Re: Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web (long read)

Good short read. Facebook's "pay to promote" is a classic case in point,
where a feature of reaching out to your own social-network, suddenly became
"premium" (or "freemium").
For smaller companies with limited means, when executed over shorter
duration is called "bait n switch".

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 5:26 PM, ken <[email protected]> wrote:

> Adding fuel to the fire...
>
> (If we can accept the premise offered below, what real value does
> Zuckerberg offer India?)
>
> Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web
>
> Late in 2014, I was abruptly pardoned and freed from Evin prison in
> northern Tehran. In November 2008, I had been sentenced to nearly 20 years
> in jail, mostly over my web activities, and thought I would end up spending
> most of my life in those cells. So the moment, when it came, was
> unexpected. I was sharing a cup of tea when the voice of the floor
> announcer – another prisoner – filled all the rooms and corridors: “Dear
> fellow inmates, the bird of luck has once again sat on one fellow inmate’s
> shoulders. Mr Hossein Derakhshan, as of this moment, you are free.”
>
> Outside, everything felt new: the chill autumn breeze, the traffic noise
> from a nearby bridge, the smell, the colours of the city I had lived in
> most of my life. Around me, I noticed a very different Tehran from the one
> I had been used to. An influx of new, shamelessly luxurious condos had
> replaced the charming little houses I was familiar with. New roads, new
> highways, hordes of invasive SUVs. Large billboards with advertisements for
> Swiss-made watches and Korean TVs. Women in colourful scarves and manteaus,
> men with dyed hair and beards, and hundreds of charming cafes with hip
> western music and female staff. They were the kind of changes that creep up
> on people; the kind you only really notice once normal life gets taken away
> from you.
>
> Two weeks later, I began writing again. Some friends agreed to let me
> start a blog as part of their arts magazine. I called it Ketabkhan – it
> means book-reader in Persian.
>
> Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it is an entire era online.
> Writing on the internet had not changed, but reading – or, at least,
> getting things read – had altered dramatically. I’d been told how essential
> social networks had become, so I tried to post a link to one of my stories
> on Facebook. It turned out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking
> like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got
> three likes. Three! That was it.
>
> It became clear to me, right there, that things had changed. I was not
> equipped to play on this new turf — all my investment and effort had burned
> up. I was devastated.
>
> Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was
> arrested. At that point, and despite the fact the state was blocking access
> to my blog from inside Iran, I had an audience of around 20,000 people
> every day. People used to carefully read my posts and leave lots of
> relevant comments, even those who hated my guts. I could empower or
> embarrass anyone I wanted. I felt like a monarch.
>
> The iPhone was a little over a year old, but smartphones were still mostly
> used to make phone calls and send short messages, handle emails, and surf
> the web. There were no real apps, certainly not how we think of them today.
> There was no Instagram, no SnapChat, WhatsApp. Instead, there was the web,
> and on the web, there were blogs: the best place to find alternative
> thoughts, news and analysis. They were my life.
>
> It had all started with 9/11. I was in Toronto, and my father had just
> arrived from Tehran for a visit. We were having breakfast when the second
> plane hit the World Trade Center. I was puzzled and confused and, looking
> for insights and explanations, I came across blogs. Once I read a few, I
> thought: this is it, I should start one, and encourage all Iranians to
> start blogging as well. So, using Notepad on Windows, I started
> experimenting. Soon I was writing on hoder.com, using Blogger’s
> publishing platform before Google bought it.
>
> Then, on 5 November 2001, I published a step-by-step guide on how to start
> a blog. That sparked something that was later called a blogging revolution:
> soon, hundreds and thousands of Iranians made it one of the top five
> nations by the number of blogs. I used to keep a list of all blogs in
> Persian and, for a while, I was the first person any new blogger in Iran
> would contact, so they could get on the list. That’s why they called me
> “the blogfather” in my mid-20s – it was a silly nickname, but at least it
> hinted at how much I cared.
>
> The Iranian blogosphere was a diverse crowd – from exiled authors and
> journalists, female diarists, and technology experts, to local journalists,
> politicians, clerics, and war veterans . But you can never have too much
> diversity. I encouraged conservatives inside Iran to join and share their
> thoughts. I had left the country in late 2000 to experience living in the
> west, and was scared that I was missing all the rapidly emerging trends at
> home. But reading Iranian blogs in Toronto was the closest experience I
> could have to sitting in a shared taxi in Tehran and listening to
> collective conversations between the talkative driver and random passengers.
>
> There’s a story in the Qur’an that I thought about a lot during my first
> eight months in solitary confinement. In it, a group of persecuted
> Christians find refuge in a cave. They, and a dog they have with them, fall
> into a deep sleep and wake up under the impression that they have taken a
> nap: in fact, it’s 300 years later. One version of the story tells of how
> one of them goes out to buy food – and I can only imagine how hungry they
> must have been after 300 years – and discovers that his money is obsolete
> now, a museum item. That’s when he realises how long they have been absent.
>
> The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. It represented the open,
> interconnected spirit of the world wide web – a vision that started with
> its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon
> centralisation – all the links, lines and hierarchies – and replace them
> with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Since I
> got out of jail, though, I’ve realised how much the hyperlink has been
> devalued, almost made obsolete.
>
> Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it
> treats any other object – the same as a photo, or a piece of text. You’re
> encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic
> process of liking and plussing and hearting. But links are not objects,
> they are relations between objects. This objectivisation has stripped
> hyperlinks of their immense powers.
>
> At the same time, these social networks tend to treat native text and
> pictures – things that are directly posted to them – with a lot more
> respect. One photographer friend explained to me how the images he uploads
> directly to Facebook receive many more likes than when he uploads them
> elsewhere and shares the link on Facebook.
>
> Some networks, like Twitter, treat hyperlinks a little better. Others are
> far more paranoid. Instagram – owned by Facebook – doesn’t allow its
> audiences to leave whatsoever. You can put up a web address alongside your
> photos, but it won’t go anywhere. Lots of people start their daily online
> routine in these cul-de-sacs of social media, and their journeys end there.
> Many don’t even realise they are using the internet’s infrastructure when
> they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend’s Facebook
> video. It’s just an app.
>
> But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: they are its eyes, a
> path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look
> or gaze at another webpage – and this has serious consequences for the
> dynamics of power on the web.
>
> More or less all theorists have thought of gaze in relation to power, and
> mostly in a negative sense: the gazer strips the gazed and turns her into a
> powerless object, devoid of intelligence or agency. But in the world of
> webpages, gaze functions differently: it is more empowering. When a
> powerful website – say Google or Facebook – gazes at, or links to, another
> webpage, it doesn’t just connect it , it brings it into existence; gives it
> life. Without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No
> matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is
> looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind, and therefore incapable
> of transferring power to any outside web page.
>
> Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards,
> reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into
> quiet deaths. The consequence is that web pages outside social media are
> dying.
>
> Even before I went to jail, though, the power of hyperlinks was being
> curbed. Its biggest enemy was a philosophy that combined two of the most
> dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: newness and popularity.
> (Isn’t this embodied these days by the real-world dominance of young
> celebrities?) That philosophy is the stream. The stream now dominates the
> way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly
> checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of
> information that’s picked for them by complex and secretive algorithms.
>
> The stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You
> don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open the
> Facebook app on your smartphone and dive in. The mountain has come to you.
> Algorithms have picked everything for you. According to what you or your
> friends have read or seen before, they predict what you might like to see.
> It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many
> websites. But what are we exchanging for efficiency?
>
> In many apps, the votes we cast – the likes, the plusses, the stars, the
> hearts – are actually more related to cute avatars and celebrity status
> than to the substance of what’s posted. A most brilliant paragraph by some
> ordinary-looking person can be left outside the stream, while the silly
> ramblings of a celebrity gain instant internet presence. And not only do
> the algorithms behind the stream equate newness and popularity with
> importance, they also tend to show us more of what we have already liked.
> These services carefully scan our behaviour and delicately tailor our news
> feeds with posts, pictures and videos that they think we would most likely
> want to see.
>
> Popularity is not wrong in and of itself, but it has its own perils. In a
> free-market economy, low-quality goods with the wrong prices are doomed to
> failure. Nobody gets upset when a quiet Hackney cafe with bad lattes and
> rude servers goes out of business. But political or religious opinions are
> not the same as material goods or services. They won’t disappear if they
> are unpopular or even wrong. In fact, history has proven that most big
> ideas (and many bad ones) have been quite unpopular for a long time, and
> their marginal status has only strengthened them. Minority views are
> radicalised when they can’t be heard or engaged with. That’s how Isis is
> recruiting and growing. The stream suppresses other types of unconventional
> ideas too, with its reliance on our habits.
>
> Today the stream is digital media’s dominant form of organising
> information. It’s in every social network and mobile application. Since I
> gained my freedom, everywhere I turn I see the stream. I guess it won’t be
> too long before we see news websites organise their entire content based on
> the same principles. The prominence of the stream today doesn’t just make
> vast chunks of the internet biased against quality – it also means a deep
> betrayal to the diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned.
>
> The centralisation of information also worries me because it makes it
> easier for things to disappear. After my arrest, my hosting service closed
> my account, because I wasn’t able to pay its monthly fee. But at least I
> had a backup of all my posts in a database on my own web server. But what
> if my account on Facebook or Twitter is shut down for any reason? Those
> services themselves may not die any time soon, but it is not too difficult
> to imagine a day when many American services shut down the accounts of
> anyone from Iran, as a result of the current regime of sanctions. If that
> happened, I might be able to download my posts in some of them, and let’s
> assume the backup can be easily imported into another platform. But what
> about the unique web address for my social network profile? Would I be able
> to claim it back later, after somebody else has possessed it?
>
> But the scariest outcome of the centralisation of information in the age
> of social networks is something else: it is making us all much less
> powerful in relation to governments and corporations. Surveillance is
> increasingly imposed on civilised lives, and it gets worse as time goes by.
> The only way to stay outside of this vast apparatus of surveillance might
> be to go into a cave and sleep, even if you can’t make it 300 years.
>
> Ironically enough, states that cooperate with Facebook and Twitter know
> much more about their citizens than those, like Iran, where the state has a
> tight grip on the internet but does not have legal access to social media
> companies. What is more frightening than being merely watched, though, is
> being controlled. When Facebook can know us better than our parents with
> only 150 likes, and better than our spouses with 300 likes, the world
> appears quite predictable, both for governments and for businesses. And
> predictability means control.
>
> Middle-class Iranians, like most people in the world, are obsessed with
> new trends. Since 2014 the hype is all about Instagram. There’s less and
> less text on social networks, and more and more video, more and more
> images, still or moving, to watch. Are we witnessing a decline of reading
> on the web in favour of watching and listening? The web started out by
> imitating books and for many years, it was heavily dominated by text, by
> hypertext. Search engines such as Google put huge value on these things,
> and entire companies – entire monopolies – were built off the back of them.
> But as the number of image scanners and digital photos and video cameras
> grows exponentially, this seems to be changing. Search tools are starting
> to add advanced image recognition algorithms; advertising money is flowing
> there.
>
> The stream, mobile applications, and moving images all show a departure
> from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone
> from a non-linear mode of communication – nodes and networks and links –
> toward one that is linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.
>
> When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do
> is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on
> current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and
> of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on the like or share
> button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I
> remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like.
> This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of
> the web. This future is television.
>
> Soon the internet will be a collection of mobile apps rather than of
> websites. And the money these apps generate will be out of monthly
> subscription, instead of advertising – something like cable television with
> its various theme-based packages, and its primetime. (Already if you want
> to post anything to a social network, you have to do it early morning or
> late night, when most people are using the app.)
>
> Sometimes I think maybe I’m becoming too strict as I age. Maybe this is
> all a natural evolution of a technology. But I can’t close my eyes to
> what’s happening: a loss of intellectual power and diversity. In the past,
> the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels
> like little more than entertainment. So much that even Iran doesn’t take
> some – Instagram, for instance – serious enough to block.
>
> I miss when people took time to be exposed to opinions other than their
> own, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss
> the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own
> domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social
> networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares, and best time to post.
>
> That’s the web I remember before jail. That’s the web we have to save.
>
> The original article can be found here:
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blogfather-facebook-instagram-and-twitter-are-killing-the-web
>
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-- 
regards,
Banibrata
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bdutta
http://twitter.com/edgeliving

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