I recently contributed an essay to the always-excellent Literary Review of Canada, which is out in the April issue and is one of the contributions that they have put online so you can read it in its entirety for free here, you lucky people. It's a review of an essay collection called "The Reputation Society", edited by Hassan Massum and Mark Tovey. Unfortunately I didn't like the book much. The concluding paragraph of my review is this:

There is a need for inventive and serious thought about the issues of reputation and trust in an increasingly digital world. Our social and commercial interactions will be increasingly mediated by large-scale software systems, and we need ideas about how best to design, navigate and regulate these systems. Unfortunately, by avoiding real-world cases and thorny problems, The Reputation Society provides no answers.

My starting point for the review, although it's not explicit in the essay, is that information asymmetry is at the heart of anything to do with trust, reputation, and the market; and despite what some optimists claim, sheer volume of opinions does not solve the problem. Recently, I even deleted this paragraph from the Wikipedia article on Information Asymmetry:

Although information … Continue reading

Here's most of Matthew Ingram's article about a Seth Godin interview with added intemperate and unedited and probably ill-judged commentary from yours truly. The Mathew Ingram article is indented.

Thanks to the rise self-publishing tools, from Amazon’s Kindle platform to Apple’s iAuthor software, anyone who wants to write a book can do so and theoretically reach an audience of millions — as self-publishing superstars such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke have shown.

This is meaningless. In one sense it's been the case for a hundred years that "anyone…can..reach an audience of millions". You didn't even have to go through a publisher (Virginia Woolf). But for most people, going through a publisher is easier than self-promotion, which for most people is very very difficult. So to claim "anyone" can self-publish to millions is just ridiculous. We can write off Salinger, Pynchon, Harper Lee, Samuel Becket, or Cormac McCarthy for a start. Promotion (not to mention editing and more) takes a certain kind of person. Not everyone can do it. I can't. 

But this explosion of amateur authors and publishers also means a lot more competition for an audience.

I'm sorry, "amateur authors"?? Most authors … Continue reading

[After my first Alone Together post (link), about how much I like Sherry Turkle's use of closely-observed stories, the prolific Rob Horning, now of The New Inquiry among other things, wrote a companion piece (link) on Authenticity, which this post follows. Other things you may want to read about this book include Tom Stafford's Why Sherry Turkle is So Wrong and Mr. Teacup's review.]

Slippery words: caring and conversation

When I started reading Alone Together, I didn't expect to end up wondering what a conversation is, but that's what happened, so that's what you get here. Spoiler: my wondering wandered in a circle, first agreeing with Turkle, then disagreeing a little, then a lot, until I ended up largely agreeing with her again.

What do you think about a seventy-two-year-old woman, Miriam, finding comfort in telling stories toParo, a furry machine designed to care for the elderly and infirm? 

"Care for?" Turkle writes, "Paro took care of Miriam's desire to tell her story – it made a space for that story to be told – but it did not care about her or her story" {106}. It's not just the word cares that Turkle … Continue reading

I've screwed up the comments trying to move to Disqus so I don't have to deal with the 10/1 spam to real-comment ratio that Typepad lets through. Hope to have it sorted soon, when usual crappy service will be resumed.

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[The first of a few reflections prompted by Sherry Turkle's Alone Together.]

The sublime Leonard Cohen in today's Guardian:

I don't really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It's just my experience. All I've got to put in a song is my own experience.

The same is true of fiction. Songs and stories are powerful ways of communicating, but literature with an agenda is almost always bad literature, stories with a message are almost always shallow morality tales, and the fables that now pepper popular non-fiction books are often particularly egregious examples. Thomas Friedman's taxi drivers and Malcolm Gladwell's hush puppies are the 21st-century template for books on management, business, economics, politics, and technology only because even badly-told stories seduce us.

Whenever I encounter a story in a non-fiction book my guard goes up, whether … Continue reading

Doing some reading after up my recent post on Ethan Zuckerman's "Cute Cats" talk I came across this post by Sarah Kendzior at registan.net. I know roughly nothing about the places and events she discusses, but it is a fascinating post by an obviously knowledgeable person, and the comments thread following it is one of the most absorbing I've ever read. Lots of people have great things to add, and they do so in a constructive and generous way.

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I just read Sherry Turkle's excellent and provocative Alone Together and I plan to put up four wordy posts about it here, more "inspired by" than "review of", which will probably take me a month or so. Does anyone want to join in, either at your own blog or here, to make it a conversation instead of a monologue? If so, either leave a comment or by email  (here).

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