Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel

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, Gladwell’s 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 “sticky” 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 Gladwell’s charming, almost irresistible anecdotal style made The Tipping Point seem like an expression of just the kind of humanistic, belletristic sensibility that the book’s own automated values disdained. In a conversation about the design of The Tipping Point with—among others—Sarah Crichton, Gladwell’s editor at Little, Brown, the New York Times reported that in the publishing company’s 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 Point’s transvaluation succeeded on every level.

Not surprisingly, the Internet boosters love Gladwell. Internet guru Kevin Kelly writes that “there has always been a tipping point in any business, after which success feeds upon itself.” In Who Let the Blogs Out? Biz Stone, a “senior specialist for blogging at Google Inc.,” typically enthuses over Gladwell’s ideas: “Connectors are connected. They’ve got lots of friends.” (“Friends” meaning “useful connections.”) He excitedly retells Gladwell’s (inaccurate) version of Paul Revere’s ride and turns Revere into the first blogger, since the latter uses “blogging software instead of a horse to spread [an] idea virus.” Stone then goes on to show how Internet users can apply Gladwell’s 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 “Google bombing”…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 phrase…

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, Corante…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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