Category: media

Doing It For The Lulz

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The BBC profiles scientist Delroy Paulhus, a specialist studying why some people have an unusual propensity to be selfish, manipulative, and unkind.

If you had the opportunity to feed harmless bugs into a coffee grinder, would you enjoy the experience? Even if the bugs had names, and you could hear their shells painfully crunching? And would you take a perverse pleasure from blasting an innocent bystander with an excruciating noise?

These are just some of the tests that Delroy Paulhus uses to understand the “dark personalities” around us. Essentially, he wants to answer a question we all may have asked: why do some people take pleasure in cruelty? Not just psychopaths and murderers – but school bullies, internet trolls and even apparently upstanding members of society such as politicians and policemen.

It is easy, he says, to make quick and simplistic assumptions about these people. “We have a tendency to use the halo or devil framing of individuals we meet – we want to simplify our world into good or bad people,” says Paulhus, who is based at the University of British Columbia in Canada. But while Paulhus doesn’t excuse cruelty, his approach has been more detached, like a zoologist studying poisonous insects – allowing him to build a “taxonomy”, as he calls it, of the different flavours of everyday evil.

He turns his eye to a particularly vexing problem for those who create online communities as well:

He thinks this is directly relevant to internet trolls. “They appear to be the internet version of everyday sadists because they spend time searching for people to hurt.” Sure enough, an anonymous survey of trollish commentators found that they scored highly on dark tetrad traits, but particularly the everyday sadism component – and enjoyment was their prime motivation. Indeed, the bug-crushing experiment suggested that everyday sadists may have more muted emotional responses to all kinds of pleasurable activities – so perhaps their random acts of cruelty are attempts to break through the emotional numbness.

Story: Psychology: the man who studies everyday evil


Quick Tips To Become A Better Writer

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  1. Read, read, read, read, read, read. Everyone always says that because it's true. But don't necessarily read just anything, read various styles of writing and create a basic taxonomy of those stylesthat you can refer to mentally, in a mindset that's more like concentrated practice than just breezy reading. Pay attention to structure, tone, form, use of (or wilful disregard for) grammar, and cadences.
  2. Learn how to break down basic sentence structure. Know what a gerund phrase and subordinate clause are, or how to spot a sentence splice. You can ignore the "rules" but you need to know them.
  3. To expand on number 2: Be able to instinctively identify the subject, verb, and object of your sentences. Every sentence has 'em, at least a subject and a verb. This isn't a firm rule, but there's an excellent chance that your sentence's perceived meaning hinges on them, no matter how complicated. And for reference subject, verb and object of the last sentence by the way were "there" "is" and "chance" respectively, not the thing that looks like a sentence and follows the word "that." Now that you know what they are exploit them. Most likely there's a better verb than variations on "to be" such as "is" "was" "has been" and the like.
  4. Write. But don't just write whatever comes to mind (though you should do that too): write to form. Now that you're being observant of how certain styles are structured and their conventions you can try for yourself. Attempt to mimic the way certain kinds of prose are written.

Here are a few examples of the same thing in various styles picked at random: 

"Triangle" – straight news format aka New York Times or AP style

Wilson Phillips, an internet user from Skokie, Illinois, visited the popular online site Quora today in an attempt to learn how to write. In a visit  Mr. Phillips described as "disturbing," site contributors were alleged to have committed several acts of hostility, including accusations he was an disgruntled former employee of Myspace, a claim Mr. Phillips denies. 

"Time Magazine" – famous backwards construction used in features

The clicks on the keyboard started out even, but soon picked up in speed. As comments were added, tempers flared. A voice rang out. "They should be so lucky as to work for Rupert!" it said, as minutes became hours. Broad daylight gave way to a dim monitor glow, and a grim realization took hold. It was almost midnight, and Wilson's secret was out. 

"Gawker" – ie snarky news/blog style

It looks like Wilson won't be getting off this island any time soon. Sources tell us the ex social-ite had a run in with the valley mafia late last night on Quora, which is quickly turning from a minor Mike Arrington masturbatory obsession into a digital mob. 

"Gonzo" – Hunter S. Thompson, the master

They're a vile bunch, mean on a good day and as vicious as a badger when cornered. And to them Wilson was prey. A life and reputation torn into meat and bone, the bastard never had a chance. Of course for predators that's the price of a meal, and he wasn't even the first that day. 

Heh. The details matter. Ask most people to write the first sentence of a story about a run of the mill news event like a house fire and they'll probably do something like "A house on Main Street burned down today" when in real life those stories usually come at the news sideways. For example: "Broken windows and car alarms were among the unpleasant sights this morning at the site of a residential blaze that claimed three downtown homes".

And so on… ya get the point. And that's just journalism; do the same with modern fiction, magical realism, classic literature, your favorite writers, etc. Once you can separate style from subject you have a set of tools that can evoke a mood. Like a musician practices ear training to identify pitch or major from minor keys you should know the mechanics that underpin a certain feel or tone, and use them, even when you forget you're using any style and just have your own voice.

Making a Mint With The Value of Press

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The Mint.com story shows that often what people feel is an avalanche of “word of mouth” is really just great press.

OK, fine I'll admit it, I'm the last human in the world to dive into Mint.com. As an OCD spreadsheet wielder with every penny I have or don't have tracked and sliced and diced I never really thought it was for me. But today I decided it might be worth giving it a shot. It had some features I wanted to try and let's face it, no matter how good your spreadsheet is, chances are you're no match for a well designed application.

I have to say, I was more than impressed, and my turbocharged spreadsheet feels like a bicycle sitting next to a Porsche 911. I had dim memories of first being tipped by Jason Calacanis via his TechCrunch event with Michael Arrington, and was trying to remember the story of Mint getting off the ground. A quick google revealed this article and sure enough, it was only two years or so ago. They've certainly blown things out since. But reading the interview with founder Aaron Patzer lent even more insight:

We didn’t have money for advertising, so we started a blog. We didn’t have money for writers, so most of our original blog content then was guest posts from other personal finance blogs, plus a couple of columns on people’s worst financial disasters.

To build demand, we started asking for email addresses for our alpha 9 months in advance of launch. Then when we had too many people sign up, we asked people to put a little badge that said “I want Mint” on their blogs to get priority access. We got free advertising and 600 link backs which raised our SEO juice.

When it came time to launch, we choose TechCrunch 40 – why pay $20k for DEMO?

We decided not to do SEM – it’s too easy and too additive. Instead, we relied on press. It’s where I spent 20% of my time. I’m spending it right now while writing this.

The net result has been millions of visitors and 1.5m users essentially for free. Mint is not inherently viral like a social network – but all good things are viral by word of mouth.

And so here we are two years later. We’ve attracted over 1.5 million users, found over $300 million in savings, managed $50 billion in assets, and helped people track nearly $200 billion in purchases.

Notice the interesting way he uses the terms "viral" or "word of mouth" and "press" almost interchangeably. It's a great illustration of a common misconception — which is this idea that all you need is to build something truly impressive and people will beat a path to your door. 

Granted, there's more than a grain of truth to that, brilliant ideas really do spread virally, and with lightning speed. 

 

But often what people feel is an avalanche of "word of mouth" is really just great press. Sure, often the press is "following" the word of mouth buzz. A classic example, perhaps the opening shot of the Web 2.0 era (or the final screaming death of the 1.0 era, depending on how you look at things), is F*ckedcompany.com, which Phil Kaplan famously created for the hell of it over a long weekend, emailed as a link to six people, and woke up a couple days later to find tens of thousands of visitors beating a hole in his servers. 

So, it happens. But more often than not when people say they "keep hearing" about something, or that "everyone's been telling me about" something, they don't mean real actual conversations. Most people move in pretty close-knit circles. What they mean is that everyone in the media has been telling them about it. What feels like word of mouth often isn't so much the presence of tremendous chatter from close, trusted friends and but rather the absence of an over the top, in your face marketing blitz. To be specific, paid marketing, like advertising. Like Superbowl ads. Like Pets.com.

And to go back to the F*ckedcompany.com example, the viral pass-along for that site was nothing short of remarkable, it was like a direct conduit into the zeitgeist. But if my memory serves, it made the Wall Street Journal within the week, and was on to Time, Newsweek, The Today Show, Rolling Stone, and just about everywhere in the media universe in a short amount of time. How many people discovered it through an email forward or water cooler conversation vs. the number that learned about it via some kind of "proper" media channel?

That's something you can only guess at, but it's one example of many. Zappos.com is another that comes to mind in the online/startup space, and there are more examples than you can count in entertainment, music, film, etc. 

In all cases they've hit a trifecta, that combination of a great product (yes, that's still the prerequisite, if you don't have that the rest of this is meaningless) with a core evangelical base of initial users and a successful effort to get that positive word of mouth coming from those who measure their audiences in millions. 

You bet the media has changed, these days the personality with the huge megaphone might be a tech hero with a six figure Twitter follower count. But social media is media. And that personality is a media personality, the underlying point isn't diminished one inch. 

It's not strictly impossible to see success happen purely organically, without any organized plan for publicity. Though I'd say it's nearly always when a founder or principal happens to be naturally press-savvy. But exceptions aside, more often than not it's a thoughtful, considered — and experienced — person or team at the helm, managing the media strategy. 

So, to bring it home with a pun — if you'd like to make a mint, you might want to think about who's minding your press. 

 

Slice Of Life @ Paul Simon’s Beacon Theatre Opening

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Beaconcake

One of the more impressive cakes I've ever seen. The centerpiece of the backstage celebration party following the re-opening night of the restored Beacon Theatre in NYC, headlined by Paul Simon and a few special guests (including a surprise encore with Art Garfunkel). Despite the presence of a large knife (upper right) for the entire event nobody had the guts to be the first one to take a slice. Wonder what it tasted like. 

Where Pitchfork Meets Keynes

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I was having a discussion with some friends in the media and music business recently, specifically about the much-discussed (read: over-discussed) phenomenon where bands emerge and bubble up from the blogosphere and become overnight sensations in a teapot, taking the hipster world by storm, becoming ubiquitous in all the tastemaker places almost simultaneously. Someone commented that this phenomenon is really particular and endemic to the indie rock world — where there's a massive wave of over-hype and artists are thrust out into the world not even fully formed, subject to a premature "next thing" consensus and an inevitable backlash to come. 

I don't think this is confined to music at all. Political consensus among the chattering classes is probably the most direct and clear example, with so much media, so much airtime to fill on deadline, and so many predictions that "have" to be made in the face of subjectiveness and a major herd mentality. It's also common to quickly moving technology trends (iPhone, Twitter, lots of other gadgets) and even
financial opinions (Jim Cramer and Motley Fool come to mind especially). And probably quite a few other things. Just straight old TMZ style pop culture too.

But confining the discussion specifically within the confines of the music business, what I think is interesting is the degree to which the indie rock world
exemplifies a certain set of attributes. You don't see
the same hyper-"meta" discussions and self referential issues in other
genres so much, at least not in my estimation. In straight bubblegum pop you
might just as easily have the overwhelming hype and meteoric rise, and even
in more esoteric niches like country or jazz or even bluegrass you
definitely have flavors of the month, someone who makes a breakout
performance at a festival or a last minute substitution. 

As a sidenote — I actually think classical is a close second to indie in the
herd-hype department, with that last example of a last minute substitution
and seemingly coming out of nowhere being a great example of how many well
known artists — most notably Leonard Bernstein and Lang Lang, among others
— got their big breaks. And both suffered a torrential backlash several
years into their career as well. 

But anyways, the basic concept is pretty well established. What's
interesting to me is that in indie rock (which I should make sure to define here as the hipster, Pitchfork, blogger world, etc — not in the indie=independent sense) it seems to have come to dominate
the landscape. 

And of course, it conjures up parallels in economics. Specifically the classic quote about the stock market and investing from The General Theory, by John Maynard Keynes: 

"Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in
which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a
hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice
most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a
whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself
finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of
the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same
point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of
one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average
opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree
where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion
expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who
practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees."

I've always thought this was a pretty good metaphor as well for the worst
parts of the hype machine that seems to swirl around indie rock, in the way mentioned above. The issue here isn't that you have a scene that's incredibly dynamic and
changing, that artists come out of nowhere and get a ton of hype and then
recede. There are plenty of reasons why you'd see those kinds of things happen. For example, another just-as-plausible hypothesis would
be that it's an artistic scene that is intensely focused on novelty, hence
the quick rise and short shelf life of many such artists. 

But I don't think that's quite it. I think it's the self-referential nature
of the whole thing that is the most fundamental attribute. Everyone is
looking at what everyone else is doing. In economics or ecology you'd
describe it with some concepts from complex adaptive system dynamics, where
you have systems or implied algorithms that are self-referential and loop back on themselves, and have both positive and negative feedback loops working at cross
purposes. Not too far from the idea Keynes intuited in the 1930's in the quote above. 

So the more hype builds around you the more success you have. That's a
positive feedback loop, a network externality. If 10 influential indie blogs
plug you then that might lead to 30 more the next month. But there's a
negative feedback loop. The more success you have the more you arouse the
distaste and backlash of many members of the community.
You have everyone looking at everyone else to see what they think before
they make up their mind. 

People's opinions of an artist's intrinsic merit
are in part based on their perception of who else likes them, what kind of
people like them, how many of those people there are, and how long this has
been going on.
Like in the beauty contest example above, many participants are picking the
prettiest competitor at a beauty contest not based on what they personally
like, but based on their impression of what they think other people's
impression will be. 

So you have two countervailing forces at work — and the result is the
classic boom-bust cycle that has tons of parallels. In ecology the textbook
one is watching deer populations skyrocket, then they eat all the available
food, and then half of them starve and die. Then they do the same thing over and
over again. In economics it's the classic business cycle boom/recession wave
in the stock market and economy as a whole.
It's the natural outcome of a wicked combination of positive and negative
feedback loops, both governing the same variable, in this case success and
prestige and "hype." 

Or to simplify: 1) The more successful you are the more people like you. 2) The
more successful you are the more people hate you. Pour them together, and
you get breakneck change, massive and premature over-hype and massive and
premature backlash. Both often divorced from any underlying actual merit of
the music in question. Just like financial bubbles tend to affect the good
firms as well as the bad, both on the way up and the way down. The truly
great stuff endures, but when you're looking at a week to week timetable
that boom-bust cycle is all you can see.

I think it's food for thought. The interaction of positive and negative feedback loops in self-referencing systems with network effects is well known in complexity theory to be the driver for some very interesting emergent phenomena, not just in simple rules-based systems but in applied social sciences as well. Perhaps there are some parallels to be drawn in marketing, media, and even entertainment and popular culture. 

Credit where credit is due.

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Damm, I should post more often huh. Note to self: get with the program, buddy. 

But this email I just got inspired me to write. If you're going be that guy to trash someone in public, even if it ain't personal and just academic, then you have to give credit where credit is due. This post by Jason Calacanis is one of the most insightful and forward thinking things I have ever read on the subject of online interaction, and its effects of interpersonal and hyper-non-personal relationships. Just read it. 

I remember coming across something that reminded me of the Milgram Experiment last year and thinking that the internet was like a giant accelerant to the basic human condition laid bare by that study. But Jason's taken a vague concept rattling around and crystallized it and made it compelling, personal, and persuasive — and I suspect may have just kicked off a discussion we'll be hearing more and more about in the near future. 

Quality economics advice? Well we've been over that already. But when it comes to online communities, Jason has to be considered perhaps the most intuitive and insighful expert out there — if this is any indication. 

I'll be mulling it over for awhile.