The National Interest is running my review of Douglas Edwards’s new memoir, I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Here’s how the review begins:

In December 2001, an upstart Silicon Valley company named Google posted its corporate philosophy, in the form of a list of “Ten Things We’ve Found to be True,” on its website. At once charmingly idealistic and off-puttingly smug, the list set the tone for Google’s future public pronouncements. “You can be serious without a suit,” read one of the tenets. “You can make money without doing evil,” read another. But it was the most innocuous sounding of the ten principles—“It’s best to do one thing really, really well”—that would prove to be most fateful for the company. No sooner had it pledged to remain a specialist than it began to break its promise by branching into new markets, with far-reaching consequences not only for its own business but also for the Internet as a whole.

Google issued its philosophy at a decisive moment in its history. Although it had incorporated just three years earlier, in late 1998, its eponymous search engine was already widely viewed as the best tool available for navigating the net. But the company was struggling to make money. To succeed financially, its young founders, Stanford grad-school buddies Larry Page and Sergey Brin, knew they would have to supply not only search results but also advertisements tied to those results. At the time, the market for search-linked ads was dominated by another Internet start-up, Overture, which had forged partnerships with major web portals like Yahoo, America Online, Ask Jeeves and Earthlink. Google’s own advertising system, AdWords, was more sophisticated than Overture’s, but big websites feared that the company, which operated its own site at Google.com, might end up competing with them for online traffic. Google’s high-toned philosophy, with its promise to stick to doing “one thing”—i.e., web search—“really, really well,” was meant to reassure would-be partners that it wouldn’t expand into their markets. The subtext was clear: “You can trust us; we’re pure.” …

Here’s the rest.

Rough Type’s retro summer continues with this post, which originally appeared on this blog on December 19, 2006, under the title “Sharecropping the Long Tail.”

A while back I wrote that Web 2.0, by putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few.

Richard MacManus’s new analysis of web traffic patterns helps illustrate the point. Despite the explosion of web content, spurred in large part by the reduction in the cost of producing and consuming that content, web traffic appears to be growing more concentrated in a few sites, not less. Using data from Compete, MacManus shows that the top ten sites accounted for 40% of total internet page views in November 2006, up from 31% in November 2001, a 29% increase. The greater concentration comes during a period when the number of domains on the web nearly doubled, from 2.9 million to 5.1 million.

Even if we grant that traffic numbers are unreliable and that page views are not the only way to measure traffic, the trend seems clear: A few big sites increasingly dominate the web.

On the surface of it, this might seem to contradict the long-tail, or power-law, theory. But it’s not so simple. As MacManus shows, the greater concentration of traffic can largely be explained by the popularity of two “social networking” sites, MySpace and Facebook, which together accounted for 17% of all page views in November 2006. Both MySpace and Facebook are made up of millions of “user profiles” created by their members. If we counted each profile as a separate site, which in a content sense it is, we would find no increase in the concentration of traffic, consistent with the long-tail theory.

What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.

It strikes me that this dynamic, which I don’t think we’ve ever seen before, at least not on this scale, is the most interesting, and unsettling, economic phenomenon the Internet has produced.

Thanks to the Internet, Americans are devoting less of their free time to watching television and more to creating socially useful stuff.

As if.

A year ago, the Nielsen Company reported that Americans’ TV viewing hit an all-time record high in the first quarter of 2010, with the average person spending 158 hours and 25 minutes a month in front of the idiot box.* That record didn’t last long. Nielsen has released a new media-usage report, and it shows that in the first quarter of 2011, the average American watched TV for 158 hours and 47 minutes a month, up another 0.2 percent and, once again, a new all-time high.* Twenty years into the Web revolution, and we’re boob-tubier than ever.

But even that understates our video consumption. One of the Net’s big effects has been to free TV programming from the living room and the bedroom. We can now watch the tube through our laptops and smartphones 24/7 – at work, in restaurants, and while strolling down the street. And that’s just what we’re doing. In the first quarter of 2011, the average American watched 4 hours and 33 minutes of streaming video a month on a computer, up a whopping 34.5 percent from year-earlier levels. That same average American watched an additional 4 hours and 20 minutes of video on a mobile phone, up 20 percent from Q1 2010. You no longer need a couch to be a couch potato.

Of course, we’re doing more on the Net than just watching video. We’re also playing Angry Birds. As of the start of this year, human beings were devoting 200 million minutes a day to playing the addictive computer game. That works out to 1.2 billion hours of our collective annual cognitive surplus.*

Bottom line: the more time we spend in front of media devices, the more time we fritter away. Shocked? Me neither.

Previous posts on this subject:

Gilligan’s Web

Charlie Bit My Cognitive Surplus

Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa discusses The Shallows (Superficiales is the Spanish title) in an essay published last week in El País. Here’s a bit:

Lo acabo de leer, de un tirón, y he quedado fascinado, asustado y entristecido.

Carr no es un renegado de la informática, no se ha vuelto un ludita contemporáneo que quisiera acabar con todas las computadoras, ni mucho menos. En su libro reconoce la extraordinaria aportación que servicios como el de Google, Twitter, Facebook o Skype prestan a la información y a la comunicación, el tiempo que ahorran, la facilidad con que una inmensa cantidad de seres humanos pueden compartir experiencias, los beneficios que todo esto acarrea a las empresas, a la investigación científica y al desarrollo económico de las naciones.

Pero todo esto tiene un precio y, en última instancia, significará una transformación tan grande en nuestra vida cultural y en la manera de operar del cerebro humano como lo fue el descubrimiento de la imprenta por Johannes Gutenberg en el siglo XV que generalizó la lectura de libros, hasta entonces confinada en una minoría insignificante de clérigos, intelectuales y aristócratas …

Here’s the rest.

As our cars, phones, and computers become more location-aware, do we become less location-aware? What would going “on the road” have meant for Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty if their cars had been outfitted with sat-nav screens? Those are among the questions Ari Schulman tackles in his searching essay GPS and the End of the Road in the latest issue of The New Atlantis.

Here’s a taste:

Just as important as what we see in the world is how we go about seeing it. We are adept at identifying points of interest, but pay scant attention to the importance of our approaches to exploring them; our efforts to facilitate the experience of place often end up being self-defeating. What [Walker] Percy’s strategies aim to do, in part, is to put the traveler into a state of willingness and hunger to encounter the world as it is, to discover the great sights with the freshness, the newness, that is so much of what we seek from them. Alain de Botton also describes this attitude as the solution to the guidebook problem, and identifies it as the mode of receptivity.

Practices like geocaching and geotagging rely on this receptivity. Geocaching asks the user to be an active participant in seeking, and to seek something unknown. Viewing geotagged photography may impel us to go forth into the world and seek with our own eyes what the images present to us, thus claiming them in some way for ourselves. It is a tricky balance: as always, photographs, especially when so readily viewed at the very places they were taken, hold the potential to substitute for rather than deepen our own awareness. But these practices at least give some idea as to how location-based technologies can encourage us to orient ourselves to the world in its primary, phenomenal sense — as a realm of places.

But GPS navigation, in its present form, seems to do quite the opposite: it dulls our receptivity to our surroundings by granting us the supposed luxury of not having to pay attention to them at all. In travel facilitated by “location awareness,” we begin to encounter places not by attending to what they present to us, but by bringing our expectations to them, and demanding that they perform for us as advertised. In traveling through “augmented reality,” even the need for places to perform begins to fade, as our openness to the world gives way to the desire to paper over it entirely. It is an admission of our seeming distrust in places to be sufficiently interesting on their own. But in attempting to find the most valuable places and secure the greatest value from them, the places themselves become increasingly irrelevant to our experiences … The technology that is meant to facilitate travel deadens the spirit of discovery that draws us to the experience — moreover, it traduces that spirit: dis-covery, the removal of the things that paper over our vision so as to reveal the truth of the world, gives way to covering the world over deliberately, and calling that an enhanced revelation.

Read it.

The New Republic is running my review of Simon Reynolds’s new book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. It (the review) begins like this:

“Who wants yesterday’s papers?” sang Mick Jagger in 1967. “Who wants yesterday’s girl?” The answer, in the Swinging 60s, was obvious: “Nobody in the world.” That was then. Now we seem to want nothing more than to read yesterday’s papers and carry on with yesterday’s girl. Popular culture has become obsessed with the past — with recycling it, rehashing it, replaying it. Though we live in a fast-forward age, we cannot take our finger off the rewind button.

Nowhere is the past’s grip so tight as in the world of music, as the rock critic Simon Reynolds meticulously documents in Retromania. Over the last two decades, he argues, the “exploratory impulse” that once powered pop music forward has shifted its focus from Now to Then. Fans and musicians alike have turned into archeologists. The evidence is everywhere. There are the reunion tours and the reissues, the box sets and the tribute albums. There are the R&B museums, the rock halls of fame, the punk libraries. There are the collectors of vinyl and cassettes and — God help us — eight-tracks. There are the remixes, the mash-ups, the samples. There are the “curated” playlists. When pop shakes its moneymaker today, what rises is the dust of the archive. …

Read on.

Google+, Google’s latest attempt to crack social networking, marks a refreshing break from tradition for the Behemoth of Mountain View. First, unlike its predecessors, G+ entered the arena with something other than a spectacular and fatal bellyflop. Second, the site actually seems to have been designed rather than just engineered. It’s a pleasant place. Third, it does a nice job of carving out at a newish space in a crowded market. The benefits of the site’s most talked about feature, Circles, at this point remain largely theoretical, but the way it presents information is distinctive without feeling unfamiliar – a neat trick.

In its first weeks of invitation-only existence, G+ has reportedly managed to attract something like 20 million members. That’s impressive, but probably not as impressive as it sounds. Getting people to check out a buzzy service is pretty easy, particularly when Google’s muscle is behind it. Getting them to keep using it is a different matter. My unscientific survey of the site indicates that there are a whole lot of accounts that are still just shells.

A social network is, like the internet itself, a network of networks. The network expands by tracing the intersections among fairly well-defined social groups – a kind of connect-the-dots process that gains network-effect momentum as it proceeds. Facebook understood this dynamic well, as it grew from one college to a small set of campuses to the entire student world and on to everyone and his brother. That’s one of the main reasons Facebook is now closing in on a billion members. (MySpace didn’t understand the dynamic very well, which is one of the reasons it has turned into Nowheresville).

Because it begins in homogeneity, a social network often quickly assumes a particular character – a culture, as we like to say these days – based on the people populating its early core networks and the way that they initially use the service. This foundational culture plays a crucial role in encouraging use and loyalty early on – it’s the magnet that holds everything together and pulls in new members. But if the foundational culture is too strong and too narrow it can end up limiting the eventual growth of the network. Magnets repel as well as attract. To succeed on a global scale, Facebook had to transform its early student culture to a more mainstream culture – it had to go from Shitfacebook to Straightfacebook. It has been very successful at that – it’s a heck of a lot easier to entice older people to a youth culture than to do the opposite – though in the long run its mature, increasingly white-bread culture may prove to be its Achilles heel. A hipper network could quickly siphon away Facebook’s younger members, leading to a network implosion of breathtaking magnitude.

Google+ is probably not that hipper network. Its foundational culture feels much more professional than social, which means it’s starting in a very different place than Facebook did. All social networks strike some sort of balance between functioning as a publishing platform (formal speech) and functioning as a conversation platform (informal speech). Facebook has always skewed toward conversation; Twitter started with a conversational skew but quickly shifted toward a publishing skew (though it continues to have conversational subcultures). Google+ skews pretty heavily to the publishing side. Its early core membership seems dominated by what might be called the new media axis – a combination of techies and media types who love to talk shop. These folks aren’t generally too keen on Facebook (too conversational, too intrusive, too untrustworthy), and while they tend to be heavy Twitter users, many of them have become frustrated by Twitter’s limitations. Google+ provides a compelling blog/tweet hybrid – a stream of published nuggets which carry their comment threads with them as they flow by – which is attractive to the new media axis, whose members look to social networks more for information exchange and self-promotion than for shoot-the-breeze conversation.

Google+’s appeal to the new-media crowd has been the secret to its early success. It is also quickly shaping its foundational culture. The problem for Google, assuming it wants to turn G+ into a mainstream social network rather than a niche one, is that this culture is both strong and narrow. It attracts a particular set of users, but it repels pretty much everyone else. G+’s prospects may, in other words, be circumscribed by the culture that its early success has already established.