Blogging, writing and creativity

I recently came across this piece on the Internet by Clay Shirky. Clay Shirky is in the category of people popularly called “net evangelist”. Quoting from it:

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

Ah ahem… excuse me?

If one believed authors like Dr. Shirky, it would seem that giving creative tools to the majority automatically produces great results. This is part of a larger fallacy: that people love to create cool stuff, and therefore, if they’re given the tools to create great stuff, great stuff will be created. And that, somehow, indulging in an act of “creativity”, however silly or prosaic, is superior to indulging in an act of “consumption”.

But is that really true? I’ll discuss this question by looking at “blogging” in the context of good writing, which has been hailed by some as a new social phenomenon, a new way of unleashing the hitherto suppressed creativity of the masses, or, as Dr. Shirky so fondly says in his write-up, a new way of recording and utilizing the “cognitive surplus” of the masses.

Dr. Shirky isn’t alone, though. Other optimistic statements include:

The single most important difference between
the Internet circa 1999 and the Internet circa today is the explosion of user-generated
creativity—from blogs, to podcasts, to videocasts, to mashups, the
Internet today is a space of extraordinary creativity.

This one’s in the book Code, version 2 (Page 194), by Professor Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law Professor and founder of Creative Commons.

What does it take to be a good writer?

What distinguishes good writing from bad writing? Lots of things, but a not-unimportant distinction is that good writing is meant to be read. A good piece of writing confers some advantage to those reading it — whether it is entertainment, information, or experience. A bad piece of writing, on the other hand, doesn’t need to cater to standards of readability.

This means that good writing should, by nature, be “reader-friendly”, it should allow the reader to enter the text, understand it, feel it, appreciate it. Of course, every piece of writing has its natural target audience. If you’re writing a to-be-bestselling novel, you’re targeting a very large potential audience, so you’ve got to create an engaging experience for a large number of people. If you’re writing a cooking guide, you’re catering to all the wannabe cooks in the world, so your words have to make sense to, and provide useful instructions to, those cooks. If you’re writing a self-help book, you’ve got to reach out to the emotional and other needs of the potential audience of the book.

So, a good writer needs to keep in mind what his or her readers really want, or seek, from the piece of writing. In this sense, good writing isn’t just about having something to say, and putting it down on paper. Rather, it involves a process of winnowing down what one has to say so as to give something (information, entertainment, or experience) to the people reading it. So to create a piece of good writing, one needs to step into the shoes (and minds) of the target audience.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that one cannot write good stuff for oneself — it is very much possible, but the writer still needs to view himself/herself both as a writer and as a reader. In other words, good writing, at the very least, necessitates something that goes beyond the need to simply write.

A closely related feature of good writing is, in general, its ability to transcend space, time and context. Of course, not every subject of writing lends itself to the possibility of transcending context — for instance, a text in category theory (a branch of mathematics) is naturally embedded within a certain cognitive context. But in so far as is possible, good writing allows “reuse”. So, a great book on category theory will transcend the specific context in which it was written (namely, a single person writing a book to help with a specific personal goal) and reach out to people seeking to learn category theory at different places, different times, with different degrees of prior knowledge, and with different goals.

What is blogging for?

Literally, “blog” is short for “weblog”, which is, loosely, a log of personal activity, that happens to reside on the web. It’s an online version of a personal diary. Not all blogs are in the form of personal diaries, but this still dominates the general purpose of blogging — getting on paper (or, in this case, the web) the events, experiences and reflections one wants to record. The key element here is the freedom to record things the way one wants, rather than having to conform to standards or ethics. So, for instance, I can blog about how I fought with my girlfriend, what happened in a lecture, or how my trip to the beach went. There’s a strong “I” element to blogging.

From this viewpoint, blogging is about writing things because one feels the need to write them; not so much for writing things that need to be read. Arguably, this remains true, even if the blog is open for anybody to read. In fact, most of the blogs that my friends and acquaintances keep, are largely designed either for their own use, or for a select group of people who may be close friends or within the same social circle. This blog and this blog are just some examples.

At the risk of over-simplification: while writing is hard because it forces a person to transcend his or her local context and produce something that can be read or understood, blogging is the very opposite: it allows a person to enforce and assume his or her local context. The structure of blogging, as essentially a time-based enterprise (somebody blogs, some people comment, then another post comes up), further reinforces this.

This isn’t to say that all local, time-based information is bad. But blogging tends to reinforce the local even at times when it isn’t necessary. Thus, we see bloggers often use acronyms, abbreviations and slang that are intelligible only to a small group of people (for whom the blog was intended) and valid only for short periods of time.

So does every blog qualify as a piece of creativity, a positive utilization of the “cognitive surplus” of the people? Let me take that to an extreme. Does every piece of chatter, gossip, every scribble or doodle, every remark, qualify as creativity? If yes, then blogging may be creativity, but it is by far a tiny drop in the ocean of creativity. And if every piece of chatter and gossip does not qualify for creativity, then, how is blogging really different?

A stark truth is that writing of any kind, which involves systematically recording events, opinions, biases, or what not, is a challenging task, and not many are cut out for it. Yes, I’m sure everybody has the inner talent, but not everybody is willing to or keen to take the effort. Blogging could, in principle, allow people to start out small, and then gradually improve the quality of their writing to produce stunning pieces. In practice, the culture of blogging does not exactly encourage people to move up the ladder of quality, usefulness and good writing.

The incentive system in blogging

People respond to incentives. This is a core principle that economists have unanimous agreement about, and it is a principle that pervades the thinking in any discipline or practice that involves dealing with people. So let’s apply it to blogging. What are the incentives in the blogging system?

Arguably, blogging is a noncommercial, or “sharing”-based activity. This means that people blog out of their natural instinct to share, do good, and feel part of a community. Let’s assume that a majority of bloggers come with such motives (though, of course, people who blog for money also have financial incentives). So what are the metrics that show how great a blog is? Wait, let’s think.

The first metric is comments. Blogs usually have this feature called comments, which allows anybody (yes, anybody, though in some cases, comments may be moderated by the blog-writer) to write just about anything as a comment on the blog. It’s not in general clear that the better blogs get more comments, but comments do tell the blog-writer (and others who chance upon the blog) that people have read the blog and chosen to respond. That’s positive feedback for somebody who wants to “share” and be part of a “community”.

So why do people comment on blogs, and does it reflect on the blog’s quality?

• People comment to see their name out there, under somebody else’s blog. In other words, comments allow one to have the pleasure of mileage on somebody else’s effort.
• People comment to get links back to their own website. This is the back-scratching theory all over again. True, search engines don’t follow links in comments, but people do.
• People comment when they find something outrageous in the blog, or they have a sharp point of disagreement with the blog.
• People comment out of a friendly reciprocity. This is particularly seen in the small blogs meant for friends; here, commenting is a lot like saying “Hi” or “How d’ya do” or “I read your post”. In the language of transactional analysis, it’s a “stroke”.
• People comment to thank the blog owner for a good and insightful post.

Apart from the last one (which is a very small fraction of the overall comments I’ve seen) none of the comments reflect on the quality of the post. It may even be said that a great post is a detraction to would-be commentators. That’s because commentators, like most blog-writers, are lazy, usually don’t have much to say, and seeing a blog post that actually has a lot to say can be a bit off-putting to somebody who wants to post a comment like “Hi; nice post. What you doing these days?”

Also, the problem of having too many blogs to read has to be solved by something, and that something, more often than not, is web search. In principle, the Internet, allows people to transcend local boundaries and find any blog, even if they don’t know the owner of the blog personally. In practice, web search, personal referrals, and links are the main tool for this. What implications does that have for what constitutes good blogging? Good blogging is all about getting the largest number of inward links to your site.

Finally, the economic model for blogging is singularly unrewarding to good content. I’m talking of the advertising model. This model says: don’t charge people for reading your blogs, instead, put Google Adsense (or some other advertising model) so that visitors clicking the links automatically make you money. Literally, this means that the way to make the most money is not by creating actively engaging content that sucks people in; rather, it is by allowing people to be sufficiently distracted to click ads. “Knowledge wants to be free [with Google ads]“, I think I heard somebody say.

Is this blog post anti-blogging?

Hardly. Sorry to give the impression. What I’m trying to point out here, is that blogging hasn’t unleashed any tremendous masses of new creativity. It hasn’t made people fundamentally more lazy or more creative. It has given opportunities for people to channel certain kinds of creativity, but its larger benefit is to just allow (creative and non-creative) people to record activities on the web that may otherwise have gone unrecorded. This might be helpful to them and their friends, and might prove a boon to historians, sociologists, and other people in search of data.

Good writing and solid creativity continue to remain the province of a few, and very few of these few are “made” by the Internet. Indeed, the best of bloggers are people who have achieved fame in other spheres, often through dint of hardwork, talent and slow and painful drudgery. Merely giving everybody the tools or the right to publish doesn’t make everybody a good writer, because good writing requires effort and personal commitment. Nor do people become more creative just by writing and not listening — which is what a large chunk of the blogosphere is about.

The other main idea I’d like readers to take home is that being “noncommercial” or “sharing” is not in itself a virtue, or something to be praised. Just because blogging is free, that doesn’t make it, in any sense, superior to newspaper articles or books. Again the best of blogs aren’t just free offerings; they’re usually written by people who also make money out of something very similar. For instance, a software professional may blog about trends in software, an economist may blog on recent trends in economics, and so on.

The best writers are great readers

If good writing is meant to be read, then to aspire to write well, one’s got to read well, and read a lot. If you want to produce great movies, then you’ve got to watch at least a few movies. And this is my core objection to Dr. Shirky’s paragraph: he seems to imply that creativity, however inane, is superior to consumption ,which is a passive activity.

Taking this logic to its extreme, kids would be better off creating stuff all the time, than watching television, reading books, or learning about the world from others. The idea, I guess, is that doing stuff oneself and being in control is more important. But just going around creating stuff doesn’t make one a great creator. Doubtless, the need and the urge to create, as well as constant attempts at creating something, are needed. But what’s also needed is the ability to consume stuff that exists, to critically examine it, to soak it till one is deeply familiar with it and knows at an intuitive level what is going on. It’s hard to imagine people who like to write their own stuff and abhor reading, transform themselves into great writers.

To be fair to Dr. Shirky, I don’t think this is the point he is making. And it is doubtless true that the opportunities presented by the Internet give people a chance to both create and consume. But his writings, and those of many other net evangelists, undervalue the importance and necessity of all the hardwork (a lot of which appears passiv eand boring) needed to create good stuff. And in so far as people somehow make believe that blogging is a short route to great writing without having to do all the hardwork, it will continue to be the case that the best bloggers are people who have established and gained their expertise through other ways.

Snap judgments and creating new products

Recently, I was reading the book Blink! by Malcolm Gladwell (author of the bestseller The Tipping Point). Blink! talks about how people make snap judgments: as soon as they encouter something, their subconscious makes judgments/decisions about it. This may be a well-parroted fact, but Blink! goes further in a few respects.

Malcolm Gladwell explains that most of us cannot give very good explanations of how we’re making the snap judgments, and in fact, when we try to explain, our judgments often get confused, and we can significantly mislead ourselves. He quotes a study where two sets of students were given a set of problems about a board game. The first set, before being shown the problems, was asked to think about soccer hooligans, the latter to think about college professors. The second set of students did statistically better than the first.

In another study, students were called to a person’s office, and there was a short exercise. For some students, there were “anger” words occurring more frequently in the exercise, while for others, there were “polite” words occurring more frequently. The students who were primed with the anger words were more prone to interrupt another individual than the students primed with the polite words (the experiment was set up fairly carefully).

Perhaps the biggest eye-opener is Gladwell’s discussion of implicit association. Harvard’s Implicit Association Project has a number of tests you can take to determine whether you have implicit associations, for instance, associations of women with driving, or associations of old people with doing the laundry (these aren’t very typical associations).

Where do these findings come in? Gladwell says that there are some people who can train their instincts in a way that they are not misled by their subconscious, basically because they choose to observe what is relevant, and choose to ignore what is irrelevant. Thus, they not only refuse to be budged by irrelevant features, but also observe the relevant features in the very short span of time given by initial exposure. Secondly, they are able to act on their subconscious observations, and do not mis-attribute the observations to incorrect reasons or get fuddled by too many questions or doubts.

When collecting data about the way users will respond to a product, or collecting data about the effectiveness of a service, people may not give very good answers. Why? Firstly, if the survey contains too many questions, that force the person to rate and answer qualitatively, that may actually change the person’s initial snap judgment. Gladwell describes this in a study of jam preferences. Experts and random people were made to taste a range of jams. The random people, in a snap judgment, did almost the same as the experts, and the market, in giving relative ratings for the jams. However, when given a questionnaire to describe the reasons for their choice, with questions about specific aspects of the jam, the random people messed up and changed their preferences. The experts, who were able to store the tastes and understand exactly what was going on, didn’t get befuddled by the questionnaire.

Something similar happened with the Aeron chair — a highly ergonomic chair. The Aeron chair and its variants are now the de facto in the software industry. But when it was first brought out of the lab, there weren’t many takers. People looking at the chair just didn’t believe it’d be great, because it didn’t match up with the conventional wisdom of how chairs should look. It was only with the passage of time, as people started using the chair and found their backaches steadily reducing, that the chair started becoming popular. Today, the chair isn’t regarded as ugly, but when it was introduced, it was considered to be aesthetically repugnant.

This again raises questions about the way we collect feedback about the products and ideas we are developing. It also means that when reading people’s reviews about something, the ‘’snap factor” and the fact that the reasons they state may not be their real reasons, need to be borne in mind.

One example of this is the speed with which people judge things online. For instance, a number of people who look at the Citizendium and find that it doesn’t have an article on an important topic like Bill Gates decide that the encyclopedia isn’t quite in competition with Wikipedia. In a similar way, people may read one article on Citizendium, and decide that the quality of Citizendium is better (or worse) than Wikipedia.

Is this correct or good judgment? Gladwell’s book shows that snap judgments are often surprisingly good, and asking more from people usually leads to possibly misleading interpretations of one’s own behavior. Nonetheless, snap judgments made out of context can be bad and misleading. For instance, considering the fact that Citizendium has been around for only about 1.5 years, compared to Wikipedia’s 7, and the fact that Wikipedia, at a similar stage in time, was in a substantially worse state, means that a current state comparison of the two encyclopedias isn’t a very reliable way. It would be reliable if the information-gathering mechanism took age differences and policy differences into account; and the experienced web surfer would know what pages on a website to look up to get an idea of what directions it is taking.

Nonetheless, with the democratization of the Internet, blogging isn’t limited to savvy and unbiased web surfers who’re on the lookout for understanding policies and directions and evolution of things. The typical web surfer is still likely to take a look at something and say Yes, that works and No, that’s not good enough. This means that a product that is good, but unusual, may simply not receive the attention of large masses of people who are measuring it against metrics they understand.

Does this mean that new and different ideas are prone to failure? No, and this is where the Wisdom of Crowds (as described in Surowiecki’s book) comes in. Even though people on average may have biases, and even though these biases may on the whole may go agianst a product, if the product has genuinely new value to offer, there will be a few people who’ll be willing to deviate from the crowd and go for the product. Of course, there are also a few people who deviate from the crowd when it’s making the right decisions. But as Surowiecki points out, diversity and independence and the willingness of people to deviate from the crowd are what add to the wisdom of the crowd.

How does a new product gain the masses? When Google started out, they had to struggle for three years before their Backrub algorithm actually won the attention of an investor. Before that, their algorithm was popular, and liked, but nobody was staking themselves on it. But then there was an indvidual who could see the potential rather than the current scope of application, and this individual pumped money into the product. Today, we don’t even think aobut it when doing a Google search, but if it hadn’t been for the individuals who really pumped money into it, Google might well have died, or been delayed in its evolution (which may mean, for instance, that GMail would have come two years later than it did).

While some products like the Aeron Chair meet with instantaneous repulsion, others like Google Search meet with a somewhat lukewarm response. It’s good, but I still like my Yahoo! search that has indexed a much larger part of the web may have been the response of people initially exposed to Google search. However, Google was able to break through to become the de facto search engine. How? Because there were enough people who took a bit if the risk and pain of handling a developing product, because they saw the potential. And as the product became better and more comprehensive, the number of people using it became more and more, and it made more and more sense to use Google.

This is common sense, but very important: when a product is in the initial stages, let the masses see it if you want, but don’t let them be the arbiters of its value. Use their feedback, but do not take it literally. Some people will come up with imaginative suggestions, that need to be valued. But often, the objections of people are to the current appearance rather than to the idea and its potential. The more tuned a person is to the rate at which the product quality can change ,the more that person can separate the aspects that can change and be improved, from the aspects that are intrinsic to the new value offered by the product.

As yet another example, take the evolution of computers as a tool for writing. When computers first came into play, people thought things like: the disc space is expensive, it’s easier and faster to write on paper, one can make multiple copies, one can post letters to people across the world. Today, disk space is cheaper, multiple copies can be made and sent across the world much more easily on the computer, and almost all the advantages that paper and pen had over computers, have now been inverted. To top things, we now have interoperability: both scanning and printing are virtually free, and with improved word recognition technologies, writing something by hand would be equivalent to typing it. So if people using the computer had said: there’s just no way it can match up with all the conveniences of writing, they’d have been missing the malleability of the digital technology.

Wisdom of crowds

I recently read James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds. The book provides fascinating insights into the way crowds generally tend to be smarter than the individuals who constitute it. It begins by exploring the potential of crowds for cognitive tasks, tasks which involve understanding, measuring and estimating. The examples described in the book are interested because most of them do not involve any kind of cumulation of knowledge but rather an operation like taking an arithmetic mean, median or mode. For instance, one of the experiments has people estimating the number of peas in a jar; each person makes separate estimates and the estimates are then totalled up.

I didn’t need to read Surowiecki’s book to know that crowds can be wise; I’ve seen enough demonstrations of this in real life, and that’s because I’m a first-year student at the University of Chicago. The situations where I’ve seen crowds behave wisely involve more cumulation, though; individuals put in their bits and pieces to construct a solution. I’m talking about the approach that the first-year office in Chicago usually takes to solving problems in the three-times-a-week assignments we get as part of our compulsory coursework. The problems seem almost too hard, impossible, to solve on one’s own, but the crowd’s never failed. Somebody or the other (sometimes, multiple people in unison) always manages to come up with a solution of sorts, and the solutions are scribbled all over the chalkboards in the first-year office with DNEs.

What Surowiecki (and perhaps those designing the first-year coursework) don’t address explicitly is the question of where the wisdom of crowds takes the individuals who are in the crowds. Surowiecki in fact makes the point that being in a crowd could make us individually stupider and yet collectively wiser, but he doesn’t address in detail the question of how the individual can harness the crowd to become individually wiser. Arguably, the goal of a course is to make those studying the course individually wiser, so that when they work as individuals in other collectives or groups, they can take that added wisdom to the new group.

This constitutes a different view to the goal of problem-solving, and a different focus on the way the crowd and the individuals constituting it need to behave optimally. If current performance is the goal, the strategies to be adopted are focussed on and measured only by current performance, which, in the case of assignment problem-solving is the rate at which one solves assignments. So it’s common to hear questions like Where are you placed currently? being interpreted as Are you working on algebra, analysis or topology assignment? At the collective level, it further means that where the first-year currently is, is directly correlated with the sum total of problems solved as yet by first-year students, which means that if a problem is already solved by one individual, another individual can then skip thinking too much about that and work on a different problem.

On the other hand, in situations where it’s not just current performance but the regular gains that the individual takes back that counts, the strategy gets modified somewhat. The first question is: what are the gains over and above getting a sufficient understanding of the solution to write it down? This could be a hard question, often in situations where the assignment problems themselves seem unmotivated and directionless (which does happen every now and then). In cases where there is a mid-term or final examination, one goal could be to develop the ability to solve similar problems when confronted with them in an examination-like situation. In other cases, there isn’t any clearly defined uniform goal for all individuals. If there isn’t a uniform goal for all individuals, the crowd cannot adopt a strategy on a uniform consensual basis. Thus, the individuals who are there in the crowd, even if they have specific things they want to gain, feel it’s better to flow along with the crowd and focus on the common and uniformly accepted goal: understand the solution enough to write it.

This is interesting because somehow the whole idea hasn’t taken off with me. It’s not that I consider it morally inappropriate to just focus on solving assignments; it’s more that I consider it highly boring to feel like part of a herd that’s hopping from board to board scribbling solutions that’ll be copied religiously and may never be seen again. That’s not exciting, and surprisingly, it may not be saving that much time for its individuals. Though the crowd often solves all problems early on, the time it takes for the solutions to dissipate to everybody is often long, and the general air of lethargy just drags on.

On the other hand, I remember one situation where the crowd experience was fun, because it was more structured and individuals saw more to gain by paying attention. For the Algebraic Topology course last quarter, Professor Madhav Nori set us an Assignment 7 which we didn’t have to submit but which would be used heavily in the construction of the final examination paper, so it was up to all of us to solve it. We decided that everybody would try to solve the problems, and then, the day before the final examination, we all got together in one classroom, and all the solutions would be presented by individuals who had solved the problems. The explanations would be problem by problem, and the other students would pose questions and get things straight. Mike Miller and Emily Riehl independently volunteered to take notes during the proceedings and they sent PDFs of the solutions to all of us, so the others could focus on listening and absorbing.

There were a lot of differences with the usual first-year assignment-solving experience. Firstly, everybody was present, together, at one time (it was remarked that this was the first time in more than a month that all first-years were in one room). Secondly, everybody had a goal, which involved more than just writing down the solution now; it involved understanding the solution well enough to reproduce it in an examination situation. Thirdly, everybody had tried independently (or by discussions in smaller groups) to solve the problem and even those who had failed to solve some problem, or not tried hard enough, at least had a background with which to listen. Fourthly, there was an organizational effort, and a better, more conducive environment for learning (the explanations were all done in lecture halls, which have sliding chalkboards and a better ambience for listening).

These differences all highlight that the way in which crowds get together, and what each individual brings in and hopes to take from, the crowd, determine how the crowd behaves and what the individual gets out of it. It also highlights the importance of having people at the head, and people who decide to choose appropriate settings and background for optimal operation. In other words, it requires individuals to figure out how to optimize harnessing the crowd’s potential.

The key point is that individuals can better the crowd by harnessing it, and we can thus get wiser individuals and hence a wiser crowd tomorrow. But the crowd doesn’t tell individuals how to harness it. Let me illustrate this point by looking at yet another example of the wisdom of crowds: the World Wide Web. Google knows what the wisdom of crowds is; that’s what it harness to get good search results. Wikipedia harnesses the wisdom of crowds to build an encyclopaedia with virtually complete outsourcing, and with a few people at the helm adjusting the strings every now and then.

But the individual who now has access to these resources can better them. As an individual who can use Google search, I can harness the power of it for my individual goals, and an as individual who can read Wikipedia articles, I can harness their content to meet my needs. But I can do more; I can layer my intelligence over these and construct resources for myself that depend on, but outshine, the resources that are obtained through the collation of the wisdom of crowds. If I do so, and if enough other people do so, then we reach the next layer of individual and collective wisdom, because our current individual efforts become part of the crowd that tomorrow’s individuals can tap on.

Most people don’t see it that way, they see the wisdom of crowds as something the individual must passively accept and make good use of; which is possibly one reason why individuals aren’t getting wiser just as fast as they could. But it’ll soon catch on; this is the first time that individual creativity can really take on, not from individual knowledge and potential, but from collective potential, so that today’s individuals are as wise as yesterday’s crowds.

I think Surowiecki’s book views individuals as independent agents who may collaborate in specific ways, but are acting in self-interest, and whose actions together constitute the crowd. What we can really do is to see that the individuals can access the total harnessed wisdom of the crowd and grow upon that, which means a paradigm of faster growth. This is very different from individuals trying to tap on the crowd’s collective wisdom while part of the crowd, it’s about moving one paradigm up from the crowd.