On Lincoln and Accuracy

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Timothy Burke

A Facebook friend of mine directed my attention to Eric Foner’s evaluation of the film Lincoln. Foner likes the film somewhat, but complains that it is inaccurate in some important respects. Foner comments, “The emancipation of the slaves is a long, complicated, historical process. It’s not the work of one man, no matter how great he was,” pointing out both that abolitionists deserve more credit than the film grants them and that slavery was already dying because of the extent to which the slaves themselves had “self-emancipated” during the course of the war.

Interestingly, the screenwriter, Tony Kushner, doesn’t respond with the usual Hollywood dodge that they had to take liberties in order to make a better story, nobody looks to a Hollywood film for learning about history, or any of that. The film is, he says, “enormously accurate”, based on consultation with professional historians. “What we’re describing absolutely happened.”

Foner agrees: it’s not wrong, it’s just “inadequate”.

This is a more nuanced version of a stereotypical kind of exchange that academic historians would do well to avoid. Even grossly inaccurate films are doing interesting cultural work of some kind or another, not always in a straightforwardly bad way–and Lincoln is not grossly inaccurate.

As I see it, Kushner is perfectly justified in claiming a devotion to accuracy in the sense that what the film portrays–the political maneuvering to get the 13th Amendment established and ratified–actually happened largely as the film shows it. Foner’s right as well: abolitionism mattered, the slaves mattered as agents, African-American leaders pressuring Lincoln and Congress mattered, Lincoln was a latecomer to its necessity, and the story was a longer and more complicated one in any event. The issue is really not about accuracy and inaccuracy, it is which of the accurate stories is most true, most important, most matters.

As I read the thoughts of other scholars piling on behind Foner or who had their own complaints, I see one of two possible alternative films to the Spielberg version emerging.

One is a terrible, unwieldy film, a towering pile of distracted attentiveness to every single causal argument and every single participant experience that historians can collectively insist belongs in the full, true, real story of how slavery was abolished in the United States. If we’re going to tell the story of abolitionism and the agency of slaves, surely we cannot leave out the larger history of slave revolts throughout the Americas and the changing role of the Atlantic system in the global political economy of the first half of the 19th Century, correct? It would be “inadequate” to assume this is an exceptional American story. Surely we’d have to continue the story into Reconstruction so that viewers don’t misunderstand and think that slavery really, truly completely came to an end? Surely we need to show what industrial labor in the North was like between the 1830s and the 1870s to give the audience a fuller context for understanding labor, freedom and rights? Surely there are other stories of antebellum political and judicial drama that need to be told alongside the story of the Thirteenth Amendment, so that it (or Lincoln) doesn’t appear entirely exceptional. Surely we need still more of the story of ordinary soldiers on both sides? Of the role of gender in abolition and slavery? I am only very slightly kidding here: this is precisely the stuff of scholarly historiography, as it should be. But when we view a film and begin to inevitably see its incomplete nature as ‘inadequacy’, we’re committing a category error on several levels.

Which is why I think Foner’s response is in some ways just one more front in the long struggle between social history and narrative. I suspect that he and many other historians would find any cinematic representation of any individual playing a key or decisive role in shaping consequential events inadequate–that what we have here is less an argument about particular discrete facts or events or people and more a deeper argument about what really matters in history.

There is certainly a second possible film in Lincoln that might satisfy the imagination of social history that would not simply be a potpourri of every possible historiographical claim: the story of a representative person traversing events much larger than themselves, enduring and navigating through transformations taking place on a vast stage. There are films of this very sort about history and even a one or two here and there about the Civil War and slavery–and here the exclusions of important or interesting stories and people are equally pronounced and, I suspect, more sharply and painfully felt. But the possibility of this kind of film shouldn’t be seen as ending the larger argument, as being the kind of film that would permit complexity or critical thought against those that tell stories of consequential individuals whose decisions are represented as having greater power to shape outcomes.

If we’re going to have that argument through and around cinema, we would be wise to always avoid scolding a film for inaccuracy. Finger-wagging is a death trap for public intellectuals: it keeps us from appreciating the complexity of how a film or other cultural work can have meaning for its audiences, and it casts us outside and above the world of ordinary spectatorship. More importantly, most historians know better than to claim there’s a linear relationship between “accuracy” and “critical thought”, the latter being what most historians would like to see as the outcome of reading or learning about the past from a trustworthy source.

When we want to say that we don’t think that a given event–or any event–was primarily about powerful or important people and their decisions, then let’s say just that and go from there, accepting the legitimacy of the interpretative argument that follows that statement. Disagreement about interpretation involves but is not reducible to fact, to accuracy, to evidence or to comprehensiveness.

Posted in Academia, Popular Culture | 3 Comments

Flash Mob Protest Wanted

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Yo, people of San Francisco! If ever there has been a store that deserves to be periodically picketed by a flash mob, it’s Unionmade. (493 Sanchez Street). The Gawker story has all the information you need to know.

Postmodern bullshit deserves a postmodern form of social activism, don’t you think? Maybe the same Ministry-of-Peace type genius that drains all the meaning out of language the way that Count Dracula goes after plucky Victorian virgins can just absorb any protest or objection. But maybe, just maybe, for once folks could compel an understanding that certain kinds of talk obligate certain kinds of walks. It’s not like the store couldn’t just rebrand, after all. Say, “Expensive Stuff That We Think Is Well Made Though Maybe in a Sweatshop, Who Knows.”

P.S. There’s one in Santa Monica also.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

A Mismatching of Frame and Picture

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I understand the allure that a certain kind of soft-authoritarian approach to governance offers, not the least because when the man on the white horse is genuinely devoted to producing beneficial outcomes in his (or her) territory, good changes with a singular vision and coherence can really unfold at a startling pace, seemingly without all the debilitating rent-seeking and nonsense of incremental deliberation.

Mayor Bloomberg has seen more than his fair share of this kind of favorable attention, even though he’s long exhibited signs of the dark undertow that pulls at even the most technocratic trains-run-on-time regime: an imperiousness about criticism, a distaste for the people he governs, a need to reshape his territory to make visible his personal will. But for the meritocratic elite of a community–a group that surely includes the editors of the New York Times those seem at worst forgiveable sins, at best laudable achievements. Until the day comes–and it always does–that le deluge arrives, often before the ruler is entirely apres.

In New York City, the deluge has been literal. And while it’s true that the Bloombergian drive to efficiency and results has produced some of its customary benefits in the clean-up (the quite amazing restoration of a seriously damaged mass transit system), away from Manhattan, it’s equally clear that not all is well. Which makes this morning’s story in the New York Times about Bloomberg and the problems of communities that have not been restored or supported such an interesting read. I can’t recall the last time I saw an article that so visibly underscored the contradictory feelings and impulses of its editorial staff about the news story being covered.

The online version of the story has already dispensed with the probably-accidental juxtaposition of a headline proclaiming that Bloomberg is seeking results rather than hugs that was accompanied by a photograph of President Obama hugging someone. (You can still see the headline in the story’s URL, though.) Quite aside from the seeming dig at Obama (and maybe Governor Christie), the old headline seemed to promise that the mayor’s focus on outcomes over symbolic leadership was producing consistently good results.

Read the story itself, and you find that it says something quite different. Oh, in a few spots, the celebratory narrative makes a few feints towards coming back in the frame, but mostly it’s a story about how Bloomberg is dodging anything that might turn into an unplanned or spontaneous encounter with the anger and desperation of people out in the boroughs, and that those challenges have “laid bare his limitations”. It’s the kind of mismatch of a framing headline and reportorial content that just begs the question of whether the editors panicked about the possibility of insulting the Princeps or whether they just didn’t read the story that their reporters filed.

Panic might be understandable, because the reluctance of such a leader to face disgruntled members of the body politic is not just a personality quirk. It’s an indicator of the reason why this kind of political regime is an ever-present danger: when there is a gap between what the man on the white horse wants to see and the world as it is, the man tends to blame the world–and shoot the messenger.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

Danger in Numbers

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Writing and reading large numbers of letters for tenure and promotion dossiers is quite a chore. On that, I agree with Don M. Chance. On almost everything else he says about such letters in his essay for the Chronicle, we disagree.

Chance’s basic position as I read it goes like this: the sample size of outside letters in most evaluations is too small and too easily slanted consciously or unconsciously towards a favorable assessment of the candidate. Ergo, Chance believes that reading these letters is a mostly valueless sort of make-work, that at best all one can do is read them with “an entire 26-ounce box of Morton’s”, to assume that they’re inaccurate and should be read for “what is not said”. The system, he argues, has to be made rigorous and systematic, more like science, by upping the sample size to ten outside letters, at which point he feels it will be impossible to bias the sample.

As long as we’re talking rigor and science here, the notion that a larger sample size will magically change the nature of the population being sampled seems unrigorous to me as Chance argues it. Because Chance argues that the default assumption should be that letter-writers are dishonest (consciously or unconsciously) and that the default assumption should be that candidates should not be awarded tenure. Let’s just assume for a moment that Chance is correct (he’s not) that normally letters are exaggerated, self-serving or inaccurate. What’s the distribution of “normal” here in the total possible population? If this Diogenes of the dossier only finds his honest letter in 5% of the total letter-writing population, he might need more than six or even ten to appreciably improve the odds of getting even one. If letters are pervasively dishonest, if professionalism is a sham, focusing on sample size is a red herring.

But this thought concedes too much in any event, in several respects. What is Chance’s evidence that letters are largely promotional or dishonest? First, that the sample in any given promotion and tenure process is not random. It’s not clear to me what “random” in a field where there are perhaps twenty to forty qualified specialists familiar with the candidate’s work might look like. None of those people are likely to be strangers to the candidate: scholarly work incubated in social networks well before digital technology. Some may be rivals, some may be trusted collaborators, some relative strangers, but randomness won’t locate some icy, remote intellect who can appraise the candidate’s work without any previous knowledge of or feelings about the candidate. It’s also not clear to me that what Chance regards as the normal or common procedure in promotion processes is in fact normal or common–there are many institutions that try to make sure that there are writers who are not personally acquainted with or previously knowledgeable about the candidate to the degree that this is possible.

Second, Chance argues that the language of most letters is improbably positive–essentially that his colleagues can’t possibly be as good as the writers are suggesting that they are. There’s an echo here of a long-running conversation about the phenomenon of grade inflation, and as in that discussion, it is at least a possibility that the relentless pressure of competition for academic jobs, the intensification of academic professionalism, the creation of mentoring systems and so on means that yes, indeed, most of his colleagues are as good as the letters say they are.

There’s something deeper and a bit uglier lying underneath his assumption that the letters can’t be true, that it can’t be that most people deserve tenure. He uses a lot of language about journals that are B-level, institutions that are third-rate, and so on. Since he’s sharing his impressions, I’ll share one of my own. The people I’ve met (inside and outside of academia) who have the strongest, most uninhibited feelings that they are the top-rate, most elite people in their workplace and that everyone else is a third-rater are often not the most top-rate–and they are consequently the people who spend the most time trying to create systems and structures and procedures and bureaucracies that will affirm their separation from the common herd because they can receive that affirmation in no other way. A lot of the people I’d regard as truly exceptional talents just go about the business of being exceptional without worrying so much about building rules and procedures that will earn them a gold star and get everyone else wearing some dunce hats.

This in the end is the worst problem with the proposition that what we need to do is write more letters, make more metrics, indulge in a fetishistic mimicry of “science” in the evaluation of our peers. Not only would such a change dramatically amplify the uncompensated chore of writing assessments and evaluations (rules are like rabbits: require ten letters and I guarantee you in a decade, the same logic will grow the requirement to twelve, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five), it goes in entirely the wrong direction. Outside letters are already a form of outsourcing: they relieve faculty of the burden of having to become literate enough in the work of their colleagues that they can judge for themselves its value and integrity, and therefore simultaneously relieve us all of the obligation to communicate and disseminate our work in a manner that anticipates and welcomes those collegial readings.

If Chance wants to know whether to trust those adjectives, to believe in the professionalism of his profession, to know whether he’s the only person who invests time and effort in such letters or merely one in a legion, the first step is not to build a graven idol out of statistics, to believe that a bigger N is a magic path to truth and trust. The first step is a more humane gesture: to learn to read for oneself, as much as one can, the work of any colleague you’ve been asked to evaluate, and to build a culture that expects academic work to provide signposts for such readings. That’s work too, but it’s a more gratifying kind that doesn’t require putting our human sensibilities and intellectual abilities in a blind trust, yoked to a process that must be made as remote as possible from the ways we actually work and know one another.

Posted in Academia | 4 Comments

Those Who Won’t Teach

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Timothy Burke

The various distinctions that institutions of higher education like to draw between themselves are sometimes important and sometimes true (not necessarily both at once). And sometimes those distinctions hold some weight outside of higher education, among prospective students and their parents, or in wider public domains.

But just as often “professors” are the same everywhere in the public imagination, and “universities” are more or less one big lump that spans from Harvard to community colleges. So the policies of administrators and the actions of faculty in any given institution can end up having a general effect on everyone in the profession.

Which is why I care more than I should about the story of a journalism student at SUNY Oswego who was the target of severe punitive action by the Oswego administration for what was essentially a bungled class assignment. As reported by Gawker off of documents from the free-speech organization FIRE, the student was asked to write “a profile on a public figure”. He decided to write about the Oswego hockey coach and reached out via email to several of the coaches of other teams in the division, handling the initial contact badly in several ways.

FIRE is more interested in the free-speech side of the case, I think. What I think matters is what it says about how Oswego’s administration sees education, its alleged reason for existing.

Looking at it as a teacher, I see three things that I’d mark down and try to teach the student after seeing this assignment or hearing about how he was going about it. First, he misidentified himself by implying he was doing the profile for the public affairs office, where he was interning, and as he found, the consequences of a misidentification can be fairly serious for the credibility of the writer and the completion of a story assignment. Second, he should have called rather than contacted via email, for a host of reasons. Third, he was clumsy in the way that he tried to signal that he wasn’t just writing a puff piece.

But that’s why students pay tuition and attend classes and do assignments: to be taught how to do it right. The Oswego administration decided instead that the ego of their hockey coach or the inviolability of their administrative demeanor or something else was far more important than teaching students.

It’s easy to dismiss this as one institution doing it wrong–basically, the “It’s Chinatown, Jake” approach to witnessing harm being done. But this sort of story ends up affecting us all in two ways. First, feeding the cynical fear of a generation that higher education is just rent-seeking, a credentials factory. Second, it is precisely this kind of clumsiness that is going to help even the weakest versions of online education make the case that what large universities offer is at a minimum no better than the wholly online product and is many cases superior, because at least there’s none of this kind of nonsense going on.

Posted in Academia | 3 Comments

The Folkloric First Amendment

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Timothy Burke

One curious part of online discourse almost since the beginning of the Internet has been the way that the First Amendment figures as an iconic artifact at certain recurrent moments, almost as much as the comparison-to-Nazism described by Godwin’s Law.

The most curious of all the curious recurrences is a brandishing of the First Amendment as a guarantee of freedom not just from government restriction but from social or cultural critique. See for an example the case of one Denise Helms, whose racist comments on Facebook have been circulating around the Internet. The defense of Helms by a few commentators often takes the form that the First Amendment guarantees her right to say what she said, so everybody should just shut up about it.

That’s a very common kind of structure of response in these situations. This is curious for two reasons. The first is, of course, that it is untrue in every possible sense. It is not what the First Amendment says nor is it even a coherent propositional extension of what it says. You cannot assert that the First Amendment protects the right to speak freely except if your free speech is a critique of someone else’s speech act.

More deeply, and you can see it in what Helms said when interviewed in television, is the defense of the particular speech act as profoundly inconsequential and yet also so passionately felt that it is not explained as a mistake or exaggeration. “It was a joke”, or “I don’t really feel exactly like that” or “Calling someone a nigger doesn’t mean I’m racist” and so on. This is embedded in the idea that one has the right not only to say whatever one wants without anyone replying or criticizing but that the First Amendment is a guarantee of hermeneutical freedom too, that it is the ultimate in statutory Humpty Dumptyism: words mean what I say and say what I mean, and no one can tell me otherwise.

So Helms, or the many who have preceded her in similar moments of argument and dispute online and offline, defines free speech as speech that is completely free of social context and completely free of semantic relation to culture, history or language. It is a kind of folkloric echo of Randian objectivism applied to the First Amendment, but of course, this view can never explain one crucial fact: then why bother to speak at all? To whom are you speaking? How could you expect anyone to understand you if your words must be freed from what most listeners would commonly understand them to mean?

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

The State of the Art: 500px and Flickr as a Window Into Social Media (II)

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Timothy Burke

II. Algorithmic Culture: Code and Agency

New media theorists and digital humanists, most prominently Alexander Galloway, have been writing over the last decade about “algorithmic culture”, about practices, interpretations and readings that arise within and around algorithmic media. Galloway often tries to chart a path out of the typical binaries of bad or good interfaces and implementations, away from the debate over whether algorithms and AI are a boot stamping on the human face forever. With less theoretical savvy and detail, I’m going to try to do the same in this analysis of 500px and Flickr. In particular, I’m going to try and work within the approach described very well in Chapter Four of N. Katherine Hayles’ new book How We Think, in which she charts “a complex syncopation between conscious and unconscious perceptions for humans and the integration of surface displays and algorithmic procedures for machines”. (Hayles, How We Think, p. 13) Along the way, I’m going to compare these sites expressly to massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, to show how similar the design imaginaries and their attendant contradictions and crises are across a broad range of algorithmic media.

How It Works

500px is the most interesting of the two sites in this sense, in part because of attention to interface and audience I described in my first post in this series. Flickr’s rating system is fairly rudimentary and linear: users can favorite a picture, they can comment on a picture, and the total views of pictures are tracked. An algorithm that relates favors, comments and views ranks photos as more or less “interesting”, and in turn, “interestingness” is used to identify which pictures should be highlighted in the area of the site called Explore.

500px uses somewhat similar mechanics to move images between filters called “Fresh”, “Upcoming” and “Popular”, and to move them within those designations. They have added two ways to rank: a “like” button, also known as a “vote”, and a “favorite” button, which filters the image into a user’s personal archive. In addition, as at Flickr, you can choose to follow another user, but at 500px, the activity of the users you follow fills the filter called “Flow”–you see not only what they post but also what they have voted and favored. 500px users can also comment on an image.

At 500px, votes and favors influence a measure called Pulse, which is visible on thumbnails from a mouseover. Pulse is a highly engineered algorithim: it leaps quickly above 50 from one combination of a favor plus a vote (you learn quickly that this is what it means to have a 59.7 Pulse) and then accumulates more and more slowly as it approaches 90 (out of 100), making a move past 99.4 exceedingly difficult. A photo moves from Fresh to Upcoming to Popular as it climbs in Pulse. Once it reaches its peak rating, it begins to slowly decline in Pulse at a steady temporal pace until it hits 50, reverting again to Fresh in time. (If an image is ever selected as an Editors’ Choice, it retains that filter for the rest of its time on the site.) An image can continue to garner favors and votes after its Pulse starts ebbing, but this will at best slow its recursion to the average.

However, photographers also have a measure that cumulates in a linear manner, called Affection. This does not decline over time: it simply gets bigger and bigger as the user’s images gain favor and votes. (It does not move from gaining or losing followers.) It only goes down if an image is disliked or if the user deletes an image that had likes and favors on it. A high Affection entitles you to dislike images: most users do not have access to the option.

Even if the site designers were secretive about the intent behind this design (they’re not) it would be fairly easy to see the intent. If photographs accumulated Pulse in a linear fashion, the Popular filter would be a largely static register of the most popular images ever uploaded to the site. (You can get a version of this, in some ways, by looking at which images are bestsellers in the Market tab.) This would be visually dull, and more importantly, discourage any new entrants to the site hoping to get attention for their own images (or even discourage established users with high Affection from hoping that newer images of their own might ever make it to the top of Popular). Pulse imposes the rule of time on what would otherwise be a photographic oligarchy. Virtually every competitive mechanism in massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft have been subjected to similar mechanics of decay and reversion, for the same reason: advantages which accumulate in a linear fashion and which are never disrupted or restarted quickly kill competition, deter new participation, and make the game dull for everyone, even the winners.

The Playing Out of Algorithmic Design

The recognition of a mimesis to the recurrent crisis of capitalist accumulation has long been noted by critics and designers. What I’m concerned more with here is how the algorithmic regulation of competition plays out in lived practice. Several issues leap out right away. First, that there is a tension between Pulse and Affection that can’t be resolved by the algorithm or the design. Users (or in games, players) have to decide what matters most: the signs of long-term accumulation of reputation capital (some coded into the design, others outside of the frame of the site or software) or the more variable algorithmic signs of prowess and success. You could easily create a sort of super-stat that measured Affection against participant-time and number-of-photos to distinguish the photographer who has very high Affection density per image from the one who has high Affection simply from the sheer volume of images and length of time participating.

Pulse moves palpably to the will of the viewer: jumping it is a minigame in its own right, a nibble of cheese for the mouse that presses the levers. Affection moves glacially, as much a measure of how long a user has been contributing to 500px as it is of the variable acclaim of his or her peers. Affection sorts the site into a kind of social hierarchy, whereas a high Pulse for an individual image is notionally democratic, waiting for the one picture that sparks the hivemind.

The culture of practice doesn’t play out so neatly. Upon uploading a picture, it appears in Fresh. The volume of global uploads is such that any given image has around 5-15 seconds at almost any time of the day to stay on the first page of Fresh, and perhaps no more than 2-3 minutes in the first three or four pages. After that point, the only way for a user to discover that picture is either by looking at the photographer’s overall output or by seeing it in their Flow, where postings from followed users will appear. If a user is following a lot of photographers, then a new image will also move out of view quickly. In a user’s own profile, the default display is also temporal, meaning the first images that a new users posts will almost certainly not be seen by anyone unless they are extraordinarily spectacular or the user latter establishes sufficient reputation capital that other participants dig down into the archive and find images.

Moreover, the designers had to make a crucial adjustment from the outset: images that are tagged as having adult content have an algorithmically suppressed Pulse. The central justification for this move is that they are in aggregate the most likely images to be favored and voted and would dominate Popular if they were not adjusted, which would then change the entire presentation and purpose of the site and very likely drive away other photographers of all kinds. Which of course then creates an alternative motive for users to not tag their nudes or erotica as adult, which requires other users to notify the community managers, which creates a need for a penalty to users who fail to tag appropriately, which creates a possibility of malicious false notification or for that matter debates about whether an image is “really” a nude or erotica.

The conceptual point of both Pulse and Affection is otherwise strikingly different for different cultures of use within the site. A successful commercial photographer with an established business, like wedding photography, who is using 500px is likely seeing it first as a hosting service for a portfolio and a form of advertisement. Both Pulse and Affection are additional rewards for such a user, much as Yelp or Zagat reviews can help a restaurant, but they’re not necessary. A commercial photographer who is seeking work, say as a nature photographer or photojournalist, might cite Affection and Pulse as a part of a resume. And both measures also make it more likely that a photograph might be purchased in the site’s internal marketplace, which is good for both the photographer and the designers.

An amateur like myself with no real commercial aspirations sees Pulse in particular very differently. Pulse is like the digital camera itself: a rapid iterative feedback loop that teaches, a crowdsourced mode of instruction. But just as Ian Bogost has pointed out that games teach mostly about their own procedural content, so too does Pulse teach me as much about the algorithmic culture of 500px as it does about photography.

Here’s my highest Pulse image so far:

I don’t think it is in any sense my best photograph, but I understood why it attracted attention. The flower is a prominent subject even in a thumbnail, the bokeh in the background is attractively composed in relation to the foreground subject, and the pollen is crisply in focus and colorful.

Here’s my next highest:

Here I made a conscious decision to process the photograph for more attention. I like the composition and my focal point, but with ordinary pumpkin colors it seemed banal to me. So I desaturated the image some to create a different mood. Users at 500px seemed to respond very well to that choice.

Other experiments have taught me similar lessons. I took what I think is a fairly dull photo of a woodland path and dialed up the saturation of the green hues while processing it to dull the look of the path itself. I think it looks fairly lurid but it grabbed some attention when posted. Other photos that I like, on the other hand, languish deeper in my profile: posted too early in my participation, not grabby enough in a thumbnail, or so common in their composition and subject at the site that their technical merits hardly matter.

But working the algorithms of the site is also a game that has nothing to do with photography, and all users, whatever their reasons for uploading content, clearly play that game, perhaps in particular the most casual users who use the site for archiving personal photographs. Time of day, the random chance of how many photos are pouring into Fresh when there’s an upload (someone dumping thirty banal vacation shots of their buddies at a beachside bar can bury a sublime photo of a landscape by one of the site’s most prominent participants), juxtaposition of images, all of them matter and structure the dance of clicks and views and algorithmic workings.

More importantly, the social mechanisms that the site enables almost regretfully play a key role, as they do at Flickr. A vote for a picture carries no intrinsic social weight–and for that matter neither does a dislike, which is a persistent issue at the site. I can like a photo (or if I were sufficiently Affectionated, dislike one) without being unveiled to the owner of the image. If I favor the photo or follow the photographer, my user name is attached to the action. But users often want a photographer to know more immediately if they’ve voted or favorited an image. Hence a common comment is “V + F!!!” or something of the sort.

What this enables, not by algorithmic design, is an economy of reciprocity. And again, this is a common structure in algorithmic culture, wherever it is used to construct a competitive relation between objects and actions. In World of Warcraft or other MMOs that have measures like reputation or experience that can be gained by defeating other players, the mechanics immediately lend themselves to reciprocal conspiracy, in which players coordinate an industrialized, efficient exchange of consensual victory and defeat to raise each other’s scores far more rapidly than people who are playing “for real”, requiring in turn a mechanism that provides for diminishing returns for defeating the same person sequentially. Which in turn just leads to many players regarding the entire activity of play as a larger scale version of the same managed competition, shaved down to the most efficient and algorithmic procedures for accumulation, dumping off everything else as a kind of hermeneutical and philosophical dross.

Algorithmic design approaches people like a Turing Test in reverse, an attempt to truncate them into codeable entities. And human users both rise to this entirely too well, with the collective ruthlessness of a virus seeking exploits and unintended effects, and subvert such truncation, finding ways to reinsert human aspiration and culture where they’ve been intentionally smoothed out of the workings.

Reciprocity rings at 500px and Flickr on one hand run almost like a moral economy alongside the meritocratic hierarchies built by the algorithms: some users work reciprocity hard and instrumentally to pump up each other’s reputation and images (and at some tipping point both reputation and images start to become self-sustaining social facts). Which often enrages both the “real” meritocrats and the aspirants who are trying to rise “honestly” through the genuine acclaim of others. It also affects the culture of commentary: very few comments express any constructive criticism or any detailed evaluation beyond “Great capture” (an especially silly comment when it is directed at both good and not-so-good images built through extensive composition in Photoshop). Even favoring with no comment creates an almost silent expectation of reciprocity. But any comment that is not an efficient offer of reciprocity also conveys some other human sociality, some possibility of connection beyond the algorithmic, as do the narratives or framing information that photographers offer with their images. All of which is complicated still further by the richly international nature of the site: “V + F” is a lingua franca in part because more detailed critiques would need translation into Spanish, French, Russian, Czech, Chinese, Hindi and many other languages to create dialogues between many of the most active contributors.

Algorithmic Eyes and Big Data

As your own favorites accumulate in a personal archive, you learn something about your own photographic eye, your readings of culture. But you also are retrained by the accumulation of images and your consumption of the totality of the site’s archive. An image that seems exceptional in its beauty and composition at first sight and would remain so if you stopped there and never looked again at the site becomes a cliche when something like it is seen again and again and again in the uploads of a hundred users. But in the best sense of meritocracy or evolution or capitalism, that same image can still be redeemed as wondrous if on the one thousandth iteration, a photographer of exceptional skill and vision offers their own version of the cliche.

The “big data” of an archive like 500px or Flickr shows patterns that are mined first and best through direct experience of navigating the archive. The user’s eye, clicking rapidly across and through the site’s interface, reveals structure and repetition but is also retrained and reoriented by that revelation. If I was setting out to be a successful commercial photographer and using 500px as an autodidactical tool, I would discover first many of the things that the standard pedagogy of photography tries to teach and second I would discover many things that an art historian or anthropologist of media might tell me about.

For example, spending a few hours watching thousands of images coming in as Fresh, rating some of them and tracking others, most users might recognize that successful images mostly conform to some of the basic norms of composition and craft in photography, whether they come from amateurs, professionals or people just sharing family and vacation pictures. Issues that are out-of-focus where they should be sharp, images that have multiple or no clear subject, images that don’t follow the rule-of-thirds without a reason for not following it, do not fare well. A viewer with no prior knowledge of these concepts might nevertheless begin to intuit them because of the pace and volume of digitized, algorithimic culture.

A few days or weeks of participation and most viewers could identify genres and tropes and subjects that get strong ratings from viewers without any knowledge of the history or circulation of those images. A list of image types often selected out by viewers might look like this:

Misty forests, especially with strong color contrasts or unusual color schemes
Sunsets, especially over water or agricultural fields
Pictures of circular bales of hay
Insect macros that contain narratives (the insect in motion, two insects having sex) or that offer dramatic color contrasts
Flower macros, especially of unusual flowers or flowers with intricate structures
Pictures of animals, particularly animals from the tropics, particularly animals from the tropics in the tropics
Star trails, especially over dramatic natural objects
Ultra wide-angle lens landscapes, especially those with small single buildings or people in the distance
Piers, paths, walls falling away into distance with leading lines pointing towards a distant dramatic object
Non-Western peoples in folk dress or ‘ethnographic’ poses
Soft-focus portraiture of women (nude and otherwise) in natural settings
Macro photography of water or liquid in motion
Still lives with strong color schemes and extremely sharp focus
Photoshop compositions of figures, landscapes and objects to exotic or fantastic effect
Small boats either floating or fallen apart on water or at the shoreline with strong color or textual contrasts
Birds in flight, especially raptors or large waterfowl
Spiral or fractal structures in architecture, usually shot vertically either looking directly up or directly down

And so on. All of which are cliches or tropes for a reason, because of their visual possibilities and the range of both aesthetic and technical understanding they can express. A more dedicated student of photography might also notice that certain strong genres of existing photography often don’t fare quite as well at 500px (but do pretty well at Flickr): B&W street photography, for example, doesn’t seem to climb very often to the top of Popular.

Someone reading for paratext might also notice that images with notes, stories or evocative titles often do better than those that do not. And certainly someone wise to the culture of the site itself would see where and how the workings of social networks and histories of presence within the site play a role.

The thing that’s new about algorithmic culture in this sense is partly what Haynes discusses in her book: that the “syncopation” it enables and produces is both showing us all something about how we already see and make and teaching us new ways to compose and design what we see and make: we discover in and are discovered by a site like 500px. We see the patterns, and the patterns teach us to make more of them, but also to remix them, deviate from them, improve upon them. We are never the solitary romantic artist or interpreter in that discovery or that creation: the algorithm is our co-agent, letting us, making us, traverse and annotate and generate a cultural technics that is so much vaster and richer and knowable than anything we’ve seen before, and is also more “us” than ever, more of us making and seeing and curating. But also making us see that there really are people (more of them than ever before) who compose and see and create differently and better than us: because the other category of image that often vaults to the top at 500px is the image that no one has seen before and is yet instantly familiar the first second that we encounter it, as if we have been waiting for it all along.

As we have been. Not just the us that clicks, but the we that includes our algorithms, made by us and making us. Managing our cultural spaces and unmanaging them, ordering them and sending them tumbling downhill towards strange attractors of all sorts. We spill out over the code infrastructures and interfaces–and that spilling, excessive us includes our technics, our machines, our programs, our pictures.

Posted in Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System, Pictures from an Institution | 1 Comment

Akins of Tomorrow

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I posted a while back on Facebook about Todd Akin’s statements on abortion and rape, but the subject is worth returning to this morning.

Among the post-mortems is the proposition that extreme anti-abortion sentiments cost the Republicans two Senate seats that were theirs to win, and that the Republicans will have to have better discipline about expressing such sentiments in the future.

This is no doubt true as a reading of what happened in those races, but it’s a serious mistake to act as if Akin, Mourdock and others on the right expressing the view that rape doesn’t cause pregnancies, or that pregnancies following rapes are the will of God, and other variations thereof are just being indiscreet, stupid or unbalanced. Or that they are just an idiosyncratic and extreme fringe of the argument against abortion rights. What they say about rape and pregnancy is a an almost necessary outcome of the baseline case against choice. They cannot get away from these sentiments without conceding on the fundamentals of their beliefs. The proposition that rape by definition cannot make a woman pregnant, and the even uglier inference hidden inside of that, that a pregnant woman wasn’t raped, is a desperate and conscious attempt to get out of the trap they’ve made for themselves, not a product of incapacity or derangement.

The trap is this: if you concede that it is legitimate for a woman to choose in the aftermath of a rape to terminate a pregnancy because that pregnancy extends the trauma and violation of the attack, you concede that women are entitled to the control of their own bodies, minds and lives including pregnancy. Game over. Because there’s no way to firewall off rape as so utterly unlike all the other circumstances in which a woman might decide that she cannot carry a pregnancy to term, all the other feelings of trauma or violation or risk or burden or incapacity or fraility or self-protection or need or planning or autonomy. You concede that it’s a woman’s prerogative in one case, you are open to many others, if not all others–and you are conceding the inflexible declaration that an embryo is a fully human subject with full human rights. (Because no one anywhere would argue that anyone is personally entitled to kill a fully human subject just to manage our own autonomy and emotional wholeness, or to bring closure to trauma.)

Don’t expect people like Todd Akin to get away from their views on rape and abortion. They can’t get away until they adopt a far less absolutist view of the underlying principles. Once it’s conceded that women can choose, the argument is only about what the circumstantial rather than fundamental restrictions to their choices can be.

Posted in Politics | 14 Comments

What Could Change

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Lest anyone think from my essays yesterday that I didn’t vote, or that I don’t think it’s important to vote for Obama, a quick note.

1) I can’t think of anything that Romney would likely improve, even in areas where I think very little can change, or where I think the changes are largely beyond the power of national leaders to easily affect. (For example, I think there’s some fundamental changes in the global political economy happening now that can’t really be countermanded by any national leadership.) One of the oddities of Romney’s campaign that neither Obama or many of his supporters ever really called attention to is that Romney’s campaign ads repeatedly talked about Obama’s promises of “hope” and “change” and how neither were achieved. This clearly implies that Romney believes in making good on both–but in none of his (many, shifting and contradictory) policy commitments or his rhetoric does he remotely seem to endorse the soaring aspirations that vaulted Obama into office. Obama promised a post-partisan politics full of meaning, promised to overcome culture wars, promised to make headway in making government policies that meaningfully tackled and resolved issues of enormous importance to the future of the United States and the world. Romney has no interest in any of those objectives, which is what “hope” and “change” stood for. It’s very strange to complain that your rival failed to live up to promises when you expressly reject what he promised. When I have to choose between someone who might make some things better and someone who is guaranteed to make them worse, my choice is simple.

2) I have no idea who I’m voting for with Romney, really. With Bush the Lesser, you knew in a way that you were voting for the strongmen that he surrounded himself with–if you could have voted for Louis XIII, you would have understood you were voting for Richelieu. With Romney, who knows: he is whatever works the system of the moment. Arch-conservative in Iowa, moderate at the first debate, America-firster when speaking in Ohio, remorseless outsourcer when heading Bain. Obama is a known quantity, and pretty much what I expected him to be ideologically (a pragmatist and moderate) if not what I hoped for in his political skills and ability to achieve his objectives. People who can be whatever they have to be for their own political gain are scary people.

3) Supreme Court. Just saying.

4) Most importantly, on a massive slew of culture-war issues, I believe the choice is unmistakeably clear, potent and vitally important. Things will get much worse for people I care about–and for myself–in a Romney Administration. They have considerable potential to get better in an Obama Administration. While we’ll be living for some time, perhaps all our lives, with the unresolvable nature of these struggles in the best-case scenario, the worst case is bad indeed.

5) While the inaction of Obama and his chief advisors on the oversight of financial capitalism drives me nuts, I think he’s far more likely to make some progress towards economic justice and reform in other areas of policy. Who knows, maybe he’ll finally stop letting the foxes guard the henhouse as well. Romney, on the other hand, would just dispense with the fiction that the foxes are on guard and just go ahead and slaughter up the remaining poultry for a vulpine orgy.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

The State of the Art: 500px and Flickr as a Window Into Social Media (I)

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been exploring Flickr and 500px a lot over the last month, partly as a way of sharpening my own growing interest in photography and visuality. Both sites, however, are also fantastic case studies of the evolving character of social media and digital culture, and my examination has done a lot to sharpen my sense of what’s wrong, what’s right and what’s interesting about the state of the art in social media.

I. Interface, Energy and Sociality

Flickr has been called out recently by tech writers for its moribund, sluggish response to the rise of Instagram, 500px, Smugmug and other photo-publishing and photo-archiving services. Flickr still has a huge community of users and there is still a tremendous amount of daily activity at the site. As an archive of images, it still has no rivals in large measure simply because it’s been around as long as it has without major traumatic changes to its functionality or accessibility.

However, it’s easy to see why both commenters and users (both at Flickr and in other communities) see Flickr as dying or stagnant. “See” is the operant verb here. Before you ever dig down to the myriad of groups at Flickr to find that all but a small number of them have had no discussion or administrative oversight for months or years, you can see it in the default visual design.

All the crucial functionalities you might seek in a visual publishing platform that also serves as social media are present somewhere in that interface: links to other platforms; the ability to customize sets and collections of material; user control over levels of access to material; multiple ways for users to comment upon, bookmark and curate the material of other users. But then look at 500px.

Most of the same functionalities are present somewhere in 500px’s interface, with one huge exception (to which I’ll return shortly). But 500px’s designers understand that the content of the site is visual, so the user controls and publishing tools are hidden “under the hood”. The pictures control the interface and the interface’s presentation shifts upon each reload, creating an endlessly dynamic relation between the images that creates an exciting meta-image: it allows a viewer to find surprising associations between images, to see each picture in a new way each time it is encountered. This is true whether I’m looking at my Flow, which is built up from the activity of users that I’ve chosen to follow (the images they’ve liked, they’ve favorited, they’ve posted), looking at Fresh (new postings), looking at Popular (highly rated), or Editors’ Choice (hand-selected images).

500px’s sensitivity to visual design might be attributed to the fact that its creators are skilled photographers, or to the declared central goal of the site (to provide top-flight photographers with a publishing platform with a built-in payment system), or to its creation in a more recent and bandwidth-intensive era. Or conversely, to the fact that Flickr was an accidental offshoot of a design process that wasn’t intended to produce a photo-sharing service and has since undergone several changes of ownership and configuration that have prevented any possible comprehensive redesign of the site’s appearance.

The causes are less important than the consequences. The first consequence is a recursive mimesis: 500px’s look intuitively persuades a user that the site is devoted to rich, spectacular visuality, and the spectacular visuality of the good images is enhanced both by the way that they appear in isolation and in concord with others. 500px’s interface automatically associates everything posted to the site together via a single channel (Fresh) and mixes together everything that a user’s hand-picked group of other users bookmarks or likes (Flow).

You can see the same thing on Flickr, but it takes going two or three clicks deep via Explore. It’s not a default gateway into the site itself–the story at Flickr is your photostream, not Flickr as a whole. When I go to 500px, I often spend time just looking before I go into my own profile to tinker or survey activity on my pictures. When I go to Flickr, I might occasionally choose to go to Explore to see what’s new and interesting, but I’m as likely to go to my Contacts or to the groups I follow. I don’t ever see images with the same sense of dynamic presentation and juxtaposition: they all appear in little boxes. Flickr is the visual equivalent of a particularly static and uninvolving 9-panel grid comic-book layout put up alongside a dynamic comic-book layout by Jim Steranko or J.H. Williams.

The visuality of 500px lends it speed as well: users can shift between different collections of images quickly and down to the level of individual images or the collected works of a single photographer and back again with a minimum of clicks and a very intuitive interface design. Getting around Flickr is much slower and much less intuitive: seeing content without a specific predetermined search takes much more understanding of the site, not just its interface but its community and culture. It is much easier to simply look at 500px. The interactivity of the site is often a goad for traversing its visuality: ah! there is another great picture, click “like” and oooh! yet another, favorite it. The results of your own curation of other people’s work into Favorites are a thrill, like traversing a private museum. Looking at your favorites on Flickr is a much less visually rewarding experience.

And yet, if you want to go deeper, below the surface, there is almost nothing to 500px: it’s all image and no scaffold. Visuality is the alpha and omega of its community: exchanges between users are limited to the comments at the bottom of photos and to a very badly designed support forum that is palpably both an afterthought and a reluctant concession. By design (both in the aesthetic sense and the business-plan sense) words and all they enable don’t belong at 500px. Flickr, on the other hand, has as much room for words as users would like to claim. Though many groups and fora have gone relatively silent, there are still areas of strong activity, where users talk to each other using both words and pictures. (I find the group Photography Critique particularly interesting and useful, for one example.)

This difference both affects the kinds of sociality that are possible at the respective sites and reflects the kinds of sociality that they aspire to. 500px was founded with the clear intent to help photographers sell their images, either directly off the site or to build reputation capital for their professional work. In this it has so far been successful, from what I can see. If I were looking for a wedding photographer today and money was no object, I’d be able to find a good ten to thirty from 500px who were incredibly exciting and distinctive in their work. (For example, the Israeli photographer Victor Vertsner, whose work I could easily favorite in its entirety.) In pursuit of this constituency, 500px’s interface is much less friendly to copying or reusing the work of its users, and it has incorporated a sales mechanism into the core design, unlike Flickr’s rear-guard relationship to Getty Images.

A richer set of community tools and platforms for communication at 500px could aggregate, collate and connect users in a much greater variety of ways–and in so doing, subvert the desire to produce separation between the commercially viable photographers and everyone else, as well as allow words to ‘work’ the images in ways that run counter to the site’s aesthetic objectives and identity. All social media communities that have hierarchies or intentional separations between aspirational groups within the community run into trouble about the management of those separations where the groups overlap.

As 500px has become more popular, it has drawn three other communities: amateurs with no commercial ambitions (like me) who are hoping to learn and improve via posting and viewing; people who take and post pictures from their own lives and experiences and use the platform to share this documentary record with family and friends; and a more shadowy group that uses such sites to deposit and circulate copyright-violating or illicit images. (What complicates the fourth group’s activities is that one group of commercially-viable photographers on the site are creators of original erotic photography, whose work is subject to a complex set of filters and disincentives. More on this in the next post of my series.)

The amateurs who are learning benefit from the much more rapid iterative loops within the site’s interface design: it is in that sense like a digital camera itself, showing you almost right away how images attract or disinterest their viewers. But to learn in that fashion, they need the precious commodity of the Internet age, attention. The more that the non-commercial amateurs use the site’s mechanisms to draw attention, the more potentially rivalrous they are with the people who need that attention to make a living. At the other end, the amateurs who hope to be seen as photographers have an equal felt need to separate themselves from the people just sharing their vacation shots and baby pictures–but for that group, the attention provided by the site can be both a source of amusement in its own right and a way to make social connections to strangers.

500px has had several implementations of a “dislike” button that I believe they may feel helps to manage these rivalrous borderlands and keep the site’s identity clearly focused on their core constituency. The problem, as always, is that social media designers believe that sociality follows from design. Instead, as Flickr demonstrates, it follows from history, usage, custom and culture, from the actual users in the actual situated lives that a site attracts–both those it attracts on purpose and those it attracts by accident. Design and interface are the material preconditions of social practice in digital media, but once a sociality takes its emergent shape in a new site, it can have a remarkably adaptive, plastic and durable spirit that subverts, protests or ignores attempts by designers to push and pull it where they want it through recoding and refurbishing. At some point, every successful social media site needs to hire more sociologists and anthropologists and fewer coders if it wants to understand what it has become and might yet be.

Posted in Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Pictures from an Institution | Comments Off on The State of the Art: 500px and Flickr as a Window Into Social Media (I)