The Agony and the Ecstacy of Web Logs

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I was poking around kottke.org and saw a post referencing the 10th anniversary of another blog, waxy.org. It’s a very high quality blog, and I had a great time poking through the archives. What’s been sticking with me, though, are some of the thoughts in the birthday post arguing for a personal vision and less content as the key to a great blog in the new internet landscape:

Ten years ago, I started this site with three simple rules: no journaling, no tired memes, and be original. 18 months later, I added a little linkblog.

In those ten years, I’ve posted 415 entries, including this one, and over 13,000 links.

….
 

Personal homepages and weblogs have long since faded from the popular trends. They’re no longer hip and nobody’s launching the hot new startup to reinvent them or make them better.

Most of the interest in writing online’s shifted to microblogging, but not everything belongs in 140 characters and it’s all so impermanent. Twitter’s great, but it’s not a replacement for a permanent home that belongs to you.

And since there are fewer and fewer individuals doing long-form writing these days, relative to the growing potential audience, it’s getting easier to get attention than ever if you actually have something original to say.

The particular information economics of the internet mean that the world of personal blogs and homepages have gone through as much change, though on a smaller scale, as the newspaper industry, though in an even more compressed timeline–and this is coming from someone who wasn’t even writing online in those early days. There’s way more competition for space; almost nobody gets attention anymore by being simply an X [stripper, line cook, police officer] that blogs. Even project blogs, á la Julie and Julia have become passé. And the early standbys of blogs: link aggregation, tv show recaps and the like have been almost entirely consumed by professional bloggers, whether they work for traditional news outlets, non-profit organizations, or commercial blogs. The point that Andy Biao (of waxy) makes is that personal blogs are not going to be able to compete on frequency of updates or density of coverage. The only way that they can compete is with personal vision and quality of content.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I go through another period of social media self-loathing. I’ve learned not to delete Twitter or Tumblr accounts because I inevitably will want to update or access the network, but just as predictable is the dissatisfaction at spending my time filling my thoughts with what is essentially disposable information.

In a culture where sharing of information has never been as easy. We are pressured to share our opinions and preferences both on a personal level, through peers on social networks, and in the aggregate, through the advertising that supports them. It has become the case that the rules of knowing when to speak, and knowing when to be silent, have broken. Though his famous quotation “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” easily fits in a 160 character limit, one suspects that Wittgenstein would not have been a prolific Twitterer.

So I’ve come around to the idea that in a world where we’re constantly incentivized to give our own opinions, in a world where we’re constantly reminded how many of our opinions are shared with so many people, the most radical act of self expression is to discern which are those unique thoughts, to discern which thoughts must be expressed. And if that means that I only update a couple times a month, perhaps that is the exact amount I should be updating.

easter song

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

happy easter, for those of you who believe as such. a note about the origin of the holiday name from Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin, you may find it as interesting as I did.

Above, the christian songwriter Keith Green performs “Easter Song.” Below, “El Cordero Pascual” (The Passover Lamb) from Oswaldo Golijov’s cantata La Pasión Según San Marcos. 

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I was reading Gawker’s takedown of Alexandra Molotkow’s New York Times essay, “Why The Old-School Music Snob is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter” with some amusement. Their take dismisses it as a music snob version of Patton Oswalt’s Wired Magazine rant against nü-geek culture: this is nothing new, the past wasn’t as great as you remember it, and you’re just being elitist. Oh, and you’re 27, so shut the fuck up already.

That’s at least a little true. But some pieces of the essay really struck me. On the shift in musical culture after the rise of internet file sharing:

Within a few years, knowledge had ceased to confer any distinction, and hoarding it had become about as socially advantageous as stamp collecting. Thanks to the Internet, cultural knowledge was now a collective resource. Which meant that being cool was no longer about what you knew and what other people didn’t. It was about what you had to say about the things that everyone already knew about.

And

My quarrel here isn’t with the idea that cool people don’t know as much about stuff as they used to. If you really want to drill deep into your interests, you still have that option. You just have to accept that most of your findings will have no social value.

My beef is really with the factors that gave rise to this state of affairs, and I realize this beef is deeply stupid: I bridle at the idea that good stuff could be public in the first place, that I should have to share my tastes with the wider world.

I definitely think that it’s true that the High Fidelity ideal of the record-collecting, bootleg-recording, foreign release-hunting music nerd has, to some extent, been absorbed into the broader culture. And this is because we’ve won. Almost ten years ago in Freaky Friday, Lindsay Lohan and Chad Michael Murray fall in love through their mutual admiration for semi-obscure alt-rock acts like The Breeders and The Vines. Entire TV shows, notably The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy became enormously popular through their indie saturated, unusual-for-TV soundtracks. Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist. If everybody seems to be having the same conversation about the same artists peppered with the same references, it’s not because people have ceased to be adventurous with their music, it’s that the culture at large has shifted.

But it’s not all bad. These two things remain true: it’s really, really cool to be “into” music, but really, really uncool to be too into music; and, more importantly, people don’t even fucking hear 98% of what they listen to. As always, music is used today as a marker of what social groups you fit into, and somehow the highest form of praise one can give to another’s taste these days is eclectic. But get too music into talking about music, or, hell, talk about the music at all, and you start verging into uncool territory. Because people don’t know what they’re listening to. And to a snob like me, that’s reassuring, because even though what we listen to may be the same, we hear something different.

 

false prophets

Matthew Eilar4 Comments

I thought I would break my silence to cop to being one of the many duped by Mike Daisey’s monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, excerpted in This American Life. In January, when the episode aired, I made a little bit of hay with it, which I now regret.

You can find the transcript of TAL‘s “Retraction” episode here. The audio is also up here.

From Ira Glass’ blog post about the retraction:

I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week’s episode ofThis American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.”

Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.

James Fallowes, editor and China correspondant for The Atlantic, writes about his and other China reporters’ responses to the original story and the revelation of its fabrication:

When I heard Daisey’s Shenzhen riff on C-Span late last year, I wrote to a longtime friend who is also a friend and supporter of Daisey’s and had been trying to get us together. I said: This doesn’t sound right. I also said that I was bleakly amused by Daisey’s presenting the far-off exotic territory of “Shenzhen, China” as some super-secretive realm that he alone had thought to unveil. I pointed out that I had done a gigantic cover story and on-line slide show about this unknown land back in 2007, plus later in a book and a video series; that the Wall Street Journal had done hundreds of stories with Shenzhen datelines before and since; that there had been countless books, picture shows, news features, etc, about the Shenzhen phenomenon; that “Foxconn” was hardly an unknown enterprise; etc.

What I didn’t do was push the point any further. Evan Osnos very well explains one reason why many reporters (other than Schmitz) failed to do so: the suspicion that in a place as big, chaotic, contradictory, and surprising as today’s China, Daisey could indeed have come across circumstances others had not discovered, or had stopped noticing. I also made a perhaps-craven “life is too short” calculation: I would spend my time trying to explain the China story the way I could, rather than devoting the time to picking apart an account I thought was wrong.

I thought I would also add a few words about why I think this whole incident is so unfortunate:

Chinese manufacturing is a sector of the global economy that is closed off to the average American consumer, is located at the intersection of incredibly powerful interests, and is covered by media outlets that make claims that are difficult to evaluate.

There are so many barriers to finding firsthand or reliable information about factory conditions. There’s a vast amount of difference between Chinese manufacturing plants and American factory farms, which also have an interest in keeping their operating procedures hidden from public view. One is the fact that it’s a hidden part of the supply chain for products that we use every day. Members of Apple’s design team at all levels are more accessible and have a larger public profile than the CEOs of the contractors and subcontractors that execute those designs. Then there’s the sheer distance between the consumer and the factories where the products are made, not to mention the language and cultural barriers that separate consumers and workers. Even if we had some grasp of the geographic and cultural dynamics of manufacturing in China, these are still closed factories, bound by secrecy policies.

And this information is extremely important. Large corporations in America, large corporations in China, and the Chinese government itself all have a great interest in keeping this part of global manufacturing hidden and keeping attention off of working conditions in these factories (not to mention the opposing interests of other electronics makers, domestic labor unions, and trade protectionists). None of these groups has a reputation for transparency, or ethics in any sense that a human being would understand. Yet these groups also have a tremendous amount of power to spread misinformation and competing narratives, as well as having open access to all of the information in order to strategically leak information and half-truths. Which makes it even more important that we have reputable reporters on the ground that have the expertise to sift through these competing claims for us.

And these media reports are not conclusive. Even the New York Times report on conditions in the factories of Apple’s supply chain, perhaps the most detailed reportage on the issue, makes it clear that it’s very hard to get a clear picture of the whole manufacturing ecosystem. And, as other journalists have noticed, the report did not even touch on the manufacturers for other tech companies or the conditions in the mines that supply raw materials for the electronics. I had heard about many of the things that Mike Daisey mentioned in his monologue. But I had no way to evaluate those claims, no one who was willing to stand up and vouch for the story.

The most appealing aspect of Daisey’s monologue was the idea that an average consumer–just like you!–might go to one of these factories and witness the conditions we’ve been hearing so much conflicting information about. There’s a tremendous power in saying “I saw these things. I witnessed these events.” And so it is tragic, and ironic, that the lasting effect of all the attention that Mike Daisey was able to bring to Apple might end up as another competing narrative spun from another web of truth and lies.

 

 

baking the body of christ

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I was fascinated by this story on the economics of the communion wafer market from Killing the Buddha. Rowan Moore Gerety illustrates the changes in the Catholic Church in America and the commercialization of religious goods and functions by contrasting market leader the Cavanagh Company, a commercial bakery, and convent bakeries in Missouri and Texas:

Like many of the mom-and-pop business relationships buried and mourned with the rise of the corporate, the ties that bind monastic bakers and “their” churches are not easily reduced to those of sellers and buyers. Historically, the connection of convent bakeries to their clientele bears only an incidental relationship to its economic viability. It is not an industry, Sister Lynn said, but an “an extension of our Eucharistic charism…a way we support the faith life of the Church.” Commerce in the service of religion, rather than Cavanagh’s religion in the service of commerce.

The difference is evident on the factory floor. The production plant at the Clyde, Missouri monastery, is adorned throughout with crucifixes and religious art, like a flour-dusted store-front church. Beneath Jesus on the cross, the nuns’ concentrated devotion recalls the Shaker cabinetmakers of the nineteenth century, sculpting the back of dresser drawers for His eyes only. The Cavanagh Co. does not have any religious ornaments in their production facility: in a factory constantly clouded with pulverized wheat, it would be inappropriate, Dan Cavanagh reasoned, “to put a cross up and have it essentially defaced with flour dust.” Cavanagh Co. retains a Christian sensibility, but what capitalist does not think his customers’ beliefs are sacred? “The majority [of our staff] is Catholic, but I am not sure if they go to church regularly,” Dan went on. “From a company standpoint, this is not important, as their job entails making sure that the product quality is top-notch.” They simply do not identify with the product in the same way that women religious tend to. The Sisters in Clyde tell their customers “they’re not just getting a product, they’re getting a prayer,” and consider their prayers “part of our promise to our patrons.” They are enriched through prayer themselves.

Another of the prescriptions to emerge from Vatican II was that the hosts be uncontaminated during production. In a fortuitous convergence of doctrine between the Food and Drug Administration and the Catholic Church, the Cavanagh Company has taken “contamination” to mean human touch, and the company maintains a fully-automated production process where employees are forbidden from laying their hands on the wafers. “I feel pretty strongly that the host should not be touched,” Dan said. His view makes it easier to comply with legal guidelines for industrial food production, but it also gives the company something to market. “Our wafers are untouched by human hands,” boasts one promotional brochure. “That gets my dander up,” a Sister in Clyde told the Chicago Tribune: The Sisters’ touch gives what other businesses would call “added value.”

One interesting note in the story is one of the original ways that Cavanagh gained its market prominence was by marketing whole wheat communion wafers, and it also mentions that a growth sector is individually sealed communion kits, with individual servings of communion wine and and a single communion wafer. It’s hard not to see that as a symbol of the church becoming more like the world and losing its soul.

For another story of the hidden consequences of shifts in societal behaviors and preferences, see Mac McClelland’s story on working for a shipping distributor that contracts with Amazon.com.