by Nick Bilton
Because of these relationships, those somewhat unknown online friends may be as influential—or more so—as a running buddy or a next-door neighbor. You and I are just as likely to accept their recommendations for restaurants and plumbers. They may influence the books you read, the movies you see, or the news you click to. Because you know they have common interests, you may trust them even if you don’t know them well enough to describe their hair color or favorite sports teams. As a result, these new communities and their members have a powerful and growing impact on what businesses their “friends” frequent, what they do, and how they spend their money. In the future, their power is going to grow in expected and unexpected ways.
Already these relationships have become filters for the content that appears on my digital doorstep. Take my Sunday reading experience: Several years ago my wife and I would lie in bed on a Sunday morning with the New York Times print newspaper and a few weekly magazines. Now, every night before we go to sleep and every morning when we wake up, we browse our mobile phones or laptops, looking at the information our communities share with us, and in turn share interesting information with them. These links bubble up from our personal connections on broad networks rather than being imposed by a faceless curator. Instead of our relying on professional editors to package a home page or produce a printed page, our online friends are now our de facto editors, providing a supply of news and information that is highly personalized and tailored to our interests. As a result, these relationships are much more than “social.” They are hugely influential.
Defining Communities
As one of the Web’s most popular buzzwords, a “social network” most often means a website or service that enables people to communicate or be in touch with one another in a personal way. Facebook, for example, is one of the largest social networks, with hundreds of millions of users.
When the term “social networks” started gaining traction online, it seemed redundant to me. The Web was supposed to spur social exchange—that’s why it was created, so that people could communicate and share information with others. Plus, many early Web users, me included, had been chatting and sharing images and content on message boards, on forums, and in other dark alleys of the Web for years.
As the label “social” started to spread into job listings, résumés, and advertisements, I kept thinking there was more to the idea of people being social on a network. I mean, if you built homes on a new street and strangers moved in, would you be shocked when they all started to talk to one another? When the people living on the street started having dinner parties and talking about books they found interesting or movies they had seen, would you hire anthropologists and scientists to interview everyone? Probably not. In fact, we would probably be shocked if they didn’t start communicating and being “social” with one another.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t think social networks are important. Quite the contrary. As you can see with Sam H., I think these networks have a far more significant role than just being a connection between people or a way to tell the world what I had for breakfast or even share links. But it wasn’t until I read Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson, a Cornell University emeritus professor of government, that I gained a real understanding of what was happening online with our social networks.3
Anderson has spent most of his career exploring, breaking down, and defining what it means to be a nation. His work has been incredibly influential in creating a new explanation of nationalism and the building of nations. As I learned about his theories, it occurred to me that they also unintentionally applied to the Internet, which, in a way, is a nation all its own.
In the 1980s, Anderson went way beyond conventional terminology and developed a fascinating and groundbreaking theory, proposing a new definition of a nation. “It is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign,” he wrote. “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”
In your life, you have all kinds of these communities. The nation you live in is one, of course—your passport proves this. But so are your church, your neighborhood, and your alma mater. Anderson would argue that actual communities exist only when the other members of the community are physically present for us, there in the flesh to be seen, as in church on Sunday morning or Yankee Stadium in the summertime. But faced with an inability to be physically aware of all the others in a community, we imagine their existence.
Our physical locations help illustrate this thinking a little better. Though I will never meet or know even a small fraction of the people who live in America, I feel connected by our shared belief in our Americanness. I feel a strong sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps with the more than 300 million people who have the same passport I do, but that sense of community exists only in my imagination, as it may in the imaginations of my fellow citizens.
New York City is another imagined community. Brooklyn, the borough of New York City where I live, and Thirty-third Street, where my house is, are imagined communities as well. Even if I devoted my entire life to trying to meet everyone in the community of New York City, it wouldn’t be humanly possible. I would have to interact with more than 400 people a day for seventy-five years. Yet I still consider all the inhabitants of this city a part of my world, and they consider me a part of their world.
Much of Anderson’s work on nations as imagined communities owes its origins to the printing press, which, he says, made the idea of the modern nation possible to begin with. That’s the case because the press made books available in the common languages of the men and women of Europe—English, French, and Spanish—instead of Latin. After that, books in a common language became a vehicle for helping a community define its shared ambitions, and the modern nations we know today developed.
In addition, the concept of imagined communities goes way beyond geography: I am middle class, a meat eater, a rock climber, an NYU instructor, a reader of a certain genre of books, a drinker of a specific brand of coffee, and a devotee of the New York Times. These all represent different, but important, imagined communities for me. Some are connected and overlap, but most don’t, and they are all dynamic, subject to influence by other communities in my life.
Anderson’s thesis applies to our online digital lives too. As technology continues to expand and strengthen personal, professional, and social connections across space and time, the ties you feel to your online communities—to people like Sam H.—will grow as well.
At the heart of Anderson’s idea is the question of which people we identify with and why. Isn’t it possible that I have more in common with a rock climber from China than with a non-rock-climbing American? Could my daily reading of the New York Times include real and imagined connections with “like-minded” readers of the same and similar publications? Even reading this book, you’re entering an imagined community with others who have read it or will read it in the future—but you’ll never know all of them. And although we don’t think about it consciously, every story we engage with has some sort of community aspect to it.
Anderson singles out the newspaper for special attention, examining randomly a sample front page of the New York Times. The stories, he notes, are diverse: A single front page might have stories “about the Soviet dissidents, famine in Mali, a gruesome murder, a coup in Iraq, the discovery of a rare fossil in Zimbabwe, and a speech by [then French president] Mitterrand.” So what connects these things? he asks, and then answers:
“Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each other or of what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and the juxtaposition shows that the linkage between them is imagined.”
Sure, he explains, one key connection is the date—all these stories happened or came to
light at this single point in time. But all those things were also important and newsworthy, making each paper a kind of “one-day bestseller,” with wide influence. And then there was also a shared community of readers.
“Each communicant is well aware the ceremony he performs is being replicated by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion,” Anderson says.
If you and I read the New York Times, we are joined together by the information simultaneously presented to us. The newspaper is a community built partially on political interests and opinion but also around the collection of stories, their event date, and the location of the establishment that produces them.
The same could be said for the Bits blog I write for the Times. It may touch on several unrelated topics on a particular day, but it speaks to a specific community of readers who may be in the technology business, investing in technology, or just fascinated with gadgets and innovation. Without subscriptions or passwords, defining the exact community that reads the blog isn’t easy. A decade ago that community may have existed in smaller slices—say, in subscribers to the Times or a technology trade magazine or some arcane Internet bulletin board—but now they can join in one place and, in a completely new way, actually talk to me and one another through our comments sections.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this new kind of community emerged when Michael Jackson died suddenly and unexpectedly in mid-2009. The tidal wave of response was enormous. According to CNN.com, in an article aptly titled “Jackson Dies, Almost Takes Internet with Him,” the websites of TMZ and the Los Angeles Times, which broke various parts of the story, both crashed. Google News users couldn’t access the news for a period of time. For several hours, Google’s top 100 search terms were almost all related to Jackson. Google’s “trend” service rated the response to the story as “volcanic.”
Keynote Systems, which tracks how websites perform, said that major news sites took more than twice as long to download news stories. CNN said its site had 20 million page views in the hour after the news broke. Wikipedia reported more than five hundred edits to Jackson’s entry in the day after he passed away.
In a different generation, small groups might have gathered around a television or radio and maybe later attended a memorial service or sent a letter (with a stamp!). On this day, AOL’s Instant Messenger service went down for forty minutes as people tried to communicate with their own networks. Twitter messages topped 200,000 an hour.
In the minutes and hours after the sad Jackson news broke, enormous, invisible, imaginary, and yet very clear communities formed. Regina Lewis, AOL’s consumer adviser, said individuals had three reactions: They wanted to know the news, they wanted to share it, and they wanted to react with their own tributes and remembrances.4
On that day, people around the world were connected in unforeseen ways with people they never imagined a connection with. At any given moment, you can feel intimately connected and yet be unable to grasp the other participants in these online groups. Online, communities seem to exist everywhere, behind every website, social network, e-mail address, or news article. In the digital, always-on, real-time, creating, consuming society we live in today, we are constantly weaving in and out of small and large, obvious and imagined communities.
In the same way that Anderson recognized that the printing press and its ability to communicate in a common person’s language could break up power structures and create meaningful and powerful nations, so too may our online communities reshape and remake both our own personal imagined nations and our traditional ways of communicating. As the printing press took off, it rightfully frightened those in control, creating fear and anxiety about how society might turn out if so many other people were well informed. Similarly, these extensive new communities and their odd ways of communicating in bytes and snacks, tweets and links, have unsettled those who fear that this will transform our broader nations into a teeming Tower of Babel with lots of voices and noise but little deep thinking. That brings me to another person I recently met online: George Packer.
Bilton Versus Packer, a Twitter Tussle
As the Michael Jackson experience underscored, the Web offers a continual and gargantuan influx of creation and information, and it continues to grow at tremendous rates every day, leading to a natural feeling of information overload.5
Consider what happens on Facebook, for example. On any given month, each user creates an average of seventy pieces of content. Altogether for the site’s half a billion users, that’s close to 35 billion links, news stories, random blog posts, and pictures and videos of friends and loved ones. YouTube, the popular video site, said in 2010 that every single minute, twenty-four hours of video is uploaded to YouTube’s servers. That means in a single day 34,560 hours are added to the site—so much that it would take you nearly four years of nonstop viewing to watch all of it.
It’s enough to make you want to crawl under a blanket and curl up with a good old-fashioned book.
At least that seems to be pretty much how George Packer felt in early 2010. Packer has covered the war in Iraq, atrocities in Sierra Leone, and unrest in the Ivory Coast; has written several novels and books, including The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq; and has been a New Yorker staff writer since 2003. In the face of this avalanche of stuff, he vented his frustration in a blog post.
“Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell,” he wrote. “I’m told Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. Twitter sounds less like sipping than drowning.”
He wrote that he was particularly concerned by a New York Times column by media critic David Carr, my colleague at the Times. Carr had written, “There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.”
Well, of course, Packer wrote: “Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them.… Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.”
He went on to confess that he doesn’t own a BlackBerry or a smart phone and that when he takes the train from New York to Washington, he sits in the quiet car without his laptop and telephone and hopes he can still muster the attention to read for two hours.
His plea struck a chord. And in an ironic twist, a link to his essay was retweeted more than seven hundred times on Twitter.
I can completely understand why Packer is pushing back against a flood of online information. As he notes, there are only a certain number of hours in the day, and given the choice, he’d rather spend those hours on something other than other people’s 140-character musings. He’s not alone: In comments on his article, many heartily agreed with him.
But after finding his article on Twitter, I wrote a blog post suggesting that he ought to at least give Twitter a tweet. In profound and unexpected ways, the service has the potential to transform news and communications. For example, when Iranians took to the streets to protest their presidential election in summer 2009, the main television news networks reported only sporadically on the response. But people in Iran, who weren’t always able to send e-mail messages or upload videos or even access the Internet from a computer, found they could send tweets from their phones. They began sharing details of the emotional response—citizens breaking into stores, people starting fires, and the resulting police beatings—in as much detail as 140 characters could convey. Viewers, reading the dramatic accounts headline by headline an
d sensing that a rebellion on the order of Tiananmen Square might be under way, complained clearly and loudly to CNN and others.
Using the label #CNNfail, tens of thousands of people vented about the lousy coverage. Some noted that CNN had shown a repeat of Larry King’s interviews with the folks on American Chopper, the reality television show about people who build motorcycles. Others complained that a spat between Sarah Palin and David Letterman over a poorly worded joke on a late-night show was getting far more attention. Twitter both underlined and highlighted what viewers were missing and gave them a forum for making their intense displeasure known.
Perhaps going a bit too far, I recalled how some journalists feared the potential destruction caused by the railroads and suggested that if Packer had been around 150 years ago, he might have been “afraid to engage in an evolving society and demanding that the trains be stopped.”
Clearly, I was stepping into tender territory. My blog post generated more than a hundred comments. As I expected, readers favored Packer’s view about 80 percent of the time. One commenter said, “I firmly agree with Mr. Packer! Twitter Dee Twitter DUMB!” Another asked me to “please spare us the implication that we (non-reporters really) need or must have this latest, up-to-date information in order to function in life. That notion is complete hogwash and goes hand-in-hand with the myth of progress as inevitably leading us to the ultimate manifestation of human greatness. I’ll take a great investigative journalist or writer (like George Packer) over 10,000 tweets any day.”
Packer wasn’t any more convinced than the readers despite my arguments about Iran or how Twitter had helped connect families after the earthquake in Haiti. In a follow-up essay, he worried that “[t]here’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world.”
