New Beginnings

I had not intended to make a regular thing of summarizing my year. I wrote the post on 2011 because that was a particularly bad year, and I had things I wanted to work through the only way I know how–by writing about them. This year, however, turned out to be exceptional in precisely the opposite sense as last year–a lot of wonderful things happened in my life and in the lives of those important to me.

Of course, 2012 was always going to be an exceptional year for me in one important way–my wedding was set for August 25th, meaning that the whole process would characterize two-thirds of the year. That would have been enough to make it an exceptional year. But a lot of other stuff happened, and once again I cannot curb my compulsion to write about it.

Losing a Friend

2012 did not start well, as Tiger, our old family dog, passed away.

Can this be compared to the losses my family experienced the year before? Of course not.

But Tiger was almost 12 years old. He is the only dog for which it could conceivably said that we grew up together. You can certainly say it for my sister and brother, who are much younger than I and were quite small when he was a puppy.

It’s hard to describe how I felt about losing him. You get this little creature when he is only a few weeks old, and you watch him grow up. Then you watch him grow old. And you know, you always know, that he will be gone long before you have come anywhere near growing old yourself. Why do we put ourselves through this, again and again?

But of course, I will put myself through it again. There isn’t any reason I could articulate for what makes it worth it. But I could never say that getting Tiger was the wrong choice.

Tiger with ball

Getting Married

But that was in early January. Though I wanted to mention him, my brain has arbitrarily lumped his passing into 2011.

What 2012 was really about was getting married.

In a way, it was appropriate that our wedding fell on an election year. Turns out that planning a wedding is a bit of a political process.

I think I was more prepared than most, as my dad has been warning me about what wedding planning is like for basically as long as I’ve been alive. Still, laughing at old stories about the planning of my parents’ wedding is rather different from living the reality of planning my own.

Choices and responses that seem perfectly normal and acceptable under any other circumstances are suddenly imbued with significance. Decisions made for purely practical reasons come off as signals about how important you consider someone to be in your life. Tensions run high. Throw in all the logistical fun of planning any big event, and you’ll get the general picture–for those of you who aren’t already all too familiar with this process.

In the end, it was the happiest day of my life so far.

dancing at wedding

We lucked out in so many dimensions.

The weather was perfect–it was the best week of weather in the Boston area of the whole summer. There were no last minute logistical disasters. Our justice of the peace, bless her, was fantastic and entertaining. My friend and groomsman Alex brewed a special beer for the occasion–which was tremendously popular–and created a label using a picture of us taken by his wife Marley. Our dads knocked everyone’s socks off with their fantastic speeches. Her maid of honor gave an equally eloquent speech, and my best man embarrassed the hell out of me, as was his duty.

For all the stress of getting there, weddings, when they go well, are truly wonderful. So many people, from so many different times and parts of our lives, all come together. I have always known that I was exceptionally lucky for the family that I was born into, but I have been equally lucky in my friends. And I am unbelievably lucky in who I was standing next to, in front of all those friends and family, on that very day.

It was over in the blink of an eye, and then I was a husband, and I had a wife.

Still processing that one.

One of my favorite things about the wedding was seeing people from different parts of my life meeting one another. Also, seeing Internet friends meet each other–one of whom I met in person for the first time that day!

https://twitter.com/stephenharred/status/239753028742291456

https://twitter.com/stephenharred/status/239756777065947137

The next day, Catherine and I flew off to Paris to enjoy our honeymoon for a week and a half.

A New Job and New York

The time relaxing in Paris was just what the doctor ordered, because as soon as we returned to DC we had to shift gears and find an apartment in New York to move into by the end of the month.

Way back on March 31st, Catherine and I had taken a bus up to New York to stay with some friends for the weekend. A strangely large number of our friends had moved there recently, so we thought it high time to go up and spend some time with them. We stayed with Peter and Jordan, two good friends of ours (Peter was my best man). We didn’t do any tourist things, really–we lived life like our New York friends did for a couple of days.

It was a lot of fun. Neither of us had had any interest in living in New York before, but on the bus ride home, we discovered that we had each been swayed by seeing the residential side of it. We had no reason to move to New York, but for the first time we had come away feeling like we could see ourselves living there.

That very week I received an email from Eric Litman asking if I’d be interested in talking about a position at Medialets, a company based in New York.

The details of how this came about are very strange, and if you’re curious you can read about it here. Suffice to say that a blog post written four years prior and connecting to Eric on LinkedIn more recently were partly responsible for the opportunity.

It turned out to be a tremendous opportunity, in many dimensions. At the outset of the year, I thought I wanted to move in a more academic direction–hence my unfulfilled goal of trying to get a paper published. But Medialets oozes ambition, in a way that no company I’ve ever worked for has. It is in the middle of a rapidly changing industry–I doubt that by December of 2013 the company or the industry will look much like they do today. And Eric offered me a chance to be a part of that.

It has been very exciting, and between the nature of the job and the added move to a new city, it added an extra level of chaos to a year already beset by wedding planning.

The folks at Medialets were kind enough not to make me move until after my wedding. The first three months would be spent mostly working from home, and then coming up by train every other week for 2-3 days at a time.

This was mostly exciting at first, especially when they brought me up for my whole first week and also paid for Catherine to come, too. However, after a while, that kind of regular travel gets to be a bit much.

Throw in the fact that we needed to go to Massachusetts at least once this year to settle some wedding planning matters in person, and all that travel got to be downright tiring.

By the time we moved to New York, I was ready for the transition. As ready as I was going to be, anyway. With the help of a broker, I ended up seeing over 20 apartments; half of which I saw during my last trip up in September. We ended up in the Upper West Side, and have been pretty happy with the place.

It’s only been three months, but we already feel strangely comfortable in Manhattan. As someone who has had to be driven or drive everywhere for pretty much my whole life, it felt weird to sell off my car before we moved here. But it’s just so ridiculously easy to get around here without one (not to mention that I couldn’t exactly afford to keep one in some Manhattan garage!).

It’s too soon for me to write up all of my feelings about living in New York. Perhaps I will save it for another post, after I’ve lived here longer. But aside from two years in which my dad worked at the embassy in Paraguay, I have never lived anywhere but the DC area. And I have never lived more than a 30 minute drive from my immediate family. This was a big change, right on the heels of getting married.

We also ended up being in New York at a rather peculiar time.

Sandy: A Weeklong Interlude

We had been in New York for almost exactly a month. We had spent time with our friends who lived here. My parents had visited. The weekend before the storm, some friends from Virginia had visited.

We had just begun to settle into our new routines when Sandy came along and put half the city in the dark, to say nothing of the flooding.

We were very lucky. We’re way up in the 90s on the Upper West; the land is quite elevated and we never lost power. The businesses in our area never really closed, save perhaps during the height of the storm (though it isn’t like we were going out to check at that point).

Peter and Jordan live down in the 30’s on the east side; they lost power and running water. So they crashed with us for a few days.

That week was very strange. Medialets’ office was without power as well, though for me this was a moot point since I couldn’t really get to it without the subway. Since we had power, and since the nature of my work allows me to work from home easily, I thought I’d be pretty productive.

It didn’t quite work out that way. It wasn’t just the office; half of my coworkers didn’t have access to power or an Internet connection. Still, a lot of my job involves contact with people at other companies. I thought there was a good chance I’d be able to make progress with them.

Those people are all at ad agencies, ad tech companies, or media companies, though. Guess where nearly all of them were located? Lower Manhattan.

So I stayed online during the day and did what I could, working off of a system that was, at the time, diesel-fueled. Catherine continued to work from home as she normally would, for she was working remotely for the company in Virginia that she had been working for when we lived in DC. Jordan did what she could as well, and Peter caught up on his law school readings.

Your Huddled Masses
Your Huddled Masses

I really enjoyed having Peter and Jordan over, though I suspect that everyone but me grew a little tired of the close confinement. It turns out that my brain was wired for some kind of wolf pack mentality, where I’m happiest when I have my friends all in one space where we’re together all the time. So I had a great time.

It bears repeating just how lucky we were. Many people lost their homes to Sandy, some tragically lost even their lives. We lost access to the subway for a few days and gained some company, and then everything basically went back to normal.

Still it was a bit crazy to have this happen a mere month after moving here!

Another New Job

And since we hadn’t packed enough change into one year, Catherine went and got herself a new job as well!

Having the choice to work remotely was great when we were moving. If looking for an apartment at the eleventh hour was stressful, having to find the means to pay for it would have been more than doubly so!

But for a number of reasons it made sense to look for a job here. And the turnaround was amazingly fast–they reached out to her on a Monday and had made her an offer by that Friday.

Suffice to say that January of 2013 will begin with both of us working different jobs, in a different city, and with a different marital status than we had in January of 2012.

Blogging

Though not as exciting as everything else that was going on, this was a particularly fun year of blogging.

The most exciting thing to happen was that Stories of Progress and Stagnation was linked to by a few big econ blogs–including Marginal Revolution and the Economist’s Free Exchange blog–leading to a few thousand views. A big deal for a blog that gets a couple dozen views on a good day!

I wrote the piece mostly because I had a lot of stories that seemed persuasive to me, only they basically contradicted each other. It was a simple case of thinking through writing. I certainly wasn’t trying to make an argument.

Interestingly, most commenters seemed to think that I was arguing for one or the other of the stories. Even Robin Hanson clearly believed this:

You write well Adam, but in the end I’m not persuaded. You push me toward accepting Cowen et al’s position, at least for rich nations for now.

Implying that I was arguing against the stagnationist point of view. Several other commenters, on the other hand, seemed contemptuous of my apparently hard-line stagnationist position!

I’m still not sure whether this division is a sign of the failure, or proof of the success, of my writing in this instance. But in any case I enjoyed my fifteen minutes of elevated attention.

Though nearly all of my posts this year were basically intellectual storytelling, the one that was by far the most fun to write was My Love Letter to Video Games. Over the years it has increasingly become clear that gaming is not just something you do in your home; it’s part of who you are, and it ties you to other people no less than loyalty to a sports team. In any case I used this as an excuse to take a trip down memory lane.

2013

2012 was a year I’ll never forget, but I’m hoping the next one will be much less eventful. I’m ready for a little more peace, and a little less excitement.

Of course, I’ve also ended up in an industry that is changing at an insane pace. So, in my professional life, “peaceful” is probably not the adjective of choice.

But I’ll settle for being in the same city, with the same jobs, by this time next year!

Using Programming to Learn Math, Using Math to Learn Programming

When I was in High School, the tool of choice for any math class was the TI-83 graphing calculator. I believe this is still the case.

One cool thing about TI-83’s is that you can create custom programs for it, using a language called TI-BASIC. By going online, you could find all kinds of programs people had made for the things. Games were of course the most popular thing to download; simple things like Snake or a port of Oregon Trail.

For more practical purposes, there were programs that could, for example, solve any quadratic equation. The teachers did not approve of these. I wasn’t one to cheat, so I thought–is it really cheating if I make the programs myself, from scratch?

It was a great exercise. I often had to make multiple programs per unit, since the standard fare of math classes is to have problem sets with different givens and different unknowns (it might be the Y-intercept or it might be the slope that is unknown in the slope-intercept equation, or it might simply be Y). This forced me to really get to know the different equations inside and out, and it also tested the limits of my knowledge of what I could do in TI-BASIC.

But the teachers still did not approve of this. They took every possible opportunity to ask us to wipe the memory on our calculators. They discouraged using programs at all. They were so wedded to the traditional way of teaching and learning math that they saw this incursion of technology as nothing but a distraction, and a tool for cheating.

I can’t speak for every math teacher in the country, but I can say that mine were subscribing to a backwards way of thinking. Do you know how many of the kids in my Freshman geometry class still remember what they learned there? And of those, how many actually ended up with a practical application of that knowledge? I promise you that the number is very close to zero.

But what a wasted opportunity to encourage kids to get into programming!

A Co-Learning Program

I am not suggesting that we give up on teaching math, but I do think that how we teach it needs to be seriously rethought.

What if, at the same time that elementary school kids were being taught basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication tables, they were also learning the basic syntax of one programming language, like Python?

As students progressed in their learning of math concepts, it would become increasingly integrated with the programming classes. Math problem sets would require students to create programs, on the spot, that could solve whole classes of such problems. The actual programming class would be dedicated to teaching bits of Python that would specifically be helpful for solving such problems, without spelling out exactly how to accomplish that end.

In short, math would be used to demonstrate what programming was capable of accomplishing, and programming would be used to force students to think in depth about the nature of the math they were learning.

This concurrent, integrated learning program would begin in elementary school and follow students all the way to the end of High School. By which point they would know at least as much math as any other High School graduate, and have a mastery of at least one programming language that only a tiny minority of High School graduates (or anyone) can really boast of today.

The Collision of the Personal and the Professional

BLOGS VS MAINSTREAM MEDIA…FIGHT!!

Eight years ago, when I was a pretentious, know-it-all 19-year-old, the conversation about new media was dominated by the rhetoric of bloggers and journalists, citizen and mainstream media. I had seen the blogosphere call out Dan Rather for running with forged documents as evidence. I learned of the role they played in making sure Trent Lott’s statements saw the light of day.

As far as I was concerned, newspapers and news outlets in general were old hat on their way to extinction, and blogs were the future.

What did I think this meant?

It meant that newspapers would unbundle. It meant that articles on the Iraq War or science features written by journalists with little background in the subject matter would be replaced by people living in Iraq, and actual scientists, who would have blogs. This wasn’t all in my head–such blogs existed and have only grown more numerous.

My thoughts on whether anyone would make money on this new way of things, and how, went back and forth. But I thought the future looked more like Instapundit and Sandmonkey than like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

As I have witnessed the evolution of the web over the years, aged to a point beyond a number ending in -teen, and followed the conversation and research on new media, my point of view has changed–to say the least.

It’s not simply that it was wrong, but that it was far too narrow. It has not only become clear that professional media, in some form, is here to stay. It has also become clear that the old blog vs mainstream media perspective misses the big picture.

What has happened is that many activities that we conducted in our personal lives have moved online; they have become digital and they have become some approximation of public. This has big implications for other people’s professions–one tiny corner of which is the impact that personal blogs have had on professional media. But it also has an impact on our own professional lives.

In short, the personal and the professional are colliding on a number of fronts. How this collision will play out is an open question.

THE PERSONAL BECOMES PUBLIC

The vast majority of my conversations with nearly all of my friends and family occur in a digital format. It happens on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. It happens in email, in text messages, and in Google Talk chat windows. A very large proportion of this is public or semi-public.

I also enjoy writing about subjects that I’m thinking about. For that reason, I’ve maintained a blog in one form or another since 2004. I have never made one red cent off of my blogging. It has always been something I’ve done out of enjoyment of the writing itself.

Before the Internet, my writing would undoubtedly have been relegated to the handful of friends I could strong-arm into looking at some copies I made for them. I certainly wouldn’t be able to ask this of them on a very regular basis, so most of my writing would have remain unread–or, discouraged, I would have written a lot less.

The thing I enjoyed about blogging from the beginning was that it provided me with a place to put my writing where people could find it, without me having to make the imposition of bringing it to them. However, translating this private analogue activity into a public and digital one has implications beyond this simple convenience.

For one thing, it makes it possible for me to connect with new people who share my interests from anywhere in the world. It can also have implications for my professional life. If I write something insulting about my coworkers, or, say, something extremely racist, odds are it could get me fired and possibly have an impact on my long-term employability.

Conversely, just as I can discover and be discovered by new friends, I can also discover and be discovered by people who might provide me with a career opportunity–and indeed this happened to me earlier this year.

When enough enthusiasts move online in this manner, it begins to have consequences for the world of professional writing in general. One lone guy blogging about a few esoteric subjects isn’t going to have much of an impact. Over 180 million people writing about everything under the sun will have some serious implications. If we take Sturgeon’s Law at face value and say that you can throw 90 percent of that in the garbage, we’re still talking about tens of million of people writing pieces of average to excellent quality.

This is a dramatic expansion in the supply of written works. This has understandably made professional producers of written words sweat more than a little. One way of looking at this is from the old blog vs mainstream media perspective. A better way to look at it is from the understanding that any professional content outlet is going to have to adapt to the new reality of personal production if they want to survive.

That process of adaptation has been messy and is still ongoing.

THE PROFESSIONAL BEGINS TO ADAPT

What my 19-year-old self did not realize is that the media business has never really sold information. It has sold stories, it has sold something for groups to rally around and identify themselves with or against. There is still money to be made by selling this product. Clay Johnson has documented some methods that he finds vile, but there are plenty of perfectly respectable ways to do it as well.

Take The Verge–a technology site that launched last year. It does not suffer from the baggage of a legacy business–it was born online and lives online. It was created by a group writers from Engadget, another professional outlet that was born on the web, who thought they could do better on their own. I have argued that their initial success was made possible in part by the fact that the individual writers had built up a community around them, through their podcast and through their personal Twitter accounts.

The Verge invests a lot in building its community. The content management tools it offers in its forums are, they claim, just as powerful as the tools they themselves use to write posts. They frequently highlight forum posts on their main page. Their writers engage with their readers there and on various social media.

Another way that the professional world has adapted is by treating the group of unpaid individuals producing in their space as a sort of gigantic farm system for talent and fame. This system is filled with simple enthusiasts, but also includes a lot of people consciously trying to make the leap to a career in what they’re currently doing for free. Either way, a tiny fraction of this group will become popular to varying extents. Rather than competing with this subset, many existing professional operations will simply snap these individuals up.

Take Nate Silver, the subject of much attention this election cycle. He started writing about politics in a Daily Kos diary, then launched his own blog on his own domain. Eventually, this was snapped up by The New York Times. The article on this is telling:

In a three-year licensing arrangement, the FiveThirtyEight blog will be folded into NYTimes.com. Mr. Silver, regularly called a statistical wizard for his political projections based on dissections of polling data, will retain all rights to the blog and will continue to run it himself.

In recent years, The Times and other newspapers have tapped into the original, sometimes opinionated voices on the Web by hiring bloggers and in some cases licensing their content. In a similar arrangement, The Times folded the blog Freakonomics into the opinion section of the site in 2007.

Forbes did this with Modeled Behavior; Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish has done this with The Atlantic and now The Daily Beast. In publishing, Crown did this with Scott Sigler, and St. Martin’s Press did this with Amanda Hocking.

Suffice to say, these markets continue to be greatly disrupted. However, I do not think the adapted, matured versions of these markets will involve the utter extinction of professional institutions.

YOU GOT YOUR PROFESSIONAL IN MY PERSONAL

I consider my Twitter account to be extremely personal. No one is paying me to be there. With a handful of exceptions, I don’t have any professional relationships with the people I follow or am followed by there.

But there are definitely people who I feel have followed me because of some notion that it might help their career. Not because I’m some special guy who’s in the know, but because they think, say, that following everyone who seems to talk a lot about social media will somehow vaguely translate into success in a career in that industry. A lot of people who consider Twitter a place for human beings to talk to one another as private individuals have a low opinion of such people.

But I cannot deny that I have, on occasion, used Twitter to my professional advantage. And it’s not as though there’s a line in the sand for any of these services stating FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. It’s difficult for journalists of any kind to treat anything they say in public as something that can be separated from their profession. I have seen some create distinct, explicitly labeled personal Twitter accounts, with protected tweets. Of course, Jeff Jarvis would point out that they are merely creating another kind of public by doing so.

Moreover, more and more services we use in our personal lives are having implications for our employers. How many of us have had an employer ask us to “like” the company page on Facebook? Or share a link to a company press release? These services are far too new for us to have expectations set about them. Is this overstepping the boundaries of what is acceptable, or is this a legitimate professional responsibility we have to our employers?

In a world where a personal project or an answer on Stack Overflow can be added to your resume when applying for a job, the line between personal and professional is not quite as sharp as it used to be.

Take Marginal Revolution as an example. Is it a personal or a professional blog? Certainly Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are not paid to write what they post. But they are using the blog as a venue for participating in the larger conversation of the economics profession. Of course, they also post on any number of specific subjects that catch their interest. It is both a platform to promote their books, as well as to solicit advice from their readers on what restaurants to check out when they are traveling.

Are categories like “personal” or “professional” even useful for describing things like Marginal Revolution? Is it an exceptional case, or–its particular level of popularity set aside–is it the new normal?

How Has the Web Evolved?

Here’s a pocket history of the web, according to many people. In the early days, the web was just pages of information linked to each other. Then along came web crawlers that helped you find what you wanted among all that information. Some time around 2003 or maybe 2004, the social web really kicked into gear, and thereafter the web’s users began to connect with each other more and more often. Hence Web 2.0, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’m not strawmanning here. This is the dominant history of the web as seen, for example, in this Wikipedia entry on the ‘Social Web.’

But it’s never felt quite right to me.

-Alexis Madrigal, Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong

Madrigal’s summation is definitely not a strawman. Take the following passage from Paul Adams’ book, Grouped:

The second shift is a major change in the structure of the web. It’s moving away from being built around content, and is being rebuilt around people. This is correlated with a major change in how people spend their time on the web. They’re spending less time interacting with content, and more time communicating with other people.

Is this the case? Was the pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter web really just a bunch of “documents linked together”, as Adams claims elsewhere in the book?

Madrigal doesn’t think so, and neither do I.

The Web Was Always Social

I spent most of the 90s as a teenager in rural Washington and my web was highly, highly social. We had instant messenger and chat rooms and ICQ and USENET forums and email. My whole Internet life involved sharing links with local and Internet friends. How was I supposed to believe that somehow Friendster and Facebook created a social web out of what was previously a lonely journey in cyberspace when I knew that this has not been my experience? True, my web social life used tools that ran parallel to, not on, the web, but it existed nonetheless.

Madrigal’s experience parallels my own. It might be more appropriate to speak of a social net rather than a social web, since the social technology of my youth included AIM and ICQ and IRC. The web itself was definitely social, however–in Middle School, I spent a lot of time on fan sites for the video games and TV shows that I was into, and those sites had forums and Java chatrooms. The sites became the common space the site community used, and individual connections could then be followed up through email and ICQ and other chat services with personal accounts.

eGroups–an email list service that was eventually swallowed up by Yahoo!–was another source of social activity for me; it became a sort of forum in my inbox.

Later, I got deeply into EZGroups, a service for quickly making your own forum with a decent discovery mechanism for finding other people’s. Then there was also LiveJournal; which came closest to the modern idea of how social graphs work.

In short, there were a ton of services for connecting with other individuals and groups, and interacting with people on those services was what I did with the vast majority of my time online in those days. And I don’t think Madrigal or my experiences are unusual in this regard.

The Web Was Always Viral

Before “going viral” was the phrase we used to describe when a piece of content suddenly went from a few dozen views to a few thousand, or tens or hundreds of thousands, or millions of views, the phenomena existed. One example that stands out in my mind from when I was in High School (over ten years ago) is “Irrational Exuberance (Yatta)“.

Yatta was part of a class of videos and animations that everyone suddenly knew about. Hanging out at a friend’s house, one-on-one or in groups, eventually ended up having a set amount of time where we all gathered around a computer screen and watched the videos we’d all found that everyone just had to be sure to see too.

This was before YouTube of course. The sources were big flash portals like Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep. Sometimes they were just some random, small website. But there was never any shortage of stuff to sell on our pre-Facebook social networks, or in our old fashioned in person ones for that matter!

We Have Increased What We Can Measure

One thing that Madrigal and Adams agree on is that modern social networks have vastly increased our ability to measure what people are doing online. Here’s Madrigal:

Second, the social sites that arrived in the 2000s did not create the social web, but they did structure it. This is really, really significant. In large part, they made sharing on the Internet an act of publishing (!), with all the attendant changes that come with that switch. Publishing social interactions makes them more visible, searchable, and adds a lot of metadata to your simple link or photo post. There are some great things about this, but social networks also give a novel, permanent identity to your online persona. Your taste can be monetized, by you or (much more likely) the service itself.

And Adams, in Grouped:

The third shift is that for the first time, we can accurately map and measure social interaction. Many of our theories can now be quantitatively tested. This is incredibly exciting for researchers, but it will also transform how we think about marketing and advertising. Many things that were previously hard to measure, for example, word of mouth marketing, can now be analyzed and understood. We can now start to measure how people really influence other people, and it will change how we do business.

It is certainly true that Twitter and Facebook have increased the measurability of certain activities. As someone in the digital advertising industry, and someone with a strong interest in the social sciences, this is certainly and exciting shift to me. And certainly, the information being generated will inform the decisions made by these services, as well as make it more possible to sustain such services financially–so in that regard, measurability will have an impact on user experience.

But measurability isn’t really all that directly exciting to me as a user of these services. Can we really encompass the big change that’s happened since the onset of the modern social web under the heading of what we’re able to quantify?

Common Spaces

As you may have guessed, I don’t think the measurability really covers it. And I don’t think Madrigal’s characterization of the transition as one to publishing really does the trick, either–it is just as much “publishing” to write in a publicly viewable forum as it is to post a status on Facebook.

One change that has happened rather rapidly is the emergence of gigantic, global common spaces. It may be that many of the basic activities people do on Twitter and Facebook–sharing links, having conversations one on one or in groups, sharing pictures–are not new, but what is new is that it is being done in a space shared by a ridiculously large percentage of the connected world.

Twitter activity is public by default, and anything you say on it can pass into a gigantic number of people’s timelines in an instant if it is carried far enough on a wave of retweets. Conversely, your circle of 15 friends you follow on Twitter who all live near you in DC may seem as insular as any old fashioned forum or email list, but the fact of the matter is that tweets from people anywhere in the world can enter your timeline at any point when any of those 15 friends retweet them.

Facebook is ostensibly more private than Twitter, but in practice content can travel just as far and wide–farther and wider, in fact, as its service reaches a billion users, almost half of the connected world.

We are only beginning to understand what it is like to live with these enormous online common spaces. Serendipity, which some people seemed to think was going to be killed by algorithms and automation, is a larger force than ever. This includes the case where you’re having a conversation with one person on Twitter and someone who follows you both jumps in because they find it interesting, or entertaining. It also includes the case where you are discovered and end up with a job.

Somewhat more controversially, it may even include the case where one man’s Facebook group leads to the overthrow of a 30 year old regime.

Always Connected

I would be derelict if I didn’t mention the obvious impact that mobile devices are having on the evolution of the web. From a pure input perspective, we can now record anything from anywhere and share it immediately. It is even possible to stream live video from a mobile device–so that anything can be covered in near real-time.

From a usage perspective, it’s like being able to carry around your friends in your pocket, all the time. When I was coming up to New York every other week for work, it was a comfort to be able to have conversations with my friends and see what they were saying on Twitter and Facebook. Especially on those nights when I didn’t have anyone to meet up with for dinner, and had to strike out on my own.

Much has been said about how mobile is revolutionizing our lives, and I don’t have too much to add to that here. But we can’t talk about the web without thinking about how its evolution is tied inextricably to the increasing mobility of our connected devices.

The Maturing Ecosystem

One big thing that has happened since I started using the web is that the ecosystem of social, content, and commercial services has matured significantly. What was there before our big common spaces have adapted to the existence of those spaces. As an example, I can’t help but see Instapundit as a blog that is frozen in a very particular time in the web’s evolution–today, if the vast majority of your updates are a few words and a link, it makes much more sense to publish them on Twitter than to have a full-fledged blog.

Of course, Instapundit became popular long before Twitter existed, and has no reason to change since his audience has stuck with him. But I have to think that if Glenn Reynolds had started it 10 years later, it would have been on Twitter.

Meanwhile, more mainstream publications have migrated completely online, and more publications that were born on the web have become mainstream. The conversation about whether amateur bloggers are going to replace professional publications has basically died out, as an ecosystem which includes both has become quite robust. Twitter and Facebook act a glue that brings content and people together on a scale unprecedented in the web’s history.

In tech circles we love to talk about what is dead, and what new thing is replacing something that has already grown old in the short timescale of modern technology. But the fact of the matter is that blogs did not kill professional content, and Twitter did not kill blogs. As our connected services evolve, specific companies may fall but it’s unlikely that any particular category of thing is going to truly die. What changes is their role, as the ecosystem absorbs the new tools, new conventions emerge for the old tools, and people simply get a better idea of just what any of this is good for.

The Web Has Evolved

The web, and the Internet more broadly, have undeniably changed in my lifetime. The story of that change, however, is often far more subtle than simply “it has become social” or “viral” or even “mobile”. People are still talking to one another and sharing things online; that has not changed. What has changed is how we’re going about it.

How to Avoid Gas Lines, Now and Forever

Let’s imagine for a moment what we want to happen when gas stations are all of a sudden faced with a shortage of gas.

We would want to encourage consumers to consume less gas. There are several ways they could do this. For trips they absolutely need to take, they could carpool much more often than they used to. There might be a whole set of trips that they decide they shouldn’t take right now, during this time of increased scarcity, so as not to reduce the overall supply further.

We would also want to encourage suppliers to divert from their usual routine to bring more gas to the area with the shortage.

So how do we get to a world where this is what happens during a shortage? Do we have to make laws about how gas is allocated nationally? About how many miles people are allowed to drive, or what the minimum number of passengers per car needs to be? Or more directly, how much gas per person we’re allowed to consume?

The Ideal Policy

In fact, there is a much more elegant solution, totally uncontroversial among economists and proven by the American experience of the 1970’s: just allow prices to rise. As soon as the price controls begun by Nixon were overturned, gas lines in America became something mostly confined to history books.

I say mostly because every so often, after a disaster like Sandy, we hear about gas lines cropping up temporarily again. But surely this is inevitable, right?

Wrong. What has happened consistently in these scenarios is that prices have not been allowed to rise.

You might ask how can economists be so cold and unfeeling as to say that the victims of a disaster should have to pay higher prices. Well, let’s do a little thought experiment.

What would happen if prices in New Jersey shot up to an astounding $20 per gallon?

The person who was thinking of doing a 5 minute drive instead of a 30 minute walk might opt to walk instead, since filling up will be so expensive. The group of friends all going to the same place a 30 minute car ride away or farther might all pool their money to pay for the gas. In other words, people will economize on their gas usage.

Meanwhile, since they are paying the cost in money rather than in time spent in gas lines, gas stations will be gaining more funds, which in turn will allow them to outbid gas stations outside of Jersey for additional supply. The influx of supply will eventually–and history has demonstrated that this can happen surprisingly quickly–start bringing prices back down.

In short, during a shortage the price system both forces people to reduce their consumption and bids additional supply towards the area that needs it the most. In other words, it accomplishes exactly what you would want to accomplish during a shortage.

Every alternative to the simple solution of relying on the price system has proven itself pathetically inept. In the 1970’s they tried a whole gamut of different regulatory allocation approaches, and nothing worked until the price controls were ultimately revoked entirely.

It is frustrating that we still have not learned this lesson. But I suppose history has also demonstrated that we are terrible at learning from repeated failure.

 

Suggested Further Reading: