Alan Jacobs

It has been a fascinating phenomenon in the discussion around publishing how adversarial people get around other people’s choices. So if someone says “I like an ebook,” a person will respond “Ohhh, I can’t believe—how can you do that?” It’s like that obnoxious person who you don’t want to go out to dinner with anymore because they can’t just order what they want, they have to comment on what you’re eating as well. What’s been epidemic in this discussion is that when both camps talk about their own preferences, they have to malign other people’s preferences too, and make grandiose extrapolations about the consequences of other people’s preferences for their own. If they like printed books, they should be buying the damn things instead of whining about other people’s preferred mode of reading.

In 1988, Shoshana Zuboff wrote the prescient book In the Age of the Smart Machine, in which she argued that we face two roads with information technology: We can “informate” or “automate.” The high road would be to “informate,” which would mean using information technologies to better understand a particular process (for example, how to diagnose an illness or how to tell fake reviews from real ones), and then using that knowledge to support more complex applications rather than pushing out human role and judgment from the process. In contrast, to “automate,” the low road, involves replacing human work and skill with machines so that narrow, well-defined tasks are carried out at a lower cost and with more control, but at the cost of nuance, flexibility, and judgment. Unfortunately, thoughtless automation is driving the day. If we don’t get off this train, it might have the same results it has had in other sectors of the economy: an unsustainable economy with high unemployment—and a lot of cheap, plastic crap.

The longtime goal of Facebook, and of founder Mark Zuckerberg—who was memorably profiled here by Jose Antonio Vargas as “an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing”—has been to build a separate Internet. (Also see Ken Auletta’s Profile of Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s C.O.O.) In the minds of people who work at Facebook, there’s the cold, confusing, open Internet that is managed by Google and its algorithms. You go there and you never quite know what you’re going to get. And then there’s the Facebook sub-Internet, where everything is kinder and organized by your friends.

Initially, Facebook was just a place to post photographs and see which of your high-school classmates had gone to pot. Then it became a place for organizing political protests, and wasting time playing games. It’s grown and grown in all these ways. It gets credit from many for helping facilitate the Arab Spring, and it now hosts four per cent of all the photographs ever taken. Now, if Facebook gets its way, it’ll be where you read your news, find new songs, and watch video. It will have eaten a big chunk of the rest of the Internet.

There are great consequences to this. The more our online lives take place on Facebook, the more we depend on the choices of the people who run the company—what they think about privacy, how they think we should be able to organize our friends, what they tell advertisers (and governments) about what we do and what we buy. We’ll rely on whom they choose as partners to give us news and music. Real issues are at stake, in other words—not just the size of photos and whether you can poke.

Specimen sheet

maps from Geographicus

Again, it seems to me that the increasing focus on the neurological aspects of reading leads researchers and cultural critics to fetishize the act of reading itself rather than to focus on the question of what this reading is for. For instance, discourse producers have always faced the question of what to skim and what to read deeply. If the rise of the Web has increased the magnitude of this problem for them, then has their output (journalistic and scholarly articles, reports, essays, etc.) significantly diminished in quality? Even though this question is too broad to be answered in any meaningful way, it could be broken up into smaller, more empirically tractable parts (say, by looking at only journalistic output or the scholarly output of historians). For lay-people, the research questions are even harder to frame. If there is a shift in leisure reading from a deep-reading of long-form books to a depth-focused reading of short-form web-pieces, what are its implications exactly? Concerns that this may make us less “thoughtful” are too broad and frankly, too elitist, to mean much. A better research question could be: does this shift from long-form books to more short-form web content focusing on politics and current affairs make us more politically conscious? Cass Sunstein and others have speculated that the internet with its tendency to exacerbate homophily (i.e. the tendency of people to talk to people who are similar to them in some respects) may increase the political polarization of the electorate. However, empirical work on this topic is still inconclusive. We need to develop further research questions on similar lines rather than simply thinking about deep reading/skimming dichotomy in isolation.

A long time ago an extraordinary family lived in Cappadocia. They were orthodox Christians during a period when it could be hard to be a Christian at all, because of official prohibitions and persecutions sponsored by the Roman emperor; later, when the emperor was a Christian but an Arian, they maintained Trinitarian orthodoxy against him. When the Emperor of the eastern half of the Empire came to one of them, Basil, the bishop of Caesarea, to remonstrate with him and order him to support the Arian position, he was bluntly refused. When the emperor expressed incredulity, Basil replied, “Maybe you’ve never met a real bishop before.”

Basil and his brothers and sister built what may have been the first hospital, and opened it to the poor of Cappadocia. They took in women who had been abandoned by their husbands or ignored by their families after being widowed; they took in abandoned children. They offered to take and raise children who otherwise would have been aborted or killed soon after birth. They comforted the dying who otherwise would have died alone.

When there was a great famine in Cappadocia, Basil sold much of his land and used the proceeds to feed the hungry. He excoriated the rich of his congregation for failing to do likewise. When the people of his congregation professed skepticism that they could do anything to avert the famine, Basil told them what they should say: “Offhand, I would say, ‘I shall fill the souls of the hungry. I shall open my barns and I shall send for all who are in want. I shall be like Joseph in proclaiming the love of my fellow human being.’”

One of his brothers, a monk, devoted himself for years to hunting, not for sport, but in order to provide food for the elderly poor. Another brother, a bishop, joined Basil in repudiating the rich who were willing to provide help to their fellow Christians but refused it to the Cappadocian Jews. The food was to go to all in need. In times of particular stress, Basil was known to set aside his bishop’s robes, put on an apron, and work in the kitchens.

These people followed Jesus. To them, true doctrine and faithful obedience were one; there was no need to choose between them, and indeed no option to do so. They loved life, because life is God’s first and greatest gift, and they sought to nurture it everywhere they found it. They were friends to the unborn and the prisoner, the widow and the orphan, the Gentile and the Jew. They were what I want to be.

Basically, then, Europe doesn’t have the death penalty because its political systems are less democratic, or at least more insulated from populist impulses, than the U.S. government. And elites know it. Referring to France, a recent article in the UNESCO Courier noted that “action by courageous political leaders has been needed to overcome local public opinion that has remained mostly in favour of the death penalty.” When a 1997 poll showed that 49 percent of Swedes wanted the death penalty reinstated, the country’s justice minister told a reporter: “They don’t really want the death penalty; they are objecting to the increasing violence. I see this as a call to politicians and the justice system to do more.“

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon. In 2001, Borders agreed to hand over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were non-strategic and unimportant.

Oops.

Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.

Today’s largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story, but now other traditional entertainment providers are facing the same threat. Comcast, Time Warner and others are responding by transforming themselves into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere, which liberates content from the physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets.

Today’s dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple’s iTunes, Spotify and Pandora. Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content. Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4.6 billion in 2010, growing to 29% of total revenue from 2% in 2004.

He [Derek Parfit] decided to study philosophy. He attended a lecture by a Continental philosopher that addressed some important subject such as suicide or the meaning of life, but he couldn’t understand any of it. He went to hear an analytic philosopher who spoke on a trivial topic but was quite lucid. He wondered whether it was more likely that Continental philosophers would become more lucid or analytic philosophers less trivial. He decided that the second was more likely, and returned to Oxford.