tantek [10:07 AM]
I made a minor cassis.js auto_link bug fix that is unlikely to affect folks (involves a parameter to explicitly turn off embeds)
(revealed by my own posting UI, so selfdogfooding FTW)
selfdogfood++tantek [10:10 AM]
/me realizes his upcoming events on his home page are out of date, again. manual hurts.
Tantek’s thoughts and the reference to selfdogfooding, while I’m thinking about food, makes me think that there’s kind of an analogy between food and people who choose to eat at restaurants versus those who cook at home and websites/content on the internet.
The IndieWeb is made of people who are “cooking” their websites at home. In some sense I hope we’re happier, healthier, and better/smarter communicators as a result, but it also makes me think about people who can’t afford to eat or afford internet access.
Are silos the equivalent of fast food? Are too many people consuming content that isn’t good for them and becoming intellectually obese? Would there be more thought and intention if there were more home chefs making and consuming content in smaller batches? Would it be more nutritious and mentally valuable?
I think there’s some value hiding in extending this comparison.
I was thinking in the same vein. What about “slow software” with the purpose of being good for us – not just VC-funded hotness?
Chris Aldrich went off on an interesting tangent yesterday, while thinking about food.
I agree with Chris that “there’s some value hiding in extending this comparison”. So here’s my home-cooked appetiser.
I’m not the first person to observe this, but the thing about fast food is that it plays directly into appetites for which we have not yet had time to evolve an off switch. Fat, sugar and salt have been in short supply for almost all of our history. If our ancestors came across an abundance of any of these and failed to gorge when they could, they would not in fact be our ancestors. We have an insatiable appetite for fat, salt and sugar precisely because our ancestors had such an appetite. And now that we’re faced with so much of those three valuable components of a good diet, we have to learn to ignore them.
I’m also not the first to observe that we are consumate gossips. Our social intellect 1 requires us to know what others are thinking, particularly about us. You could say that we find it as difficult to avoid wondering what others are thinking as we do to avoid fat, salt and sugar. Social media engineers, like fast food engineers, know precisely how to get us to worry about how others are responding to us and how we ought to be responding to them.
And they have an extra tool to play with: intermittent reward. Most people know that you can train a rat to press a lever to get a food pellet. Stop providing food, though, and eventually the rat stops pressing. Instead of giving a reward regularly, however, you can also schedule the rewards randomly, so that on average the rat gets a pellet, say, every 10 presses, but sometimes it gets one after far fewer presses and sometimes it has to work much harder before the system delivers a reward. And if you train the rat that way, when you withdraw the reward it will continue to press the bar for far longer than the rat that got a reward every 10 presses.
Did I get a retweet? Or a like? Or a comment? Rats! Let me try again. Oh yes, there’s a star. I wonder how I can get more stars?
You see where this is going?
Just as fat, salt and sugar are extremely valuable when they’re scarce, so a hunger for gossip is valuable when it too is scarce. And it used to be, in our evolutionary past.
That was when the Dunbar Number 2 — which owes a lot to ideas about social intellect — was probably a key element in social cohesion. Once the number of people you had to keep tabs on got much larger, the chances of something going wrong increased. Rival factions could form, wreaking damage on the group, which would split, and grow and split, and grow …
Now, social media offers us a huge number of people to “care” about. What do we think of them? And what do they think of us? And again, we have to learn to ignore our desire to know, always to know.
I don’t want, now, to talk about the appalling behaviour that anonymity and tribal belonging foster online, though those are probably also aspects of the same tendencies. For me, the clearest demonstration of that was the success of the more limited social network ADN. 3 Bizarrely, for anyone who has seen what other siloed social networks have become, ADN was a place of respectful, thoughtful, engaged conversation. And even when it wasn’t, it was a great place to be. Rather than offer my own encomium, I’ll just link to the farewell of one of my ADN chums and note that the reason it was such a great community was because for each of us it was really quite small.
So, to get back, finally, to Chris’s questions:
Are … people consuming content that isn’t good for them and becoming intellectually obese? Yes
Would there be more thought and intention if there were more home chefs making and consuming content in smaller batches? Yes
Would it be more nutritious and mentally valuable? Probably
But I set aside the first question — Are silos the equivalent of fast food? — because I don’t honestly think it is the siloed nature of the social spaces that is the problem, unless you want to blame the fact that, being silos run for their owners’ benefit, they need to keep your eyeballs captive so they can sell them.
It is abundance — the size of the community and the unlimited fat, salt and sugar, manipulated by clever engineers and our own evolutionary history — that creates the conditions in which we overindulge, satisfying short term “needs” at the expense of long-term well-being.
An idea developed by my old mucker Nick Humphrey, most notably in The Inner Eye: Social Intelligence in Evolution. ↩
There are actually several. The common one is 150, “the number of people we call casual friends—the people, say, you’d invite to a large party” Robin, too, I would count among my 150. ↩
app.net dies tonight, or possibly tomorrow, so this is very fitting. ↩
Laying the Standards for a Blogging Renaissance by Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)
Aaron, some excellent thoughts and pointers.
A lot of your post also reminds me of Bryan Alexander’s relatively recent post I defy the world and to go back to RSS.
I completely get the concept of what you’re getting at with harkening back to the halcyon days of RSS. I certainly love, use, and rely on it heavily both for consumption as well as production. Of course there’s also still the competing standard of Atom still powering large parts of the web (including GNU Social networks like Mastodon). But almost no one looks back fondly on the feed format wars…
I think that while many are looking back on the “good old days” of the web, that we not forget the difficult and fraught history that has gotten us to where we are. We should learn from the mistakes made during the feed format wars and try to simplify things to not only move back, but to move forward at the same time.
Today, the easier pared-down standards that are better and simpler than either of these old and and difficult specs is simply adding Microformat classes to HTML (aka P.O.S.H) to create feeds. Unless one is relying on pre-existing infrastructure like WordPress, building and maintaining RSS feed infrastructure can be difficult at best, and updates almost never occur, particularly for specifications that support new social media related feeds including replies, likes, favorites, reposts, etc. The nice part is that if one knows how to write basic html, then one can create a simple feed by hand without having to learn the mark up or specifics of RSS. Most modern feed readers (except perhaps Feedly) support these new h-feeds as they’re known. Interestingly, some CMSes like WordPress support Microformats as part of their core functionality, though in WordPress’ case they only support a subsection of Microformats v1 instead of the more modern v2.
For those like you who are looking both backward and simultaneously forward there’s a nice chart of “Lost Infractructure” on the IndieWeb wiki which was created following a post by Anil Dash entitled The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media. Hopefully we can take back a lot of the ground the web has lost to social media and refashion it for a better and more flexible future. I’m not looking for just a “hipster-web”, but a new and demonstrably better web.
The Lost Infrastructure of the Web from the IndieWeb Wiki (CC0)Some of the desire to go back to RSS is built into the problems we’re looking at with respect to algorithmic filtering of our streams (we’re looking at you Facebook.) While algorithms might help to filter out some of the cruft we’re not looking for, we’ve been ceding too much control to third parties like Facebook who have different motivations in presenting us material to read. I’d rather my feeds were closer to the model of fine dining rather than the junk food that the-McDonald’s-of-the-internet Facebook is providing. As I’m reading Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Distraction, I’m also reminded that the black box that Facebook’s algorithm is is causing scale and visibility/transparency problems like the Russian ad buys which could have potentially heavily influenced the 2017 election in the United States. The fact that we can’t see or influence the algorithm is both painful and potentially destructive. If I could have access to tweaking a third-party transparent algorithm, I think it would provide me a lot more value.
As for OPML, it’s amazing what kind of power it has to help one find and subscribe to all sorts of content, particularly when it’s been hand curated and is continually self-dogfooded. One of my favorite tools are readers that allow one to subscribe to the OPML feeds of others, that way if a person adds new feeds to an interesting collection, the changes propagate to everyone following that feed. With this kind of simple technology those who are interested in curating things for particular topics (like the newsletter crowd) or even creating master feeds for class material in a planet-like fashion can easily do so. I can also see some worthwhile uses for this in journalism for newspapers and magazines. As an example, imagine if one could subscribe not only to 100 people writing about #edtech, but to only their bookmarked articles that have the tag edtech (thus filtering out their personal posts, or things not having to do with edtech). I don’t believe that Feedly supports subscribing to OPML (though it does support importing OPML files, which is subtly different), but other readers like Inoreader do.
I’m hoping to finish up some work on my own available OPML feeds to make subscribing to interesting curated content a bit easier within WordPress (over the built in, but now deprecated link manager functionality.) Since you mentioned it, I tried checking out the OPML file on your blog hoping for something interesting in the #edtech space. Alas… Perhaps something in the future?
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<em>Related</em>
Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
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Read The Soothing Promise of Our Own Artisanal Internet (WIRED)
Includes a reference analogizing the internet to food, which I’ve done before myself.
hat tip: Kevin Marks in IndieWeb chat
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This context piece David Mead is talking about is a far bigger issue than most people might give it credit for. Most don’t even notice it because their lives are split up so tragically online that they simply have never had any other experiences. Seeing things from a different perspective, I can guarantee that they’re missing out.
I’m reminded of chef Alton Brown who regularly gives the cooking advice that one should never buy unitasker kitchen tools, but instead get multi-taskers that can do a variety of jobs. This typically cuts down on a lot of the mess and fuss in one’s kitchen and generally makes it a nicer place to prepare food. Nine times out of ten the unitasker is a much more expensive and infrequently used tool and ultimately gets lost in a junk drawer. More often than not, there are one or multi-taskers that can do a better job for far less.
In some sense social silos like Twitter (with functionality for notes and bookmarks), Instagram (photos), Facebook (notes, photos, links, etc.), Swarm (locations and photos), etc. are just like those unitaskers in the kitchen. They only do one (or sometimes a very few) thing(s) well and generally just make for a messier and more confused social media life. They throw off the mise en place of my life by scattering everything around, making my own content harder to find and use beneficially. On my own website, I have all of the functionalities of these four examples–and lots more–and its such a much better experience for me.
As time goes by and I’m able to post more content types (and cross link them via replies) on my own website and even to others’, I do notice that the increased context on my website actually makes it more interesting and useful. In particular, I can especially see it when using my “On This Day” functionality or various archive views where I can look back at past days/months/years to see what I had previously been up to. This often allows me to look at read posts, bookmark posts, photos, locations to put myself back in the context of those prior days. Since all of the data is there and viewable in a variety of linear and non-linear manners, I can more easily see the flow of the ideas, where they came from and where they may be going. I can also more easily search for and find ideas by a variety of meta data on my site that would probably have never been discoverable on disparate and unrelated social sites. That article I read in July and posted to Twitter could never be grouped again with the related photo on Instagram or the two other bookmarked journal articles I put on Diigo or the annotations I made with Hypothes.is. But put all that on my own website, and what a wonderful exploding world of ideas I can immediately recall and continue exploring at a later date. In fact, it is this additional level of aggregation and search that makes my website that much more of a valuable digital commonplace book.
I’ll note, as a clever bit of of search and serendipity to underscore the discussion of context, it’s nearly trivial for me to notice that exactly two years ago today I was also analogizing social media and food culture. Who knows where those two topics or even related ones from my site will take me next?