Parse.ly Blog

To the Next Parse.ly Intern: Learning is Not A Race

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:00:19 -0400

Emmett Butler is a web and video game developer and an NYU senior studying computer science and music technology. In this post, he reflects on his time as an intern at Parse.ly

Today, I leave Parse.ly after 20 months of work that took me from writing web scrapers to diving deep into semantic web standards to designing mobile SDKs. Here is some advice and emotional primer for the incoming Parse.ly intern. I can only speak from my own experience, and while I try to generalize, all of my advice is heavily colored by what I went through when I started.

When I started at Parse.ly, I was working 20 hours a week alongside another part-time work study job. I was entering my 3rd year of an NYU double music technology/cs degree, and my technical skills were rudimentary. I had no “real world” experience to speak of, and the extent of my outside experience was a few hackathons, schoolwork, and a handful of personal projects. I actually remember thinking during my first few weeks at Parse.ly that I had no idea what I was doing - I didn’t delude myself.

In the course of my time here, I’ve gone from mechanically writing 4-6 web crawler scripts per day to developing semantic web tools and mobile SDKs for Parsely’s customers, as well as contributing to the main analytics product, Dash. I gained experience in most of Parse.ly’s codebases circa mid-2012, primarily as a result of my own exploration. I personally feel that I’ve come a long way.

Parse.ly was both my first “real” job and my first time collaborating with other professional developers. Knowing that I was extremely inexperienced, it was easy to assume that everyone else on the team had all of the answers. In my mind, there was no question I could ask the other developers that would challenge them - the rest of the team was light years beyond me as far as I was concerned. This was my mindset for probably the first 2 or 3 months I spent at Parse.ly, and it didn’t really change until I had done something I saw as substantial enough to warrant being taken seriously by anyone else. Of course, this is a poisonous mindset and it can (and did) lead to all kinds of negative emotions and behaviors. Primarily, it stopped me from contributing meaningfully to discussions, since I was convinced that I had nothing to offer.

What I came to realize about this mindset is that it is (obviously?) not founded in fact. I’m sure this realization is something everyone has to go through at some point or another, but the most important thing for me to personally understand was that there is no worldwide programmer race. I am prone to operate under the assumption that there is a race going on between all programmers in the world to see who can be the “best” the fastest, and I’m losing. The fact is that nobody actually thinks this way about anyone other than themselves - everyone is worried about their own skills, but they don’t spend time comparing other people.

The point is that everyone has their own expertise and skillset, and it’s very unlikely (no matter how much you want to believe it) that the sum of your own knowledge is fully duplicated across the rest of the Parse.ly team. You know something someone else doesn’t, and this simple fact invalidates the “race” idea. Skill sets are vectors, not scalars - you can’t just “rank” people based on the entirety of what they know or don’t know.

The upshot for me was to stop comparing myself to other developers, especially the Parse.ly team. There is nothing to be gained from worrying about “how good you are”.

As for contributing to discussions, I think about it like this: you are very familiar with yourself. You probably have a constant internal monologue in which you acknowledge your own thoughts about the discussions and teams activity happening around you. You’re comfortable with this. If you’re anything like me, you tend to forget that other people (especially people who don’t know you very well) are not familiar with your internal monologue. To me, it seemed that the worst consequence of not contributing to discussions was having to go along with whatever decisions were made. It turns out, though, that since the rest of the team doesn’t hear your thoughts, the worst consequence is, in the long term, gaining a reputation on the team as unengaged. This applies, as far as I can tell, to any tech team, not just Parse.ly. If you don’t actively contribute in group settings, people may see you as unengaged, or they might give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re still paying attention. If you do contribute, though, you remove all doubt as to whether you care about being a productive team member. Ultimately, contributing to conversations is bound to make you look better, not worse.

My first project at Parse.ly was the data exporting feature (what became Dash’s “save page as” buttons). My first day was consumed by haphazardly setting up virtualenv, python, pip, mongodb, postgres, and dash on my laptop, and the assignment came on my second day (in my experience, this is a typical timeline for Parse.ly interns). The environment setup consisted mostly of Andrew guiding me through the setup processes (which were at the time alien to me) over a google hangout. When Andrew told me my assignment, it was presented as a verbal list of customer-facing requirements and a few technical pointers (for example, “try using tablib for converting to CSV”).

I had no idea where to start. The project was an exercise in smart google searching and lots of trial and error. It felt weird at the time to be given a project that I would have to learn a lot to complete, and the distributed nature of the development team made it even more intimidating to ask for help when I needed it. A distributed team is a great environment for seasoned engineers to collaborate asynchronously, but it leaves something to be desired for a novice developer in the process of learning. In a non-distributed environment, I could lean over and ask another engineer to look something over or give a pointer - this becomes less natural when you’re collaborating over IRC.

As a result of the team’s geographic separation and my above-mentioned mental blocks, I learned how to figure things out for myself. I started spending more time searching online and participating in StackOverflow than I did wondering when some team member could find time to help me learn. Honestly, I think the distributed environment contributed positively to my learning, as it forced me to break out of the comfort of more experienced devs and learn to fend for myself, so to speak. If I wasn’t already an autodidact, I certainly became one around this time.

There is a lot that you can do as an incoming intern at Parse.ly to make the experience most worthwhile for yourself. Most importantly, learn how to teach yourself. Don’t let insecurity about your skills stop you from sharing your thoughts. React to intimidating projects with curiosity, not fear. Do not be afraid of this man, he is scarier than he looks. I mean, not as scary as he looks. He may be the most opinionated member of the Parse.ly team, but he will teach you to challenge your assumptions and defend your positions. Take every opportunity to learn bits of the codebase you’ve never seen before, in languages you’re unfamiliar with.

In short, do not let any real or perceived lack of expertise stop you from being the developer you can be. Contribute often, teach yourself whenever you can, and allow yourself to be supported by the amazing team you’re entering.

I’m more than happy to provide personal or techincal advice if you’re the target audience for this post. You can email me at emmett dot butler three 2 one at g mail dot com. (Change all number-words to digits and all “dot” to .)

Thanks to Andrew Montalenti, whose encouragement to self-reflection helped these thoughts crystallize.

Does Kinja Count As A Community Vertical?

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:00:27 -0400

Last week, BuzzFeed launched a new “community vertical” that hosts user-generated and curated content. The BuzzFeed community vertical follows on the heels of a Gawker Media project, Kinja, a combo blogging platform, social media interface, and forum built around Gawker’s various properties. Whereas the BuzzFeed’s community vertical encourages users to produce content for the site itself, Kinja is semi-segregated from Gawker’s actual sites. Instead of participating in content production, Kinja users create and curate from behind a partition. So does Kinja count as a community vertical?

Primed as a possible competitor to blogging platforms like Tumblr and Wordpress, Kinja started a solution to an age-old Internet problem: how to manage trolls. Gawker designed Kinja as a rebooted comment system. Faced with an uncontrollable population of malfeasant commenters, Gawker decided to disguise a few basic barriers to entry as a personalized profile cum social media plugin. Strip away anonymity and offer a pseudo-community, all in one stroke. If Kinja hasn’t conquered the Internet, it has improved the Gawker experience. Although obnoxious commenting doesn’t seem to have decreased much, extreme bullying, harassment, and spamming seem less common, at least from my anecdotal observations. The community seems to enforce a higher standard of conduct than in the former system, where anonymous, outrageous behavior was the norm.

Writing for Mediabistro, Karen Fratti is more skeptical about Kinja’s potential as a blogging platform. Fratti indicts both the quality of content and Gawker’s ulterior motives: monetization. But are monetization and authentic participation mutually exclusive? That is to say, is it impossible for a user to make a genuine contribution to Gawker’s content and for Gawker to monetize that contribution? No, and in fact, it is only natural that Gawker turns a profit on user-generated content. And just as the community seems to have established social norms for acceptable comments, hopefully that same community will determine editorial norms for good content.

Kinja is not a community vertical because it is too closely integrated with Gawker’s other content. Gawker’s new layout promotes a fuzziness between commenting and writing substantive material, and it can be unclear who is writing what, where, as Fratti notes. Yet Kinja’s translucency with “real” Gawker content might facilitate more sincere and enthusiastic participation than a boundaried community space, in which users feel like second-class citizens or factory labor pumping out short form stories. As Gawker and BuzzFeed continue to drift apart in style and strategy, either Kinja or the community vertical will emerge as a dominant model for user-generated content. Determining a victor will depend on a combination of user preferences and the ultimate possibilities for profit.

Users R Us: Community Verticals and User Generated Content

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:53:11 -0400

The biggest threat to professional journalists is neither declining ad revenues nor social media, but rather a growing realization that the public can generate content more efficiently and more profitably.

On Wednesday, BuzzFeed launched a new section called “Community,” where users will contribute all of the content. As PaidContent points out, BuzzFeed has always encouraged users to submit material, and has thrived off of community publishing. But this new “vertical” brings user generated content into the spotlight, emphasizing the sustainability of an entirely user-powered platform.

Community verticals threaten professional journalists because they cost the company nothing. Consider the case of, well, a lemonade stand. If my kid (note: I do not have a kid) hired strangers to mix up batches of lemonade, she would make less money than if she recruited her friends to squeeze lemons for free.

What of the quality, though? Maybe these strangers are really professional lemonade-experts equipped with secret recipes and special knowledge of the lemon-squeezing process. Perhaps their lemonade is more delicious, more refreshing, and marketable to a more upscale demographic. It’s true that user-generated content, in this tortured analogy the poor lemon drippings of the neighborhood gang, is rougher than the professional stuff. It cannot be marketed to the exact same audience. And BuzzFeed’s new vertical, unlike Reddit or other community networks, doesn’t make a play to traditional journalism. The product falls into the “cats doing funny things” bucket. Nevertheless, the kind of content featured on BuzzFeed will continue to marginalize stories framed by traditional journalistic paradigms.

Despite the very real possibility that the decline of traditional journalism will impair democratic politics, it is more likely that community participation in journalism will enhance opportunities for political participation. If more conventional media companies also adopt community verticals, the voice of the people, however diversely composed, will become a legitimate source of commentary on the news. Instead of being filtered through institutions artificially committed to certain political positions, that voice will reach mass audiences—and perhaps itself—in a rawer form. Once we abandon our investment in the formal qualities of professional journalism so fundamental to its status as a commodity, we will be able to accept a community vertical as of equivalent value to the univocal journalist.

Content Marketing: Advertising's Brave New-ish World

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:00:00 -0400

Click-through rates are abysmal. Readers are ignoring display ads. But there’s good news: advertising that looks and feels like editorial content is a proven way to engage audiences.

The content marketing era is upon us.

Content marketing might be easiest to define by what it isn’t. Content marketing doesn’t go after an immediate sale, or pitch a customer a product that they’ll purchase the next day. Instead, it’s about creating compelling content: stuff that potential customers want to read and share. The payoff? Something along the lines of brand awareness, brand loyalty, and brand trust—and in a time when Ad Age calls trust “the new currency of commerce,” it’s exactly what some advertisers are looking for.

But content marketing, in one form or another, has been around for a while. To use Inc.com’s examples: In-flight magazine? Content marketing. Michelin guides? Content marketing. Soap operas? If you were watching (or rather, listening) in the 1930s, you were engaging with content marketing. Today, you can see examples of content marketing hosted on a variety of sites, from The Atlantic to Forbes.com to Buzzfeed .

This is, perhaps counterintuitively, good news for publishers: Media sites are the sensible place for advertisers to promote their content—to get it exposed in the first place. Publishers (especially, nudge nudge, Dash users) know their audiences, and their audiences know what to expect on a publisher’s site. Smart advertisers will create or promote content that appeals to those audiences’ tastes. More often then not, well-placed content marketing will resemble what’s already on a media site, giving readers, listeners, and watchers more of what they’re already looking for—just provided by an advertiser.

That’s not to say content marketing isn’t controversial. Publishers are ethically bound, and “the difference between marketing and editorial content must be transparent,” according to the American Society of Magazine Editors. If an advertiser’s content is designed to be similar to a publisher’s, what does “transparency” entail? How can publishers make that distinction clear?

These are questions without clear answers, as evidenced by the countless “controversies” over sponsored, advertorial, or advertiser-produced content. Think Scientologate was a unique case? Think again. No seriously: think again.

We’re not going to pretend that we’ve got an easy answer. Even the specifics of ASME’s guidelines seem to boil down to the editorial version of “you know it when you see it.” What we do know is that we’ll be watching the content marketing debate closely—we’re pretty sure it’s here to stay.

Aggregation and the Individual Talent

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:00:22 -0400

Attempts to explain viral content circle back to behavioral psychology and game theory. What “goes viral” and what doesn’t depends on a combination of taste-making celebrities, powerful users on content distribution platforms like YouTube and Twitter, market dynamics, and luck, or so we are told. But it’s worth thinking about virality as a phenomenon that passes through corporate media systems. That is, decision-making about what goes viral often devolves to individual editors at digital media companies.

For example, a story on one of Columbia University’s campus news sites has been making the Internet rounds. Bwog published a pseudo-study of how many seniors at Columbia prefer cheese to oral sex. Amusing if ordinary stuff for Bwog, a site known for its irreverent humor and mild anti-institutional flavor. The article was by no means extraordinary or even unusual for Bwog, but Gothamist discovered it, perhaps by way of an alumni, and re-blogged it. Now, the Huffington Post, Complex, and MSN have aggregated the post. With hundreds of shares, the story continues to gain traction.

The regular migration of content from local channels to international media outlets demands a more complete accounting than game theoretical explanations. While individual editorial talents at those big media companies do rely on the crowd to source aggregate-able content, their decision-making processes are independent of pure democratic consensus. Indeed, as consumers, we expect editors to pluck interesting content we might not have encountered otherwise from the backwaters of the web. Yet we are also expected to participate in the “surfacing” of obscure content before it disappears into deep archives. Perhaps we should hold editorial teams more accountable for their contribution to virality.

Meta-Muckraking

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:00:35 -0400

The only subject that attracted more media coverage than Boston last week was the media coverage of Boston. A media industry has grown around the media industry, like a system of surveillance cameras for a reality television show. “Media watchdog” now might mean a media group tasked with watching itself!

In a world after Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, news is simultaneously produced and distributed on semi-interconnected channels. News is generated by traditional media corporations and shared across social media, even as social media generates its own news content and circulates conventional media products. The complicated exchange of information between corporate media entities and social media users creates its own searchable and durable archive, which in turn becomes the subject of redistribution through corporate and social media networks. Thus it has become easier for the media to conduct investigative journalism on itself, to report on its own practices, and to discipline itself. But is meta-muckraking healthy? Does it lead to real reforms or improvements in the ethics and efficiency of news journalism?

Meta-muckraking claims to cure a spiral away from “good” journalistic practices, or the rules that governed “how to write a news lead” circa 1950: get the facts right and get the facts right: be ethical and be accurate. According to its advocates, meta-muckraking exposes sleazy and reckless reporting habits—both on social media platforms and in news articles proper—and boosts the quality of journalism on the web. Public shaming is a first-resort, and its immediate effect is to transform the media industry into a spectacle.

Self-spectatorship reflects a narcissism buried deep in the heart of digital journalism, a desire to listen forever to one’s own voice. Yet meta-muckraking might reveal that pathology to itself. The patient, by conducting an auto-analysis, can diagnose its own ills. Is meta-muckraking a symptom of a disease that, in the moment of becoming-symptomatic, heals itself? Media coverage of the Boston attacks would suggest otherwise. With every passing tragedy, and there seems to have been an undue concentration this year, meta-muckraking increases in intensity. And with every passing tragedy, unethical and inaccurate reportage seems to increase, too. Either meta-muckraking is getting better at finding worst practices at work, or meta-muckraking is damaging the very institutional standards it intends to protect.

Tweeting Our Grief

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 22:46:00 -0400

After a tragedy we feel compelled to build memorials, to remember what happened, and to make it all meaningful. Whether a monument at Auschwitz or Ypres, inscribed with what Siegfried Sassoon described as “intolerably nameless names,” we make our mourning something material to make it immortal. Oral tradition may decay and become corrupt but Arlington Cemetery lasts forever, or so we have convinced ourselves. With the aid of a memory palace, an AIDS quilt or a piece of the Berlin Wall, we can recall a terrible history we might otherwise be tempted to forget. And even once we have dismissed that fantasy of perfect remembrance, we persist in erecting the names of the fallen and the lost because we feel it is right and just. Memorials map out our cultural memory; they form a guide to our communities and create a sense of belonging. In turn, our culture demands the memorial as a kind of second skin, a raised tattoo that lets a community imagine its own flesh. There is an ethics of memorialization that reproduces itself.

When violence erupts into our everyday lives, as it has seemed to with increasing frequency this past year, we seek a forum to express our grief. Although we still set up physical memorials—for example, the 26^th mile of Boston Marathon was dedicated to the Newtown victims—the Internet is our most immediate public sphere. When today’s Marathon was interrupted by explosions, when the race stopped and the tragedy started, we took to the web to search for loved ones, to spread the news, to read the rumors, and to say something about how we felt: helpless, exhausted, indignant, sad, anxious, and confused. Why is it that we tweet our grief? Why do we say we “have Boston in our prayers?” Or rather, who do we think we are talking to?

Facebook statuses and Twitter updates are like flowers rested against a grave. They wilt and brown in the sun and mold in the damp evening, rot and curl into the earth again. There the headstone stands, resilient against the days, but in its own time resigned to crumble, too. I visited a cemetery in rural Kansas last December and walked on markers collapsed into the prairie sod, unaware of who was underneath. But I think those physical signs of grief last far longer than digital memorials, at least of the social media variety. An update or a tweet lives forever in cyberspace, but disappears in a matter of minutes off the bottom edge of a newsfeed. A moment of social media grieving seems to confirm our ultimate helplessness in the face of horror. For what does it mean that I have said to no one in particular, my 602 followers or 819 friends, that I am saying a prayer for Boston? Why do I feel a compulsion to report my prayer to the void?

The cynic in me wants, very badly indeed, to indict those public prayers as social tokens, a coinage that degrades the death it intends to commemorate. Yet I cannot help but detect a faint hopefulness in those pleas. A catalogue of tweeted grief does not inspire hope that we can or will make it all meaningful. It accepts the emptiness of loss without a furious desire for filling cavities, for patching fissures and mending wounds. Instead, it wishes for a community of caring people who read and respond with their own unaddressed petitions, who can find meaning without reaction, reciprocation, and hate.

The Slow Death of the American Novel

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:00:14 -0400

In his op-ed for the New York Times, “The Slow Death of the American Author,” Scott Turow launches an indiscriminate polemic against e-books. Turow starts with a recent Supreme Court ruling—one permitting foreign holders of American copyrights to resell their editions in the United States—and ends with a Cold War flag wave against “Soviet-style repression.” Not surprisingly then, Turow’s position is consistently conservative. He advocates for the maintenance of book markets circa 1956, and his vision of an alternative to “Soviet Russia” is a variety of American democracy that is profoundly undemocratic.

Turow’s favored argument is that literary careerism is protected in the Constitution, which includes a line about how Congress ought “to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Turow comments, “the idea that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to democracy.” Turow’s first fallacy is to take the Constitution as a kind of divinely-inspired, a-historical document. In fact, copyright law was a relatively new and controversial doctrine in 1780s America, tied to questions about slavery: is owning a text like owning a person’s body? In the early American republic, copyright law was implicated in the complex emergence of federalism—who had authority over fugitive slaves and pirated texts, state or federal governments? The idea that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to a form of democracy genealogically related to slavery and empire.

The first “modern copyright law,” the Statute of Anne (1710), was amended by a later act in 1739 to prevent Irish booksellers from reprinting British titles and importing them to Britain. Sound familiar? At the time, Ireland was a British colony, and copyright law was an extension of imperial power motivated by racist and colonialist ideologies. Today, arguments for protectionist copyright laws recruit the same allies.

Turow fetishizes a democracy that is by nature exclusive. By railing against Google’s project to digitize in-copyright books, academics who want to use copyrighted materials to teach! to teach in the classroom!, and libraries that want to lend e-books, Turow imagines a world where a print-to-digital transition keeps books in the hands of wealth. The most elite universities tighten their enclosures and the decline of public education accelerates. Libraries disappear. Or even without reduction to absurdity, Turow believes that a fundamental expansion of literary and print materials is inimical to democracy. That letting more people read is somehow hostile to political participation. And indeed, according to one account of the Constitution and its history, “democracy” as it is defined therein is exclusive. It excludes women. It excludes slaves.

One obvious rejoinder to my argument is that in the absence of certain copyright laws, literary production cannot exist. “There would be no books to make free if books were free.” Yet the most fertile periods of literary creation have surrounded controversies over copyright. For example, one need only look to Victorian England to see how literary piracy stimulated and informed our received canon. “There would be no Dickens without pirates.” And maybe we’re moving, in the digital moment, beyond the novel as a popular or artistic forum. Clinging to a myth about what literature is and how it works is counterproductive when media is in such rapid flux.

A cure for struggling authors won’t be found in protectionist and jingoist trade policies, but rather in the e-book industry itself. Turow acknowledges that the “six major publishing houses…all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties…” That kind of collusion, along with structural changes in cultural markets, is contributing to the so-called “slow death of the American author” at least as significantly as foreign imports. Moreover, Turow recognizes that the real problem is piracy, not cheaper foreign products. Off-shore companies rolling out cheap e-books own copyrights to the works published. Perhaps foreign rights to American titles need to be sold at higher prices, and more of that revenue needs to devolve to American authors. But more urgently, the Department of Justice needs to crack down on e-book pirates who do not own the copyrights to the works they are distributing.

Turow winds his essay to a close with a rhetorical question: “Many people would say such changes are simply in the nature of markets, and see no problem if authors are left to write purely for the love of the game. But what sort of society would that be?” Well, it might be a “better” society than the one we currently inhabit. It might be a more tolerant society, a society with greater equality, with less fear and more compassion, a society less beholden to nationalism and more open to global communities, a society committed to compromising about development, climate change, immigration, and civil liberties. Of course, a class of professional authors would cease to exist. But then we would be without a class of people who, to preserve their livelihoods, are motivated to tell us certain stories about reality, to condition our responses to the world, to shape our experiences into limited scripts and to discipline our emotional and cultural lives. Whatever would we do.

Turow’s title alludes to a famous essay by Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author.” I’m not sure whether the allusion is ironic, because Barthes refutes Turow’s entire thesis. In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes attacks the idea that there is some author “out there” who owns “a work.” Barthes spent his career criticizing the politics of the novel, the very anti-democratic democracy Turow champions. But I have heard that Barthes loved nothing more than to read a Balzac novel before going to bed. The novel and all similarly nostalgic things are addictive. We know that they are bad for us, as citizens and as feeling, empathic people living in a world with others, yet we cannot resist their allure. If Barthes killed the author in 1967, we are now facing the slow death of the American novel, perhaps indicative of a coming freedom from the genre’s limitations.

April Fools' Day and the End of Irony

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:00:28 -0400

I have a confession: I hate April Fools’ Day.

It wasn’t always this way. When I was a pre-teen, I loved devising elaborate pranks. Saran wrap on the toilet was probably the peak of my creativity, if that gives you an idea. I also enjoyed reading silly news stories, the stuff just far side of normal. Since 1998, however, either I’ve become more gullible or the media has become more sophisticated. The thrill of satirical news comes from recognizing its satirical intent, but today, there’s often no real difference between The Onion and supposedly “serious” websites. April Fools’ pranks have converged with ordinary experience, too, making yesterday no holiday from reality as usual. I hate April Fools’ Day because it reveals how close we’ve come to living a parody of ourselves.

In short, April Fools’ Day isn’t fun (or funny) when fake news and spoofs fail to deviate from normal. When we can believe that a joke is real, it may be a pointed commentary on our culture, or it may suggest that our culture has achieved a state of absurdity. Consider this post from Eater, “April Fools’ Pranks Across the Food and Restaurant World.” From “Food1852,” a super-retro take on the popular recipe site, to “Bacon Scope,” these pranks are totally believable. Whereas a decade ago a pork-flavored mouthwash prank would have been off-kilter enough to poke fun at the food industry, now it is boring and predictable. We live with chicken ‘n waffle flavored potato chips, and hey, maybe “bacon scope” could be a successful product. Successful satire depends on difference from its target. But what is there left to satire? Consumer culture and politics have become satires of themselves. In this age of irony, irony has lost its power of commentary, because everywhere it appears it is already expected.

I don’t mean to disparage the end of irony. A world without irony, where even the ironic is sincere, includes space for previously impossible experiences. In effect, there may be new revolutionary possibilities, utopic and dystopic potential, where irony withers away. Yet I will miss April Fools’ Day nonetheless. The ironic turn, a phenomenon of the early 21^st century, was a good thing while it lasted. But it was written with an apoptotic limit, an automatic self-destruct when it reached a certain critical mass. Now we would be wise to set its sour corpse aside.

Introducing Parse.ly Deathmatch

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:43:00 -0400

APRIL 1, 2013: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Sometimes a startup needs to examine where they are now and whether the product that they’ve developed could be applied to solve different market needs. Parse.ly is no different and over the past months we’ve given a lot of thought to applications of our semantic technology to solve new problems for publishers.

One problem we feel all publishers suffer from is finding the right metric to evaluate editorial quality. Pageviews, uniques, time spent — these are all so web 1.0! The only true answer in the question of editorial quality can come from the Big Data of Viral Content Signals from the Wisdom of Crowds.

That’s why this today we are launching a revolutionary new product to evaluate editorial quality: Parse.ly Deathmatch.

We make two publishers face off against each other on a topic we’ve extracted from their content and allow the interwebs to vote on which article is hot and which is not.

We’ve run our Hadoop clusters on overdrive to crunch our semantic and traffic datasets. Every vote is evaluated for 325 elements of content compatibility. Millions of data points are reticulated, re-masticated, and post-fabricated into a single important summary metric: are you HOT, or are you NOT?

We believe this is a new day in the media industry: finally, data-driven editorial decision making, at scale.

Enter Parse.ly Deathmatch Now!

Mike Sukmanowsky
Product Lead

UPDATE: our Chief Hadoop Officer has also written a technical explanation of our new Hotclick metric in Hotclicks: the Science Behind Parse.ly Deathmatch.

Hotclicks: The Science Behind Parse.ly Deathmatch

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:59:00 -0400

APRIL 1, 2013: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Today we released Parse.ly Deathmatch, to demonstrate a new metric for online media: the Hotclick (TM).

As Parse.ly’s Chief Hadoop Officer (CHO, fmr. CTO), I felt compelled to explain the science behind this important, game-changing metric.

Hotclicks (TM) are determined by doing a comparison between two competing news stories for a given semantic topic. A swarm of objective experiment participants (let’s call them “readers”) evaluate the content quality using the full cognitive abilities endowed in them. Millions of synapses fire, billions of sensory data points are processed, and instantaneously, a judgement is determined: HOT, or NOT.

The number of “hots” registered against a given story or publisher are then put through a complex data processing pipeline to determine its Hotclicks. We’re talking serious data science, as the following peek inside the Parse.ly codebase will show:

As explained in our introductory blog post, this takes into account all sorts of factors, including 325 elements of content compatibility, which are summarized using a variation of the Golden Ratio. An aside: isn’t Math beautiful?

Of course, because this core calculation function is stateless, we can instantly parallelize it across hundreds of thousands of Amazon Elastic Map Reduce nodes, using Hadoop technology.

We’ll now explain how we reticulated the splines of content synergy.

What’s wrong with pageviews? They don’t get at the heart of the most important aspect of content: editorial quality. Hotclicks, on the other hand, utilize the Wisdom of the Crowds and Big Data to provide much more accurate readings of content quality quality and importance.

For example, take the recent New York Times “Snow Fall” multimedia storytelling piece.

According to editor Jill Abramson, this story received more than 3.5 million pageviews.

However, when put up in a Parse.ly Deathmath against a rival story, the situation looks drastically different.

Our semantic analysis system found a semantically comparable article from FreakingNews, a reputable source of investigative photojournalism (known in insider media circles as ”photoshopping”).

EXPERIMENT VARIATION v1.08.34

A) SNOW FALL: 1,211 Hotclicks

B) FUNNY AVALANCHE PHOTOS: 300,522 Hotclicks

hotclick differential: B|+299,311

deathmatch winner: FUNNY AVALANCHE PHOTOS

We ran this experiment hundreds of times, with different demographic audiences (including, notably, one test group of people currently caught in the middle of an avalanche). Time and time again, our Hotclick metric chose the editorially superior content. If you had gone by pageviews, the 3.5M for the NYT’s hyped-up snoozer would have “outperformed” this Funny Avalanche Photos compendium by a ratio of nearly 3.5-million-to-1.

So, there you have it. The Hotclick (TM). Science. Wisdom of Crowds. Big Data. Hadoop.

Give it a try yourself over at Parse.ly Deathmatch.

Sincerely,

Chief Hadoop Officer (CHO)
Andrew Montalenti
http://parse.ly
April 1, 2013

BKLYNR Is A Great Vintage In Virtual Bottles

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:00:16 -0400

If you write about new media and haven’t heard of BKLYNR, you might want to start revising next week’s column about paywalls and ad revenue. The brainchild of Thomas Rhiel, Raphael Pope-Sussman, and Ben Cotton—former classmates of mine at Columbia—BKLYNR “will publish in-depth stories about the political, economic, and cultural life of Brooklyn. Each issue will contain three pieces—something light to start, and then two longer articles.” A $2 monthly or $20 yearly subscription buys “quality journalism” “produced by a talented group of writers, photographers, multimedia producers, and artists.” Like most everything made in Brooklyn these days, BKLYNR is small batch, sustainable, etc., and it shows: the website design is beautiful, the copy pristine, pedigree unimpeachable, too small to fail. And potential readers are taking notice. BKLYNR set out to raise $10,000 prior to launch, and with a little help from The New York Timesand Reddit, it has already met that goal. A niche publication with a built-in readership, a focus on quality, long-form galore, funding scheme straight out of Kickstarter: this product presses all the right buttons. But don’t discount it as dogging the trend-line. BKLYNR’s strategy suggests a sexy alternative to the painful print-to-digital transition.

BKLYNR seeks to fill an open market, one with ample demand and lagging supply. Where’s the smart writing about Brooklyn, the in-depth coverage, the gritty reportage, Thomas, Raphael, and Ben ask. Although “big media” offers timely news content, the borough hungers for more magazine-length essays about unusual suspects, or so goes the BKLYNR hypothesis. The interesting twist of BKLYNR is not its thesis, which may or may not be true, but rather its commitment to the values of print journalism, the fundamentals so-to-speak. BKLYNR attempts to import the characteristic quality and feel of newspapers and magazines, the really good stuff (if you’re a believer), into a digital format. By recruiting contributors from struggling “big media” outfits and repackaging their work in a sleek web style, BKLYNR promises all the taste of, say, The New York Times, but without the calories. BKLYNR is slim and realistic about its scope, but it’s not a diet magazine. Digital publishing is more analogous to barefoot running than Slimfast. It hurts more to switch from sneakers to skin than to never wear Nikes at all. I’m trying to argue, by way of that tortured analogy, that it might be better (and less expensive) to rebuild from zero than to remodel print media. We’re on the cusp of a next wave of start-up publications that will outpace rebooted print media.

Some web-only publishers have rejected the principles of traditional journalism, what might be called dogma, in order to privilege nimble, witty, and lively reporting. Yet the desire for high-quality long-form content continues to grow. BKLYNR walks a middle-road between blind adherence to convention and extremist innovation. To lean on cliché, old wine in new bottles never tasted better.

Feeling Like Big Data

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:00:21 -0500

What does it feel like to be big data?

Answering that question requires a similar approach to its distant relatives, stuff of the species “what does it feel like to be a dog,” or, “what does it feel like to be my brother?” After establishing some known facts—the basics of doggy life, the body of my brother, broadly construed—we are forced to make a move to the imagination. In order to think about what another being feels, how they experience the world, we speculate and fantasize and dream about their inner worlds. Although the whole enterprise seems alien, and maybe dilettantish, it’s a task we take on almost every day. Whenever we see an animal in pain or eat a piece of meat, or shake hands with a friend and sense our own skin by touching theirs, or share a meaningful glance with a stranger on the subway, we pass through their place for an infinitesimal slice of time. The experience of experiencing as another is called empathy, and it is the beginning of our ethics and politics.

Closer kin to the computer is the plant, a being without obvious sentience, an organism that does not react to stimuli in ways we recognize as human-like. Where it is a small step from myself to my brother, and an easy stride to a dog in whose face I can read emotions, in whose eyes I can imagine a soul, it is a dangerous leap to a tree, which is something nearer to a stone than myself. Yet we can intuit the experiences of plant, or at least make the troubling jump from how sunlight warms our bones to the green glistening of leaves. In doing so we colonize life that is not our own, incorporate it into schemes of experience derived from human knowledge. The endeavor of imaginative sympathy, of empathy, is disclosed as delusion around the problem of radically non-human life. And when we come to realize that plants and bacteria are but a difference in degree from dogs and brothers, the prospect of ever feeling as another seems unlikely if not impossible. But perhaps a shift down the great chain of being can teach us a new way of thinking altogether, an alternative to empathy that allows us to sense the unimaginable. For any sensory paradox—to hear silence or see the invisible or touch the imaginary—we need to stop straining (to hear, to see, to touch) and become receptive to those experiences appearing before us.

Ironically, to refuse the empathetic move is to embrace the root of all empathy—the recognition of shared materials. There is like-stuff shared among all beings and non-beings, a point made so lucidly in Jane Bennett’s recent book Vibrant Matter. Stones, bacteria, plants, dogs, and brothers are composed of the same basic ingredients. The radical difference we perceive between ourselves, the human being conscious of its place in the world, and the senseless stone belies a possibility of mutual experience. Our metacognitive faculties—or our ability to monitor our own mental processes, to thrust our thought into thinking stuff—lets us experience our bodies and minds as fractional, heterogeneous, and material.

What does it feel like to be a computer? The answer is in the empathy of shared material. If we detach objects from the stories we tell about them and yet preserve their agency, their wild swerving through the world, we can identify with wires and circuit boards. We can let the computer speak its own story to us, because it is our ancestor. Our suspicion of technology follows from its distance. We have created it, and so unlike the stone or the plant we cannot ignore its likeness to us. As we have made our techno-habitats in our own image, we have forced ourselves to ignore our common lives and our mutual entanglements. Otherwise the guilt and pain would be unbearable. We fear becoming the slaves of robots because we know ourselves to be the slave masters. A new ethics demands more than a new relationship to natural ecosystems and organisms. Our new way of living will require a compassionate response to computer intelligence and digital beings.

One final move to big data is the most difficult, because it is ethereal. While we have “made it” or collected it and arranged it in useful patterns, it shares nothing with us other than the stamp of our creation. Still, the life of big data is probably closer to our own than even our brothers. Once we look inside and see our bodies and minds as particulate, we can comprehend our existence as an assemblage of big data. The human experience is, in fact, synonymous with big data. And as the human body grows more machine-like, as it absorbs metal into tissue and gives up tissue into digital memories, we will be forced to reckon with big data as more than a metaphor for our sense of self. When we become big data, we will have no choice but to commit to an ethical relationship with machine-beings or to conquer our newly acknowledged kin.

Unlimited Rides, Subscriptions, and "The Meter"

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:00:10 -0500

When Andrew Sullivan took back his political blog, “The Daily Dish,” from the Daily Beast, he started an independent company. Instead of relying on advertising, “The Dish” would cover hosting costs and payroll with subscriptions. Sullivan calls this business plan, an alternative digital publishing model if you will, “reader-supported.” Yesterday, “The Dish” released a report on its meter, a system that tracks the number of articles a user reads before engaging a subscription pay-wall. Thus far, the meter has resulted in $93,000 worth of new subscriptions. Including pre-subscriptions, “The Dish” has raised two-thirds of its goal funding in three weeks.

Although the publishing model at hand is revolutionary, because it jettisons advertisers and their influence, “The Dish” has not yet reached its full disruptive potential. The word meter implies a kind of gradated scale, a sort of pay-as-you-go that is antithetical to a subscription service. A true meter might work along two axes: 1) A consumer provides credit-card information, and for each article read, a (very) small amount is charged to their account, or a consumer adds money to a debit account, from which the charge is subtracted, or 2) A consumer is charged for time spent on site. For example, if you wanted to read one article from a publication, you could pay a fraction of the full subscription price. Or if you thought that you would spend less time reading content than a subscription price assumed, you could opt-in to the time charge. Basically, the difference is analogous to that between single ride metrocards, loaded metrocards, and unlimited ride metrocards. At each level, the customer is awarded a discount, bonus, or premium for opting in to a heavier use-expectation. But someone who is only in town for the weekend shouldn’t have to purchase a month-long unlimited ride card.

To lean on personal anecdote, I (Jason, the author of this post) refuse to pay certain subscription fees because my expected use is situated far below the break-even point. If a digital publisher offered the chance to pay-as-you-go, I would be more likely to opt-in, as a rational consumer. Otherwise, my money goes to waste when I buy an unlimited card but only ride twice a week.

How Parse.ly & Dash Got Their Names

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:44:33 -0500

Because…puns.

For a good thyme, sign up today at dash.to/try.

Fear and Loathing Before the Paywall

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:00:32 -0500

Do we need a digital “New Journalism”—a revolution in how reporters tell stories, an infusion of “voice” and “personality” a la Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Hunter S. Thompson?

Frédéric Filloux and Monday Note think so. Filloux suggests that a revival of “New Journalism” could save journalism from extinction. In an epic sermon to the chorus, Filloux enumerates why newspapers need to evolve: readers are saturated with content, traditional editorial models and bylines are unnecessary to credential a reporter’s work, journalists are more committed to blogging than writing for print, and magazines have shaped reader preferences. From these premises—validity questionable—Filloux concludes that “digital media needs to invent its own journalistic genres.”

Whether or not you believe that print magazines have influenced browsing behavior, a migration of content from print to digital media demands the development of new genres. After all, different genres of journalism emerged in response to the material constraints and possibilities of print contexts. A digital context thus necessitates a new set of genres.

Why then does Filloux argue, perhaps out of pure nostalgia, for a retro recycle of “New Journalism?”

Although Filloux is right that “news reporting is aging badly,” the solution is not a return to the ‘70s. “New Journalism” had its cultural moment. The movement was an expression of dissatisfaction with the norms of news reportage and the “straight” social institutions supporting those norms. Contrary to received wisdom, “New Journalism” was not especially concerned with the material dissolution of journalism. In fact, writers like Wolfe, Capote, and Thompson were enabled by a boom of affordable glossies, tabloids, and dailies. If anything, “New Journalism” is antithetical to our contemporary technological and cultural moment, entirely unsuited to current market pressures and consumer expectations.

“New Journalism” passed out of this world, or at the very least became passé, because it failed to fulfill the basic charge of the newspaper: to report facts. And factuality has not decreased in importance as criterion since the demise of “New Journalism.” Jonah Lehrer, A Million Little Pieces, the Stephen Glass scandal, to name a few examples, point to a persistent suspicion of the pseudo-, semi-, and quasi-factual. Champions of digital journalism have not focused on its creative potential, that is, the ability of journalists to invent or distort stories. Rather, the pro-digital camp has cheered for crowdsourced journalism, social media fact checking, and the advent of technologies that regulate freedom of invention, if not freedom of expression.

Digital journalism has revealed the complex relationship between “journalism as product” and “journalism as public good.” Is the news a commodity that should respond to, or alternatively, create markets? Should consumer demand for a particular type of journalism, or even journalism that says certain things about the facts, constrain what type of journalism is produced? Or is the news a public good? Is it the right of a democratic citizen to access information about his or her political, economic, and social world? The transition from print to digital journalism has emphasized this paradox, the contradiction built into post-“New Journalism.” After we have admitted that journalist need not be constrained by facts, or that facticity is not a useful metric for measuring the value of reporting, the news can pretend to be both product and public good. As our demand for stylized but eminently factual “news” intensifies, how long can the conceit of “journalism” keep up the charade?

It seems inevitable that a total divide in the journalism industry will splinter digital media: a great schism between “news” outlets that purport to deliver facts and “entertainment” portals that sell witty, clever, and pleasurable “stories.” But how will news companies convince consumers to purchase a product that ought to be free? Perhaps the real scam is that citizens must still pay to make informed decisions. Information should be free; entertainment should come at a price, if need be, a sacrifice. We can only hope that news will become a right, not a privilege of the wealthy. Until then, the “liberal media” is a myth, but not of the kind you might expect. The problem is not that some media companies hide a liberal agenda or bias, or that conservative-slanted companies attack a liberal agenda piled up from straw. Instead, we should ask, how could any media company pretend at liberalism while denying entry to all citizens?

Reading Virtual Books for Endless Afternoons

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:00:35 -0500

Warren Zevon’s continued exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a travesty. I wouldn’t throw that word around carelessly. If you’ve never sat down and really listened to a Warren Zevon record, I suggest you do so as soon as possible. You could mark off one hour better spent than watching sitcoms. Though I don’t think Zevon would knock sitcoms, he probably would have pointed to all the life happening off-screen.

Warren Zevon died in 2003 of mesothelioma, but not before recording one final album, The Wind. VH1 produced a short documentary about the making of the album. Work commenced soon after Zevon’s diagnosis. Doctors predicted he wouldn’t last three months. The word “deadline” has rarely weighed so heavily on an artist. As Warren’s health disintegrated, he struggled to finish all the songs. One particularly tough day in the studio, Warren said, the morphine slurring his usual patter, “I haven’t been reading at all lately since my diagnosis. My [unintelligible] Schopenhauer said, ‘we love to buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them.’ Isn’t that grand?” Apparently Zevon is misquoting Schopenhauer here—any philosophy aficionados out there with a source? Whether a Zevon original or bona fide Schopenhauer-ism, the quote cuts to a problem for historians of the book. Why do we buy more books than we can read now or even intend to eventually?

For book collectors like Walter Benjamin, books possess a value beyond the stories and knowledge held within their covers. In his essay “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin references Anatole France’s rejoinder “to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?” A book’s value may lie in its beauty, its rarity, a wonderful memory it evokes, or its special place in a collection. A bookshelf with one empty slot is a pathetic and yearning sight. The bibliophile wants to fill the missing spaces in his personal library. Otherwise, the ache rings like a sore tooth, rotten and pockmarked with cavities, that begs a good suck.

What will the world look like once we have lost all our books? That future that looks likelier with every passing digital edition and e-reader. Of course, we would be remiss to ignore the political promise of such a future: the possibility of truly free literature, a global library open to all readers, and a symmetrical distribution of information. But I think we would also be hasty to dismiss the real pain that we will all suffer when the last book collapses into fragments like paper moths. If we love to buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them, how will the disappearance of the book change our relationship to time? Zevon and Schopenhauer suggest that books serve as insurance against entropy. Time passes on, but the promises we make to ourselves, the vows to read the books we’ve bought, persists. Each volume represents a specific parcel of leisure: an hour for The Hunger Games, two for The Catcher in the Rye, and for especially fat stuff, maybe Melville, a day or two. We use the books we’ve bought to measure the time we have left. Of course, that measurement is a delusion. How could we ever predict the hours of books tumbling down our personal timers? But by converting the abstract and the immeasurable into concrete objects, we assure a certain peace of mind. In a world without books, we will become unstuck from those blocks of text and glue. We will be left to wander without the security of the hours we’ve promised to ourselves. In our virtual lives, our experience of time will not be measured in pages, chapters, or finished novels. Instead, we’ll drift in a flow of data, joyful and ignorant of the time we’ve spent. Entire lives will evaporate in an endless afternoon surfing the web.

Perhaps it is a marvelous opportunity, this unraveling of the knots tying our lives to mere objects. Are books but objects, though? The really uncomfortable fact of book collecting is that the “book as commodity” transforms the book’s content into a price tag. When we give up books, we will be able to complete the circuit of exchange. We will trade time for knowledge; we will loose our days into ether to set knowledge free.

The Super Bowl and Social Media Advertising

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:01:02 -0500

Super Bowl XLVII had a tough team to beat. Its predecessor, XLVI, captivated 111.3 million Americans with a rating of 47.8—meaning 47.8 percent of households watching television that night tuned in. XLVII scored 48.1, a new Super Bowl record. Sure, that 48.1 figured out to a mere 108.3 million viewers. But who’s counting. [Numbers courtesy Forbes.] Analysts had predicted the decline in total viewership, which turned out to be minimal. For all practical purposes though, XLVII was as popular as XLVI. With Beyonce and a freak power outage, that is. Nevertheless, XLVII proved that the sports media event, broadcasted across traditional channels, has maintained its status as commercial advertising juggernaut.

But how successfully did advertisers capture or engage with social media audiences? Over the course of the evening, the Super Bowl inspired 24.1 million tweets, with a peak of 268,000 tweets per minute at the end of the halftime show. The precise content of the tweet en masse is difficult to describe, but I think “color commentary” is a fair approximation. At the risk of leaning heavily on an analog cliche, the “peanut gallery” used social media to express criticism, praise, snark, and delight. Rarely did Twitter devolve into a stream of “commercial commentary,” even when the subjects of conversation were commercials themselves. Advertisers failed to inspire a level of deep engagement with their products.

According to the logic of television advertising, deep engagement with the product is a no-no. Consumers should ponder the goods at hand, make considered decisions, debate the merits of competitors; commercials should inspire a feeling, a desire (perhaps not for the product itself, but for the values that the product entails)—nothing more. Yet social media advertising is a different story, because digital consumers expect a degree of interactivity. Television is, by nature, a passive medium. The viewer receives the information beamed down from above. Twitter is, by nature, an active medium. The user broadcasts information back to the powers that be.

During the Super Bowl, advertisers had the opportunity to make visible and explicit the new relationship between television spots and social media conversations. Unfortunately, there is a prevailing line of thought about “how to make money from social media.” The paradigm of social media monetization returns the user from active user to unwitting, passive recipient of commercial data. For old-school advertisers, it’s all well and good for Twitter users to believe themselves participants in a dialogue about television advertisements, or even to participate in trending conversations about products. As long as users are confined to “the message,” they remain tools of the advertiser.

Advertisers are unwilling to facilitate a change of purpose: a switch from the user as receptacle and vehicle of advertising slogan to independent brand ambassador. Such reluctance follows from the fear that necessitates advertising in the first place, a paranoia (possibly true) that one’s product just isn’t that good. Thus the need for distraction and deception, because if one’s product was the best, in a perfect competition against lesser foes there would be no risk of failure. The “Twitter account as independent brand ambassador” demands an impossible level of trust between consumer and advertiser. The latter assumes that loyalty is, paradoxically capricious; that no one will remain a brand ambassador of their own will forever. Indeed, I find my own product loyalties shifting when I deliberate the merits of competitors. Why should I advocate for one product once I have changed my mind and think another to be superior? What is the incentive?

Advertisers recognize the perils of social media strategies that rely upon the independence and free choice of the consumer. Traditionally, advertising has depended upon the illusion of independence and free choice. How could that illusion be replaced by something real? More importantly, why would an advertiser risk everything on the whims of a consumer when those whims can be manipulated? At least for now, social media advertising cannot replicate the success of its television forebears. It is not so easy to manipulate collectives of consumers communicating across digital space. Therefore, we face an arms race between savvy consumer advocates and their advertising enemies. For the consumer, the launch of stronger and faster response systems against bad products. For the advertiser, the development of better strategies for the manipulation of social media. What’s your bet?

Reading for Pleasure

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:27:04 -0500

The first half of my life I read for pleasure every day. I came home, curled up in the beanbag chair next to my bookshelf, and read for an hour or three. Although I played sports, did homework, and hung out with friends, my life as a middle schooler was less than busy. According to a monthly reading journal I kept, I averaged three books a week. Full disclosure, my parents limited the time I could spend on the computer. We had one desktop, located in a cabinet between kitchen and family room. We didn’t own any video game systems. (My dad bought broken pinball machines and we fixed them, and we had a foosball table.) Wednesday was the one night a week we watched TV.

The first time I wrote the preceding paragraph, I ended it, “I entertained myself with my books.” But that isn’t a perfectly accurate statement, because I didn’t think that books were entertainment. Reading was an integrated part of my life, no different from eating dinner. The absence of books would have been unthinkable.

When I started high school, I stopped reading for pleasure except over holidays. I had more of everything: more activities, more homework, more friends. And more electronic stimulation, because my parents realized that limits on computer use forced me to blitz through essays and research. I got my first laptop for my middle school graduation. Without supervision, I discovered instant messaging and stayed up late at night talking with my peers. Instead of reading by myself, I expanded my social circles, which perhaps suggests that reading and dialogue or the life of the mind and social life are mutually exclusive. The contradiction of reading and socializing is a recent phenomenon, though; from “the republic of letters” to literary salons, reading has been a historically communal activity. While the Internet has made it possible for the salon to move into digital forums, a limited number of teenagers discuss literature on listservs. More so than television, which remained a background channel until I left for college, time spent on the Internet traded off with reading.

Pleasure reading has become a dirty turn of phrase. Considering the sexual connotation of “pleasure,” the slip of fun into smut isn’t exactly surprising. Yet we might ask how a particular category of “bad reading,” the erotic, has come to imply a more general set of reading behaviors; that is, how has an attack on erotic books become an attack on reading for fun, nothing more?

Erotica is solitary stuff. To read dirty books is shameful in part because of their content, which bucks conservative sexual mores, but mostly because they empower the individual—myself minus companions. The reader of pornographic and obscene literature does not need the validation of an external audience. He or she probably wouldn’t receive it, even if he or she was looking for it. Against the threat that erotica poses to the couple as concept, we have set up a cultural defense, the stereotypes of the troll, the pervert, and the loner.

But what about ordinary books, the non-explicit or prurient? How did it happen that reading became a specialized task that one completed during designated times in roped-off corridors? Why do we have books that are written for reading on the beach?

In the process of defining a good life as a social life, and moreover, a social life of a certain sort—one conducted in virtual coffeehouses—we have condemned all lonely pursuits as selfish and narcissistic. “Pay-per-view” means sex, despite its so-called “legitimate”channels, for example, Ultimate Fighting Championships. “Dining alone” means loneliness, despite the possibility that a table-for-one follows from circumstances neither pathetic nor the tragic. We label the isolated as the lonely because it has been conditioned, culturally and socially, as a useful shortcut. We hear “pay-per-view” and assume businessman-in-hotel-room. We see a person eating “by his lonesome” and assume that he is alone because he is unable to be with others. Besides perversion, why would someone choose to isolate himself? Our reliance on these shortcuts reflects a poverty of imagination. Thus, a term like “anti-social” can enter our vocabulary and come to stand for any behavior orchestrated by a party of one. Just as a brownie or Internet porn is sinful, but especially so when eaten or watched in solitude, the art of reading alone is a crime against nature. For man is a social animal, and his nature is to live among others. Even when we take “me-time,” we do so in order to broadcast our individuality and isolation to the crowd. Me-time is sign of class, the privilege that affords time for the self partitioned from the time that rightfully belongs to others. But what has happened to the things we do by ourselves, for ourselves, and tell no one about? What has happened to the secret things, the rituals and habits and oddities that we keep quiet and cherish inside? There are still remainders from Internet life reserved for the personal, but they are endangered and dwindling. Public intimacy has appropriated the sacred time set aside for the self.

Only on vacations from ordinary life are we expected to escape the collective. Reading for pleasure becomes a break from the daily drag. Such a treat to sit down with a book with no phones or email, or to have enough energy to focus on an object other than a screen. This logic is self-perpetuating. Once an activity becomes reserved for the extraordinary, it is a stumble away from abnormal. Consigned to vacation time, pleasure reading is safe. When it breaks free from that expectation, when pleasure reading infiltrates the everyday—when we start reading Dickens in our cubicles or jostling straphangers to flip a page or turn off American Idol or Girls or Homeland or power down laptops in favor of a thick-spined book—we begin to wonder why we have to confine our reading to stolen moments.. First, we question why we require a staycation from electronic stimulation, second, why books are the appropriate form for that respite, and third, why we need a break at all! At the time of its invention, the novel was a technology designed to alleviate boredom. Now, we need something comparatively boring to relieve the anxiety and stress of living. The most dangerous inquiry of all is one for revolutionary thinking, but banal all the same: Why don’t we read instead of reading for pleasure?

It was when I realized that reading was my vocation that I began to read for pleasure again. From that epiphany, I understood that the distinction between reading and reading for pleasure is a state of mind, a willful orientation to any activity. For it is our choice to say, “I am reading for pleasure,” rather than “I am reading,” to think that the difference between the two statements is true. By virtue of a minor rethinking, a slight alteration in phrase, we have taken back enough power to scrutinize the surety of other received wisdoms: that we are social animals, and that our social world has migrated into the digital.

50 Years from a Birmingham Jail, The Justice of Internet Freedom

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 10:00:29 -0500

Before January 21^st was the inauguration of Barack Obama, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. But yesterday’s celebration of our first black president and of a civil rights martyr is more than simple coincidence: 2013 is the 50^th anniversary of Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” When Dr. King was arrested in Birmingham for protesting Jim Crow, a group of white clergymen published a statement. “A Call for Unity” acknowledged the injustice of racism but insisted that segregation was an issue for the courts. Social activism was not the path to equality; public spaces were not the proper place for struggle. In anticipation of Dr. King’s arrest, Harvey Shapiro, then editor of The New York Times Magazine, had extended an open offer to Dr. King: if Dr. King found himself in jail again, he could write a letter for the Times. Yet Shapiro could not convince his colleagues to print “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King’s response to “A Call for Unity.” File the incident under “unfortunate rejection slips sent to great authors.”

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is a lucid discussion of justice and law. The central questions of the essay are, is racial segregation a just or unjust law, and, if racial segregation is an unjust law, how are we to respond?

“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.”

I have introduced Dr. King’s exposition on just and unjust laws so as to ask a question unrelated to racial segregation: is copyright law just or unjust, insofar as it applies to the exchange of information on the Internet?

I have posed this question because freedom of information will be a pressing problem for Obama and the administrations that follow. Although racial, gender, religious, class (etc) inequalities continue to trouble the progress of human freedom, the fight for equality is migrating to virtual spaces. File sharing and piracy are symptomatic of this shift. A denial of access to the Internet, like the denial of education or medicine, suppresses the individual as political actor. Policy issues like copyright law, antitrust legislation, and censorship define the parameters of behavior on the web. These laws determine what can and cannot be said, where and how and by whom.

That is not to suggest that file sharing is “right” or that copyright laws are unjust. Rather, the terms of the debate need to change. Conversations about intellectual property set the rights of the consumer against the rights of the artist. In fact, “the rights of the artist” is a shibboleth. When we speak of “the rights of the artist” we speak of “the rights of the corporation,” the distributor of artwork, whether music, books, or photographs. The regulation of information exchange, that is, the designation of limited rights conferred upon ownership, implies a new relationship between the consumer and the corporation. Instead of obtaining a material object, the consumer acquires a contract of “fair” and limited use. In effect, the consumer does not own the object in its entirety, but only a peculiar and arbitrary application of the object. It is as though a person, having heard a song on the radio, had his tongue cut out for whistling it on the street.

I do not want to pass judgment on the relative injustice of copyright laws after such a preliminary analysis. But I do think we can ask how Dr. King would have responded to illegal file sharing:

“In no sense do I advocate evading the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

In his second term, Barack Obama will have the opportunity to reset the assumptions governing Internet freedoms. Perhaps unfortunately, the free Internet cause does not have a Dr. King to pen missives from cold jail cells. Needless to say, I do not think Dr. King would have approved of Kim Dotcom. As long as dialogue about file sharing and copyright circles around greed, from either the consumer or corporate position, the cry for justice is nothing but crocodile tears.