GENRE 2.0.

Adam Greenfield posts on what seems like a decline in blogging:

What he's really asking is not so much whether blogging is withering away, but rather, whether the expressive explosion of what some people still call "web 2.0" has faded. And it has, I suspect, for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, there was a bubble there, and it fooled a lot of people who said they weren't going to get fooled again. That bubble was borne out of novelty, and out of the adjustment period that comes when we start doing something new. Do we still need to post every single boring picture we take to Flickr? Are we, as bloggers, getting anything out of the treatises Greenfield's searching for? At some point it becomes noise and it stops being any fun. At that point, we're going to start seeing more traditional content in non-traditional venues, and less diarying and self-expression dumps.

Given that, it would be nice if new media scholars would start taking genre into account a little more seriously. When Greenfield asks in his post's title if "blogging per se [is] a dying art," the blogging he's talking about isn't blogging "per se," it's a particular kind of blogging. For those of us interested in studying another kind -- like, say, political blogging -- the tendency to describe blogging as if it were one thing is a real pain. It's not something that would happen with other media -- nobody looks at "television" without at least some acknowledgment of genre differences. Yet, a colleague and I came up dry over the course of hour yesterday spent looking for literature that examines readers of political blogs specifically, rather than just of blogs generally -- as far as we can tell, the only such piece is another I and three co-authors wrote which will be published soon in Cyberpsychology & Behavior. I got into an interesting but frustrating conversation about this at a conference last weekend, in which basically every speaker brought different assumptions into the discussion based on their genre interests, and I really think it's a significant problem in the study of blogs.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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THE FRINGE.

One of things that strikes me about the scholarly approach to the Internet -- in particular when it comes to democratic theory concerns, but other things as well -- is the tendency to ignore casual, mass use in favor of focusing on uses that relate to political communication, mobilization or participation in some way but that tend to involve only a certain segment of the Internet population. This is nothing new, to be sure -- lots of early networked communication/virtual space scholarship centered on the construction on new identities unlinked to one's physical self -- changing genders most often, but changing anything else as well. This doesn't appear to be something that's really panned out now that the Internet actually exists and is well populated. Some people do it, sure, but they're few and what they do online doesn't tell us much about how people in general use the Internet.

My point is that given the huge changes in the technology and demography of the Internet over the past ten years or so, we actually don't understand very well how people use the Internet, and we don't spend much time trying to find out. Rather than studying casual, mainstream users -- if only to have some idea of what the baseline is -- we talk about blogging, or mash-ups, or homemade political ads on YouTube, or social tagging, or Second Life, etc. Among younger users these things are much more common uses than they are among older users, of course, though it's hardly a straight-up correlation, but they're not exactly widespread in any age group. (It should be noted that within the group that is using these things, we often ignore what the Second Life people call "griefers," or at least naively assume there is some rationale behind their behavior other than adolescent misanthropy.)

So let's assume that five million Americans are doing any given one of these activities somewhat regularly -- often enough that they're not just trying it out, but are actually using it. That's probably too high (the well-publicized "One Million Strong for Barack" Facebook group has just over 300,000 members at the moment), but for the sake of argument, let's say something has five million users. That's about 2.5% of the adult population in America, and probably 3.5% of the adult Internet user population. Let's say that across all these tools and sites that are so interesting in scholars, there are ten million people using at least one of them. That leaves over 90% of online Americans being largely unstudied, perhaps using the Internet for news, perhaps wary of "Web 2.0" tools for one reason or another, but largely unaffiliated with what so many scholars see as a revolution of social politics. While there is certainly something important in examining how people on the cutting edge are using the Internet, it's a mistake both to assume that the things they are doing will filter down to the rest of the online population eventually and to assume that the mass of vanilla users have nothing to tell us about how people interact through networks.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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GENERATIVITY.

We had a talk yesterday from Jonathan Zittrain (of the Oxford Internet Institute and Harvard Law) on the procession of "generative" technologies over time, and in particular the generative successes of the PC and the Internet. The idea of technological generativity is that a system provides the independent ability to create within it -- e.g., the structure of the Internet which allows people wholly unrelated to its creation and operation to produce things like Flickr, or Movable Type, or del.icio.us, etc. The generativity of both the Internet and the PC (in that case, in terms of application development) can be modeled as an hourglass, where production is funneled through IP (the Internet Protocol) or the operating system to use on the other side.

One of the interesting things about his talk -- apart from the mode of the presentation itself, which was occasionally very meta but in a compelling way -- was his interest in the normative concern of maintaining high levels of generativity in new systems, such as the iPhone. But the thing that especially caught my ear was one of the last things he said before the end of the session, which was that geeks can extract generativity from most any system (witness, e.g., iPod Linux, which fully modifies a nominally closed system), but that the more pressing concern is that typical users can get some generativity out of digital communication systems. I agree with this basic concern, that new media lose a lot of their appeal if regular people can't use them to express themselves in a wide range of ways, but it seems like overreaching to claim that those regular people have such generative abilities as it is. People can and do produce all kinds of things thanks to the combination of, say, iMovie* and YouTube, which respectively take advantage of the generativity of the PC and the Internet. But more importantly, regular users rely on the ability of geeks to exploit the generativity of the PC and the Internet in order to produce iMovie and YouTube in the first place. Given this reliance of user generativity on geek generativity to exist in the first place, are we simply worrying about a sliding scale of difficulty or usability? What's the difference between iPod Linux, XBox modding, BitTorrent and Napster? They all require different levels of skill to implement and use, and they all required geek generativity to be created. Unless and until the tools are generated, they can't be used to generate content and experience.

* iMovie is probably not the best example, since it is produced by the same organization as the OS on which it runs, but I couldn't think of a consumer-level video program not produced by Apple or Microsoft.

posted by Aaron S. Veenstra
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