"Twitter Users Are Smug"

The raucous two women that form the musical-comedy duo of Garfunkel and Oates have a snarkily culturally-incorrect song about the assumed superiority complex of pregnant women, "Pregnant Women Are Smug." I've been toying with revising the lyrics for power Twitter users, to reflect the sense of closed-circle smugness I've been sensing from power-tweeters of late.

Even though I'm a heavy Facebook user, I'm not trying to launch a new Microsoft/Apple-style culture war. Users of Facebook and LinkedIn rarely lead any passionate defense of their social networks. (Users of MySpace, meanwhile, remain on life support, heading to flatline, as the network laid off half its employees in mid-January.) After all, Facebook is the network with the CEO everyone loves to hate. Few get as worked up over Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone as they do about the junior svengali of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

Nor do I have a serious problem with Twitter's notorious 140-character limit for posts, even if the striving for brevity usually leads to superficial thinking. This is the result of any social network designed first and foremost for a handheld smartphone (or even dumb phone) client. No, my main gripe is the benignly authoritarian network architecture of Twitter, and the way its single-direction, one-t0-many multipoint topology is ideally designed for celebrities and PR managers.

Asking followers to engage in layers of re-tweets while urging them to "join the discussion" would not be so annoying if passionate Twitter advocates were up front about the network's limitations. When I call Twitter authoritarian, we should look at the root of that word: authority. Twitter's hub-and-spoke is designed for followers to pay attention to the central authority figures gracing each sub-hub, and to mouth what the grand poobahs of Twitter have to say. Sure, Facebook has plenty of re-postings, people with 1000 friends, and recycled information, but it is designed with a more peer-to-peer infrastructure. If social networks were high schools, Facebook would be the unique environment in which jocks, freaks, goths, and nerds were all on equal planes, while Twitter would be one with a built-in reinforcement of cliques.

Stone and Dorsey are not responsible for the aura or arrogance that populates the network lately, nor are the early Twitter users who have become power-tweeters by default. Rather, we see a new breed of market analyst and journalist promoting others to join a discussion that rarely is as rich as one on Facebook or LinkedIn - and not because of the short tweets. When people complain of Twitter being a confusing cacophony of tweet, they could just as easily gripe about Facebook being a noisy party of pretty pictures and videos, signifying nothing. But many of the Twitter complainers seem to subconsciously understand that they are being fed one-way communications, as evidenced by Twitter's language of followers and followed. Commentators like Grayson Davis were recognizing this funny celebrity-driven atmosphere two years ago, but their critiques were misinterpreted as being directed to Twitter's superficiality. Let me re-state this clearly, I'm bothered by Twitter's fascist network architecture.

Mind you, I don't object when press colleagues at EE Times, EDN, and other engineering sites chide heads-down engineers to use more social networks, with an emphasis on Twitter. God knows such vertical network users could use any improvement in social skills, as could many scientific and academic sub-communities. No, what I find offensive are the media mavens on Twitter who have spoken out in recent weeks against tactics such as cross-posting, assuming that a savvy media user will be Twitter-centric by design. No, not unless one wants to emphasize PR or celebrity life. I'm not going to stop tweeting on occasion, but I will spend the bulk of my time on more egalitarian network architectures. And power-tweeters should understand that they are driving potential Twitter users away by assuming an air of superiority for a network that has some profound issues on how it defines a discussion.

Idiot Chic

Friends on Facebook know that this week, yours truly launched the "Idiot Chic" group, dedicated to worshiping the rise of know-nothing behavior in modern society, making art and humor out of the rejection of logic, discourse, and the scientific method. Is this cruelty? Is this irony? Hardly.

As David Thomas of Pere Ubu reiterates on his Hearpen site, it is important to rid yourself of an abundance of irony (or cynicism, for that matter), and say what you mean. OK, clown mask off.



An Irony-Free™ Site

In 1984, I was among a group of well-meaning clowns who ran a dog for president, under the double moniker of the Disgusted with Yuppies Party and the Stupid Toy Society. Though this was before the rise of Gameboys and smartphones, we could foresee the consumer world defined by its stupid toys. Revel in the madness, tra-la, tra-la.

Similarly, here in the 21st century, it was disheartening to watch Clay Jenkinson of Thomas Jefferson Hour get so disheartened over a "New Dark Ages" - sure, I agree with him, there is a surfeit of literacy and little concern for making a rational argument any more. In fact, large sectors of the political and cultural world stridently reject rationalism in favor of making emotional faith-based or authority-based arguments as a way of establishing identity. My old friend Sandy said that it's of little use to lament the passing of the Enlightenment - humans have been idiots through most of their evolutionary history, and are not going to change because you whine.

In fact, we are so busy spotting the two-steps-back, we fail to notice the baby steps forward. Sure, the society is getting scary-dumb these days, but at least in Western culture, we see few of the violent gangs to enforce conformity that we saw a century ago. Today, stupid is a fashion statement, an art form. If the three most common culinary icons in 2010 are bacon, cupcakes, and IPA beer, why fight it?

Hence Idiot Chic. Like the steampunk movement currently running out of steam, the rise of cultural vapidity requires a documentation, a celebration, a reference point. Dedicated web sites or blogs are too blase, Twitter fails to give us the cultural richness we need, but a Facebook group fits the necessary dumbness model. But for those of you who refuse to bow to Mark Zuckerberg's Frankenstein monster, consider this blog an occasional and indirect portal to the moron in all of us. Hail Idiot Chic.

A New Quiescent Bardo State After a Synaptic Storm

Given the strange conscious states of the fall, amidst PHN attacks and pixelslips and whatnot, it was an odd experience to attend the Defrag conference in Denver in mid-November, dedicated to trying to find larger meaning and structure in the emergent social networks that have taken over most static web sites. I have identified two problem areas in posts on the Smartbook blog, here and here. I'll summarize those areas below, but first a word about the tie between true believers and marketing: Defrag and its cousin Glue are often given kudos for avoiding the marketing hype of conferences like Web 2.0. Nevertheless, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems warned us long ago, regarding nanotechnology, that even sober engineers and programmers can be drinkers-of-Kool-Aid if they speak of technological promises without probing negative social consequences. Defrag 2009 had a bit of that back-slapping feel. Twitter and real-time streams and Facebook and live-update aggregation were given a heavier dissection than in other venues, true, but there was a little too much self-congratulatory examination of the synaptic web without enough deep critique. Still, here's what I found interesting in what real-time web pundits had to say:

First, the notion of searching static web sites is becoming as archaic as an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM. Information arises in an emergent fashion through the sharing and discovery of information real-time across social media sites. This means that the interface of choice moves away from a Word or Excel document, or even an email inbox, and toward a real-time status update feed. What we see at the top of a Facebook page of Tweetdeck may be the interface of choice for many information sites in the future. How does any data-management system keep up with this torrential real-time feed and filter out relevant information without missing key nuggets? Good question.

In the second part of my Smartbook posts, I addressed a tougher topic that arose with Khris Loux's presentation on the synaptic web. If we really want to consider client nodes (human individuals, usually) in social networks to be the equivalent of a synapse, then all those rules about neural-network behavior - learning through back-propagation, finding a higher state of consciousness through simulated annealing, etc. - apply. There is also the issue of allowing the uber-brain of a global network to establish long-term memory through the different oscillatory pattern of a sleep cycle. Where does that exist in the constant chattery updates of Twitter or Facebook? The notion of an institutional memory gets shallower and shallower. Keynote speaker Stowe Boyd pointed out that Twitter "memory" now has decreased from two weeks to two days, and may be shrunk to minutes if Twitter's growth trend continues. A conscious, sentient entity without a working memory is reduced to sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Some people in the journalism community fret about how the replacement of real newsgathering by quick tweets will significantly harm people's understanding of the world around them. Others who study consciousness itself are concerned that social networks, particularly rapid-update systems like Twitter, will encourage superficiality more than the rapid channel-changing that was the source of so much hand-wringing in the 1980s. But that merely mentions two manifestations of a larger issue: The synaptic web that is emerging based on shared communities using real-time feeds, is a creature living in the present and lumbering forward of its own accord. On a certain level, we have lopped off large sections of the cortex and cerebellum in this global brain, and have reduced the global consciousness to its limbic level. The synaptic web needs to re-evolve a higher brain function, which can accommodate memory and analysis even as real-time streams grow exponentially. Short of a global crisis of some sort, we are not going to be stopping those constant tweetstorms and live-update feeds. We need to find a way to recapture remembering, to design an institutional memory, even in the midst of a synaptic storm.

Facebook's CIA Connections

Since conspiracy theorists are having such fun with this, it's important to stress that Facebook is neither a CIA project, nor even an In-Q-Tel project. Nevertheless, the reported links between Facebook, Peter Thiel, Anita Jones, Accel Partners, and In-Q-Tel are interesting, though it reveals more about the nature of venture capital sleeping with the intelligence community and arch-conservatives in general, than it does about Facebook in particular.