Ryan's shared items
I fear we are on the verge of fetishizing privacy. Well, we’re not — but our media and government are.
Media’s assumptions
Yesterday I got a call from a journalist about Google+ and its Circles. He was not at all hostile to Google, Facebook, or social, but even so, implicit in his questions was a presumption that privacy is our highest priority in social services.
Think about that for half a minute and the absurdity of it becomes apparent. We don’t come to social services to hide secrets; that would be idiotic. We come to share.
The journalist said that people must be afraid of being public. Think about that for the rest of a minute: Media and government have held a monopoly on publicness as they have owned the megaphone and soapbox. Now the internet gives the rest of us the ability to be public and these long-public people think we are scared of what the have? How patronizing of them.
The meme about Google+ Circles is that it beats Facebook on privacy because it gives us upfront control over whom we share with. That’s true: Every time I share something I make a decision about whether to share it with the public or some of my circles. That is better, clearer, and easier than digging into Facebook’s settings once and for all to silo my world. It is better than not bothering to change those settings and depending on Facebook’s defaults, only to find them change and become more public. Google+ got to learn from Facebook and start with Circles to enable this difference.
Except I have watched my own behavior with Google+ lo, these 36 hours and I find at when I share with less than everyone it is not out of privacy or security needs. It’s out of relevance. I may have something to tell my TWiT colleagues or my fellow journowonks that would bore everyone else who follows me. So I restrict my audience not to keep a secret but to reduce noise for them, which I can’t do on Twitter or can’t easily do on Facebook. I am still sharing; it’s better sharing.
The journalist talked about Zuckerberg and Google wanting us to share — and they do because, as I’ve said, they depend on getting us to generate more signals about our interests, needs, and desires so they can gi e us more relevant, thus valuable content, services, and advertising. But in the journalist’s phrasing I heard him implying that Zuckerberg and Page were squeezing stuff out of like toothpaste tubes, against our wills.
Nonsense. As I say in Public Parts, 600 million people can’t be wrong. We are sharing a billion things a day on Facebook alone because we want to, because we find value in it. That’s where the discussion should begin, with the power of publicness, not with the presumption of privacy.
Government’s presumptions
I was delighted yesterday to see a senator — Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania — warn his colleagues against “breaking the internet.”
Some are in such a rush to regulate the net and protect what they and media think is our highest priority — privacy — that they threaten to both hamper how sites and services and operate and how they can sustain themselves.
Jay Rockefeller is pushing do-not-track. John Kerry and John McCain have a privacy bill. Al Franken has a bill to limit sharing of location data with third parties (those “third parties” are becoming the boogeymen of the digital age, though they are often just companies that serve ads, provide web services such as analytics, and sell us stuff).
I’m not suggesting that all this legislation is bad. We do need privacy protections. Sites must give us greater and clearer control over what we share to whom and why (as Google seems to have done with its Circles). Phones should not be storing information about what we do without our knowledge and without giving us control over it. Stipulated.
But I fear unintended consequences. Rockefeller’s do-not-track could pull the advertising rug out from under web sites, forcing some of them to go behind a pay wall — if they can — and killing other sites, reducing the content on the web. Franken’s location bill, I learned this week, does not have a carve out for sending data to ad-servers (they are dreaded “third parties”), which could kneecap the local-mobile content industry before it even starts.
Politicians and media companies are coming at these questions at the wrong starting line: as if we go to the internet to take a piece of private information and squirrel it away there. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re sharing.
: MORE: On Twitter, @hasanahmad complains that when sharing a photo with a circle members of that circle could share it in turn and then it becomes more public.
Yes, absolutely. That’s how life works. You tell a friend something. Then, as I say in Public Parts, the responsibility for what to do with that lies with that friend; what you’ve said is public to that extent and whether it becomes more public is a decision your friend will now make. It may be fine to share in turn; it may not be. You’d need to set those conditions with that friend before sharing. And if you don’t want the friend to share, maybe you shouldn’t share. The issue here isn’t technology. It’s people. No change there.
So I asked my Twitter interrogator what he proposes we do about this: Put license conditions on the photo we share? Sue the friend?
This is where Eric Schmidt is right. I’ll paraphrase him: If you want to hide something, the worst place to do that is on a social network. That’s where you share. Your brain is where you hide secrets.
: SEE ALSO: Jonathan Allen on sharing for purpose v privacy.
Nothing wrong with a thoughtful "To do" list. Everything right about it, in fact, unless your engineer-like devotion to it as such is that you stick to it no matter what—and some "must-do newbies" come along. There is a lot to say for inflexibility—and flexibility. (Go figure—management is an art.)
In any event, I want to use this space to say that "To do" lists are not enough—not nearly enough. In fact I want to urge three other daily "must" lists be added to your morning cogitations.
#2. "To be" list. If you went to a play, and someone appeared on stage and proceeded to read the play—with no acting—you'd say they missed the point of theater. Well, management of any sort is, pure and simple, theater with the acting. Who are you going to "be" this morning? How are you going to project yourself upon the scene? What is your tactical interpersonal approach to each and every one of those items on your "to do" list? A manager by definition can't do it all—or maybe can't do any of it. Hence her/his job is to "engage" others—and engagement is 100% about emotion—whereas the "to do" list is 100% engineering. So think through your "leaderhip" approach—and the unabashed "theater" you will use with each of the folks-teams you are attempting to engage re that particular "to do" item.
#3. "Relationship management/development" list. Life, including business life, is all about relationships. With allies. With doubters. With friends. With foes. Inside the organization—"above" you and "below" you. Outsiders as well as insiders. What is the extant "State of the Union" this morning? Come hell and high water, what relationships are in need of repair? What allies desperately need bucking up? Are you plugged in enough two levels "down"? Are you plugged in two levels "down" in a customer's or vendor's organization? Along with "to do" and "to be," we need a considered tactical plan to pro-actively manage our ongoing and prospective relationships.
#4. Strategic "To dos." Presumably you have some sort of more or less defined "strategic objectives" for the year (never more than three), or even for your expected 3-year tenure in your current assignment—or during the 4-month life of your project team. Amidst the hurdy gurdy of daily affairs (proceeding through the three prior lists, for example), are you visibly inching forward with your #1 or #2 priority—or are they silently lost in the shuffle? Maybe it's just a small gesture or two, but your gang should realize that in parsing any issue, that top strategic priority must be moved forward at least a millimeter or two.
You could readily argue that, even if you got up at 4AM, you'd still be constructing the lists per se at 4PM. My answer: Sure you could. Nonetheless, at some level, I'll go down swinging concerning each of these four ideas—and insist that each of the four, in a discrete and palpable fashion, must be top of mind as you navigate the day or week.
Four lists:
- To do—gotta get done.
- To be—how you play 'em.
- Discrete relationship management tasks.
- Activities directly or indirectly moving/nudging Strategic Priority #1/#2 forward.
Have at it!
Don't be a wimp!
(So get up at 3AM.)
Two of the largest bookstore chains—Barnes & Noble and Borders—are in danger of being forced into bankruptcy; their plight raises the broader question of whether bookstores will survive in any significant number, and, if not, what the consequences will be.
There are two clear threats, both Internet-related, to the bookstore. The newest is the e-book, in which the contents of a book are transmitted over the Internet to an electronic reader owned by the book’s buyer. No bookstore is involved. Slightly older is the sale, as opposed to the delivery, of a book online; Amazon is the principal seller in this market. No bookstore is involved unless Amazon doesn’t have the book in inventory; in that event the customer is referred by Amazon to a bookstore that has the book and will sell it online and deliver it to the buyer; the purchase is made through Amazon. Most of the books that Amazon and the other online booksellers don’t carry in stock are out of print, and bookstores that stock such books tend to be small (though there are some exceptions), because the market for such books is tiny.
A possible third threat is diminished appetite for books. I haven’t been able to find good statistics on annual sales of books in the United States (and anyway “books” is an extremely heterogeneous product category), but it would seem that the amount of entertainment and instruction available online is so great that online substitution for reading books must have reduced the demand for them. At the same time, however, the demand for books should be stimulated by the fall in cost when books are bought online, cutting out the middleman—the bookstore—a point to which I’ll return shortly.
It seems inevitable that the number of books sold through bookstores will plummet. Books bought through bookstores are more costly not only in price (to cover the costs of the bookstore), but also in customers’ time—the time required to travel to and from the bookstore, find the book one wants to buy, and complete the purchase (which takes more time than an online purchase). The only offsetting advantages of the bookstore are the opportunity it provides for browsing and the fact that the customer can see and handle the book before buying it. But these advantages are offset to a considerable extent (doubtless more than offset, for many customers) by the use by online sellers of artificial-intelligence programs to recommend books to their customers, by the much vaster inventory of an online seller like Amazon, by ease of search, by the reader reviews that the seller presents, and by the seller’s ability to allow customers to look inside the online book before ordering it, much as if he were leafing through a printed book in a bookstore.
It is true that Amazon’s book-recommendation program is primitive, and is no substitute for browsing in a well-stocked bookstore, but it will improve; one can foresee the day when customers will furnish (and Amazon store) comprehensive information about their age, sex, education, occupation, and reading tastes, which Amazon will use to create an initial list of recommended purchases, which it will refine as it receives orders from the customer plus supplementary information from the customer as the customer’s tastes and interests change.
At present fewer than 30 percent of all books are bought online (either in hard copy or as an e-book), but I have seen an estimate that this figure will grow to 75 percent within a few years. Very few bookstores will have enough customers to survive if bookstore sales fall from 70 percent to 25 percent of all book sales, except those bookstores specializing in out of print books—whose customers will largely be online. In time, moreover, with more and more publishing electronic, there will be fewer and fewer “out of print” books.
The substitution of online for bookstore distribution of books will provide a substantial social saving and, as I said, increase the demand for books by reducing their retail price. As for the effect on publishers and authors of books, there is concern that it will be adverse, but that seems unlikely. A seller tries to minimize his cost of distribution, just as he tries to minimize his other costs; the publisher is the ultimate seller, and the bookstore part of the chain of distribution. But there is an important, and potentially relevant, exception, and that is where a distributor provides point-of-sale services that increase the demand for the product. This is the rationale for resale price maintenance: manufacturers of some goods place a floor under the retail price of the goods, thus deliberately increasing the retailers’ margin, but hoping by doing so to induce them to engage in nonprice competition that will increase the demand for the goods. Bookstore staffs, by decisions they make concerning choice and display of books to carry, and by making purchasing suggestions to customers, can, in principle, increase the demand for books. But these services cannot guarantee the survival of many bookstores, because unless the services are valued by a greater margin than seems realistic to expect, there will be too few customers to defray the bookstore’s fixed costs at acceptable prices.
The question then becomes whether the loss of point-of-sale services that bookstores provide will hurt publishers (and therefore authors, whose prosperity is linked to that of publishers) more than it will help them by reducing their distribution costs. That too is doubtful. As technology continues its forward march, online booksellers will find it increasingly feasible to duplicate and indeed improve on the point-of-sale services that bookstores offer. Bookstores will decline, and perhaps vanish when the current older generation, consisting of people habituated to printed books (as to printed newspapers), dies off. Yet this may well represent genuine economic progress, just as department stores and supermarkets represent progress though they cause the demise of countless small retailers.
