Green/Yellow Journalism

In general, I like reading Jack Shafer's columns on Slate.com. His most recent, a brief invective against "environmental" journalism, is a little puzzling. Opening with this broadside attack:

green journalism tends to appeal to our emotions, exploit our fears, and pander to our vanity. It places a political agenda in front of the quest for journalistic truth and in its most demagogic forms tolerates no criticism, branding all who question it as enemies of the people. Not all green journalism harangues, but even the gentlest variety sermonizes, cuts logical corners, and substitutes good intentions for problem solving.

Shafer goes on to haul a small and unimpressive set of evidence out damning environmental reporting, squaring off most directly with Slate's own "Slate Green Challenge" series, which was jointly authored with Treehugger.org a few weeks ago.

While I tend to agree with Shafer, that, overall, journalism about environmental concerns can be sloppy, and from the perspective of an environmentalist, possibly self-defeating in so far as the softer, do-gooder reporting undermines the more serious scientific, technical, and policy reporting, it is curious that Shafer tries to hang environmental journalism on failing to prize journalistic truth and cutting logical corners, without providing more than one instance of this (the NYT article). I don't have any data in hand, but my general impression is not that "green" reporting is factually incorrect, or even incomplete, but that it suffers from too much rah-rah cheerleading and a bad case of the telling-you-what's-best-for-yous. This puts green journalism more in the camp of journalists advancing unpopular causes grounded to a journalistic truth (see Kristof on Sudan), than in the company of yellow journalists, doesn't it?

Or maybe sensationalism isn't that damning a charge, after all?

Global Cities at the Tate

I've had a couple of interesting conversations in the last few days about cities - one with OES and AL over dinner on the 4th of July, another in fits and starts with ENW over email. In all cases, I am advancing a half-thought out thesis, which basically goes like this: as cities become richer and safer in their centers, and more sprawling and stratified as you move outward from the center, the city loses some of the essential qualities that make it special. With respect to sustainability and resource planning, I think this argument is on pretty solid ground. As I think about culture, I veer onto thinner ice (with ideas like 'a city can be too safe and too easy to live in'). I was hoping to post something cogent on these topics, but I'm still sorting through some thinking on this front. In the meantime, I wanted to post some photos from the Tate Modern's Global Cities exhibit, which I saw in London a few weeks ago, as well as direct you to the exhibition site. While it wasn't great, either as art or urban study, the focus on a couple of key indicators - density, % of population that is foreign-born, ethnic diversity - are really interesting perspectives on what demographic factors will shape the evolution of some of the world's major cities in the coming years.

Also, a particularly contentious post by Matthew Yglesias on the Atlantic Monthly blog, tying global warming concerns to issues of urban density and planning. In general, I agree with Yglesias, but it is a thread worth picking up in greater detail in a future post. Courtesy ENW.

Photos, from top:
Maha Maamoun, Domestic Tourism
Scott Peterman, Ecataepec
Andreas Gursky, Copan

Social Divides on Social Networking Applications + Twitter

My opinion on social networking software is pretty simple. I do believe that encoding social networking behavior in online platforms and applications has the potential to enrich people's lives, as well as add value to wealth-creating activities (i.e., SN has business applications). Appealing to my idealistic side, satisfying one or both of those criteria is the basis on which a technology or business innovation is worth spending time thinking about. While the question of how business value will be delivered from social networking is a topic I have discussed (see previous posts, or this article for a cursory view), the question of how social networking applications may be enriching people's lives is not something that I have spent less time considering. At a very high level, I think social networking software can enrich a person's life in the following ways:

1. Allowing a person to capture and maintain their real-world social network through technological means - so you do a better job maintaining friendships over distance and time, and understand your friends in new ways based on the information they choose to convey about themselves;
2. Allowing a person to find new friends through their social network - so you can extend your circle of friends on a friends-of-friends basis;
3. Enabling a person to express their personality through a "broadcast" medium - so you could use the profile feature of most social networks allows a person to create, control, and communicate their identity to the world at large;
4. Enabling a person to make connections based on interests or attributes that can't be facilitated by their real-world social networks - so you can meet people online to whom you may have a strong affinity using a social networking service, where the connection may never have occurred in the physical world;

With that generally in mind, two recent articles caught my eye and are worth a quick read.

Social networking expert Danah Boyd publishes an interesting study on her website in which she traces "class divisions" in the usage of the social networking services MySpace and Facebook. In studying the use of these services by young people, Boyd has found both perceptions of usage and actual usage patterns where "good kids" - meaning college-bound students, but also a proxy, it seems, for middle-to-upper-class students, and traditionally popular school cliques - tend to use Facebook, whereas the "Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids" call MySpace home.

There may be some features of each of the services that are responsible for their attraction to different types of users. Boyd indicates that the Facebook crowd prefers its "clean" interface, whereas some of the heterogeneous set of high school outsiders lumped into the MySpace crowd prefer the "bling" and front-end configuration capabilities of MySpace. More likely, however, is a simple migration of real world patterns of behavior and social networking migrating into the online world. This is a real shame, of course, as one of the hopes of the online world would be the ability for people to transcend the impositions of their day-to-day realities. Especially for kids. As Boyd sums it up, sigh.

On an entirely separate note, Clive Thompson writes in Wired about recent flavor-of-the-month Twitter. Now, I haven't actually used Twitter, as I try to avoid the more twee software phenomenon to the extent that I possibly can, no matter how hot they are, but smarter people than me have. In case you don't know what Twitter is, Thompson sums it up well:

a tool that lets you post brief updates about your everyday thoughts and activities to the Web via browser, cell phone, or IM. The messages are limited to 140 characters, so they lean toward pithy, haiku-like utterances.

And his argument for Twitter is as follows:

Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter — and the similarly mundane Dodgeball, a tool for reporting your real-time location to friends — is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.

When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that's not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

Now, I don't know if I buy any of this, but it is an interesting hypothesis - that the more data we provide about ourselves to our friends, the better they can know us - in greater depth, in more detail, with greater variety. And that is, I would hope, one of the aims of social networking software.

New Ways to Social Network

While Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn have emerged from the pack in the social networking space (it's still hard to really call it a full-fledged market, isn't it?), it seems to me that quite a broad range of users and use cases are being under-served by these three services. Specifically, while Facebook and MySpace have done good jobs serving the social part of social networking, in the broadest sense, they become less effective as a user tries to use their social network effectively to satisfy some specific aspect of their personality.

For example, Facebook and MySpace have not been particularly effective in serving their users in a professional context, either as job seekers or as employees who may leverage their social network to do their jobs, like salespeople or recruiters. This opportunity fueled the rise of LinkedIn, as well as my previous employer, Visible Path. As another example, while each of the social networks may help me identify certain interests (I am a soccer fan, I like to travel), they are less useful in exploring those interests to any depth.

As those uses of social networks are left unmet, other services are struggling to fill those niches. Part of the difficulty in doing this is the relative saturation that Facebook and MySpace have achieved (in the US) for users likely to sign up for social networks. This leaves upstart competitors trying to establish new ways of getting their social networking services out. One method, currently adopted by Visible Path, is to understand a social networking service not as a "destination," but rather, as a service that can be accessed from other business applications. This effort has the benefits (to Visible Path) of broadening the points of access that a user might have to its service and (to the user) of providing access to a social networking service from within the context of applications or websites they are already using. Visible Path CEO discusses this approach in a blog post on that company's blog. While this isn't a new approach, (as social networking has long been a feature of many community/bulletin board web sites, and LinkedIn and Facebook are opening up there networks to external development) it will hopefully be a successful gambit in introducing users to a service with some differentiating value (and with the caveat that, as mentioned, I formerly worked at Visible Path).

A different approach to introducing a new social networking service to the market is being taken by Ning, founded by Marc Andreessen, which recognizes that most people have different aspects to their personality and may have wildly divergent interests. Ning allows users to start their own social networks, focused on whatever topic they choose, and then allows people to use their single Ning userID to join any network of their choice. The service is fairly feature rich, and has the obvious benefit of marrying the appeals of community and area-of-interest focused services to a single social networking platform. While I haven't used Ning extensively, I have been excited by the launch of Tripsanity on Ning, by my old friends CC, DC, and KP. Tripsanity is a social network focused on traveling for people with an adventurous spirit. It brings the sensibility of guides like Lonely Planet to an experiential and user-driven community, and is a cool way to plan a trip, be a voyeur on someone else's trip, or keep tabs on your globe-trotting friends.

Trickle-Down Edunomics

An interesting article in the New York Times a few weeks ago caught my attention. The opening paragraphs are as follows:

Lehigh University has never been as sought after as Stanford, Yale or Harvard. But this year, awash in applications, it churned out rejection letters and may break more hearts when it comes to its waiting list.

Call them second-tier colleges (a phrase some administrators despise) or call them the new Ivies (this, they can live with). Twenty-five to 40 universities like Lehigh, traditionally perceived as being a notch below the most elite, have seen their cachet climb because of the astonishing competitive crush at the top.

“It’s harder to get into Bowdoin now than it was to get into Princeton when I worked there,” said William M. Shain, who worked at Princeton in the 1970s and is now dean of admissions and financial aid at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me. Bowdoin is one of those benefiting from the spillover as the country’s most prestigious colleges turn away nearly 9 out of 10 applicants.

At Lehigh, known for its strength in engineering and business, about 12,000 students applied this year. That is a whopping 50 percent increase in applications over seven years ago and more than 10 times the seats available in a freshman class of 1,150. The median SAT score of admitted students has climbed about 10 points a year in recent years, officials said.

Not knowing enough about the demographics of matriculating college classes, don't immediate questions arise about who is getting a "first-tier" quality education, and what the is quality of the education being received by the students who in another era might have been first tier? It feels like an odd supply and demand problem, but where I'm left wondering - is the increase in demand for top tier education simply a result of demographic shifts and increased access? And is it possible that the quality of the "product," so to speak, of "second-tier" institutions can be elevated to provide the same quality of education to those students who might otherwise have attended Harvard or Yale? And what is the macro consequence? Will we have a more effective, better educated populace? Or a populace who is under-served, in terms of higher education?

Hipsters, Prepare to Die

ENW sends me an article form 3 Quarks Daily entitled "Hipsters, Prepare to Die." For that reason alone, I must write about it, but unfortunately, the title may be the only reason I have. It is fascinating to hear someone who has somehow stationed themselves in the outskirts of Romania reflect back on Williamsburg hipsterism (in whose bosom I now sit). But it's hard for me to really believe that a) this generation is really so different from the last, or any other, given that I know enough children of the 60s who did not, in fact, share that mythic experience of the 60s and that b) we, our hipster generation, don't really feel all that special. Do we?

I think what is perhaps more consequential than the supposed irony of these hipsters, as a threat to us in our old age, are three things: our late bloom into adulthood, where so many of our contemporary twenty-, thirty-, and even forty-somethings have been able to put off the basic mechanics of life, like jobs, babies, death, and taxes; our political disengagement, where we are ill-equipped to navigate and shape an increasingly complicated and technocratic political landscape that will determine the fate of issues like health care and social security; and the changing demographics of our world, where, as we collectively get older and (maybe) richer, the world will get younger and poorer. None of these things are caused by irony, nor will any of them be fended off by irony. ENW?

Freeman Dyson on Our Biotech Future

Freeman Dyson's essay "Our Biotech Future" in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books is a speculative take on the potential of biological science and biotech to provide a basis for addressing the key social and environmental problems of the 21st century - including rural poverty. I suppose it is a positive that Dyson is hopeful and not resigned in his take on the future, but his very high concept essay, which skims from the domestication of technology, through to early/proto-Darwinian models of evolution in early microbes, to a comparison of "Green" versus "Grey" technologies is so un-tethered from any immediate technological reality that I'm left grasping as to the hope that Dyson holds. Maybe that's why he's a visionary and my imagination strains to keep up, but it seems that while Dyson's optimism might be contagious, his practical conceits are frail, at best. Take the opening comparison of the domestication of physics to the domestication of biology (a future which I still can't conceive...) Isn't his example about the domestication of information technology, not physics? Other than advances in telecommunications, have the hallmark scientific initiatives of the atomic age - nuclear power, nuclear weapons, space exploration - really made it into the home? I guess the list might include fiber optics and lasers, but can you really count microprocessors, as well?

And what I struggle to imagine is the analog for biotechnology. Will there really be an interface that allows the non-expert user to manipulate biological information? Is that really what breeding new species of flowers or reptiles is? And is that really a good thing?

Growing uncomfortable in my old age, I suppose.