Jacob Kramer-Duffield thinks

I don’t know if this quite qualifies as a trend, but then, trend pieces don’t need real facts, so what the hey. Something I’ve noticed these last months across several major sites, is a move away from the traditional, boring-but-understood approach to comments. While pretty much everyone already agreed that YouTube comments were the worst thing on the Internet, somehow Google managed to make them worse. Not more misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or violent – that’d be hard – but far more nonsensical. In necessitating a Google+ account (which, mea culpa, continues to be totally useless), it shut out many, and in re-threading the conversations based on “relevance” it took away the free-wheeling (often awful, but still) conversational threads of comment sections.

Similar complaints have followed on Gawker’s transition to Kinja, but perhaps the most ridiculous post-comment context has to be Voice Media Group’s new “My Voice Nation” system, which I was alerted to after it pulled in a second-order @ exchange I’d had about one of its stories. Not the tweet itself, but the conversation I’d had about the tweet, with a friend. The “comment section” thus becomes a random mash of unrelated, unconnected words – a documentation of buzz, perhaps, but in no ways a conversation.

And of course: I never signed up for that. I did send that tweet, yes, and I suppose that’s public-ish, but again – not all publicly accessible data is meant to be publicized. I’m guessing most people won’t ever notice, but for me, I’ll just make sure to never send out or comment on a piece of Voice Media Group content unless it’s unavoidable (which is to say: never).

What’s curious about this Death of Comments is that they’re not being eliminated as a feature for principled reasons, or as a straight cost-benefit analysis (i.e., it doesn’t really make sense to have a community manager paid to make the comments not *quite* so execrable). Rather, the transition seems to be away from comments and towards a comment-like substance – words related to the content, written at some point in some medium, presented in some relation to the content. I’m not sure what the long game is on that, but it’s all a little lorem ipsumy for my taste.

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I wrote a column for the Txchnologist, and it’s over here. If you like what I’ve been writing about here recently, you’ll like this too. A preview:

Social media, despite its centrality in our daily lives, still causes most businesses to tremble with fear. They fear liability over what employees may post in their official capacity. They fear embarrassing information posted by employees, both current and potential, in their off hours. They conduct social media “background checks” to ferret out anything that might reflect poorly on the business. Such is this fear that social media sites are discouraged or outright blocked at many workplaces.

As modes of business communication, social media channels are treated as loudspeakers, with messages painstakingly cleared through legal and public relations, polished to perfect sheen and void of real meaning. Meanwhile, email remains the central trusted tool of business communications. Used internally, it is the official channel for directives, meeting planning and document-sharing. It is the central way to communicate anything that matters both within your organization and to any collaborators. For external communications, email lists are built, maintained and bombarded. Huge marketing dollars are spent formulating email segmentation strategies, word-smithing, and tracking open rates.

All of this is entirely backwards.

Read the whole thing!

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TechCrunch reports on a recent ComScore report highlighting changes in webmail usage:

In introducing his messaging platform last November Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said one of the primary motivations behind Messages product strategy was that teenagers have given up on email, “High school kids don’t use email, they use SMS a lot. People want lighter weight things like SMS and IM to message each other.”

A comScore report on 2010 digital trends reinforces at least part of Zuckerberg’s claim.  It’s inevitable: Innovative social messaging platforms like Facebook and Twitter as well mobile communications continue to dominate our online time, and web email begins its steady decline. Total web email usage was down 8% in the past year (YOY), with a whopping 59% decline in use among people between the ages of 12-17. Cue Matt Drudge -style alarm.

Usage was also down 1% among 18-24 year olds, 18% among 25-35 year olds, 8% among 35-44 year olds and 12% among the 45-54 demographic. Because oldsters are continuing to migrate online in droves, web email use actually saw an uptick in the AARP-eligible sector, with 22% gains among 55-64 year olds and 28% among those 65 and older. Obviously this was not enough to offset the decline in youth usage.

Though the numbers don’t lie, “webmail is dying” is entirely the wrong way to look at it. My dissertation research found similar figures in terms of the pre-eminence of social communications methods: cell phones and texting are the center of young peoples’ (in that case, college students’) social universe, with Facebook messages more popular than email for social communications. Contra Zuck, IM is not used as frequently or centrally in their social communications, and it’s my hunch that for the most part it’s getting pushed out by texting.

But all of this changes in a professional context. Young people still use email for communicating with their parents and, in the context of college, want to only use email (and face-to-face meetings) to communicate with their professors: no cell, texting, IM, Facebook messages. Definitely not. This divide was further explicated in interviews where students described that email was for professors, internships (and bosses there), and campus organizations – mailing lists and the like.

What’s clear is that while webmail and email are, among younger cohorts, losing their social centrality, they are not going away at all. Rather, email is becoming increasingly professionally branded. Old people (e.g., me) still use it (albeit at slightly decreasing rates) for social communications, and the ComScore report shows that the oldest cohorts are actually using it increasingly for those communications. But email has become the central tool for business communications, and as young people enter a workforce that is actually increasingly adopting webmail for professional purposes – notice the flat number among 18-24s and smaller decreases above that – email usage will endure. It just might get left at the office.

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This is why:

Lower Merion School District employees activated the web cameras and tracking software on laptops they gave to high school students about 80 times in the past two school years, snapping nearly 56,000 images that included photos of students, pictures inside their homes and copies of the programs or files running on their screens, district investigators have concluded.

In most of the cases, technicians turned on the system after a student or staffer reported a laptop missing and turned it off when the machine was found, the investigators determined.

But in at least five instances, school employees let the Web cams keep clicking for days or weeks after students found their missing laptops, according to the review. Those computers – programmed to snap a photo and capture a screen shot every 15 minutes when the machine was on – fired nearly 13,000 images back to the school district servers.

If authorities have the ability to behave badly, some of them always will. Which is why stuff like this is especially bad:

The MPAA and RIAA have submitted their master plan for enforcing copyright to the new Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Richard Esguerra points out, it’s a startlingly distopian work of science fiction. The entertainment industry calls for:

• spyware on your computer that detects and deletes infringing materials;
• mandatory censorware on all Internet connections to interdict transfers of infringing material;
• border searches of personal media players, laptops and thumb-drives;
• international bullying to force other countries to implement the same policies;
• and free copyright enforcement provided by Fed cops and agencies (including the Department of Homeland Security!).

The Fourth Amendment has been gutted pretty extensively over the past generation, but if “unreasonable search and seizure” has any meaning at all, it should mean that neither the government nor private corporations should be legally empowered to constantly monitor our activities through our own computers.

I’ve thought for a while that the coming divide in our politics is not going to be one of conservatism versus liberalism, but about authoritarianism versus a politics of individual liberty. News like this goes to reinforce that belief, as does the acrimony of our current political climate in the US. More on the latter, later, but I’ll reiterate the main point: it’s a bad idea to give authorities unlimited surveillance powers because they will always, always be abused.

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I’ll heartily second what Jim Fallows says here (though without rehashing my earlier anti-Kindle thoughts, I wouldn’t say it’s an argument for the Kindle per se so much as eReaders in general):

My main view on communications media is that new systems usually add to old ones, rather than displacing them. Radio didn’t eliminate books and newspapers — that would come later!; movies didn’t eliminate still photos; TV didn’t eliminate either movies or radio; and the internet has not (yet) eliminated TV. A few communications systems do disappear altogether, except for specialist/curio use: vinyl records, photos on real film, etc. Usually the field just becomes more crowded and the options more diverse.

So it will be, at least for a while, with e-readers like the Kindle versus “real” books.

To add to this a bit, what I think this kind of innovation in new communications channels does is to rationalize the kind of content on each. For all the nostalgia that some (e.g., me) have about obsolete forms, books do a better job at holding novels than newspapers, so we don’t see serialized novels anymore. Similarly, TV and movies do a better job at dramatic narrative than radio, so very few radio dramas still exist. But radio’s still excellent at talk shows and sports broadcasts (safer, too, if you’re driving), and the nature of the technology means that nowadays we can shove a radio into just about anything else (e.g., cell phones).

eReaders are going to perform a similar function – eventually (sooner than later) they will mostly eliminate the printing of many academic texts and monographs (and this is going to be a good thing for the people who write those texts, but more on that later). There’s probably a good place for magazines on eReaders but I’m not quite sure on what that is. Many of the books at the top of best-seller lists will find a lot of their sales (or in the Kindle’s case, rentals) moving very quickly to eReaders once there’s a critical mass – which makes sense for the most disposable (if fun) stories. Nobody’s really that well-served by several dozen more Dan Brown books ending up in used book stores.

In the end, eReaders represent not a replacement for books but an overlapping-but-complimentary form. They’ll absolutely cut into book sales but there will be a new equilibrium whereby booksellers will be able to more clearly see what their market is, and isn’t.

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Good post by Richard Nash on the future of publishing, most of which I agree with. I don’t agree at all, however, with one of the predictions:

3. Most predictions for 2020 based on models derived from controlling the supply side, that is, from the monopoly on the means of producing and distributing books, will be wrong. By which I mean, the supply chain book publishing and retail model is ending. The book retail chains will disappear, just like Circuit City, Sharper Image, Tower Records disappeared. And the corporate publishers will likely all but disappear just as Atari, Digital, Wang disappeared though the backlists will be spun off to private equity companies looking for semi-predictable IP-based cash flow, and a couple of front list publishing enterprises will likely be operating trying to emulate the Hollywood blockbuster model with just about enough success to be able to stay in business.

It seems certainly possible that Borders will not make it, but the idea that there will be literally no retail book chains is preposterous. Circuit City went out of business because they fired their best employees and destroyed whatever appeal they had as a place to get electronics; Tower Records went under because you can’t just sell CDs. But Best Buy is doing just fine, thankyewverymuch, because they have been flexible and now do all of what both Circuit City and Tower did, but better, and more.

Barnes & Noble is employing a not-dissimilar strategy: they knew from early on that an online presence is key, and while they’re not Amazon they’re well-established online. Similarly, they know that they’ve got to have an entrant in eReader space, so even if Nook doesn’t cut it, something will. B&N has also been pretty smart about store location; some of their mall and exurb locations may shut down but they’ve got a strong college store presence and lots of very attractive downtown city real estate. There was a time when I wished the chains nothing but ill, but I can’t fault B&N on how they’ve played the last several years, and I don’t see them going away.

More on all that later, but I also think this is spot-on from Nash:

8. In 2020 the disaffected twentysomethings of the burgeoning middle classes of India, China, Brazil, Indonesia will be producing novels faster than any of us can possibly imagine.

Yup.

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