I’m on Twitter…mad late

I finally jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. You can see me on there through my Twitter page or on the widget on the right-hand column of the blog.

It’s the TECHNOLOGY, stupid

The title of this post is obviously hearkening back to the oft-quoted line of famed Democratic political consultant James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid!” And today, just one week away from the election, it seems that it is the economy that has center-stage as the issue of the day. Global financial meltdown, the credit crunch, etc. has all favored Obama since McCain is as reliable as G train in the summer. (Not very.)

Amid all of the punditry on TV and the Web, I was once again pleased by the insight of Slate’s tech critic Farhad Manjoo, who has written a post on the dispositif of the Obama campaign’s tech strategy to win the election, specifically on the advantage of text messages employed by Obama over the traditional robo-call employed by McCain.  (Sooooo close. Let’s hope it happens.)

So why is the text message so much more effective than the robocall? Don’t they both serve the same function?

On the surface, these texts don’t seem that different from robo-calls—they’re both automated messages and both easy to ignore. But for reasons that aren’t completely understood, text messaging is different: We pay attention to short messages that pop up on our phones.

Political scientists have run dozens of such studies during the past few years, and the work has led to what you might call the central tenet of voter mobilization: Personal appeals work better than impersonal ones. Having campaign volunteers visit voters door-to-door is the “gold standard” of voter mobilization efforts, Green and Gerber write. On average, the tactic produces one vote for every 14 people contacted. The next-most-effective way to reach voters is to have live, human volunteers call them on the phone to chat: This tactic produces one new vote for every 38 people contacted. Other efforts are nearly worthless.

So here is where the genius of text-messaging comes in. It’s much cheaper.

It’s expensive and time-consuming to run the kind of personal mobilization efforts that science shows work best. Green and Gerber [political scientists that Manjoo cites for this research] estimate that a door-canvassing operation costs $16 per hour, with six voters contacted each hour; if you convince one of every 14 voters you canvass, you’re paying $29 for each new voter. A volunteer phone bank operation will run you even more—$38 per acquired voter. This is the wondrous thing about text-messaging: Studies show that text-based get-out-the-vote appeals win one voter for every 25 people contacted. That’s nearly as effective as door-canvassing, but it’s much, much cheaper. Text messages cost about 6 cents per contact—only $1.50 per new voter.

Wow. So not only do you get a cheaper means of connecting to potential voters but also a more successful one.

Okay, you may be wondering, any Joe Schmoe can try to campaign using texts, why is Manjoo convinced that Obama’s effort is so damn good?

The beauty of text messaging is that it is both automated and personalized. This is true of e-mail, too, but given the flood of messages you get each day (no small amount from Obama), you’re probably more attuned to ignoring e-mail. Text messages show up on a device that you carry with you all day long—and because you probably get only a handful of them each day, you’re likely to read each one.

This is especially true when the message seems to have been tailored to you specifically—Obama’s often are. The campaign knows a lot about me: At the least, it knows that I live in California, and because I joined the text-message list in order to learn the V.P. pick, that I’m fairly interested in politics (and therefore likely to vote). It’s possible that they might know even more; given my ZIP code and my phone number, they could potentially have tied my text-message account to my voter registration file, allowing the campaign to send me messages based on my party registration, whether I usually vote by mail, and whether I sometimes forget to vote. (It doesn’t appear that the campaign knows what’s in my registration file, though; I’m registered as a permanent absentee voter, but the campaign hasn’t asked me to mail in my ballot yet.)

And it is this ability to “microtarget,” as Manjoo puts it, a political campaign that is usually sprawling with various messages and themes to the small pockets of individuals that gives Obama such a technological advantage. It is the ability to technologically create a pocket of dialogic (as opposed to disseminatory) intimacy with voters, among many other things, that Obama has been so successful. Let’s see what happens in a week.

X-posted at Human Potential.

Drinking Alone in Toronto

A piece for this weekend’s New York Times Magazine has appeared early online about the difficulty of transitioning “Facebook” friends to “real life,” and, more generally, the rather tenuous nature of digital sociality and face-to-face interaction. It’s a fun piece and not really “techy” at all. Remember folks, this is being published in the Magazine.

The author, a middle-aged single father of one, living in Toronto, sees that he has nearly 700 Facebook friends and decides to create an “event” in order to meet some new people.

So I decided to have a Facebook party. I used Facebook to create an “event” and invite my digital chums. Some of them, of course, didn’t live in Toronto, but I figured, it’s summer and people travel. You never know who might be in town. If they lived in Buffalo or Vancouver, they could just click “not attending,” and that would be that. Facebook gives people the option of R.S.V.P.’ing in three categories — “attending,” “maybe attending” and “not attending.”

And the short and the long of it is basically that the writer, though he gets a fair number of RSVPs, ends up drinking with one person, as no one else shows up to his Facebook party.

On the evening in question I took a shower. I shaved. I splashed on my tingly man perfume. I put on new pants and a favorite shirt. Brimming with optimism, I headed over to the neighborhood watering hole and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Eventually, one person showed up.

Awwwww.

PSYCH.

No. I don’t really feel bad about this guy, but that is the type of response that he was trying to elicit. Of course, I have some sympathy for people like this but there has to be some responsiblity that this person has to bear. Firstly, no one on Facebook creates “Facebook parties” in which they invite random people that they do not really know. They use the “Create Event” function out of convenience. It’s easier to do invite all of your Facebook friends than try to send a blast text message or e-mail. What was the author thinking when he created this whole new category of a “Facebook party”?

Read his last words:

I would learn, when I asked some people who didn’t show up the next day, that “definitely attending” on Facebook means “maybe” and “maybe attending” means “likely not.” So I probably shouldn’t have taken it personally. But the combination of alcohol and solitude turned my thoughts to self-pity. Was I really that big of a loser? Or was it that no one wants to get together in real life anymore? It wasn’t Facebook’s fault; all those digital pals were better than nothing. For chipping away at past friendships and blocking honest new efforts, you really have to blame the entire modern world. People want to hang out with you, I assured myself. They just don’t have the time.

Don’t project dude. It’s your own damn fault…

X-posted at Human Potential.

In Rainbows business model works

Late this past summer, Blender Magazine released a rather silly but buzzworthy “The 33 Most Overrated People, Places, Trends and Other Junk in Rock” list. And the idiots there–Jon Dolan, Josh Eells, Joe Levy, Rob Sheffield, Rob Tannenbaum, Jonah Weiner, Douglas Wolk–put Radiohead’s model of consumer-set pricing for their album In Rainbows at 31 in that overrated list. (My friend Jon Coplon, though he works at Blender, is not an idiot as his name did not appear on the by-line. The one time where not getting a by-line is perhaps helpful is this instance.)  They wrote:

31. THE IN RAINBOWS MODEL
Record industry: evil! Paying what you want: good! But even in the “intellectual property wants to be free” age, a glorified tip jar isn’t going to work for most bands—Girl Talk notwithstanding, if the act doesn’t have a pretty huge fan base already, they can basically forget it. And if you look a little more closely at what Radiohead did, they actually made a lot of their money from In Rainbows the old-fashioned way: selling physical copies, including fancy, limited-­edition versions with premium price tags.
Underrated alternative: Tour-exclusive CDs

What you see above is not only faulty logic but also a music publication so self-defensively engaged in saving its parasitic status to the failing record industry, that it’s not even funny; it’s sad. Now, they did get one thing right–that Radiohead ended up selling a lot of physical copies (CDs) of In Rainbows. But that’s thing; isn’t that kind of the point?

Wired Magzine’s music blog Listening Post had a recent post in which the author suggests that Radiohead’s model was quite successful:

New numbers revealed by the band’s publisher at a conference in Iceland on Wednesday show that even after giving away In Rainbows as a pricing-optional download starting on October 10, 2007, the band still sold more CDs of the album than it did of either of its previous two albums.

Music fans bought 1.75 million In Rainbows CDs, as first reported by Music Ally, while 2001’s Amnesiac and 2003’s Hail To The Thief sold 900,000 and 990,000 CDs respectively.

As for the pricing-optional digital version of the album, it generated more money from digital sales than all of its other albums combined. Although Radiohead didn’t allow any of those albums to be sold through iTunes until June of 2008, that revelation should silence those who criticized Radiohead’s business acumen for allowing fans to pay whatever they wanted to download the album.

It seems that it is now quite a different story than that which Blender told in late summer. Now, I must be fair and cede at least one point to Blender’s initial spilling of the haterade. Yes, the album that you “give away” must have great songs on it for people to not only pay what they want for it, but to then also buy the physical copies. This goes without saying. But what I would argue is that if it is free, people will give it a listen, a gander, a shot. What Radiohead did was to give this experimental business model a shot and most importantly, after its apparent success, legitimacy. Now I know Blender’s list was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I don’t know why the music industry and its peripheral industries do not embrace new ways of consuming music. They fail to realize that more people listen and consume music now than ever before. The trick for the music industry is to tap into such consumption. Their dogtmatism, thinly veiled as comedy, will only serve as shovels to their own graves.

X-posted at Human Potential.

Opera streaming on the Web

The state of contemporary opera is more than a bit bizarre and interesting. Today it is considered haute culture and only for those who are not only economic elites but of course culturally elite. But it wasn’t always for those people. Socio-historically, opera is something more akin to the musical than something like an orchestral concert, something that all kinds of people can go see. (Still doesn’t mean it’s not expensive to go see “The Producers” for example, but still you see what I’m saying.) Yet what has lagged behind is opera’s ability to keep up with the times and remain relevant. This is the case not only for opera but for classical music as well. Alex Ross of the New Yorker has written about this almost everywhere. Here’s is a good place to start. That’s why he has claimed that classical music has been on the brink of death for a very long time. First of all, it has a name problem. Even those who compose music today and are let’s say under the age of 40, how can you possibly seem not old when the genre of music you compose is deemed classical (though not yet classic)?

In a similar fashion, the very same forces that precluded the masses from enjoying classical music have thus turned on opera for its own demise. With arts funding basically zero during the Bush Administration, opera is dying a slow death as its patrons (the rich white people who actually go see opera and also contribute their production) are dying off. What will opera do?

Enter the Internet. The NY Times reports that the Metropolitan Opera will begin streaming operas on the Web. There’s a catch of course. There’s a fee. It is a silly thing for the Met to do since it is basically making a pay-per-view service in the era of fluid file-sharing. Why in the hell would people pay for such a thing? It is a rather terrible survival strategy for an institution that is not going to last much longer. Now, I’m not all that attached to opera (I’ve only been to one–a costumed rehearsal of The Great Gatsby in high school which SUCKED. All my Fieldston people, you know what I’m talking about.), but I find it so disturbing (and thus funny) when I see institutions attempt to stay afloat by integrating online content because “that’s what the kids are all raving about.” That’s exactly the business model which the Met has taken except that they don’t really know what the kids are doing. They have just applied their bourgeois principles onto online content for the Met and have effectively confirmed their out-of-touchness. They are not just out of touch with the main currents of online media but indeed of their own failing health.

You know what, good riddance!

X-posted at Human Potential.

NY Times: Overfeeding on Information?

The Times asks if Americans are becoming news-obsessed as we are in the middle of a very exciting election season as well as stuck in a hot economic mess. They begin with a story of a film production accountant with the last name “Lehman” (coincidence? please….) whose MSNBC-watching habits have gone so far as to elicit a pretty hilarious behavioral tick from her  5 year-old son Beckett.

YANA COLLINS LEHMAN, a film production accountant who lives in Brooklyn, knew something was amiss when her 5-year-old son, Beckett, started to announce to no one in particular, “I’m John McCain, and I approved this statement.”

Ms. Collins Lehman, 36, thought: “Oh my God, I’m watching too much news.”

But it is hard not to, she said, with the financial markets in meltdown, and that crisis increasingly intertwined with a frenzied presidential campaign entering the homestretch. This is why her own news diet has spiked to where it feels as if it’s taking over her life. And maybe her son’s, too.

“It’s such a drain on productivity,” Ms. Collins Lehman said. “It’s a compulsion.”

And of course the NY Times looks to a sociologist to ask about news-compulsion.

ERIC KLINENBERG, a sociology professor at New York University, said people are unusually transfixed by news of the day because the economic crisis in particular seems to reach into every corner of their lives. Usually, he added, people can compartmentalize their lives into different spheres of activity, such as work, family and leisure. But now, “those spheres are collapsing into each other.”

I do not buy Klinenberg’s veiled economism but I do see where his view stems from. More philosophically, we would consider his statement about the ability to rationalize and compartmentalize social phenomena parallel to what existential philosophers call “ontological security.” In other words, everything is in its right place. Or as the phrase goes, “everything is everything.” But as of late, during periods of crisis or social transformation, as the classical sociologist Durkheim believed, we experience a spike in “anomie” or normelessness. Or, as the great George Constanza put it: “Worlds are COLLIDING!!!!!“(Warning: The link is actually in Spanish overdub, which I find to be extra-hilarious.)

But beyond the existential argument, I find another area that the Times reports on to be far more interesting, that of what Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital.”

For others, information serves as social currency. Crises, like soap operas or sports teams, can provide a serial drama for people to talk about and bond over, said Kenneth J. Gergen, a senior research psychologist at Swarthmore College who studies technology and culture. “It gives us the stuff that keeps the community together,” he said. And for those whose social circles think of knowledge as power, having the latest information can also enhance status, Dr. Gergen said. “If you can just say what somebody said yesterday, that doesn’t do the trick,” he said.

This is something you and I have all experienced, which is the necessity of “one-up-manship” that occurs at all social gatherings especially in situation in which the person who does not know how to explain a derivative and its importance in the current global financial meltdown is looked upon as lacing social currency, in other words, culturally poor. It is most likely the case that we modulate between the one who is disdained and the one who disdains.

However, I find the tragic human alienation narrative that the Times story paints is not only a bit “precious” but also empirically iffy in one sense. Information can become a compulsion but it can also, and is in many places in the world, a hard-to-find commodity. And in many ways, I think information-in-use, that is not the concept of information but information as it is used socially and other wise, exists as something that is ready-at-hand, not something is overloading humans’ ability to use it. What I mean to say is that the Times report lacks an understanding of information distribution. It assumes that because all of this information exists in our technomediated worlds, that it is used by everyone at once. It is quite clear that people do not use one media at a time; I, along with most of you all, watch TV regularly with laptop close by. Nevertheless, information, especially news, must be accessed through iPhone, TV sets, and computers. It does not land on the doorstop of your consciousness with the help of a news stork. All of this to say, the Times paints the portrait of the overfed individual who obsessively watches the news and goes to Huffington Post by him or herself. This is a very old story from the 1950s in which the individual loses his or her individuality through the colonization of his or her mind by technology (See various books by Riesman, Lasch, Adorno and Horkheimer, Jacques Ellul, and more recently Neil Postman). But this is not exactly an accurate picture of the conditions under which information is distributed–sent out and received.

How many times have you sat around the TV with roommates, friends, significant others and had a burning question which was quite easily answered by someone grabbing the computer or whipping out (pause..haha, had to do it.) their iPhone?

X-posted at Human Potential.

Google-Yahoo ad deal will hurt blogosphere

Finally, someone who is speaking sensibly about the Google-Yahoo deal. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has written a great piece called “Google Plays Monopoly: Why the Google-Yahoo deal is bad for the Web.”

Since the proposed deal (outlined here), everyone (including the idiotic Microsoft) has been against it. Newspapers worldwide (minus the US) have done so, as have many tech blogs. There have been some, however, including some bloggers at the NY Times, who have said there’s nothing to fear. This position is more than stupid; it’s uncritical and like many things in the US, completely enslaved to a corporatist mentality that businesses mean well. I’m sorry to say that we only have to look at the current global financial meltdown to know that American corporations are not looking out for anyone. Hence, the Google-Yahoo deal, which was a godsend for Yahoo, which was also flirting with Microsoft for a buyout. This ad deal between them and Google was supposed to be a “better” alternative. But Microsoft was angry and pushed for a Department of Justice anti-trust investigation. That is happening right now, and is holding up the deal.

During this legal limbo, bloggers and others have been going at it about the merits (and lack thereof) of this deal. They have been mostly oversimplified and reductionist but Manjoo’s is quite persuasive because he is not talking about monopolization (aka Googlization) but how this deal would affect other parts of the Web since Google has its hands in EVERYTHING. He argues that this deal would be quite bad for the small websites and blogs:

It’s not only advertisers who ought to worry about Google gobbling up Yahoo: A more powerful Google will also hold greater sway over the millions of Web sites that depend on advertising for their revenue. Many big sites—newspapers and online magazines like Slate, for instance—and millions of small sites (blogs, e-commerce sites, startup firms) run ads provided by Web companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. As Michael Arrington—the founder of the tech industry blog TechCrunch, one of the most successful new publishers on the Web—points out, Google doesn’t share much revenue with sites that run its ads. “The only thing keeping them even close to honest is the fact that Yahoo and Microsoft will occasionally compete for those partners,” he argues. Once Yahoo is gone, Google will be able to decrease the revenue given to blogs and other small publishers—a potentially huge blow to a vibrant new medium.

This is why the deal is bad, not because Microsoft is upset that it lost the Yahoo bid.

X-posted at Human Potential.

A Jonas Carpignano Joint

Finally went to see Spike Lee’s latest “A Miracle at St. Anna” with my friend and college housemate Mike. Although we are not averse to regular man-dates, this one in particular was important because our friend and other college housemate Jonas was on the crew for this film. So I had to pull a proud parent move and take a Blackberry photo of the credits until my boy’s name popped up. Well here it is under “Set Production Assistant”:

Holla back clat clat!

You can also see him in the background in this photo (with explanatory John Madden-esque teleprompter drawings done by mois) that was a part of a special multimedia slideshow done by the NY Times.

I’ve asked Jonas only one favor with this Spike-connect. I want to meet Q-Tip, who starred in Lee’s “She Hate Me” (2004), is the leader of A Tribe Called Quest, and the coolest cat ever.

X-posted at Human Potential.

What kind of capitalism do we have now?

First off, apologies for not posting my review/response to Bill T. Jones’ “Quarreling Pair.” I thoroughly enjoyed it (the GF liked it a lot more than me) and will talk about it in a future post.

But in this post, I want to focus on the various ways of reckoning with the passage of the bill that was formerly known as “the bailout” but is not referred to by most parties as “the rescue bill.” (The power of words…) I don’t think the ins and outs of the bill are necessarily that important or even conceivable right now as the bill (450pp.) contains a lot of boring economese and Washingtonese. What I do think is important to stress is the bill consists of a government investment in a lot of “bad debt,” in other words, mortgages and the like that folks have defaulted and and cannot pay back. The federal government is doing so, in order to recapitalize the market (give them usable money the Treasury and the Fed Reserve’s).

Jacob Weisberg at Slate has written a very smart piece (as he usually does) regarding what to call this new form of capitalism that we have now entered. For a while, many economists and social theorists have been referring to what we have “neoliberal” capitalism. As Weisberg argues, that no longer exists anymore since the passage of this bill now requires a lot more regulation of the markets by the State. But that does not qualify the economic situation of the US today as “socialism” or even “reluctant socialism” according to Weisberg.

Despite the collectivization of losses and risk, it doesn’t qualify as even reluctant socialism. Government ownership of private assets is being presented as a last-ditch expedient, not a policy goal.

Personally, I find this kind of a weak claim. Nevertheless, Weisberg also acknowledges that we defnitely do not have a laissez-faire economy since the government has intervened severely with the passage of this bill.

Yet it’s inaccurate to describe our economy, either pre- or post-Paulson, as simply laissez faire. A system in which government must frequently intervene to protect the world from the results of private financial misjudgment is modified capitalism—part invisible hand, part helping hand.

But Weisberg is weary of calling what we have, as many left critics of the bill have suggested, cronyism or corporatism.

This was the economic philosophy of fascist Italy, which Mussolini defined as a merger of state and corporate power. Under such a system, the largest industries function as adjuncts to the regime. There are many contemporary variations on this theme, such as the Asian and Latin American styles of crony capitalism, oil-state plutocracy, and kleptocracy on several continents. Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian capitalism is yet another version. But despite the closer ties that can be expected between government and a consolidated financial sector composed of superbanks like J.P. Morgan Chase-Bank One-Bear-WaMu; Bank of America-LaSalle-U.S. Trust-MBNA-Countrywide-Merrill; and Citi-Smith Barney-Wachovia, corporatism doesn’t accurately describe a system in which favoritism toward specific companies is roundly decried and concern about moral hazard nearly sank the economy.

This is I believe where Weisberg’s argument suffers a bit. Although he is right to point out that we do not live in a Mussolini-esque form of repression, there is a lot to be said about how much Weisberg asks us, the readers, to bracket out the fact that we only have 3 superbanks in the so-called financial sector. It’s not really a sector if there are only 3 access-points. On substance, I think Weisberg’s point simply assumes that the US is different based on the fact that we do not have a single product that gives us our dominant place in the global economy. Whereas Putin’s authoritarianism has oil, we do not. In fact, the US does not technically produce anything. Our place in the global economy is consumption, which I think Weisberg does not touch at all, not just about American in particular but in his whole analysis. Capitalism, as Marx so long ago, reminded us is about production. But he was always quick to not that consumption was always an integral part of the production process. Not so for Weisberg, at least in this piece.

But to continue with his analysis of the other types of capitalism, Weisberg of course has to talk about the major alternative to American-style capitalism–the European version of socialist democracies,

with its larger, more interventionist state, wider social safety nets, more extensive regulation, and higher taxes. Socialized health care would represent a step in this direction, but bailing out bondholders to protect the financial system doesn’t.

Hence, what we do have according to Weisberg is, something he calls life jacket capitalism.

A better name for our new system might be life jacket capitalism. The role of the watchdogs isn’t just to enforce seat-belt and helmet laws for the financial sector. Market misjudgments have produced systemic risk with growing intensity and alarming frequency, requiring rescues in 1988 (the savings-and-loan crisis), 1994 (the Mexican collapse), 1997 (the Asian meltdown), 1998 (the Long Term Capital Management debacle), and 2008 (the subprime catastrophe). In an age of globalization, threats to the financial system can arise unexpectedly from almost any place. What’s scary about such an arrangement is how much power it vests in our economic guardians and how vigilant, wise, and adroit those guardians need to be. One dud call like letting Lehman go and the whole world can blow up.

Ah yes. This is the argument that many theorists have been making for a while. That is, societies are forced into investing into taking on risk without them explicitly choosing to do so. This bailout plan is one great example. We have not voted on the bailout. We have simply taken it on because the legislative branch has yelled “panic.” Thus, we see a logic of pre-emption that justifies the taking on of economic and other types of risk for the sake of survival, despite the fact that the apocalypse is not understood or even imagined by the masses.

There is however the silver-lining for people interested in political transformation such as myself. It is that perhaps the financial meltdown has finally, as Weisberg writes, made people see

the reality that private enterprise on its own won’t address global ills such as climate change, economic inequality, or systemic financial risk.

And that is why, I think the US will ultimately give way to the European model in the next 20 years; and that is not a bad thing.

X-posted at Human Potential.

Going to see Bill T. Jones TONIGHT at the BAM

Going to see this tonight with the GF.

From Jones’ site:

In A Quarreling Pair, Bill T. Jones explores the dualities
between any two people and the struggle to co-habitate and to live
together against all odds.

The work is in part inspired by A Quarreling Pair, by playwright and
novelist Jane Bowles.  The play, written for two puppets, is an absurdist
meditation on the relationship of two middle-aged sisters, Harriet and
Rhoda, who sit in separate rooms and quarrel endlessly about trivial
tasks, the futility of life, and their inextricable bond. Bill T. Jones
chose this work as inspiration because “This short but powerful play has
been on my mind for nearly 20 years as I have ruminated on the idea of
partnering, onstage and off.”

To Mr. Jones the play also suggests the world of entertainment, with its
strange poetry and curious songs. A Quarreling Pair  is an opportunity to
go deeper into what makes each of us performers.

I saw Bill T. Jones, a big time dance choreographer and Tony Award winner, at Wesleyan a couple of years ago and it was pretty outstanding. I’m not sold on the concept, but I will withold self-entited snobbery until later and will post crappy Blackberry photos. Until then, here’s the NY Times review.
X-posted at Human Potential.