envisioned. After the 2008 crash, major news organizations died off in droves, but recent layoffs aside, the long view on professional media is much better than it was in 2004. Amateur media is full of aspiring professionals who make up a kind of farm system for the professionals. The typical path involves either being called up to work in the establishment press or launching a digital-only brand of their own — or in the case of the Vox and FiveThirtyEight crews, both. Influenced by the contentious style of the web, the “objective” style has been all but abandoned, with the public debate appearing much more like the party press days of the 19th century than the 20th-century mass media. Whether one views these developments as progressive or regressive, the more heated rhetoric has brought with it greater energy and loyalty from audiences.

Time disenchants all idealists eventually. Blogs, those great fragmenters of media, were themselves fragmented into a dizzying array of other amateur and aspirationally professional outlets. Paradoxically, this multiplication of forms walked in lockstep with a concentration of huge user bases into a small number of platforms. But at bottom, the dream of a flat republic of equals was always naive. From the very beginning, there were big sites and little ones. Right from the start we threw up pageview counters and sought out tools like Technorati to see where we ranked in terms of audience and links from our peers. The network-republic was a beautiful dream, but a dream is all it ever was.

The ecosystem matured, in short, and I’d like to think that I matured along with it. It no longer seemed plausible to dream of a utopia imposed in part by my own will; the structural factors in play — technological and economic — are much larger than I am. Nowadays I find it more worthwhile to take responsibility for myself and my limited impact on the world, rather than focusing on heroically influencing world-historic trends.

It is now very hard to believe that I ever thought authenticity was the endpoint of all this. Social media’s characteristic form of comedy and didactic commentary — the meme — is a set of highly conventionalized, rule-structured performances. This does not vindicate my old nemeses, the gatekeepers; the “rules” here are fluid and the game being played is indeed played, rather than manufactured or directed from above. But there are better models, better ways of thinking about surviving, even flourishing, in our current information environment, than I was capable of conceiving in the heady days of web 2.0.

In search of such models, I turned to the classics. The most valuable mentor from this realm is Aristotle, who in his more practical works always focused on what you could make of a concrete situation. Consider this model through the lens of stand-up comedy. A successful punchline does not occur in a vacuum; the audience must be carefully prepared. When it is pulled off, it has a lasting effect; jokes that may have drawn polite chuckles moments earlier now produce howls of laughter. No comedian is guaranteed this outcome; each steps into a situation of great uncertainty and vulnerability, and each seeks to master the room.

Persuasion in this model is an event that happens to the audience when the performer successfully pulls off his or her performance. The skill of making the most of the room you are given and delivering just the right punchline in precisely the right way with the right setup for the particular audience — that is akin to what Aristotle called phronesis, practical wisdom. For Aristotle, phronesis was the art of doing the right thing in the right way at the right time for the particular situation. It is a skill that can only be learned by doing, not through reading books or formal instruction. In our current information landscape, what is often required to accomplish this in the situations we find ourselves in on social media is a sense of ethos, of who you are in your situation and the range of possibilities, and possible dangers, that it implies.

We can illustrate how this all works with an event, late in the history of the blogosphere but still early in the history of social media, and of Twitter in particular. The event was one that already had deep precedent, and seems all the more familiar to us now for having played out in large part on Twitter. The weekend of Easter, 2009, several authors of LGBT-themed books discovered that their works had been removed from Amazon’s sales rankings and wrote about it on their blogs and social media accounts. With lightning speed, social media chatter grew into a PR debacle of enormous scale, with the #amazonfail hashtag becoming the locus of the controversy on Twitter.

The story is familiar, but the ending is unusual and instructive. The situation was completely defused around its fourth day, with arguably little in the way of lasting damage to people’s perception of Amazon as a brand. The direct responsibility for taking the wind out of #amazonfail lies not with Amazon’s PR team, who — quickly by historical standards but at a glacial pace compared to the speed of social media — explained the situation as an innocent mistake. No, it was one man’s willingness to believe them, and what he wrote about it, that almost single-handedly turned the situation around. Within a day of his posting on his blog about it, #amazonfail was dead in the water.

It’s unlikely that the man in question, Clay Shirky, expected such a result. Still, he aimed to do what he could. Aristotle defined rhetoric as the art of identifying the available means of persuasion in a given situation, and Shirky certainly availed himself of that art in this case.

In this passage we see an excellent example of what Aristotle called pathos, or getting the audience in the right frame of mind:

When trying to explain one’s actions, hindsight is always 20/400. With that caveat, I will say that the emotional pleasure of using the #amazonfail hashtag was intoxicating. There is no civil rights struggle in the U.S. that matters more to me than the extension of equal rights without regard for sexual orientation. Here was a chance to strike a public blow for that cause, and I didn’t even have to write a check or get up from my chair to do it! I went so far as to publicly suggest a link between the Amazon de-listing and the anti-gay backlash following the legalization of gay marriage in Iowa and Vermont. My friend Nelson Minar called bullshit on my completely worthless speculation, which was the beginning of my realizing how much I’d been seduced by righteousness, and how stupid it had made me.

Shirky here performs a careful balancing act. In speaking of the personal importance of “the extension of equal rights without regard for sexual orientation,” and of the opportunity to “strike a public blow for that cause,” he tells the #amazonfail activists that he is one of their people, and shares their deeply held concern. In talking about not having “to write a check or get up from my chair” he flattered critics of “hashtag activism” who imagined it was just about feeling righteous without having to sacrifice anything. In short, he invited both sides in.

The reasoning of Shirky’s post — what Aristotle called the logos component of rhetoric — surely had merit. In brief, he, and even most of Amazon’s critics at this stage, believed Amazon’s explanation that a mistake had been made in one of their offices and had led to incorrectly categorizing a slew of novels as adult or erotic fiction. Taking this for granted, he argued that the people still mad at Amazon wouldn’t have been had they been aware of this to begin with. He called the tendency to hold on to outrage generated when circumstances seemed worse than they turned out to be “conservation of outrage.”

If it had been a critique of those stupidities that circulated over the weekend, without the intentional mass de-listing, it would have kicked off a long, thoughtful conversation about metadata, system design, and public relations. Those are good conversations to have, we need to have them, but they are not conversations that would enrage thousands of people in the space of a few hours and kick off calls for boycotts and worse.

But if I had to give a single factor that carried the day, it would be ethos; who Shirky was perceived to be, at that moment, in relationship to the issue itself and the community concerned with it.

Shirky was posting about #amazonfail the year after his biggest hit, the book Here Comes Everybody, came out, establishing him as a person of substance on the social implications of current technology. His roots within the technology community itself went back further; a prolific online writer in the golden age of blogging, his 2003 essay “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality” supposedly inspired Chris Anderson’s 2006 The Long Tail, another hit within the same community.

Shirky goes out of his way to make sure we know who he is:

I have been thinking about the internet as hard as I can for the better part of two decades, and for the latter half of that time, I’ve been thinking about the problems of categorization systems

And as for his politics, recall the remark above that there “is no civil rights struggle in the U.S. that matters more to me than the extension of equal rights without regard for sexual orientation.” This was why he immediately threw in with the critics of Amazon and saw it, as they did, as an opportunity to raise awareness of discrimination and roll back a specific case of it. This wasn’t someone who was making excuses for Amazon from the beginning or who was indifferent to the plight of the LGBT community.

Here we have someone who is trusted by the tech commentariat and the tech-interested public, and at minimum did not appear to be a suspicious actor on the political question in play. I do think that he made the right argument at the right time in the right way, and each aspect mattered a great deal; but what is easy to overlook is that he was also the right person to do so, at that particular moment. Few people at the time commanded enough trust among enough people interested in the question to pull off what he pulled off. It’s possible that no one else did.

Watching the crisis fizzle out was truly something. A day before, we had all hardened into our sides of the argument; Amazon’s explanation of what had happened did very little to alter that situation. Then Shirky posted his piece, and it was shared over Twitter like a wildfire passing from person to person. By the next day, talk of #amazonfail had almost completely died — at least as far as Twitter activity was concerned. A few diehards kept going at it. I checked in on one who had been a debate partner at several points of the event; he was pressing on, demanding to know what was so special about Shirky that he got to decide when this was over. I’m sure Shirky was just as puzzled by his effectiveness. He did not sway that one man, but he swayed more than he could’ve reasonably expected to.

Practical wisdom is the mastery of this balancing act, but this mastery does not mean you get results like Shirky’s in the #amazonfail case — almost no one does that, and it’s unlikely to happen to Shirky himself more than once. But it is about doing the most good that you can in the situation. Sometimes this means recognizing that you are not the right person to try and play the role which Shirky played in #amazonfail. This might mean you recognize someone else who would be better suited to such a role. It might mean that the best thing for the situation and for your own good is to simply stay out of it — an underrated option in an age of outrage.

Practical wisdom is precisely the skill for taking responsibility for the situations you find yourself in, as well as the people connected to you and impacted by your choices. I’m an argumentative person by nature, so flamewars of the early internet were just an opportunity to flaunt and channel this unfortunate trait of mine.

Nowadays, when I see someone making a pithy remark on Twitter that pisses me off, I try to ask myself what I am hoping to accomplish before giving into the knee-jerk instinct to reply. I ask, who am I to this person? Nine times out of 10, I’m just some random man on the internet to them; jumping in to attack does not exactly inspire confidence. They may have chosen to say what they said in such a way that predictably caused reactions like mine, but I also chose to be on Twitter in the first place, even knowing how the game is played there. If I am going to choose to be on Twitter — which there are many good reasons to do, but many more not to — I ought to at least do the most good that I can there. For myself, and for whatever influence, however small, I have.

Which is not to say that I always or often succeed in displaying such wisdom!

I came to the web seeking a kind of communion of equals, seeking after an ideal of effortless authenticity. In the end, looking back, I have to say that many of my enemies from those days were correct in their criticism. The journalists, the academics, the institutional old guard of various sorts who warned about the vindictive online crowds and the dangers of fracturing trust in the institutions of common knowledge — their fears have been vindicated in many ways.

But not their worldview. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the Republic of Letters replaced by the research university, the party press replaced by the “objective” press, and classical rhetoric replaced by propaganda (later rebranded by Edward Bernays as “public relations”). The wheel is turning once more, and what it is turning back to is not authentic expression, but to a rejection of the supposedly scientific management of every aspect of the human experience. To survive in the world we have made and are making, we would do best to turn back to Aristotle and the art of life.