Oversharing is over -- save it for your book deal

Melissa Gira Grant — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:00:00 PDT

Former blog queen Emily Gould suggests the rest of us delete, unfollow, cancel, and block ourselves from the Web. This is notable chiefly because Gould's last big appearance in print was an excessively detailed confessional of her online misadventures for the New York Times Magazine. The social media age is complicated, she complains in a writeup of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody for MIT's Tech Review. Someone stop us before we blog again!

Gould, a former Gawker editor who institutionalized oversharing as an element of blog style, now plays the penitent. As a writer, she revealed details of her love life in the course of contributing to a gossip site, one that eventually used her exit as more gossip for the mill. Today, though, Gould can't resist the temptation to revisit her past:

Like an expatriate who reads every new novel that's set in her homeland, I read books about the Internet to remember the time I spent working and living there.

Gould argues that dependency on services like Twitter and Facebook to define ourselves gives us "inauthentic" relationships — representations of human connection, not the connection itself. But I stopped reading when she invoked theorist Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Benjamin's worries are still legitimate — his Teutonically hard-to-follow essay prophesized the TV-driven wars of the last two decades. But why is Emily Gould invoking Marxist theory to warn us of the dangers of Twitter and Tumblr? Because, like Shirky, she has a book she wants you to buy.

Second Life's absentee population

Chris Mohney — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:00:20 PST

CLAY SHIRKY — Second Life released a bunch of figures last Friday, including the cumulative number of users, as part of their "effort to drive toward complete transparency and openness", as they put it. I've been critical of Linden Lab's population figures in the past. And it turns out I was right, about all of it.

Now that Linden is publishing actual user numbers, we can see that the Residents figure, as expected, is a big overcount over actual people (about 50% inflation, in fact, accounting for over a million ersatz users). Second Life doesn't have two million users. They have had two million users over the life of the service, and they've lost most of them. Of those users, the majority — something like 5 out of 6 — bailed in the first month. What we don't know is what the other sixth are up to, but after Friday's post, we can guess the answer is "Not much." As John Zdanowski, the Linden employee who posted the figures, notes, "Approximately 10% of unique users have logged in for 40 hours or more."

He doesn't caveat this — it isn't current users, or 40 hours per month. The plain meaning of that sentence is that fewer than 200,000 people have given Second Life even a cumulative work week of their time, over the history of the platform. (After revealing this figure, Zdanowski immediately offers two separate rationales for having so few committed users, and two separate analogies for why poor adoption is no big deal, in a single paragraph.)

As any illusionist will tell you, the trick is mainly in getting the audience to look at the wrong thing. In Linden's case, they want you to think that cumulative users matters when it doesn't. A new user won't care one whit that, as of last year, 1,422,846 people had tried Second Life. What they want to know is how many of those people will still be around to interact with now?

This is the question the press should be asking — "How many of those users from 2006 have logged in recently?" Linden won't answer, of course, but it might be interesting to hear how they square the invisibility of the one population number that actually affects user experience with their stated goal of transparency and openness.

Valleywag: clay shirky

Oversharing is over -- save it for your book deal

Second Life's absentee population