Authenticity in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

"Born Originals," the 18th-century English divine and poet Edward Young, the author of Night Thoughts, once asked, "how comes it to Pass that we die Copies?"

I twitter--often, several times a day. Most of my 140-character posts to the microblogging service are gnomic little mutterings, many are telegraphic self-advertisements (the quotidian, new-media equivalents of "THE NILE IS SETTLED STOP SPEKE"), and some are bluntly promotional of stories on TechnologyReview.com. You'd think no one would read such stuff, but you'd be wrong. About 900 people follow me.

I Pownce, too--sharing images, music, or videos on the file-sharing service. I also have a Facebook profile, where more than 700 "friends," most of whom I have never met, note my status updates, nod over the books I read, and peek at my photos. I Digg. Occasionally, I blog. And all my social-media activities are rolled up on FriendFeed. If you subscribed to my feed, you'd see how often I use social technologies: 24 times on Thursday, July 31.

I am not sure why I do all this. Anything I write for Tech­nology Review or other publications reaches a far larger audience. I began because I felt I shouldn't write or edit stories about social technologies without having used them. Then, too, everyone young seemed to use social media all the time, and I didn't want to be generation-gapped by the little freaks. But I persisted because social technologies allowed me to talk with readers and sources in new, interesting ways. Also, it was fun! By now, using social media has become habitual, like keeping a diary.

But I will never use social technologies quite as the young use them, because I do not thrill to continuous attention and I value my privacy. Thus, the Jason Pontin who occupies the social space is a constructed persona, designed to be unchallengingly personable, humorous, and thoughtful. I am none of those things very often. The preoccupations of that Jason Pontin are professional: he thinks about emerging technologies all the time. And I never broadcast the substance of my inner life, because I know it would become insubstantial the moment I did.

Social-media Jason Pontin, in short, is a function of my business life. I know that this identity is inauthentic, because there is so much about which I do not post or blog. Do other habitual users of social media, whose social identities are as carefully constructed to attract attention, but who blog and post about everything (and thus feel no alienation), not know that those identities are inauthentic? Bemused by the difference between themselves and their social-media selves, are they mere Copies, cast from a few popular molds, endlessly reproduced among false friends?

This month in Technology Review, two authors write that they are.

Emily Gould, a penitent, formerly inauthentic editor of the gossip site Gawker.com, reviews two books (see "'It's Not a Revolution if No One Loses'"): Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and a reprint of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Contrasting the living new-media critic and the dead Marxist cultural critic, she writes, "Maybe, in the same way that Benjamin says the difference between 'follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon' and experiencing that same mountain at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing, social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship." Gould urges us, as "a pointless experiment," to stop using social media for a time and see our "world opening back up again."

Elsewhere (see "'I Just Called to Say I Love You'"), the novelist and essayist Jonathan Franzen condemns cell phones for their power to amplify inauthentic utterances and for what he describes as a kind of emotional coercion: "If the mother's declaration of love had genuine, private emotional weight, wouldn't she take at least a little care to guard it from public hearing?"

In Sincerity and Authenticity, a lovely collection of lectures delivered at Harvard by Lionel Trilling in the spring of 1970, the literary critic made a profound case for the importance of authenticity, and for its newness and fragility in our culture: "If sincerity is the avoidance of being false to any man through being true to one's own self, we can see that this state of personal existence is not to be attained without the most arduous effort." What, Trilling asks, is the enemy of authenticity? "No one has much difficulty with the answer to this question. From Rousseau we learned that what destroys our authenticity is society--our sentiment of being depends upon the opinion of other people."

Insofar as social technologies make us more dependent upon the opinion of others, they may be said to increase our inauthenticity and are to be deplored. But I am a technologist and an optimist about technology's capacity to expand and improve our lives. However hesitantly, I will continue to use social media. We'll work out the kinks. I choose to think that our private selves will survive and be enlarged by Twitter and Facebook as they were by earlier communications technologies. In his book, Shirky says that social technologies also increase the quantity of love in the world. Human nature, after all, is a movable feast, continuously evolving through technology. But write and tell me what you think at jason.pontin@technologyreview.com.

The Japanese Model

Japan is another country: they blog differently there.

In the first place, the Japanese may blog more than anyone else. Some 127 million people live in Japan, whereas 380 million people around the world speak English as their first language. Yet there are more blog postings in Japanese than in English, according to Technorati, a Web site that tracks and counts blog posts.

More interestingly, the Japanese use blogs in different ways than North Americans do. Blogging in the United States developed as a kind of insurrectionist, populist journalism, akin to the pamphleteering of the 17th and 18th centuries, but Japanese blogs are a medium for quirky, personal expression and an easy, inexpensive way for corporations to publish on the Web. This second use suggests some interesting lessons for North American companies that have tried to do the same.

"There's a lot more corporate blogging in small and medium-sized businesses, and I think that that's an area where Japan has been leading the U.S.," said Chris Alden, the chief executive and chairman of Six Apart, a start-up in San Francisco that sells blogging software and services. "They've realized that a huge part of their economics are now what they do online."

In addition, Mr. Alden said, even large companies like Sony are using blogs as a way to communicate with customers. (A disclaimer: Mr. Alden was a co-founder and the chief executive of Red Herring Communications, a magazine and Web site I edited in the 1990s.)

Estimates vary by company size and how one defines a blog, but somewhere between 13 and 27 percent of Japanese companies used blogging software in 2006. By contrast, less than 10 percent of the Fortune 500 had blogs last year, according to Fortune magazine.

During a recent trip to Japan, I learned how Six Apart, an otherwise conventional Silicon Valley company of the Web 2.0 era, has built an unexpectedly large business in that country. Of the company's 150 employees, 40 work in Japan. Six Apart is privately held and declines to reveal its finances, but Mr. Alden said one-third of its revenue comes from Japan.

When I visited its offices in Tokyo, Nobuhiro Seki, the general manager of Six Apart Japan, told me: "In the beginning, people just blogged about blogging. But Japanese companies have not had a problem using blogging for marketing, so long as they've been honest." (Another disclaimer: Although I had never met him before, Mr. Seki had worked on an aborted Japanese version of Technology Review at Nikkei Business Publications. Technology is a small world.)

Mr. Seki said that there was no blogging to speak of in Japan until Six Apart came along.

Six Apart was founded by Ben and Mena Trott in 2001 because Ms. Trott wanted a better way to write her own blogs. (The name cutely recalls this married couple's birthdays, which are six days apart.) The company has developed some of the most widely used blogging tools, including Moveable Type, a blogging "platform" that consumers and businesses can use free or for a fee, depending on the version; TypePad, a subscription service that hosts blogs; LiveJournal, a social networking service; and Vox, an online community where people can blog about shared interests.

Six Apart had a connection with Japan almost from the company's inception. Its first investor was the Japanese entrepreneur Joichi Ito, the founder of Neoteny, a venture capital firm based in Tokyo.

"I was first a user of Moveable Type," Mr. Ito wrote to me by e-mail. "Initially, Ben and Mena didn't want to talk about investment, so we helped localize Moveable Type for Japanese; after we earned their trust a bit, they allowed us to invest." (Six Apart has since raised about $23 million in venture funding, from Neoteny, August Capital, Focus Capital and Intel Capital.)

Six Apart Japan started in December 2003. The division sells TypePad through Japanese Internet service providers like Nifty and NTT Communications and Moveable Type through the Japanese communications company Softbank and other resellers. It also sells both products directly. Today, Moveable Type has the largest share of the Japanese market for blogging platforms, according to Mr. Alden. Six Apart Japan's partners and customers include Sony, Nissan Motor and Uniqlo, an apparel retailer sometimes called the Gap of Japan.

How Nissan and Uniqlo used Six Apart's technologies says much about how blogging has evolved in Japan, compared with the United States.

Uniqlo used Moveable Type for communications inside the company, or "intrablogging," so that employees at the 700 stores around the world could share information and customer feedback. Because Uniqlo stores tend to have only two computers, most employees blogged by using their mobile phones -- a comfortable activity for Japanese Internet users, 59 percent of whom commonly gain access to the Web from both their computers and their phones.

More daringly, Nissan chose to blog to the broader public about its new Skyline car for a year before the vehicle's release.

"Nissan Motors was very advanced," said Ichiro Kiyota, Six Apart Japan's director of corporate marketing. "Nissan invited 50 people who were very keen on motors and professional drivers to test the car and then say what they thought about it. The company very cleverly allowed critics to have their say, and so the blog seemed authentic."

Mr. Seki noted that Japanese corporate blogs, despite the country's international reputation for formality, often have a personal voice; executives and employees blog on business-related matters about which they feel passionately. That's because Japanese blogs grew out of the country's highly individualistic blogging culture, which, unlike North American blogging, has never aspired to the status of new-media journalism.

"Most business blogs in Japan are talking to customers -- selling to people -- as if they were friends and family," Mr. Seki said.

By contrast, most North American companies, particularly big corporations, have struggled to use blogs effectively. They've blogged, but with the ghastly unease of one's high school headmaster trying to rap. Or they've blogged with collectively rigid self-control, remaining resolutely on-message and uninteresting. Or they've nervously disallowed comments on their blogs, stripping the medium of the interaction that is one of its cardinal features.

In many cases, companies in the United States have eschewed blogging altogether, relying on static, informational Web sites that have garnered few search-engine links and therefore attracted little Internet traffic. That strategy misses an opportunity for more effective marketing and does not help sales.

"What's going on in Japan is that there are a lot of bloggers with a capital "B" like you'd find in the states," Mr. Alden said. "But you've also got a lot of businesses that are using blog software as lightweight content management systems."

Look east. American companies might do worse than imitating Japan's business blogs.

TED Day 3: Candor and Inspiration

Editor's note: Our editor in chief was without any connection to the Internet on the last days of TED Global 2007. This blog describes Wednesday, June 6.

Today's presentations and speeches at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Global 2007 conference were much more satisfying and intellectually coherent than the others. I came away better satisfied with the entire notion of a TED conference dedicated to Africa.

Chris Anderson, the owner and organizer of TED, always says that one must wait until the different themes and ideas he throws into his rich stew of programming begin to meld--and so it has proven here in Tanzania.

The morning's sessions began with one called "Tales of Invention," where innovators, who were not so much inventors working on African problems as inventors who happened to be African, described their work. One, in particular, stood out: Seyi Oyesola, a physician who invented something he called a "hospital in a box." It was a simple, portable (well, 150-pound), resilient set of medical devices that makes surgery possible even in the worst parts of the world. The hospital in a box has anesthetic equipment, a defibrillator, a burn unit, plaster-making tools, surgical tools, and an operating table.

The next session, titled "Health and Heroes," was notable because it allowed Anderson to directly address the darker realities of Africa that TED Global 2007 had until then seemed to be ignoring.

In retrospect, I am sympathetic with how Anderson chose to present Africa's troubles. Nearly every African who spoke at TED Global 2007 talked with great bitterness about Western journalists' representations of Africa as a slide show composed entirely of starving babies, child soldiers, and sprawling shantytowns. They found such images and stories insufferably degrading. Anderson was clearly advised by his African speakers to distance TED from such reporting. Then, too, his own tastes run to the breezily optimistic. Finally, a technology show that emphasized Africa's problems would be difficult to market: such a downer! Anderson's solution was to limit discussion of Africa's problems to a single session and issue (Africa's ill health)--and to explore those problems in the context of heroic figures who were offering real solutions to intractable difficulties. Dr. Leon Kintaudi, for instance, talked about the collapse of health care in the Congo and how he hoped to rebuild his country's rural health infrastructure.

To my mind, the problem with Anderson's solution is that it glossed over unwelcome and unflattering facts. More, even if one accepted (as I do) TED Global's thesis that technology, commercial investment, and trade might find in Africa's shortages economic opportunities that would create wealth, one left the conference without a very clear idea of how desperately hard it is to do business here.

I found the last session I saw the most thrilling. Called "Connecting the Continent," it drew together a series of very canny African chief executives, most of whom had worked in the West, to discuss one of the continent's most obvious needs: a modern communications and computer infrastructure. Each of the speakers impressed me with his or her passion, intelligence, and reasonableness. Not one underestimated the difficulties they faced, but each had conjured up African solutions to African problems.

One executive in particular, Herman Chinery-Hesse, the founder of SOFTTribe, moved me. He said, "I could of course work in the West. But I think it is undignified for an African to spend his entire career outside Africa." He was a patriot as well as an entrepreneur.

TED Day 2: Congolese Mobile Networks, Fractal Villages, and Jane Goodall's Great Apes

Seven years ago, before Chris Anderson purchased Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) from the legendary events programmer Richard Saul Wurman, I was a devoted follower of this event. At its best, TED felt wonderfully eccentric and intellectually stimulating. Subjects and speakers were drawn from the most disparate of topics and fields; the audience was left to draw its own conclusions, with only gentle prodding from Wurman. And, it might as well be admitted, the event felt very exclusive. Hardly anyone knew about TED; fewer still were invited.

Most important, Wurman had a strict rule: there was to be no promotion of companies or projects by his speakers.

Anderson claims to have a similar rule, but on this second day in Tanzania I felt strongly that I was being sold to. Generally, I was being sold the idea of Africa as a rational subject for optimism; more specifically, I was being sold individual ventures.

The first is a fairly harmless species of chauvinism, I suppose, and insofar as it offers Africans in the TED audience a swelling sense of dignity, it might even be useful. But I think it does serious damage to the complicated truth of Africa, which combines great hope and opportunities with blood-curdling misery. It's worth noting that by any economic measurement, whether it is national GDP or per capita income, most regions of Africa are the poorest in the world. Arguably, many areas are also the most environmentally despoiled, the hungriest, and the most ethnically rancorous on our dark planet. This evening, when Anderson invited the TED audience members to say what they liked and didn't like about his show, one African attendee expressed astonishment that we had discussed neither the genocide in Darfur nor the more economically motivated violence in Zimbabwe. I muttered under my breath, "That's right, brother."

For me, however, a more serious problem was how the speakers who talked about their companies comported themselves. Perhaps it was asking a little much that small-time African entrepreneurs should be as polished as American executives with their speechwriters and media training. In fairness, many of the Africans were speaking a language that was not their first. But the executives also seemed to be involved in blunt appeals to the very rich investors and executives in the TED audience. Perhaps it would have required the self-denial of a saint for an African entrepreneur not to have pitched his or her company, given who was sitting in the crowd. But it was terribly counterproductive, I fear. TED's organizers would have done better to tell the speakers to sound smart, innovative, and intriguing.

But worst of all, the African entrepreneurs were dull. Yesterday, I complained that there was no technology at TED. Today, we heard from a number of technology executives. But they left me cold. Even the most interesting, Alieu Conteh, the founder of Vodafone Congo, could not evoke the heroism of his story. Conteh created a mobile network of 6 million mobile subscribers in a country that was at war and that had only 15,000 fixed lines. He did it with no outside funding, because no Western investor would help. He built his own infrastructure, because no Western equipment manufacturer would visit his desperate country. He invested $1 million of his own money, and today his company is worth more than $1 billion, according to the Western investment banks that were asked to value it. We only learned this thrilling story because Anderson prompted him. Left to himself, Conteh would have modeled his manner on a tongue-tied CEO presenting his annual financials to his shareholders.

I turned in relief to the more cerebral events of the day, which seemed more echt TED. A mathematician named Ron Eglash discoursed amusingly (no, truly!) about how African villages and other artifacts were built on the same self-generating fractal patterns that form ferns and snowflakes. By contrast, he said, Western towns and artifacts were built on a grid. He revealed to us the fractal algorithm that he had wormed out of an African priest for sand divination. I was beside myself with pleasure. This is what TED is meant to be about! I thought.

Finally, Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, made a moving appeal to save the planet. Controversially (at least to my mind), she quoted approvingly E. O. Wilson's dictum that to provide the world's poor with a Western standard of living would require four planets. She explained that our environment is being progressively destroyed and reminded us that we have only one Earth. But while she seemed to be saying that no one should be as rich as TED's attendees, she talked convincingly of programs that could alleviate the poverty that, in Africa, is most responsible for environmental despoliation.

I thoroughly agreed with the latter point. But I was left a little bemused by her suggestion that the poor of Africa must not enjoy Western standards of living. In my fairly extensive travels in Asia and Africa, the one commonality I have found is that however much the poor hate our colonialism, our arrogance, our values, or our religion, they really want our stuff. Who can blame them? Our stuff is pretty good, not unenviable. Perhaps the real challenge for this century is figuring out how to enrich the poor world in a fashion that is both equitable and sustainable.

Tomorrow: tales of invention and heroism.

TED Day 1: Bono Heckles the Stage

Bono, of U2, attended the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference in Tanzania. Credit: 3ality

Technology, Entertainment, Design, Chris Anderson's invitation-only conference for the good and great of technology, has come to Africa, but on the first day we heard very little about technology.

Anderson somehow convinced about a thousand people to come to rural Tanzania.

Many of the princes of Silicon Valley are here, including Google's Larry Page, the venture capitalist John Doerr, and Jay Walker, the founder of Priceline and Walker Digital. The rock star Bono (who suggested to Anderson that he host an African show) turned up. But there are people here from 40 countries, including (mercifully) many Africans.

Anderson says the purpose of the show is to tell the story of an Africa that is newly entrepreneurial, growing in wealth, more and more tech-savvy, and increasingly politically stable.

He says, "It's a story that is unfolding in villages, towns, and cities across the continent--and it's a story that's not well known outside of Africa."

So far, the show has been bluntly promotional. I felt I might have been attending a meeting of the heads of different African Chambers of Commerce. Indeed, the first speaker was the U.S. head of the South African Chamber of Commerce.

There have been some consistent themes. The first is that the media is morally culpable for propagating images of African poverty, famine, war, and despair. This made me feel impatient. Surely we can agree that while there are other, more benign stories in Africa, journalists are not misrepresenting reality when they write about poor, hungry, beaten, and despairing Africans?

But the second, more interesting theme--echoed by every speaker--is that traditional aid and charity, whether distributed by nation-states or nongovernmental bodies, have failed. Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist and social worker, now a fellow at Stanford, made the case most strongly. He argued convincingly that 30 years of Western aid to Africa has achieved nothing at all. More, he said that the persistence of African poverty could be explained, in part, by aid. He explained that aid had convinced the brightest Africans to work for corrupt governments rather than as entrepreneurs, and it had "distorted the incentive structure."

"What man or nation," Mwenda asked, "has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?"

Far better, he said, is finding Westerners to invest in African entrepreneurs or businesses, which would create wealth. Mwenda, like other speakers, described at length the investment opportunities in Africa. (I half expected the pitch to be directly addressed to Doerr et al.)

This line of argument enraged Bono, however, who began heckling Mwenda.

"Bollocks!" he shouted. "That's bullshit."

Bono is a strong supporter of intelligently managed aid. When it came his turn to speak, he said that Ireland's current prosperity is explained by government investment in its people, particularly education. He said that listening to Mwenda was like listening to an African Margaret Thatcher.

Oh, and everything you've heard about Bono's height is entirely true: he really is remarkably short.

ETC: Bill Joy's Six Webs

Bill Joy, the inventor of Berkeley Unix, the founder of Sun Microsystems, and now a partner at Kleiner Perkins, that most blue-blooded of venture capital firms, is describing a taxonomy for the Internet. He calls it "the six Webs." I have heard him give this speech before - most distantly at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1999. I am a little surprised that he's still delivering the lecture - but his ideas are not uninteresting, and are worth noting.

Bill Joy's six Webs are:

1. The Near Web: This is the Internet that you see when you lean over a screen - like a laptop.
2. The Here Web. This is the Internet that is always with you because you accesses it through a device you always carry - like a cell phone.
3. The Far Web. This is the Internet you see when you sit back from a big screen - like a television or a kiosk.
4. The Weird Web. This is the Internet you access through your voice and which you listen to - say when you are in your car, or when you talk to an intelligent system on your phone, or when you ask your camera a question. Joy concedes that this Web does not yet fully exist.
5. B2B. This is an Internet which does not possess a consumer interface, where business machines talk to other business machines. It is chatter of corporations amongst themselves when they do not care about their human drones.
6. D2D. This is the Internet of sensors deployed in meshes networks, adjusting urban systems for maximum efficiency. This Web also does not yet exist. Joy says that it will embed machine intelligence in ordinary, daily life.

Joy concludes by saying that, of all six Webs, number 2 - "the Here Web" - is by far the most interesting and productive of new innovations.

Incidentally, in person, Bill Joy's affect is remarkably like Jeff Goldblum's performance of Seth Brundel in The Fly.