NEW MEDIA MAVEN

I’ve had a few brief moments in the bright internet sun in my almost two year old blog. I got quoted in Slate once, and I’ve lured a few high-profile philosophers to battle it out on my pages.

I’m somewhat proud of these moments, and they have generated a small amount of traffic for me, but I know that 4/5 of the regulars here are my friends, and that I only have 4 regulars. Still, somehow I manage to get over 100 hits a day not including my course pages (although a majority of them are vanity hits by Brandon). That’s not particularly impressive, but its something I appreciate very much. I am especially delighted everytime I get an email from someone I don’t know suggesting a link or article that they’d like me to respond to. It shows that someone is paying attention.

In any case, my latest effort to pirate contribute to the Internet has wrought some further fame, and though it isn’t directed at me, I do feel rather proud of my work. In particular, the slugs mating video has (deservedly) garnered over 37,000 hits after only 4 days. Even if 7000 of those people are repeat watchers, that’s still over 30,000 people learning from the work I’ve done. The video has also generated some amusing discussion both in the YouTube comments and around the net.

Perhaps I just haven’t become as cynical as I should be to the possibilities of the internet, but 30,000 people. It boggles the mind. That’s three times the size of the town I grew up in. Its like speaking to each one of the students here on campus. Its more people than I’ll probably ever reach professionally, or this blog for that matter. Now, I realize that I didn’t actually make the product that these people watched. In fact, a slightly edited version of the same clip was already on YouTube, as was a homemade film of the same phenomenon. Still, I put legitimate effort into compiling and cutting those clips together and throwing them up on the net, and I feel at least minimally responsible for the resulting product. All things considered, this is just another tiny drop in the oppressively large bucket of the Internet. But its a drop nonetheless.

The whole affair reminds me how powerful the internet actually is. You can hear people trumpeting the possibilities of this technology, and you can read statistics about internet usage until your paranoia is raging and your ego is deflated to the size of a pea, but I’ve never really felt empowered by the internet until now. Its weird for me to say, because I’ve spent so much time here and I’ve thought so much about it, but there you go.

Its funny that I’m reflecting on this as this new Facebook scandal is erupting. Facebook rolled out a legitimately helpful product that was well-designed and well-intentioned, though admittedly garish, and everyone had a heart attack. The new Facebook broadcasts everything you do on ‘feeds’ for everyone to see. The information was always there if someone wanted it, but now its being forced on everyone whether they want it or not. Facebook has heard the complaints, but doesn’t seem to understand them.

Nothing you do is being broadcast; rather, it is being shared with people who care about what you do—your friends.

You want to know about your friends, right? Well, apparently not. More information, even about things we supposedly ‘care about’, is not always a good thing, and Facebook overestimated their user’s demand for more of that information. What happened was that all of the facebook users were suddenly exposed to the raw data that described the actual behavior of everyone they knew, and they were disgusted by what they saw. What they saw was, in fact, the social networking and labor involved in building sites like Facebook. The success of Facebook and other social networking cites rests on exactly this kind of labor, and on individuals spending hours every week updating and tweaking their own node in the web. But not even Facebook itself understood that this wasn’t something the public actually wanted to see.

The internet is a strange, curious thing. It is mostly stable and predictable, but tiny changes can have radical and unforseen consequences. And anyone with a free Labor Day weekend and a bunch of pirated software can affect those changes. Its an amazing thing to be part of.