Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel
Author:Lee Siegel [Siegel, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Popular Culture, Netculture, Social Science
ISBN: 9781846686979
Google: WXCTPwAACAAJ
Amazon: B005KJ7APY
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Published: 2008-03-15T00:00:00+00:00
In its attempt to bring out the mob-self, to extract and explain the lowest common denominator in every individual, Gladwellâs book projects a pinched vision of life. In The Tipping Point, human existence is wholly driven by commercial concerns. Life is divided into manipulating winners and manipulatable losers: there are the people who know Connectors, possess a âstickyâ concept, and have the capacity to use their environment; and then there is everyone else. (Though one could suppose that Gladwell held out some form of hope: if the manipulated read him carefully enough, they could also learn to manipulate!) Yet Gladwellâs charming, almost irresistible anecdotal style made The Tipping Point seem like an expression of just the kind of humanistic, belletristic sensibility that the bookâs own automated values disdained. In a conversation about the design of The Tipping Point withâamong othersâSarah Crichton, Gladwellâs editor at Little, Brown, the New York Times reported that in the publishing companyâs eyes:
The cover illustration of a single unlighted match suggested highbrow literature or sociology. Presented as a business book, it might have sold even more copies. But Ms. Crichton argued that treating it as a business book would have alienated many readers, while a literary title might sell for many years.
The business book became a literary work by means of the right deceptive image. The Tipping Pointâs transvaluation succeeded on every level.
Not surprisingly, the Internet boosters love Gladwell. Internet guru Kevin Kelly writes that âthere has always been a tipping point in any business, after which success feeds upon itself.â In Who Let the Blogs Out? Biz Stone, a âsenior specialist for blogging at Google Inc.,â typically enthuses over Gladwellâs ideas: âConnectors are connected. Theyâve got lots of friends.â (âFriendsâ meaning âuseful connections.â) He excitedly retells Gladwellâs (inaccurate) version of Paul Revereâs ride and turns Revere into the first blogger, since the latter uses âblogging software instead of a horse to spread [an] idea virus.â Stone then goes on to show how Internet users can apply Gladwellâs recipes for popularity to their operations on the Web. He gives this example:
In February 2002 my friend John Hiler used blogging software instead of a horse to spread his idea virus. He wrote a brilliant essay on how bloggers could game Google in such a way that they could push a particular site to the number-one position. The concept is known as âGoogle bombingââ¦Google displays search results by popularity. When a particular web page has many incoming links, it has a higher PageRank on Google. When all the links to a web page contain the exact same phrase, then Google ranks that page very highly in the search results for that phraseâ¦
My friend was the first to write extensively about this trick. At 5:00 A.M., after pulling an all-nighter, he finished his article and emailed it to a colleague for review before posting to their group blog, Coranteâ¦John woke up to a full-fledged epidemic of his own creation. His article had generated huge buzz in the blogosphere. Over
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