What Does Digg Like? A Cultural Study

Digg is a huge social networking site that some claim has created a subcultural of its own. Following the model of participant observation inspired by the venture of a well-known social anthropologist, I decided to read digg and write this post. Digg's culture is certainly not without it quirks. Some would argue that Digg is nothing more than a collection of quirks. What is clear from my research is what Digg likes...

From watching the front-page for the past few days, I can tell that Digg likes:

1. Ending monarchies that are complacent in the rise of residential coyote attacks related to cooking with bacon.
2. Doing wheelies near dubai while obsessively staring into the eyes of the tumbling economy
3. Making netbooks based on Disney-cloned vampires that enjoy fast and furious web development tutorials
4. Quantum mathematics related to marijuana users on Wordpress that talk at TED in search of lithium at Microsoft
5. Switching Babies with manatees in 1957 during car crashes in Russia covered by Bush-era torture memos

I wasn't totally satisfied with this conclusion, so I decided to create a plot out of this following the model of the Tom Clancy Plot Generator using frequently appearing terms and ideas:

Under the staring eyes of baby manatees, Monarchs devise a scheme to increase coyotee attacks for ransom. The plot twists when the Monarchs threaten to blow up the Disney-cloned vampire netbooks even after their demands are met. Millions of lives are at stake unless a turncoat quantum pot-head blogging mathematician can gain the courage to do the right thing and stop the Monarchs once and for all. The movie ends with a mildly comical and ironic scene in which the Monarchs blow up or go to Dubai. Another satisfying tale of political intrigue and personal redemption closes, and we all walk away from this movie a little poorer as the market plummets.

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Google Getting More Evil; Bad Indexing

Despite the iconic slogan -- "Don't be Evil" -- it seems to me that Google is becoming more and more evil. All the while, I think its search result quality is becoming worse and worse. (Image: Google) How is Google becoming evil? Simply speaking, I believe that Google has decided to buy everything and anything in order to create a monopolized web experience.

A monopolized internet? Impossible. In the truest sense it is impossible, but often we find ourselves resorting to a Google search to start our browsing. Google also controls YouTube; the site that draws in millions daily from the U.S. alone. Google is also involved in many other markets: AdSense and AdWords for advertising, Blogger for citizen publishing, Gmail for email, the Android operating system for cellphones, Google Earth, Checkout for online transactions, Analytics for web traffic monitoring, and those are just a few highlights.

Google has bought up many technologies; they were even in the running for FaceBook and Twitter, though neither appears to be for sale yet. Google has also been complacent in the efforts of China to lockdown it's Internet users from outside content. The list goes on. Google is a business. It is an extremely effective business. As such, it seems to be that they are seeking a monopoly, and getting it in the quickest way possible.

While they do all of this, I've noticed that their search quality is dropping. Maybe I'm going crazy, but I think Google has more spam beating its filter than ever before. Maybe it was bound to happen, like some would argue Windows was bound to get viruses due to its hold on 80% of the market.

In typical fashion, I decided to Goolge "is google getting worse." The results were a bit surprising -- they actually confirmed what I thought. Webmasters were angry over the amount of spam and lacking indexing efforts.

To me it seems that Google has lost focus on its core business (though advertising is likely its true core business). Even YouTube is getting worse: embedded advertisements over the video, automatic content removal, automatic soundtrack removal, and content region restrictions have all invaded YouTube. A company like Google could do good, but now the just seem to be doing evil.
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CBC Mini-Series Blames Death of Old Media on Internet

Well, as big of a role as the Internet may have on the death of traditional media, there’s more to it. Newspaper, Radio, and Television coexisted for nearly a century despite being introduced as replacements. (Image: CBC) So why is it that the Internet is suddenly destroying the traditional media? Why are publishers stopping the presses or radio stations consolidating? It is the promise of the Internet that caused these things, not the medium itself.

The promise of the Internet is interactivity; we have control as users. We’ve made the shift from passive consumers to active creators. Something newspaper, radio, and television cannot provide at the same level as the Internet. Below are responses to each segment in the series:

The End of Radio

Click Here To View This Episode

The focus of this episode is on the ability of a user to pick what they want to hear. User selection is an important shift enabled by the Internet, but it is not a shift in the industry. More content is exposed, but profitability is still key. Podcasts let people share their thoughts to many, listen when and how you want, and reach more people, but it’s still the same model. Satellite or Internet broadcasting is growing, staying, but is not a revolution.

The End of Television

Click Here To View This Episode

Television continuing in a new form is what CBC should hope for as a broadcaster. TV was linear, but is now showing up on more and more devices however and whenever you want. Video blogs do not replace this medium; for them to match the production and content creation levels of television, the same bureaucracy would need to be recreated.

Portable devices can show both professional content and amateur content. The Internet enables this equality and opportunity; it doesn’t mean the end of big media. There's a shift in delivery, not in the inevitability of big players coming into existence.

The End of Print

Click Here To View This Episode

Print is dying, CBC would have us understand, because of blogging growth. Regular people’s blogs are becoming self-sustained small-businesses -- that is definitely a fact. The consensus of the interviews is that the gatekeeper is removed, resulting in a more active democracy. CBC’s failure to focus on this interactivity damages the overall discussion.

Journalists interviewed in the episode reject the power of bloggers; claiming they lack credibility. What they have that these journalists don’t is the collective intelligence. Margaret Atwood claims there is a physical connection to books; they are convenient and real. These are the sentiments of past generations. The Internet may only access 5% of the world’s knowledge, but how much does a book access? How much does a library? The Internet is growing and expanding; it is ahead now and will always be ahead.

Audio, Video, and Text are here to stay. Devices change and evolve. Technological advances consolidate many access methods into few, but that doesn’t change the structure of the system. Big media exists because popularity happens; because there is money to be made. CBC may be right that paper, television sets, and radio receivers are on their way out, but the industry isn’t. Integration and consolidation is the future.
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U.S. Policies That Matter to Everyone: Net Neutrality

An ongoing debate for lawmakers everywhere around the world is whether or not they can regulate their citizens' activities on the web. There is not only the question of how, but also whether it is anyone's place to regulate the global network. (Image: New York Times) Information obtained by the Wall Street Journal indicates that President Barack Obama plans to appoint Julius Genachowski to head the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC is critical in setting the agenda for media regulation; its decisions can influence the global media landscape due to the number of American power-player corporations that it monitors.

Genachowski, Obama's technology adviser, has been a vocal supporter of Net Neutrality and other progressive regulation choices. As I explained in my introduction, Net Neutrality is an extremely important issue that could have big effects on current and future Internet use. Essentially, Net Neutrality is trying to keep the Internet free of regulation. Regulating the Internet could take several forms, which you can investigate in depth if it interests you; but, here are some highlights:

• Increased Digital Copy Protection


• Creating Solidified Standards


• Limitations on Free Speech

Digital Rights Management (DRM) of any kind typically has side-effects that hinder the freedom of paying customers. Copy protection may be a worthy cause, but regulation of the Internet to embed copy protection into every aspect of what we do could be seriously limiting and also invade privacy. Likewise, creating solidified standards through regulation may help developers work with a more reliable system, but limits the collaborative evolution that has propelled the Internet forward.

The threat to free-speech is the most clear threat from governments destroying net neutrality. Existing statues that allow censorship by service providers could apply to the Internet if regulations are placed on it. This means that if Rogers, Bell, Comcast or whoever your service provider is, doesn't like what you're saying, they could potentially use existing laws to censor you. This depends on the Internet being defined into regulations, which could either protect free speech or limit it.

The point is, as soon as regulations on the Internet begin to occur in major countries like the United States, it would be a slippery slope toward a highly-regulated experience. The Internet is often viewed as a democratic medium; whether you agree with that sentiment or not, regulating the Internet will eliminate any hope left for it.
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Diving into Web 2.0

Recently I watched a video by anthropologist Michael Wesch, which discusses YouTube as a cultural phenomenon. Is YouTube part of a surge of democratic media or a wasteland of disorder? That is the question. (Image: YouTube) The video by Michael Wesch is a relatively simple capture from a live presentation at the Library of Congress. However, the fact that we can access this video speaks to the power of YouTube as a platform. Before YouTube, finding a video of a specific presentation would have been nearly impossible. Now almost everything is on YouTube or similar services.

The most important point to take from the discussion of YouTube as a cultural item is that it depends on its users to create and (sometimes) filter content. Wesch describes in detail how social sites like Digg and Delicious represent a new level of user control over their portal to the internet. Digg displays user-filtering, while Delicious shows user-organization. Both of these functions work to create a communal browsing experience that depends on users not just for content, like YouTube, but also to define the collective browsing experience.

The Internet user-generated movement has outpaced growth of any other movement; dwarfing the amount of TV content produced by networks over their entire life. In some ways it seems like we isolate ourselves more and more behind screens, but, as Wesch points out, there is a type of networked individualism that emerges. We are creating an individual experience, but we share it and take-in the experiences of others.

The YouTube culture is one of paradoxes. We are isolated, yet part of a community. We are talking to no one, but talking to everyone. We "pirate" content, yet create new things. Our individual experiences turn into collectively embraced internet phenomena. Everyone has an identity, but it might not be rooted in reality. These uncertainties make YouTube a cultural community that serves a different purpose to all of its participants. With either serious or playful motives, everyone seems to enjoy YouTube.

Here's his video for anyone interested:

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Venturing to the Right

It should be apparent by now that my political ideology leans left more often than it leans right, so I thought I might share with you a recent experience of reading the other side. As you may know, some of the rhetoric is beyond belief. (Image: Brietbart) I like to read a wide variety of opinions -- obviously taking some more seriously than others in the process. In a recent read through the Drudge Report, which provides some of the funniest moments of my days, I came across an article on Obama's move to talk to Iran and Syria. Feeling more adventurous than usual, I decided to take a look at the comments.

The first thing that shocked me was the number of posts with the insane belief that Obama is a Muslim. This type of fear mongering isn't surprising and shows some true ignorance on the part of those that defend this intolerant and hateful point of view or believe it to be true. If any other religion was insulted continuously in such a way, there would be site bans and complaints filed until the site overloaded. Not only has this rumor been proven untrue, it shows how intolerance relies on total ignorance.

It was a bit surprising to see a few divergent voices calling foul on these statements. Sure they were outnumbered by a lot, but those who stuck to it were putting up a fight. Regardless of this tiny minority speaking from the left, many posters simply posted their favourite lines from the right-wing rhetoric playbook.

However, this example shows the weakness of blogs to create an echo-chamber of narrow ideology that drowns out conflicting voices. The same thing obviously happens at left-wing blogs, which I am sure a right-wing reader would point out with the same annoyance I write with now. The problem with the internet is that it makes it very easy for us to pick sites that match our opinion.

If I didn't read Drudge frequently, I would have no clue about the latest liberal-flub I will be hearing about on the news networks and from hard-core right-wing political junkies I talk to. I suppose that there is value in reading the other side of the blogosphere if your nerves can take it. It never hurts to take a look -- well, at least not usually.
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Yellow Journalism and the Drudge-Effect

The topic of "Yellow Journalism" has been popping up in several of my classes recently. It got me thinking a lot about my own writing online, other sites that play into this style, and the CNN-FOX effect. (Image: Drudge Report Archives) As much as I hate to admit it, sensationalism is almost a necessity for online news sites. Whether bloggers or online journalists, all reporters who want to succeed in this saturated market have to resort to sensationalism. Yellow Journalism is certainly not a result of the internet, but it has found a new home online.

Online, no one has succeeded more with the yellow strategy than Matt Drudge. The Drudge Report claims to have more than 24 million visits over the last 24 hours and about 638 million over the past month. Drudge makes full use of his 1990s web design arsenal, including the Drudge Siren shown above, to pull his readers into his world.

Though Drudge's content more closely resembles an outright tabloid, the site has gained a stunning reader base, which rely on it for news. During the presidential election, Drudge's traffic beat the New York Times, and just barely finished behind Fox.

Though yellow journalism does not fulfill the needs of democracy for a reliable, educational press, millions of viewers flock to sensational news while snubbing actual news. At MacNN, it never ceases to amaze me that hugely important positive stories get only a fraction of the reader discussion that occurs with moderately important negative stories.

I've witnessed first hand how easy it is to sensationalize something bad. On the flip side of the coin, sensationalizing a good story often results in a public denouncement of the story as biased. The double standard of the readers makes yellow journalism even more complex and confusing. While everyone enjoys a pile on, a group hug is out of the question.

When it gets down to it, there are few ways to control a phenomenon like yellow journalism. The public craves the sensational and will abandon your site, newspaper, or television station if you don't deliver. At the same time that media consumption has reached an all-time high, so has public ignorance. Though that judgement is a matter of opinion, I stand by it. I think citizens will need to demand better for this to ever change -- after all, yellow journalism is a creation of public demand.
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The Viability of Writing Serious Emails

Many emails are business or brief notes, but sometimes we can find ourselves writing and writing. In some ways, the writing of long-winded or generally revealing letters as not transfered from snail mail to electronic mail -- but is this changing? (Image: Screen capture of Apple Mail) It has been my personal experience that a thoughtful email can transcend the negative connotations of having discussions online. Many of the issues people have with online communications revolves around the fleeting attention of both parties to the discussion -- but when thought and care enter the equation, does email rival tried-and-true forms of communication?

Now, I may be a bit biased, being someone who works online, but I believe that it can. Email is not inherently less personal than written letters, unless you argue that the hand written aspect is important. I personally see handwriting as a hinderance to thinking because it is linear and needs something like whiteout to become non-linear -- and that white out will often cause the receiver to wonder why something was changed.

When writing an email, or any other text on a computer, among other advantages, you have freedom to delete or change words and go back to a previous section in order to add a sentence. I believe a well crafted email or digital text is often far more complete in the sense that the writer has freedom to arrange their thoughts, the way they want, as their thoughts evolve.

In my opinion, if done right, emails can even be effective as a push-off point to start solving problems. It's effective because you can simply put your position out there while you ask to talk about it. With email you have the time to think over what you want to say, but the piece-of-mind that it will reach the recipient a few seconds after you press "send."

Keeping in touch via email is a reality for some of my friendships, specifically with friends who have gone to different universities. In some ways it seems to me like there is a level of openness in email that is hard to reach as quickly in person, on the phone, or on instant messengers. When you're writing a serious email, the big difference it provides is the pre-mentioned ability to sit there and think your point through. That really lets you get your thoughts out right and encourages you to talk as much as you want.
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Self-Censorship Beyond Traditional Media

Ever since watching OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, I've been thinking about how much self-censorhsip occurs in the media -- especially online. Having witnessed some first hand, I have some experience with the tricky issue. Before I was Assistant Publisher at MacNN and for its associated sites, I wrote the news on a day-to-day basis. In writing news, I had moments where I censored my own writing, sometimes unprovoked.

As a website our revenue depends on our advertisers. Knowing this, I was always mindful in some ways not to unnecessarily run down our partners. Especially when writing about Apple, who I believe is our biggest advertiser, I avoided saying too many harsh things.

Now, in my case, I didn't avoid reporting negative news about Apple, but I avoided pushing the envelope when doing so. Negative stories often draw the most page views for us, so they often draw the most comments; in these comments I, and almost every writer since, received criticism for refusing to 'take it to Apple' for obvious mistakes.

As Assistant Publisher I have an inside look at many online practices. While MacNN and other sites I am involved with do not accept bribes for reviews, many websites receive free products or additional advertising offers in exchange for favourable reviews. Our reviews department requires disclosure about any deals or products received, but many do not.

It is a clear trend though that few reviewers around the internet give ratings less than 50% unless the product does not work at all. I would say that it is a safe bet that this is the case because these reviewers want to assure that they are given more deals in the future. These reviewers work in active self-censorship in order to achieve personal gains, which should be very concerning.

To say that there will ever be a truly free medium without pressures is naive to some extent, but I believe full disclosure is the best step to take. The internet is very unregulated right now and my site operators have an anything goes mentality. There is no way for regulation to occur without violating the promise of internet neutrality, so it requires good will on the part of many. Hopefully more websites choose to do this.
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