Category Archives: Web/Tech

The Wisdom of Your Former Self

Posted inPhilosophy, Web/Tech7 Comments on The Wisdom of Your Former Self

Andy McKenzie quotes the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa:

I often find texts of mine that I wrote when I was very young–when I was seventeen or twenty. And some have a power of expression that I do not remember having then. Certain sentences and passages I wrote when I had just taken a few steps away from adolescence seem produced by the self I am today, educated by years and things. I recognize I am the same as I was.

Usually people shudder with embarrassment at the prospect of coming upon writings of their youth. It's the same logic techno-skeptics use when advising youth not to blog: Your adolescent riffs will come off as naive and immature to your wise, adult self.

Pessoa in adulthood found the opposite. His texts of 17 or 20 years old display insight of a caliber close to what he could have produced as an older man.

Isn't this prospect — that there's little significant difference between your youthful thoughts and adult ones — even more terrifying?

Since few adults today have records of their youth, it's easier for them to maintain self-serving narratives about how far they've come in adulthood. This will change, as more young people publish on Twitter and blogs. 20-somethings today will one day look back at those permanent and forever Google-able writings and either shudder in embarrasement as commonly presumed, or, like Pessoa, they will find them remarkably similar to their adult expressions. In the cases where there's no significant difference, the fact that one must work to become wiser will be unavoidable.

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The Origins of “Think Different”

Posted inWeb/Tech7 Comments on The Origins of “Think Different”

My sixth grade technology teacher changed my life.

He taught an early-morning elective class on computer repair in which we learned how to fix Macintosh computers. The curriculum covered how to take apart hard drives, how to re-install system software ("C is for CD and that's good enough for me" was the jingle to remember to hold the C key when starting a computer from system software), re-build desktops, run Disk Utility the right way, partition hard drives, and much more. In exchange for the free 7:00 AM class I had to periodically do maintenance and repair work on the school's computers. It was a hell of a deal: the skills I picked up continue to serve me well, and that class facilitated my burgeoning interest in software and the internet (with which I would soon become obsessed).

But the biggest gift from that class and teacher had nothing to do with the nitty gritty of computer repair. Rather, it was the introduction of a certain kind of life philosophy. He forced all of us to memorize the text of the Apple "Think Different" television campaign. We had to recite the ad back to him word-for-word in order to pass the class. It was a profoundly inspiring message.

On our last day, he wrote each of us a personal letter, continuing the theme of the advertisement. Mine read: "If you continue to work hard and do well, you can acquire the skills needed to change the world. With education one can make great scientific or technological breakthroughs, curb world hunger and child labor, prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, promote peace, and have the power to bring about great change in the world. With education, you have the power to do nearly anything. If you don't change the world, who will?" Then, as a postscript, he added: "Be sure to back up your hard drive."

In the 10 years since, I have not forgotten a word from the advertisement and have recited it hundreds of times (no exaggeration!) to whoever will listen, in various venues. (And the short video series I did last year was called Think Different TV.)

For all these reasons, I was extremely intrigued to watch this six minute clip of a young Steve Jobs discussing the origins of the advertisement in the context of marketing, branding, and values. Highly recommended everyone in business.

(via TechCrunch)

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The Feel-Bad Effect from Not-So-Close Facebook Friends

Posted inRelationships, Web/Tech8 Comments on The Feel-Bad Effect from Not-So-Close Facebook Friends

My good friend Stan James writes about how social networks amplify the feel-bad-in-comparison effect when you see people raving about how glorious their lives are:

In my trips back to Colorado, I have been struck each time by the discord between people’s Facebook lives and what they say in private. On Facebook they have been on an amazing vacation to exotic beaches. In person they confess that the vacation was a desperate attempt to save a marriage. On Facebook they have been to gliteratee tech conferences. In person they confess they haven’t been able to sleep for months, and are on anti-anxiety medication from the stress of financial pressures on their company…

What’s interesting is that this feel-bad Facebook effect seems to come from a distinct source: not-so-close Facebook friends.

In the case of true close friends, you know about all the crap that is going on in their lives. From deep interaction, you know the specific pains and doubt that lies behind the smiling profile picture…

Since TV was invented, critics have pointed out the dangers of watching the perfect people who seem to inhabit the screen. They are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do intereseting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet. It cannot be pschologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms.

So it’s interesting that social networks have inadvertently created the same effect, but using an even more powerful source. Instead of actors in Hollywood, the characters are people that you know to be real and have actually met. The editing is done not by film school graduates, but by the people themselves.

In the end, my friend’s strategy seems to be the right one: don’t spend too much time purusing the lives of people who aren’t in your life. And spend more time learning about the uncut, unedited, off-line lives that your friends are actually living.

Very true when reading other people's public content. People tend not to share their warts in public forums. Keep that in mind if you feel shitty in comparison when reading about the apparent charmed life of a blogger you don't know well in real life.

Four years ago I wrote a somewhat similar post but from the perspective of a person who writes generally upbeat tweets and blog posts. When you know you are going to blog about an experience before you have the experience, you want it to be good so that you can write a positive post that's fun to write and read. It changes the actual experience to be more positive. After writing about the (positive) experience, it's in the historical record. When you read old posts to remember your past, you feel happy about all the positive experiences you accumulated and recorded. It's not just about whitewashing the past or selective memory (though this is part of it); there's an anticipatory effect of sharing the experience in a public forum that changes the actual experience for the better.

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I just told a friend I was writing this post. She said, "This is a litmus test I use for how close I am with a friend. If s/he doesn't tell me anything bad about their life, I assume we're not very good friends."

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Note to readers: Blogging will be light for the next month due to extensive travel, and probably more sporadic than usual for the rest of 2010. If you don't already use an RSS reader I encourage you to do so, and subscribe to this feed. You can also get my posts via email.

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The Effect of the “Like” Button

Posted inWeb/Tech11 Comments on The Effect of the “Like” Button

The "Like" button on Facebook (and now all over the web) allows a user to indicate positivity about a piece of content without actually writing a comment. Millions of people have "Liked" status updates, notes, photos, bios, comments, and now external web pages. Similar one-click sentiment links ("Endorse," "Helpful," "Not Helpful") now exist on LinkedIn, Quora, and other social networking sites. And of course "Upvote" and "Downvote" arrows have driven sites like Reddit for a long time.

Like0 What is the effect (as I see it) of these type of one-click sentiment buttons? In a sentence: Overall engagement goes up, substantive comments / contributions go down.

Take a blog post. Historically, the only option for a user to engage was to leave a written comment. Suppose I write a post and five people leave comments. With the addition of a "Like" button I would estimate three people would leave comments, but four people would click "Like." Before sentiment buttons: 5 written comments. After sentiment buttons: 7 engaged users, 3 commenters.

My friend Dario Abramskiehn asked me awhile ago why certain of my posts receive more comments than others. I follow Chris Yeh's theory on comments: the less serious / difficult / lengthy the blog post, the more comments it will have, assuming an average level of interestingness. I chalk this up to the law of reciprocity: if you take the time to crank out something really thoughtful and original, readers feel like they reciprocate the effort in a comment. So many, naturally, abstain. By contrast, if you post something provocative and short, it's easy to leave a quick comment and feel square with the effort of the blogger.

With a "Like" button, readers who would have previously abstained can now indicate passive positive sentiment. Some readers who previously left a comment but did so half-assedly would now click "Like."

The generic, safe nature of "Like" also increases total engagement when difficult topics would otherwise deter readers from chiming in. A friend recently posted a status update on Facebook about a relative's fight against cancer. It was a positive update — i.e., one that warranted congratulations or encouragement — but, given the sensitivity of illness topics, given the fear of offending someone — the status received quite a few "Likes" and almost no comments. By contrast, a message that's more straightforward — such as my tweet about how many libertarians are religious — received several comments but no "Likes."

Bottom Line: The "Like" feature and other passive sentiment links next to content on the web show that the way users engage with content will continue to change, and that the way to measure the vitality of an online community continues to be more complicated than raw numbers such as unique visitors or numbers of comments.

(thanks to Steve Dodson for helping brainstorm this. P.S. "Like" buttons coming to this blog soon.)

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Age Matters to Multitasking and Information Diets

Posted inWeb/Tech9 Comments on Age Matters to Multitasking and Information Diets

Tyler Cowen continues the discussion about internet information culture and multitasking:

Do law partners and top investment bankers multitask?

Yes.

I won't quite write "end of story" but…

Of course top CEOs don't multitask all the time, they multitask selectively, combined with periods of extreme focus.  Still, I would say that multitasking is passing the market test… It's one thing to think that a seventeen-year-old teenager will multitask too much; it's another thing to make the same claim about an extremely valuable executive, surrounded by assistants, time management specialists, and so on. [BC: Emphasis mine.]

It's true that virtually every high-performing CEO I know multitasks. To the extent they are as effective as ever, and I think they are, who's to tell them to stop multitasking?

The harder question is about the 17 year-old. Arguably, the over-30 CEO has developed a "foundation" of focus — by that I mean he has experience from pre-internet pre-iPhone life of not multitasking as much and thus he knows when to turn off the background noise and do the extreme focus Tyler mentions. The 17 year-old, by contrast, has no such experiences. Multitasking is all he's ever known and all he's ever doing even as he is "immersed in a developmental stage where impulse control is dangerously weak and the brain is at a peak of malleability." Will he be able to do extreme focus when he must?

A different but related issue is about information consumption in the age of the web. Some of the most successful consumers and producers of intellectual bits on the Internet — guys like Tyler and Andrew Sullivan — spent 30-plus years pre-Internet reading long books and establishing the foundation of knowledge upon which their bits sit. Me? I've grown up on the web. I haven't read all the Great Books. My model is more a mix of books and bits. I do believe the bits will cohere in the long-run into a kind of foundational knowledge of the sort Tyler got from books, but perhaps the books/bits ratio for me should be different than his at this stage.

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