stevenberlinjohnson.com

A (Slightly Amended) History Of Webism

There's a lovely and typically astute installment of "The Intellectual Situation" in the latest n+1, which in my book is the most interesting small magazine to appear in at least a decade, that takes on the topic of what they call "webism." It's worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to respond to (and gently correct) this passage. I quote from it at length here so you get some of the context:

The early web magazines were Slate, Salon, Feed, and Suck—as with the best print magazines, you could count them on the fingers of one hand. Some used the unlimited space of the internet to run longer features; others used the limited attention span of internet readers to run short. Slate (funded by Microsoft) was a lighter-hearted New Republic, minus the great book reviews; Feed (funded by venture capitalists) was a more earnest version of the Village Voice. Things changed after the crash of the tech stocks in 2000. At this point the founding editor of Feed, Steven Johnson, announced that Feed and its sister webzine Suck were folding and being replaced by something called Plastic.com. Plastic.com was a new kind of site: a news aggregator. User-contributors would post links to interesting articles, with a summary, and then everyone would discuss them. This would be called “user-generated content.” It was the future of the internet, Johnson explained. Here was a man who’d burned through more than a million dollars of funding by paying a living wage to his writers and editors to produce a high-quality product that competed with traditional print media. The world, it turned out, was not ready for that. It’s still not ready.

At the time, the world wasn’t ready for Plastic.com, either. In the years to come its formula would be copied with some vulgarization and more success by sites like Reddit and Digg. News aggregator blogs like Boing Boing and Gawker would also find glory in curating and annotating news items (and only then inviting commenters in). But the apotheosis of user-generated content would come with the rise of the social networks, where the content being generated by users was not just links to interesting news items but entire photo albums, playlists, recipes, recommendations . . . in short, entire selves.

The actual events were slightly different, though I don't think the true sequence detracts from the larger argument of the essay. We launched Plastic.com before we shut down FEED and Suck. Plastic had been in the works for more than a year before we launched it—the idea had been shaped largely by four of us: FEED's Stefanie Syman (and me), Suck's Joey Anuff, and Lee DeBoer, whom we had brought in to be CEO of the company, Automatic Media, which owned both Suck and FEED. (Putting Suck and FEED together had been the brainchild of Bo Peabody, Tripod's founder, but that's another story.) The plan all along was to have Plastic run alongside FEED and Suck, with extensive overlap. Plastic hosted all the discussion forums for FEED and Suck articles; FEED and Suck editors helped curate stories for Plastic. There was some vague plan to use the Plastic threads as a farm league where talented writers could make a name for themselves before graduating up to "the show" of FEED and Suck. As a business, we thought -- accurately -- that Plastic could be much bigger in terms of page views and unique visitors, and so would complement the smaller audience size, but more polished content at FEED and Suck. (We'd be able to show advertisers both reach and quality, in other words.) I still think it's a model that might work for someone, but we didn't really get to try it out, because the dot.com bubble burst right as we were closing our initial financing, and our institutional and strategic  investors—Lycos Ventures, Advance Internet—chose to let the company run out of cash, rather than to support us through the dark ages of 2001-2003. (I say that, by the way, with no malice—it really was a dark time, and if I had been in their shoes I might have made the same call.)

All of which is to say that we did not deliberately kill off magazine-style articles, written by professional writers and edited by professional writers, to replace them with "webist" user-generated content. When Plastic launched, I did publish a little manifesto at FEED, called "The Swarm Next Time," that would end up evolving into my book, Emergence. But the plan was always to figure out a way to let the user-generated content co-habit productively with curated, long-form essays. It just didn't work out. It's true that when we ran out of money, we shuttered FEED and Suck, but kept Plastic running, because it pretty much ran itself. (The beauty of user-generated content!) But we sold it off within a few weeks, so that we could close down the company without filing for bankruptcy. The irony of it all was that three months after we shut our doors, Plastic won the Webby Award for best community site. (Wonderfully, it's still around, almost entirely unchanged from its original design.)

The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book

The following is a transcript of the Hearst New Media lecture I gave last night at Columbia University, subtitled "Two Paths For The Future of Text." Thanks to everyone who came out, and to the Journalism school for the invitation.

I want to start with a page out of history—the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of his notebooks on religion. The words on this page belongs to a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe and America, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

The philosopher John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book’s content. Locke thought his method important enough that he appended it to a printing of his canonical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here’s an excerpt from his “instructions for use”:

When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA, I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. if in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.

Locke’s approach seems almost comical in its intricacy, but it was a response to a specific set of design constraints: creating a functional index in only two pages that could be expanded as the commonplace book accumulated more quotes and observations. In a certain sense, this is a search algorithm, a defined series of steps that allows the user to index the text in a way that makes it easier to query. Locke’s method proved so popular that a century later, an enterprising publisher named John Bell printed a notebook entitled: “Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” Put another way, Bell created a commonplace book by commonplacing someone else’s technique for maintaining a commonplace book. The book included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.”

What Does "Generative" Mean Anyway?

Today's Sunday New York Times included a column of mine in the business section which tried to think about the App Store's tremendous rate of innovation over the past two years, and the clear benefit it has had for small developers. My general point was that, while many of us have worked under the assumption that open platforms tend to be more "generative," in some important ways, the closed architecture of the App Store and the iPhone OS has actually contributed to the generativity of the platform.

On Twitter this afternoon, I got into a bit of a debate with Dan Gillmor, whom I have admired for many years now, about my use of the term "generative." Twitter is a fantastic medium for sharing links to complicated ideas, and an atrocious medium for actually discussing complicated ideas, so after a few volleys with Dan I told him I wanted to retreat to the blog. So here we are.

Dan's original tweet read as follows:

it's a flat contradiction to call a system generative, as @stevenbjohnson does, if it has a corporate choke point 

Now, both Dan and I are using Jonathan Zittrain, and his excellent book, The Future Of The Internet and How To Stop It, as a reference point for this concept of "generative." Zittrain's book is indeed about the power of open platforms that lack "corporate choke points," and generativity is inarguably crucial to his argument. But I don't think the two are synonymous. Or at least I don't think they should be synonymous.

In the opening chapter, Zittrain introduces the concept of generative platforms with a discussion of the Apple II: "[it] was a quintessentially generative technology. It was a platform. It invited people to tinker with it. Hobbyists wrote programs. Businesses began to plan on selling software. Jobs (and Apple) had no clue how the machine would be used. They had their hunches, but, fortunately for them, nothing constrained the PC to the hunches of the founders."

With the exception of that last clause (more on that later) all of these statements are true of the iPhone OS. (It is not true of the iPhone or iPad hardware, to be sure, as Cory Doctorow has emphatically pointed out.) As I argued in the column, the iPhone platform has seen more tinkering and new uses, generated by businesses and hobbyists alike, than any other two-year-old computing platform in history. (Including the Web, I would argue.)

In my mind, a "generative" platform translates to something like this: a platform that is constantly being re-invented in surprising new ways by a diverse group of creators, where individuals, hobbyists, small startups, and amateurs compete on a level playing field with large incumbents.

In other words, generativity is the result we are aiming for. An open platform is the tool we use to achieve that result. That's the central argument of Zittrain's book: if we want generativity in our media and software, then open platforms are the best way to achieve that goal. But if open platforms are part of the definition of generativity, then it suddenly starts to sound a little circular: the best way to achieve a generative open platform is to build a generative open platform.

What I was trying to argue in the Times piece is that the goal we're all championing—rapid, emergent innovation with small guys competing with big software companies—is happening on the iPhone platform, and it's happening in part because of the way that platform is closed, not open.

Now, that last clause: "nothing constrained the PC to the hunches of the founders." It is true that there is a very real constraint built into the App Store approval process, and in the column I specifically singled that out as the biggest problem with Apple's current system. But in practice, I would wager 99.9% of all new ideas get approved for the App Store, and so it is really more of a threat of a chokehold thus far. (Though I would still like to see a side door, as I wrote.) But of course these things all exist on a sliding scale. There are entirely open platforms that are entirely non-generative because no one develops for them. Apple's argument is that some restraints, implemented in the right places and judiciously used, can lead to more innovation in the long run. And right now, given the track record of the past 22 months, I think that's an argument that we have to take seriously.