Blogs Still Suck

I've been at this for ten weeks now. When I started this blog I was pessimistic about the format, but I wasn't totally sure how it would pan out. If anything, blogging for a while has reaffirmed my opinions.

A lot of what Amber mentioned in her presentation about the idea of "noise" on the internet has applied pretty directly. Even though I haven't been blogging as frequently as would be ideal, given the blog format, I still frequently feel like I'm contributing just for the sake of contributing, essentially talking just to hear my own voice. Even this post is sort of just filler. None of this really needs to be said.

Additionally, I feel that the format does not lend itself to quality writing; in fact, it encourages just the opposite. The casual style of writing that works best on blogs is great, don't get me wrong. The problem lies more in the drive for speed in writing that is encouraged. I've never really proofread these posts for spelling or grammar errors, and while quickly browsing through the front page of my blog just now I picked up several mistakes and poorly-phrased sentences. Obviously, nothing is stopping me from spending more time making sure that mistakes don't slip through, but that's not really what's foremost in my mind when I'm trying to write quick, short posts.

Overall I don't think there's anything really "wrong" with blogs, in general terms. But the "background noise" issue still stands. The amount of existing blogs is staggering, and it seems pretty dubious that each and every single one of those bloggers is really saying much. So in the end it's not that I have a problem with people blogging - let people write whatever they like - but I still can't bring myself to care much, negatively or positively.

Facebook Regret

Most people I know have Facebook accounts, including the kids who are too old to legally have them. It doesn't particularly bother me that kids are lying (and breaking the law) to create Facebook accounts before they turn thirteen - but I think in the future, it will bother them. I've made the mistake of scrolling through my friends' old Facebook content, and most of it is extremely cringe-inducing. And unless you're willing to delete your account, that old content is going to be around forever, eternally reminding you of how dumb you were when you were fourteen. The thought of having posts extending back to when I was twelve, or even younger, is absolutely horrifying to me, and I think there will be plenty of people who will have to remake their accounts at some point to purge themselves of their past selves.

The idea of fake Facebook accounts is actually more troubling to me. Not from any philosophical standpoint, or anything like that. I don't care if someone wants to make a profile for their dog. I don't think Facebook is being tainted as a social network because of Batman having his own page, or at least not any more tainted and stupid than it already is. What bothers me about these accounts is that if I'm sent a request from my friend's dog, I'm expected to accept it, and I don't want to see a useless account on my feed. So I suppose they do annoy me, but not by nature of existence, more because of the social norms that have been built around them - if I don't accept your dog's friend request, I am somehow slighting you.

All in all, I think Facebook is fine as it is.  But I think Facebook might be improved if it returned to the state it was in at its inception: only adults allowed. Of course, originally Facebook only allowed college students, which made it easy to keep unwanted users out (by requiring a .edu email address), but Facebook makes far too much money to consider shrinking itself that much. As it is, I can't imagine them even excluding minors, especially as the company is going public. But in the end, people who annoy their friends by creating fake accounts are pretty easily ignored, and people who create accounts at the age of ten are only really hurting themselves.

Doesn't Really Matter (to Pirates)

When I previously wrote about piracy, I mostly neglected the issue of digital rights management software, or DRM. The chapters we read for last class and the class discussion got me thinking about it more. I've never had much of an opinion on DRM, as I've never really encountered any of the problems people have had with it (like the infamous Starforce DRM that has been alleged to break people's disk drive by mistaking them for virtual drives), but now I'm starting to feel that DRM is really counterproductive.

The most prominent use of DRM to my mind is in the video game industry, where most PC games have some fairly heavy DRM measures, up to and including the need for an uninterrupted internet connection so the game can continually authenticate itself. And yet, if you look for a free download of any game, even those with the heaviest DRM measures imaginable, you'll undoubtedly find that the game's copy-protection has already been "cracked" and that the game is easily available. The same goes for copy-protected DVDs. So from this alone, it's obvious that DRM isn't working.

As I said in my previous post about piracy, the best way to get consumers to buy something that they could acquire with minimum fuss for free is to endear yourself to them, and provide them with other reasons to buy from you. DRM does the exact opposite. I haven't had DRM-induced problems getting legally acquired content to work, but I know people who have, and it seriously reduces their desire to purchase content from companies that use DRM. I still buy CDs, because I like the case artwork and owning a physical object (once again, there's the elusive "something else" that needs to be provided to get people to buy things), but if companies were still stuffing all sorts of copy-protection onto CDs and preventing me from using the music files however I want, I would cease buying physical albums immediately.

I think media companies might be hesitant to abandon DRM because they see it as an implied defeat, a sign that pirates have finally "broken" them. What they need to realize is that pirates don't care about DRM, normal consumers care about DRM. Pirates don't have to deal with DRM, because they strip it out of their media. In reality, draconian copy-protection only hurts people who purchase their media, and hurting the people who are paying for your content is a good way to never sell anything ever again.

Let Teachers Do Their Jobs

Many people in class seemed to find web filters in schools to be an extreme annoyance, preventing them from researching topics that overzealous filters might block, such as abortion. I don't actually have much of an opinion on the subject, as I've never been hampered by internet filters at school, but there are a few points that I feel have been neglected.

First off, it seems to me that schools would be better served by monitoring student use of the internet rather than filtering it. At my high school, all students have their own profiles that are loaded across all the school's computers, so presumably it would be easy enough to see who's accessing what. If student internet history is sifted through, it would be easy to see who is accessing controversial but school-related topics (such as information about abortion) and who is accessing inappropriate content like pornography, and then only put filters on repeat offenders.

However, I think the bigger problem is teachers not being able to access sites that they want to show their students. All teachers in schools need to have the ability to remove the filter. Some of my teachers have permission to disable the filter whenever they want, others have to get permission before class whenever they want to show a YouTube video or other filtered site. CIPA requires that students be allowed to access educational material, and if you can't trust teachers to show educational material then maybe the entire public school system needs to be reevaluated.

Selling Your Soul to Google

Google is apparently now paying people to allow Google to track everything they do by means of a web browser plug-in. There's $25 worth of Amazon gift cards in it for you, if you're willing to have your every move (outside of Chrome's private browsing mode) tracked and sifted through for research purposes. What's amazing to me is that Google has been so inundated with requests that they've posted a message expressing their gratitude and noting that they won't be able to accept all comers due to the high demand. The gift cards are spaced out every three months as well, so the payoff seems further diminished. People need to rethink their priorities if the cost of a few packs of gum every three months is worth their most personal information.

Feedback Loop

My friend started using his Last.fm account as it's meant to be used: as a way to show your friends what music you've been listening to. But he now considers his account "ruined" because it reflects his actual tastes, rather than the tastes he would like his friends to believe he holds.

I think it's interesting how the idea of "taste performance" goes entirely against the spirit of the social networks to which it applies. I remember reading in a New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg that Zuckerberg found concerns about privacy on Facebook laughable, because he didn't understand why anyone would use a social network with a self-filter.

There's an opposite side to this as well, which is that we can easily filter out anything we don't want to take in. When Cass Sunstein wrote about this idea in this article, he had a somewhat more cerebral point in mind - that being exposed to new viewpoints is vital to the democratic system - but the argument can be applied to people's personal lives as well.  If our social networking profiles reflect only what we like about ourselves, and our entertainment and news feeds only tells us what we already want to hear, we're completely free of challenge or criticism.

If we build echo chambers for ourselves online, how are we supposed to mature?

Your First Hit is Free, Kid

I like to think I'm not addicted to Google, but that might just be wishful thinking. Google influences how I experience the internet to a pretty large degree. I use Blogger (obviously) for blogging (once more, obviously), Gmail and Google Docs for email and schoolwork,  YouTube for stupid entertainment, and Google Reader to aggregate just about all the sites I follow, so Google has a hand in pretty much everything I do on the internet.

However, I'm really not sure if that makes me an addict. There are plenty of services that do exactly what Google's products do. I actually have a Windows Live email account, and if Google ever betrayed its customers' trust to the degree that I would no longer feel safe with giving them access to my personal information I could see myself switch to Live. Microsoft has a suite of web apps almost identical to Google Docs. There are other RSS readers that I could use. I don't really care if Google knows what YouTube videos I'm watching.

As to Google's flagship product, Google Web Search, I'm not sure where I stand. I checked my Google web history and went back through the past month, and on average I only actually use Google search about four times a day. I'm wary of Google in that way - if I'm looking for information, I'll usually go looking on sites like Wikipedia before I turn to Google. I think that's probably pretty unusual, but I suspect Google can get a better picture of me from my web searches than it can from the documents I'm saving or the emails I'm receiving. I still much prefer Google Web search over any competing services, though. But if worst comes to worst, I can always delete my Google account and use search without logging in.

But that might just be the equivalent of saying "I can quit whenever I want to." In fact, it's worse. It's saying "I can half-quit if I'm really pushed to."

An Expert Opinion on Stopping Piracy

The best and most-consumer friendly way to stop piracy is to make your content as easy to access as possible. A couple of days ago I tried to find a TV series I wanted to watch. It was on Netflix, but wasn't available on streaming, and who actually waits for their entertainment these days? it wasn't on Hulu. I checked a variety of less-than-legal streaming sites, still nothing.

So I just torrented it. It was by far the easiest thing to do. I think that's really the key to stopping piracy: make it easier to buy something (or otherwise experience it legally) than to pirate it. I think the line of thought I went down before just giving up and opening up a torrent bears some examination: I check Netflix, because it's by far the best  experience. I get high-quality video instantly and easily, and I'm already paying for it. I check Hulu, because even if the video quality isn't going to be as good it's still extremely convenient. I only turned to free, non-ad-supported sites after I tried the legal sites. I turned to a torrent as a last resort.

It sounds ridiculous to say that driving to Best Buy and buying a DVD or waiting for a two-day Amazon shipment is unacceptable these days, but I think it's true. As I said before, I could even get the DVD shipped to me from Netflix for free (because for some reason I still get the DVD service), but I just don't want to wait. I'm not opposed to acquiring physical media, either. I have a small movie collection, and I own every season of Breaking Bad. But I don't buy physical media when I want to watch it right now, I buy it because I'd like to have it conveniently available in the future, and I think that's something that media companies need to come to understand. Convenience and usability is the
prime selling point of media in an era where I can click a button and get something for free.

Infinite Potential Fun = Zero Actual Fun

I worked on a paper for a good chunk of time today, and it got me thinking about something I've considered before: the limitless potential of the internet to provide entertainment results in me experiencing far less of the entertainment that I actually want to experience.

When I'm working on schoolwork on my computer, I rarely take actual breaks. I usually just drift away from my word processor and end up on some mildly amusing website, almost always for a far greater span of time than I would like. But I don't really care for any of the junk that I see on these little browsing excursions. I'd be far better served by closing my document and doing something I want to.

Recently, for example, I've been meaning to watch more of Mad Men, but I don't think I've seen an episode for at least a week. The time that I'd normally watch TV, when my friends aren't around, or I'm just taking a break from something more important, is instead consumed by not-particularly-enjoyable jaunts through vast amounts of non-memorable relatively worthless internet content. I'm usually unsatisfied after an hour or two spent on Reddit or similar content aggregation sites. The web seems to be a place for convenient mediocrity rather than more measured, fulfilling content.

Blogs Suck

I’m generally not a fan of blogs. Since being assigned the maintenance of this blog as part of a class on new media, I’ve been sporadically thinking about the reasoning behind my distaste. It’s because of this that I found Rebecca Blood’s interview with political and tech blogger Scott Rosenberg quite interesting. 

One of my criticisms of blogging as a platform is that most of the time I’d rather just read a full-fledged website for my news, commentary, and whatnot. But in the very outset of the interview, Rosenberg makes an excellent point in the defense of blogs that I’d never given a whole lot of thought: in a blog, the personality of the author has a lot more opportunity to bleed through, both in their style of writing and the things they choose to write about. The community-based nature of blogs lets you find other people with similar personalities and interests as well. Unfortunately, that can be more of a curse than a blessing. It can be easy to only expose yourself to opinions that validate your own, and Rosenberg himself says that he has difficulty reading blogs written from viewpoints that oppose his own.

Rosenberg’s other statements about why one should maintain a blog make perfect sense to me – from the perspective of the author. As Rosenberg writes for Salon, and has authored a book, I can see why he enjoys having an outlet for small bits of writing in between, and he cites personal pleasure as an excellent reason to write blog posts. What I don’t understand is why a reader would necessarily choose to read small bits of thought designed to catch the eye of notoriously flighty blog readers over longer and often more thought-provoking pieces. Not to say that blogs can’t be thought-provoking. I just don’t think the medium lends itself particularly well to thought-provoking.

Lastly, the nature of blogs as collections of large numbers of small bits of information can sometimes make them harder to consume, the opposite of their intended effect. Rosenberg mentions how the wealth of daily posts on the tech blog Engadget makes the blog almost impossible to follow. I used to follow Engadget, and I have on more than one occasion found myself with upwards of 500 unread posts in my RSS reader. That kind of information overload is the exact reason I stopped reading Engadget.

Maybe writing my own blog posts will change my tune, but Rosenberg has failed to.