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Dawn of the digital natives - is reading declining? | Technology | The Guardian

A number of people wrote in late last year to ask what I thought of the NEA report on declining literacy, To Read Or Not To Read, in the light of my arguments in Everything Bad Is Good For You. I actually jotted down some pretty extensive notes about it, either for a blog post or an op-ed, but it was right before Christmas, and so they ended up sitting on my hard drive. But the other day, the Guardian asked me if I had anything to say about the issue, so I went back and wrote up this little essay that's running today in the Guardian. Here's a quick taste of it:

The NEA makes a convincing case that both kids and adults are reading fewer books. "Non-required" reading - ie, picking up a book for the fun of it - is down 7% since 1992 for all adults, and 12% for 18-24 year olds.

The subtitle of the NEA report - A Question Of National Consequence - would lead you believe this dramatic drop must have had done significant damage to our reading proficiencies as a society. And indeed, NEA chair Dana Giola states boldly in his introduction: "The story the data tell is simple, consistent and alarming." But then the data turns out to be complex, inconsistent and not really that alarming at all. As Giola puts it, in the very next sentence: "Although there has been measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level, all progress appears to halt as children enter their teenage years."

What was that again? There's measurable progress in two of the three age groups reviewed? Actually, it's more than just measurable: if you look at the charts, the single biggest change - either positive or negative - is the spike upwards in reading abilities among nine-year-olds, which jumped seven points from 1999.

But at least there must be an "alarming" drop in reading skills among those 17-year-olds to justify this big report. And there it is: the teenagers are down five points from 1988. But wait, this is all on a scale of 0-500. If you scored it on a standard 100-point exam scale, it's the equivalent of dropping a single point. Not exactly cause for national alarm.

The Times Tears Down The Wall

So the Times finally killed off TimesSelect. (My pal Jeff Jarvis pens the definitive obit.) It's good news for everyone, including the Times, but particularly for the Times' op-ed columnists, who are back in the Google/Blogosphere game where they belong. I had lunch a few months ago with a group of editorial and business people from the Times, and one of the questions they asked me was what my experience was like writing for Times Select. I said that one of the bizarre things about it was that if I was purely interested in getting feedback for something I'd written -- via email, or blog links, or comments -- I was much better off posting something to this blog than writing an op-ed for the New York Times. Obviously the readership of the piece itself would be a thousand times bigger in the Times, but because the web version was walled off, the blog ended up being a more efficient means of generating responses.

Anyhow now you can enjoy the fun little series on city life that I wrote for TimesSelect last year, Urban Planet. Just be sure you click on the ads to reward the Times for their decision to drop the paywall.

Placeblogger Launches

Lisa Williams launched her excellent Placeblogger service yesterday, backed by two of my favorite writers on hyperlocal/citizen journalism issues: Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor. It's another endorsement of the hyperlocal model, and it complements what we're up to at outside.in very nicely: Placeblogger is more focused on the bloggers themselves, while we're more concerned with the local information, whether it comes from bloggers or some other source. Congrats, Lisa!

It's All About You

No doubt you've already seen that Time Magazine has cleverly named "you" as "Person Of The Year." They'd asked me a few weeks ago to write an essay for the issue about the rise of amateurism online and my own experiences with outside.in, and in asking, they mentioned that Web 2.0 was a candidate for the cover. They've chosen non-people before -- the computer was "machine of the year" in 1982, but as I was writing this piece, I kept thinking that putting Web 2.0 on the cover was going to be a little odd, almost like nominating "B2B Enterprise Solutions" in 2000. The way they've done it is much more elegant, and the mirrored covers are pretty sly too. I'm pleased to have my little essay in there as well:

If you read through the arguments and Op-Eds over the past few years about the impact of Web amateurism, you'll find that the debate keeps cycling back to two refrains: the impact of blogging on traditional journalism and the impact of Wikipedia on traditional scholarship. In both cases, a trained, institutionally accredited elite has been challenged by what the blogger Glenn Reynolds called an "army of Davids," with much triumphalism, derision and defensiveness on both sides.

This is a perfectly legitimate debate to have, since bloggers and Wikipedians are likely to do some things better than their professional equivalents and some things much worse, and we may as well figure out which is which. The problem with spending so much time hashing out these issues is that it overstates the importance of amateur journalism and encyclopedia authoring in the vast marketplace of ideas that the Web has opened up. The fact is that most user-created content on the Web is not challenging the authority of a traditional expert. It's working in a zone where there are no experts or where the users themselves are the experts...

Added 12/21: A friend writes in with these wise words:

The format of blogging - the actual interactive design part of it where feedback posts are possible, (and this goes for the wiki nature of wikipedia too I guess) is that it's self correcting and precipitates over a period of time.

So there is a wisdom of crowds kind of Emergent nature to it - - i.e., a piece in a newspaper or magazine is a finite piece with clear limits that exists in a moment (or an hour) in time - - however long it takes to read it. A blog, with its self correcting counter posts and track backs gets at the information in a "process" that the readers participate in. the ultimate truth of it, or actual thesis of what's said "happens" over a period of time and with the self correcting help of the interactive, collective responses....

I get and agree with the spirit of "it's You". But in a way they had it wrong. It's us. (though that's what they meant). Still, if they had actually said "Us", it would have made the Web 2.0 concept instantly clearer to the many who've never heard of it.

I'm going to be talking a little about power law distributions at this talk I'm giving on Monday at Adaptive Path's User Experience Week in DC, and it occured to me that it would be interesting to look at a comparison between the links directed to the top 100 blogs on Technorati, and album sales for the Billboard top 100. I think it would be interesting to see which medium has more dominant hits -- is BoingBoing more powerful than, say, Mariah Carey? Has anyone seen that comparison done somewhere? If not, does anyone have the sales data for the Billboard chart handy? I can get the rankings online but not the albums sales...

Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About Them Now?)

Long-time readers of this blog know that I have very rarely posted anything here on the "bloggers versus mainstream journalism" debate, largely because the market for good ideas on this topic has long been saturated, in my opinion. But Nicholas Lemann's piece in the New Yorker this week has finally pushed me over the edge. Don't get me wrong -- Lemann is a superb journalist, and I agree with just about everything he says in the article. But that's the problem. I think everyone agrees with just about everything he says in the article. Jay Rosen tried to kill off this kind of discussion a year or two ago with his smart essay, Bloggers Versus Journalists Is Over, but obviously it didn't stick. So let me propose a slightly more blunt approach. Does anyone disagree with the following concepts:

1. Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should.

2. Bloggers will grow increasingly adept at covering certain kinds of news events, but not all. They will play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of all kinds of news.

3. The majority of bloggers won't be concerned with traditional news at all.

4. Professional, edited journalism will have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than blogging; examples of sloppy, offensive, factually incorrect, or tedious writing will be abundant in the blogosphere. But diamonds in that rough will be abundant as well.

5. Blogs -- like all modes of contemporary media -- are not historically unique; they draw upon and resemble a number of past traditions and forms, depending on their focus.

So here's my proposal: if you're writing an article or a blog post about this issue, and your argument revolves around one or more of these points -- and doesn't add anything else of substance -- STOP WRITING. Pick a new topic. Move on. There's nothing to see here.

POSTSCRIPT, added a few hours later: I changed the line where I say that I agreed with "everything" in Lemann's article so that it now reads "just about everything," since obviously I disagree with the opening premise: "On the Internet, everyone is a millenarian." I'd be very surprised if even the most impassioned champions of the blogosphere disagree with any of my five points, which are all explicitly anti-millenarian in spirit, if not in letter as well.

Dean Disappears From Google -- Already An Exile At 9 Days Old

After getting up to around #7 on the Google rankings, our little man Dean has disappeared altogether. What's up with that, Google?

No, seriously, what's up with that? Obviously, I don't really care about Dean's PageRank, but it's not like I was comment spamming to get him a high ranking -- I was asking other bloggers to celebrate his birth with a link. And many people did, with full awareness of their actions. Is that not playing by the rules?

UPDATE 7/31: Okay, he's back, as a number of you have pointed out. Weird.

I was a little busy last Wednesday, and so I missed Nicholas Carr's excellent piece on the Benkler/Calacanis smackdown -- a phrase I never thought I'd type -- which is, in my opinion, much more interesting than the Rose/Calacanis smackdown.

I think that what Calacanis is getting at is that the reason "social media" has existed outside the price system up until now is simply that a market hadn't yet emerged for this new kind of labor. We weren't yet able to assign a value - in monetary terms - to what these workers were doing; we weren't even able to draw distinctions between what they were contributing. We couldn't see the talent for the crowd. Now, though, the amateurs are being sorted according to their individual skills, calculations as to the monetary value of those skills are starting to be made, and a market appears to be taking shape. As buyers and sellers come into this market, we'll see whether large-scale social media can in fact survive outside the price system, or whether it's fated to be subsumed into professional media. Which is mightier - Benkler's dream or Calacanis's wallet?

By the way, I read Wealth of Networks earlier this year, and thoroughly enjoyed it; I've been meaning to synthesize some of my thoughts about the argument and post them here, but haven't got around to it yet...

The Long Tail

Finished Chris Anderson's The Long Tail this morning, and while I've been following the discussion around these issues (and chiming in occasionally) since his original essay was published, I still found the book completely stimulating and fun to read. In addition to the original research that drives so much of his argument, Chris has also included some fascinating stories: the creation of the Sears-Roebuck catalogue; the pro-am movement in astronomy, etc. It also has a very persuasive critique of one of my pet peeves -- the polarization hypothesis generally associated with Cass Sunstein. (Related to our epic serendipity debate from earlier this year.)

There was a review in the Wall Street Journal this weekend that chided Chris for sharing some of the techno-utopian tendencies of writers like Steven Johnson and James Surowiecki, which is damning criticism indeed. And it's true The Long Tail -- like a certain book of mine -- does generally hold to an enthusiastic tone about the trend it is describing. But in Chris's case at least, I find that kind of sweeping criticism irritating. I suspect Chris does believe the that the trend towards long tail distributions in culture is, on the whole, a substantial improvement over the top heavy mass media model that has dominated the twentieth century. But that hardly makes him a techno-utopian. It means that in this one realm of technological development, Chris thinks things are getting better. For all we know, there may be other technological trends that Chris considers more problematic or troubling -- the point is, The Long Tail is not a book about those trends, nor is it a general statement about technology (the way, I imagine, Kevin Kelly's next book will be.)

When I was heavy in the promotion of Everything Bad, I often had people generalize out from my endorsement of popular culture and say things like: "Well, you think everything's just cheery in American society right now..." And I'd invariably have to explain that this wasn't true: I think there are plenty of problems in America right now (the usual suspects: wealth inequality, global warming, our President); I just happen to think pop culture is not one of those problems. So I wrote the book partially to say to our politicians and other cultural authorities: stop worrying about video games -- you've got real problems to deal with. Maybe you should focus on them for a change.

Reading The Long Tail actually made me think that I should have added one additional factor in my description of the forces behind The Sleeper Curve, the trend towards increased pop culture complexity I described in Everything Bad. One of the puzzling things about the Curve that readers occasionally had trouble with is that the trend is towards increased complexity, but not necessarily elevated artistic or intellectual achievement. The content can be silly or gratuitously violent, but the formal techniques used to convey the content have grown, on average, more complex. There's more information conveyed in shorter amounts of time, with less hand-holding from the creators. It occurred to me reading The Long Tail that the general trend from mass to niche can explain some of this increased complexity: niches can speak to each other in shorthand; they don't have to spell everything out. But at the same time, the niche itself doesn't have to become any more aesthetically or intellectually rich compared to what came before. If there's a pro wrestling niche, the creators don't have to condescend to the non-wrestling fans who might be tuning in, which means that they can make more references and in general convey more information about wrestling -- precisely because they know their audience is made up of hard core fans. But it's still pro wrestling. The content isn't anything to write home about, but the form grows more complex. In a mass society, it's harder to pull that off. But out on the tail, it comes naturally.

Fantastic, and dead-on post, from Chris Anderson on "media elitism and the 'derivative' myth":

What are most people actually talking about? Mostly themselves, their friends, their family and things that are more interesting to them and their daily lives than whatever we in the media choose to focus on with our limited resources and space.

I've almost finished The Long Tail, which I've found very interesting and entertaining -- I'll post about it sometime in the next day or so.