Jeff Jarvis goes on that list of people I think of as an outboard super-ego -- when he writes something I disagree with, it makes me re-examine and often alter my own views. In all the conversations we've had, and from all the posts on buzzmachine I've read, I've only found one issue where we truly disagree: the nature of interactivity in weblogs.
In a post titled
Interactivity, Jarvis says
So Bill O'Reilly, Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Dan Rather, Paul Krugman, John Podhoretz, Stephen King, Charlie Rose, Oprah -- and, yes, even Andy Rooney -- you should all start weblogs to interact with your audiences. If Dave Barry can do it, so you can.
The problem with this exhortation is that it distorts the idea of interactivity. Once you cross some threshold of readers (I put it someplace between a thousand and ten thousand), you cannot interact even with the subset of them that want to interact with you. The fact of scale has turned them into an audience.
Weblogs are a publishing platform. Interactivity is a second-order choice on that platform -- comments or no, trackbacks or no, link to the people who link to you or no -- and the larger the imbalance between people who read you and people you read, the harder it becomes to make and support that choice.
Dave Barry is in fact the perfect example. Dave Barry publishes a column online, using weblog software as his publishing platform, and his mode of 'interacting' with his readers is no different than his printed columns: readers send in funny stories, he mentions the stories, and credits the readers. This is publishing, and it does the same kind of violence to the language to label this interactivity as it would for Staples to call its customers an "office supply community."
In this same vein, Jarvis points to Elizibeth Spiers
who makes the same error, even more dramatically, when talking about John Markoff's attitude towards weblogs:
If Markoff thinks all (or even most) bloggers are keeping diaries online, then Jarvis is probably right: he doesn't read blogs—which seems ironic, given that he's the technology reporter for the Times.
Markoff is a jackass for cloaking himself in a sniffish distaste for the democratization of publishing, but at least he gets the numbers right: Most webloggers _are_ keeping diaries online. LiveJournal alone is bigger than blogger and Typepad put together, and the churn rate is lower.
Most _readers_ cluster around a small number of popular blogs (which is what Spiers evidently thinks of as blogging's mainstream.) Most _writers_, however, have very few readers, and the pattern of those weblogs is online diary. Spiers unconciously illustrates her bias by saying "most weblogs" when she means "the few weblogs with the most readers." (Note to Spiers: go to Livejournal.com, click
Random User, and keep reading 'til you get it.)
There may have been a day when most weblog readers were also weblog writers, and where the imbalance between reader and writer distribution was only a couple of orders of magnitude. Those days are long gone -- if Glenn Reynolds is to be believed on his traffic numbers, we are now at an imbalance that crosses _seven_ orders of magnitude. At some point the talk about interacting with your audience is going to give way to the recognition that weblogs have a publishing pattern and a conversational pattern; that the former does not automatically create the latter; and that the split between those patterns caused by scale is increasingly important as the weblog ecosystem continues to grow.
1. Lindon Parker on October 23, 2003 12:33 AM writes...
"Weblogs are a publishing platform"
Permalink to Comment- well no they are not(usually). At one end of the log-curve(the popular end) they are, but for the rest of the planet they're a community tool. We shouldn't forget this.
2. Clay Shirky on October 23, 2003 8:59 AM writes...
Weblogs are a publishing platform at all points. When you get enough people publishing to one another, you get conversation as well, but the basic pattern is "I have a blog, I write a post, I publish it."
Contrast email, the only other simple writing medium we have, where a message has to have an address in advance.
Permalink to Comment3. Francois Lachance on October 23, 2003 10:05 AM writes...
Clay
Do you and Jeff Jarvis share the same definition of interactivity?
I ask because in your entry "interactivity" seems to be related to a notion of dialogue or exchange between two or more interlocutors. It seems to require a connection between interpellation and acknowledgement, between call and response.
Jarvis would seem to accept the Lippman's lecture mode as part of interactivity. That is Jarvis would not differentiate between publication and interactivity. Would the lecture mode be an equivalent of the diary mode you identify as a separate genre? On Lippman, See http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/oline/ollippman.htm
Jason Rhody
http://misc.wordherders.net/archives/000463.html
explores
provides some interesting remarks about the role of images in thinking about interactivity. One commentator there wrote" For me, one useful touchstone for re-thinking the relative interactivity of image, word and word-image combinations is the Stewart Brand interview with Andy Lippman. (Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T. (Penguin, 1988), p. 46) Lippman's definition builds upon the contrast between conversation and lecture. It is of course routed in a consideration of verbal transactions. Would it be possible to work from some activity with/on images to an image-based notion of interactivity."
It is interesting to place this by Chuck Tyron's typology of the practices involved in blogging:
- making connections
- exchanging ideas
- sharing experiences
http://chutry.wordherders.net/archives/000989.html#1647
In the light of Chuck's thinking through the practice of blogging (lots more enties on his blog) I think that there is another scale that intersects the scale of numbers of readers. That would be the rate of response scale. And what counts as a response is not always an acknowledgement connecting with an interpellation. Some blog comments are not addressed to the blog entry writer but to other commentators or to other readers. How are these types of interventions similar to pointing from "outside" the conversation space to the conversation? Back to Lippman and the lecture with its supposed lessor degree of interactivity... "Interactivity modeled principlely as interruptable
conversation may not sufficiently value certain skills such as listening." http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v13/0246.html
Given the archival aspects of blogging (and of publication)... response may come after some time lag -- even after the archived blog has disappear and the publication is _out of print_.
Interactivity with the digital artefacts and interactivity with the producers of those artefacts have different time scales. Could it be that Jarvis is focussed on interactivity with product and you are concerned with interactivity between producers/consumers?
Permalink to Comment4. Seth Finkelstein on October 23, 2003 11:02 AM writes...
Part of this seems to be confusion and fuzziness in the terms.
"publishing" can mean "make available" VERSUS "one to many".
So "Weblogs are a publishing platform" can mean either
"Weblogs are a way to make available your writing" (true, even if nobody's reading)
"Weblogs are a system of one to many" (the A-list operates in that fashion of necessity)
Complicating this is that people want to call things "many-to-many" (or "interactive") because that sounds very appealing, even if it's a tortured use of the terms.
Permalink to Comment5. Seb on October 23, 2003 1:41 PM writes...
You've nailed it, Seth. My vote is for using "publishing" to mean "making public" - so every blogger is a publisher, and "broadcasting" to mean "putting things in front of many eyes" - which is something only a few bloggers do.
Permalink to Comment6. tim on October 23, 2003 3:15 PM writes...
yeah i do agree that theres no way oprah could truly "interact" with all her fans on a weblog. the sheer mass of them would make it impossible
Permalink to Comment7. Lindon Parker on October 23, 2003 6:29 PM writes...
CLAY: "Contrast email, the only other simple writing medium we have, where a message has to have an address in advance."
--- I think we're getting publishing and broadcasting confused. As I understand it, by your definition an email based newsletter would not be publishing, 'cause it has the addresses in advance...
Permalink to Comment8. lindon Parker on October 23, 2003 6:37 PM writes...
If we use the definition of publishing above from Seb & Seth ("“publishing” to mean “making public”") then weblogs ARE publishing and I stand corrected. But I think Clay is talking about "Publishing to the masses"(or at least a very large audience) and the issues involved in that.
Permalink to CommentI guess my point is that I think it dangerous to bundle this: [weblogs = mass publishing = associated problems] when for many (non-A-listers) this is not the case or stucture, and I think weblogging holds value about WHO you speak with as well as how many. But this point has been made before here I think.
9. sidereal on October 23, 2003 7:05 PM writes...
"yeah i do agree that theres no way oprah could truly “interact” with all her fans on a weblog."
I wonder if there's an opportunity in there for a clever system. I'm thinking of something that distributes tickets semi-randomly (maybe weighted by geography or monetary contribution or some such) to registered users at a rate proportional to the celeb's free time, and tickets can be used to post comments on the blog.
Essentially, you're weeding down the masses of those desiring to interact with you to a sample size. And if the sampling is fair and not biased, you'd get a fair picture of the proportion of certain feelings among your audience.
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