Community vs Communication

September 14, 2011 Leave a Comment

Through more than two decades of travels about the series of tubes that comprise the online world, I’ve often found myself pondering the nature of community, as that word is applied to groups that form and function in virtual spaces.

I’ve watched the word “community”  being ever-more widely and casually used over the years to describe clusters of physically remote individuals interacting collectively online, via an ever-evolving spectrum of technological applications, from ARPANET to the World Wide Web, from bulletin boards to LISTSERVs, from mailing lists to MMORPGs, from blogs to tweets, and from Cyber-Yugoslavia to Six Degrees to Friendster to Orkut to Xanga to Myspace to LinkedIn to Facebook to Google+ to whatever the next killer social app may be.

But are the groups that form in such virtual locations truly communities in any meaningful human sense? When evaluating traditional definitions of the word “community,” several key themes emerge:

  • An organized group of individuals;
  • Resident in a specific locality;
  • Interdependent and interacting within a particular environment;
  • Defined by social, religious, occupational, ethnic or other discrete considerations;
  • Sharing common interests;
  • Of common cultural or historical heritage;
  • Sharing governance, laws and values;
  • Perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some way from the larger society in which it exists.

If you’re willing to accept that a “specific locality” or “a particular environment” may be defined by virtual boundaries, rather than physical or geographical ones, then it’s generally pretty easy to conclude that, yes, online groups can, in fact, meet the most basic parameters for declaring that they are communities. But other elements embedded within those defining traits raise more difficult questions and considerations, including (but not limited to):

  • What, exactly, is an individual in a world where identity is mutable? Is a lurker who never comments a member of a community? Is a sockpuppet a member of a community? Are anonymous posters members of a community? If a person plays in an online role-playing game as three different characters, is he one or three members of the community?
  • How are culture and historical heritage defined in a world where a six-month old post or product is considered ancient? Do technical platforms (e.g. WordPress vs. Blogger) define culture? Does history outside of the online community count toward defining said community?
  • What constitutes shared governance online? Who elects or appoints those who govern, however loosely, and does it matter whether they are paid or not for their service to the group? What are their powers? Are those powers fairly and equitably enforced, and what are the ramifications and consequences when they are not? Is a virtual dictatorship a community?
  • How important is “distinctiveness” to community, when online groups are often defined by what they are not as much as by what they are? Are online groups merely the ultimate manifestation of Peter Gabriel’s prescient 1980 track, “Not One of Us,” wherein he asked “How can we be in, if there is no outside”?  And can you truly build a community of peers within an Orwellian world where “All bloggers are equal, but some bloggers are more equal than others”?

At root, the fundamental fallacy or flaw with online communities is the fact that virtual gatherings cannot (yet) replicate physical gatherings, as their impacts are limited to but two senses: sight and sound. While these two senses are clearly those most closely associated with “higher” intellectual function, learning and spirituality, the physical act of gathering or meeting in the flesh is much richer, as it combines those cerebral perceptive elements with the deeper, more primal, brain stem responses that we have to taste, touch and smell stimuli.

Exchanging a message online removes any ability to experience the physical reality of actually touching another person, be it through a hand-shake, a kiss, a squeeze of the arm or a pat on the back. There is no ability to taste and feel the texture of the food we discuss in a chat room, or the feel of crystal against the teeth as the first sip of wine passes our lips. The nuances of facial expression and inflection are lost in e-mails, often leading to confusion or alarm where none was required or intended. The physical act of community building is a visceral one that appeals to, and requires, all of our senses, not just those that can be compressed into two-dimensions on our computer screens.

Two-dimensional communities are, ultimately, destined to disappoint for precisely that reason. While it’s become cliché to compare the dawn of the Internet era to the dawn of the printing press era, it’s important to note that the earlier cataclysmic shift in the way that information was preserved and presented (from spoken word to widely-available printed material) did not result in the elimination of the physical gathering, upon which all of our innate senses of community have been defined and built. I have come to believe that community requires physical connection. It is deeper than an e-mail, more resonant than a blog post, more important than your hit counts or number of followers.

At bottom line, for me, “communication” occurs online, but “community” must be rooted in the soil or the flesh. So I consider myself a member of the University at Albany community, or the community of Latham, New York, or the community of Naval Academy Alumni, or the Capital Region music community, among others. And I look forward to soon becoming an active, engaged member of many new communities in and around Des Moines, Iowa, where we will be moving in November.

My current and future communities involve geographic boundaries, shared interests, common heritage, supportive beliefs. And while the members of my communities may choose to communicate with each other online (since there’s no escaping the fact that we spend a lot of time in front of computers, every day, whether we like it or not), the communities themselves are not defined by what happens in virtual space.

And that makes all the difference in the world, I think.

Filed under Communications, Media, Philosophy Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Be an Expert

July 2, 2011 Leave a Comment

A few days into my first post-college, big-boy job with the Federal government, my boss offered me one of the most profound bits of professional advice I have ever received.

“If you want to succeed here, or in any other job,” he said, “then you have to become an expert.”

I asked the obvious question: “An expert in what, sir?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just make yourself an expert in something, and when you’ve done that, you’ll be indispensable.”

Not much for a literal-minded office neophyte to work with, but I took his words at face value and looked for a field in which I could become an expert. As it turned out, this was right around the time that the Federal government decided that fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement were bad things, and that agencies might want to consider implementing systems to ensure their organizations were free from such burdens on the taxpayers’ wallets.

Rules and regulations for what was dubbed “internal controls” fell from on high, most of them jargon-heavy codifications of such common-sense rules as “Don’t let the fox guard the henhouse” and “A penny saved is a penny earned.” It dropped to the office where I worked to figure out how we might satisfy the District of Columbiacrats, but without fundamentally changing our agency’s own culture (which was already frugal and pragmatic to a fault) or wrapping our engineers in cocoons of sticky red tape and paperwork. In short, we needed an Internal Controls Expert. I saw (and took) the perfect opportunity to run with the wisdom my boss had imparted to me.

Over the years, I have parlayed my early success as that program’s nascent internal controls expert into a variety of interesting positions and opportunities. Of course, I’ve had to become an expert in many other things (budgeting, security, procurement, fundraising, public relations, art and music among them) in order to keep myself fresh and marketable in changing work situations. But the fundamental lesson remains valid: as long as you’re the go-to guy or gal for some necessary discipline in your professional field, you’ll always be in demand.

So how do you become an expert? First off, you’ve got to carefully pick your field of expertise. There are two optimal ways of doing this: either by picking a field that no one knows they need until you convince them otherwise, or by picking a field that everyone knows they need, but in which no one else wants to become the expert.

Once you’ve identified your field, research is the crucial next step. You should seek the most primary, core documents available, so that you can assimilate and spin them in your way and on your own terms, rather than relying on secondary spin by others. You’ve got to have a working comprehension of the field that will allow you to go several questions deep when challenged, and (perhaps most importantly) you have to possess complete mastery of the field’s lingo and jargon, so you’re not undone by an infelicitous slip in terminology at a key juncture.

Note well, though, that when faced in public with the unanswerable question or the indecipherable phrase, the true expert relies less on bluff-on-the-spot than on convincing others that he or she knows exactly where to get the right answer. It’s always better to say “I’ll find out, sir” (and then find out, fast) than it is to get caught in a tortured obfuscation of some point about which you’re uncertain.

You look far more confident and in control that way, and confidence is key to becoming an expert. If you don’t believe in your expertise, then no one else will either, and if no one else believes in your expertise, then you’ve failed in making yourself indispensable. You’ve got to market your expertise, too, since if no one knows about it, then you’re not doing yourself (or your employer) any good in having it. If you say something long and loud enough, it’s more than likely to become true (or to be perceived as truth, which is essentially the same thing).

This is why every waiter in New York will tell you he’s an actor. This is why freelance writers call themselves freelance writers, even when no one is (yet) paying for their work. You’ve got to hang your shingle as soon as you can, probably before you’re really ready to do so, since you will gain more expertise by actual real-world work and interaction than you will by overstaying your time in an academic research mode. You’ll learn from your mistakes this way, too, oftentimes more than you’ll learn from your successes.

But you will have successes and you will learn from them, as will others. Once you’ve deployed your expertise with aplomb a few times, those who benefit from it will continue to seek you out, and will generally spread the word about your expertise to others, since everyone likes to get credit for being the first to spot something or someone useful. Success and expertise snowball from this point, one feeding the other, until the day when you realize that, holy crow, you really are an expert in your chosen field, and you really have made yourself indispensable.

And what do you do then? You keep your eyes and ears open for a new field of expertise, since nobody wants to read yesterday’s news, everybody wants to know what you’ve done for them lately, and the only things constant in life are change . . . and the demand for experts to shepherd others through it.

Filed under Media Tagged with , , ,

Where The Air Is Sweet? Valuing American Public Broadcasting

June 24, 2011 Leave a Comment

This is a feature-length piece derived from the research I conducted while earning my Masters of Public Affairs and Policy. While I love the concept of public broadcasting, I think its modern incarnations in the United States are not necessarily true to the vision of the idiom’s founders . . . and not for the ideological reasons often cited by those who perceive public broadcasting to have a political slant or agenda. Clink the link below to open the PDF file and learn where I believe public broadcasting’s true shortcomings lie.

WHERE THE AIR IS SWEET?

Filed under Communications, Government, Media Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

You Ain’t Got A Dog In That Fight . . .

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

The best thing about today’s social media applications is that everyone with a computer can write about whatever they want to write about, push a button, and share it with the world. But the worst thing about today’s social media applications is also that everyone with a computer can write about whatever they want to write about, push a button, and share it with the world.

Just because you can write about something, doesn’t always mean you should write about something, and it seems to me that this ability to self-filter is a dying skill in the blogosphere of late. One of the great truisms of successful written communication is to “write what you know,” and I’ve always taken the word “know” to mean more than “I researched it on Google and Wikipedia for 10 minutes.”

Here’s the deal: some people are very knowledgeable about certain topics, while other people are very knowledgeable about other topics, but precious few human beings are qualified to serve as blogging polymaths. The best bloggers, to me, are those who stick within a reasonably tight span of personal expertise and experience, and whose responses to current affairs and news are tempered by a mature understanding of where they can add value to a particular debate, and where they can’t.

Unfortunately, such nuanced, informed bloggers are becoming an increasingly rare commodity. Their more-measured words are all too often trumped by the “I blog about everything” school of online scribblers, often backed by the endless, self-reinforcing do-loops created by equally non-selective readers. Collectively, they’ve created an all-noise/no-substance paradigm that appears to be as addictive and destructive to discourse as any opiate, beverage, fetish or vice.

This “blog about everything” compulsion becomes particularly annoying when such bloggers are first out of the blocks on sensitive, important or fast-breaking news topics and, by virtue of their cranked-up reflexes, become default sounding boards for addressing such topics, even though they have little to offer beyond half-baked opinions about things they gleaned from headlines. This rush by the ill-informed to serve as first responders results in them posting some truly idiotic and embarrassing material, though their shame responses seem to perish around the same time that the self-filters burn out.

As I am assaulted by such material while looking for more mature and responsible fare, I often find myself wondering why so many all-purpose bloggers feel compelled to offer endless running commentary on topics beyond their ken. I generally conclude that it’s either because they have a desperate need for constant attention, or because they’ve become obsessed with their online hit counts, impressions, visits and follows. Or both. Either way, though, their pathologies manifest themselves through malformed blurts online, typically written from a center-of-the-universe perspective that places them (and their feelings) smack in the middle of narratives where they have no meaningful place whatsoever, by any lucid, objective standard.

Where and when I grew up, if you spouted off in public regarding things about which you were ignorant, or which had no bearing on your life in any meaningful way, you’d be told in no uncertain terms to shut up, since you ain’t got a dog in that fight . . .

I’d like to see more of us use that kind of response online when we’re confronted with ill-formed blogger blather, especially when it’s peddled to us by commercial interests. Perhaps if we collectively push the B.S. button on such bloggers more often, we’ll be able to raise the level of online discourse above the point where it is controlled by the folks who have little more to offer beyond their ability to get to their computers before anybody else does.

At bottom line, not every thought that enters a blogger’s head is valid, and not every feeling that a blogger experiences merits sharing. A little discretion goes a long way, even here, even now, and to those bloggers who fail to recognize this most fundamental fact, there’s another expression from my childhood that fits you to a tee . . .  That dog don’t hunt . . .

Filed under Communications, Media Tagged with , , , ,

The Newspaper Junkie Speaks

April 30, 2011 Leave a Comment

I generally read three newspapers (preferably local ones) each and every day, in a private, solitary series of rituals. As an early-bird type, I start off with my first paper as an accompaniment to my morning coffee in the quiet time before anyone else arrives in the office. At lunch, if I can find a copy, I try to grab something in a convenient tabloid configuration, since that is perfect for reading while eating by one’s self on a diner two-top. (Something I quite enjoy doing, actually, so don’t insult me by saying “Oh, just one,” in withering terms when I show up at your greasy spoon seeking grilled cheese). Absent a handy local tabloid, copies of which are becoming harder to come by around here lately, I’ll settle for USA Today and its magnificent sports section. At home, I subscribe a regional daily, so I read that every night before my wife gets home and we head off to the gym or dinner or my regularly scheduled ass-whipping at the Scrabble table.

With all the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments lately about the decline and fall of various venerable daily newspapers, I suppose I should be worried about whether I’ll be able to satisfy my tactile news-gathering needs, since handling paper and ink clearly satisfies me in ways that clattering away at a computer can’t. Which isn’t to say that I’m any sort of Luddite or technophobe: I’ve had an internet presence longer than probably 98% of the folks reading this, so certainly appreciate the power of the post-print paradigm. I just like newspapers too, and not only because they go so much better with bacon or biscuits.

Given the amount of money that I’ve pumped into my newspaper addiction over the years, I figure I’m the guy (in a universal sense) that the newspapers really want to keep happy on some plane. They wouldn’t have to run around scared, trying to court and capture new customers who require a lot more grooming with a lot less promise of steady-state return over the long run, if they were guaranteed to keep me and my ilk, and our spawn, engaged and paying for their products. I mean, just look at the per-paper price increases that I’ve absorbed without blink or pause over the past few years, simply because newspapers in their current configurations are essentially perfectly inelastic commodities to me: I’ll keep paying for papers whatever they cost as long as they meet my needs.

But the flipside of that inelasticity is true as well: once newspapers stop meeting my needs, then I’ll stop reading them, even if they cut their prices back to keep me. So with all of that as rambling preamble, and at the risk of biting the generous hand that hosts me here, I’d like to offer some observations about what the newspapers need to do to continue meeting my needs, thereby keeping me, a self-admitted ink addict, from entering into a newsprint detox program and moving on with my life, finally smudge-free and with one less recycling bin to manage.

I’m reminded of the wonderful and insightful song “Ted Key Beefs” by Killdozer, in which my all-time favorite lyricist Michael Gerald dolefully intones the following passage:

“It amuses me to see businesses spending so much money every year to get me back, when I was there in the first place. All they needed to do was give me some service, and show a little courtesy. In fact, I was the most important person in the world to them: I was a customer. But now . . . I’m the fellow who never comes back.”‘

That’s a wise and cautionary lesson for businesses of all stripes that Mr. Gerald offers: don’t chase the customers you don’t yet have to the detriment or neglect of the customers that you already do have.

So what do my newspapers need to do to prevent me from becoming the fellow who never goes back? As Mr. Gerald noted, first and foremost, the newspapers need to give me some service and show me a little courtesy. Above all else, this means: don’t insult my intelligence by trying to spin fairytales out of the tough times you’re having of late. You know times are hard. I know times are hard. Belts need to be tightened. Be straight with me. I can take it.

But if instead you tell me that you are eliminating five sections a week in order to give me more of what I want, then you’ve insulted my intelligence. As would trying to convince me that front-page advertisements were a quaint throwback to Victorian design ethics or establishing a story-swapping service with other papers within your corporate family, then trying to assure me that the model is the same one underpinning the Associated Press, and isn’t going to result in some reporter, somewhere, losing his or her job. I’m not that stupid, and I suspect that other newspaper readers aren’t either. So don’t talk down to me that way, please and thanks.

Once my newspapers resume treating me, their current customer, with a basic modicum of courtesy and respect, what else do I want from them? First and foremost, I want news. That’s why I buy a newspaper. If I wanted style, dating, or parenting tips, then I’d buy a style-paper, a dating-paper or a parenting-paper. This isn’t to say that there can’t be news stories about style, dating or parenting, of course, but if you are running an “any old time” puff piece on those or related soft topics with no currency or immediacy, then why waste precious page space on that? News, to me, implies change. Stories that never change aren’t stories.

There’s certainly no shortage of things changing around here in the political, social, athletic, artistic, creative, dramatic, educational and medical worlds, on top of the various earth-shattering events unfolding planet-wide around us. Cover them as a priority, please, in the space you might instead use for, say, full-page photo spreads of people at parties, cruel observations about folks in the community who don’t meet certain cliques’ fashion standards, or reprints of the absolute worst columns from the otherwise choice Wall Street Journal.

After you’ve laid the news out on me, then I want some analysis. This is why I can read three local papers covering many of the same events, since each paper offers me some unique perspective on what happened and what it means. The differences in tone and content of coverage between local or regional newspapers are marked and fascinating, and you get a much richer sense of a story reading multiple newspapers. I expect my newspapers to find, hire and keep journalists, editors and reporters who can provide such unique, independent analysis in stimulating and responsible ways, unlike the unwashed rabble online (me included) who are held to no standards, and whose voices, while legion, are often shrill and uncouth. I can get that for free. If I’m paying for your newspaper, I want something better.

One of the related real beauties of the daily newspapers to me is that while stories may be breaking, at some point they have to be put to bed and processed, and given beginnings, middles and ends, at least for a day. Facts, analysis and commentary are preserved as they were perceived at the time, rather than being subsumed in an unending, ever-morphing wave of blog posts and comments. The bottom line is, I don’t need instantaneous updates for 99% of the news stories that impact me on a daily basis. I’m fine with them being captured in amber, and then getting another piece of amber the next day, perhaps with the same insect preserved within, but now in a different posture. It’s still beautiful, even if I have to wait a little bit for it to be delivered to me.

And speaking of blogs and websites, don’t send me to them. Seriously. You have me in your newspaper, so figure out how to keep me there, rather than sending me elsewhere. I like to surf, sure, but if you force me to go to your website to get something related to an article I’ve read in print, then odds are I’m going to find it, and then quickly move onto something that’s entirely web-based, rather than oscillating back and forth in an uncomfortable netherworld between print and digital like some Lovecraftian half-dead thing that requires both a laptop and newspaper to share the table with its fish and chips. That’s just too complicated and crowded. And when you boil it all down, it’s ultimately all just words and pictures in either place, so why not work to make your words and pictures so rapturous that only a fool would deign to seek the shallow, vapid imitations that blight Cyberia?

And, sad to say, but most online newspapers really are blights at this point, staffed as they are with an eager army of unskilled and untrained and unpaid community writer-bloggers who, desperate for the elusive “exposure,” give away their words (some of which might, occasionally, actually have value), while the marketeers in their cubicles hope that you who read the swill will please pretty please click on some of the advertising banners that flash and burble around it, so that they can continue to get paid to produce the paper product that their website and others like it are helping to destroy.

It’s a pretty weird business model, isn’t it? I think so, and I don’t believe that it’s a sustainable one. I believe that the few print dailies that are going to survive in the long run are going to be those that recognize that fact, and get off the web, and devote all of their time and talent to producing unique, local, exceptional written product that makes the price you pay for it seem like a bargain. Like television and radio, the daily newspaper market has long been defined by rapacious holding corporations devouring choice local properties as soon as it seems like they might be profitable. The sooner those corporations go under and homegrown (or re-rooted) locals move in to take their places, the better the product that survives will be. Yes, it’s going to be a convulsion. Yes, lots of papers aren’t going to make it. Yes, lots of writers, editors and photographers are going to have to seek new careers. But that’s going to happen no matter what.

Of course, in the aftermath of that convulsion, unit prices of the surviving products will be higher and circulation will be lower, meaning that the print newspapers are not ever going to reach the market share they once did. But that’s okay, isn’t it? Most people may buy CD’s or MP3’s these days, but there are still tough, efficient little companies out there pressing vinyl records for folks who love the heft and quality of them, and who appreciate having something tangible to hold in their hands in exchange for their hard-earned money. So here’s hoping that newspapers will find a similar niche, where reasonable profits can be made for high-quality product with a devoted, dedicated audience who are willing to pay for it, along with businesses that are willing to advertise in front of such devoted consumers for related products which may appeal to them.

But in the same way that record companies are not likely to impress vinyl audiophiles by pushing MP3s on them, newspapers are not likely to impress their most fervent readers by pushing websites and podcasts at us. We can find those on our own if we want them, thanks. We’re here with our faces buried in your newspapers because we want you to offer us something better than that.

Why do you seem so determined to make us all go away?

Filed under Communications, Media Tagged with , , , , ,

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