Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Sociologist discusses the problems of the publishing industry

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A sociologist discusses the major issues facing the publishing industry:

One year ago I interviewed John B. Thompson in the Rail about the state of the publishing industry. Thompson is a Cambridge University sociology professor, and his 2010 book Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the 21st Century was the result of more than five years of talking to editors, publishers, writers, and agents in the U.S. and the U.K. about the rapid changes in the traditional structures of book publishing. Given that these transformations have only continued, I thought it worth checking in with Thompson a year on. An updated second edition of Merchants of Culture will be published in March by Penguin (U.S.) and Polity (U.K.)…

[Thompson:] There are two major developments that are having a profound effect on the publishing industry today and that are creating a situation of deep uncertainty about the future. The first is the continuing economic crisis that has metamorphosed since then into a deeper and more pervasive recession and that has created a tough economic climate for publishers and booksellers. Retailers are often operating on tight margins and reduce their liabilities by ordering less and stocking more cautiously. Booksellers will return more books to publishers in order to reduce the amount of capital tied up in unsold stock. But even these measures may be insufficient as many retailers have been and will be forced out of business. And when retailers close, publishers lose shop windows to display their books and are faced with substantial write-offs for bad debts. This further depresses profit margins that were already under pressure from static or declining sales. It’s an economic snowball effect…

Well, it’s the intensification of a surge in e-book sales, especially in the U.S. While physical book sales are static or declining for most publishers, e-book sales are surging ahead—it is one of the only areas today where trade publishers are seeing serious growth. And the growth is startling: For most U.S. trade publishers e-books accounted for 1 percent or less of overall revenue in 2008. In 2011 the figure is likely to be between 18 and 22 percent (possibly even higher for some houses). And, interestingly, the biggest shift from print to digital has been in commercial fiction, especially genre fiction like romance, science fiction, mystery, and thriller. For fiction as a whole, e-books accounted for around 40 percent of overall sales for some large trade houses by mid-2011. But in some categories of genre fiction and for some authors the percentages were even higher—60 percent for some categories like romance, and even up to 80 percent for some authors. Narrative non-fiction has also seen a significant but smaller shift to digital. Anything more complicated—such as books that use color, like art books or children’s books—has so far lagged far behind. This change is already forcing the key players in publishing to reconsider their positions. Practices that have become settled conventions in the field are suddenly opened up to scrutiny, and players who have interacted amicably for years suddenly find themselves locking horns in new conflicts where the rules are no longer clear (as happened, for example, when Random House and Andrew Wylie clashed over Wylie’s decision to launch Odyssey Editions). To what extent the game of trade publishing will actually be transformed by this development remains, at this stage, unclear. Much will depend on how quickly and effectively the key players are able to adapt to the new information environment that is emerging around them. We are living through a revolution of sorts, and one of the few things you can say for certain about a revolution is that when you’re in the middle of one, you have no idea where and when it will end.

New technology means that a lot of people need to adapt, producers and readers included. Two additional areas I wish Thompson had commented on here:

1. It would be interesting to hear more about publishers and other actors are trying out some new ideas in order to make money off e-publishing. Amazon now has a publishing wing. Are the major publishers really shifting major resources and people to this or are they trying to hold the line? Do the recent commercials on TV and radio for books (examples from James Patterson here and here) represent these publishers continuing to hold to the old model? How much overlap is there between the e-book and traditional publishing world?

2. Thompson talks a bit about the future role of books. I’d be interested in hearing more about whether how the “long tail” phenomenon and growing e-book sales in certain genres will change larger cultural meanings and understandings. Not so much whether books will matter (I think they still will) but how they matter. Will popular e-books really only matter if a movie gets made or the author makes it to a popular daytime talk show? What books will become “classics”? Fifty years from now, which books will form a “canon” for this era?

The “sociological significance of the boombox”

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In case you were wondering, “the sociological significance of the boombox” has been reduced to a new app. A fun read that includes a lively “boombox parade through the streets of the East Village.”

Journalists need a better measure for when something has “taken over the web”

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I’ve noticed that there are a growing number of online news stories about what is popular online. While many websites need to feed on this buzz, journalists need some better measures of how popular things are on the Internet. Take, for instance, this story posted on Yahoo:

This video from the California State University, Northridge campus has ignited controversy across the Internet this morning. In the video, reportedly taken during finals week, a female student loses her temper with her fellow students, accusing them of being disruptive.

Exactly how much “controversy across the Internet” has erupted? Phrases like this are not unusual; we’re commonly told that a particular story or video or meme has spread across the Internet so we need to know about it. But we have little idea about how popular anything really is.

I’ve noted before my dislike for journalists using the size of Facebook groups as a measure of popularity. So what can be used? We need numbers that can be at least put in a context and compared to other numbers. For example, the number of YouTube views can be compared to the views for other videos. Page views and hits (which have their own problems) at least provide some information. Journalists could do a quick search of Google news to get some idea of how many news sources have picked up on a story. We can know how many times something has been retweeted on Twitter.

None of these numbers are perfect. By themselves, they are meaningless. But broad and vague assertions that we need to read about something simply because lots of people on the Internet have seen it are silly. Give us some idea of how popular something really is, where it started, and who has responded to it so far. Show us some trend and put it in some context.

Required for political participation: “digital skills”

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Here is an argument that African-Americans and Latinos could participate more in American politics if they had more “digital skills”:

Could the key to increasing civic engagement among Latinos and African Americans be computer classes?   A growing body of research is linking Internet use, particularly social network use, and increased social capital and civic engagement.  A new reportfrom the MaCarthur foundation finds that Facebook use is correlated with increased interest in and participation in politics. Scholars like Northwestern Sociologist Esther Hargatti [sic] speak eloquently about the information gap between rich and poor online.  This gap is less about access to technology and more about developing the skills to harness the technology for political and social gain.  The ability to do information searches, send text messages, tweet, share content and other on-line skills is a central element in becoming what Evegny Morozov calls a “digital renegade” rather than a “digital captive.”

The key to using the Web in democracy-enhancing ways is acquiring digital skills.  While this concept has been measured in lots of ways, the presence of digital skills can be measured by the level of autonomy the user has, the number of access points a user has to get online, the amount of experience a user has with different types of online tools, etc.

This should be an area of interest to a lot of people: how social factors, such as race, education levels, location, and other forces affect online use. “Digital skills” are not simply traits that everyone picks up on their own. It requires a certain level of exposure, time, and resources that not all have. See a video clip of Hargittai talking about this.

I wonder how much arguments like this are behind recent government efforts to provide cheap or free broadband to poorer US residents. Here is part of the statement from the head of the FCC:

“There is a growing divide between the digital-haves and have-nots. No Less than one-third of the poorest Americans have adopted broadband, while 90%+ of the richest have adopted it. Low-income Americans, rural Americans, seniors, and minorities disproportionately find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide and excluded from the $8 trillion dollar global Internet economy.”

As I’ve asked before, how close are we to declaring Internet access an essential human right?

Living Earth Simulator to model social world

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Here is an interesting project, the Living Earth Simulator, that hopes to take a lot of data and come to conclusions about social life:

Described as a “knowledge collider,” and now with a pledge of one billion euros from the European Union, the Living Earth Simulator is a new big data and supercomputing project that will attempt to uncover the underlying sociological and psychological laws that underpin human civilization. In the same way that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider smashes together protons to see what happens, the Living Earth Simulator (LES) will gather knowledge from a Planetary Nervous System (PNS — yes, really) to try to predict societal fluctuations such as political unrest, economic bubbles, disease epidemics, and so on.

Orchestrated by FuturICT, which is basically a consortium of preeminent scientists, computer science centers around the world, and high-power computing (HPC) installations, the Living Earth Simulator hopes to correlate huge amounts of data — including real-time sources such as Twitter and web news — and extant, but separate approaches currently being used by other institutions, into a big melting pot of information. To put it into scientific terms, the LES will analyze techno-socio-economic-environmental (!) systems. From this, FuturICT hopes to reveal the tacit agreements and hidden laws that actually govern society, rather than the explicit, far-removed-from-reality bills and acts that lawmakers inexorably enact…

The timing of EU’s billion-euro grant is telling, too. As you probably know, the European Union is struggling to keep the plates spinning, and the LES, rather handily, will probably be the most accurate predictor of economic stability in the world. Beyond money, though, it is hoped that the LES and PNS can finally tell us why humans do things, like watch a specific TV show, buy a useless gadget, or start a revolution.

Looking at the larger picture, the Living Earth Simulator is really an admission that we know more about the physical universe than the social. We can predict with startling accuracy whether an asteroid will hit Earth, but we know scant little about how society might actually react to an extinction-level event. We plough billions of dollars into studying the effects and extent of climate change, but what if understood enough of the psychology and sociology behind human nature to actually change our behavior?

I don’t know about the prospects of such a project but if the BBC is reporting on it, perhaps it has a future.

A couple of statements in the description above intrigue me:

1. The simulator will help uncover “the tacit agreements and hidden laws that actually govern society.” Do most social scientists think this is possible if we only had enough data and the right simulator?

2. The comparison between the natural and social sciences is telling. The portrayal here is that the natural sciences have come a lot further in studying nature than social scientists in studying human behavior. Is this true? Is this a fair comparison – natural systems vs. social systems? How much “unknown knowledge” is really in each realm?

3. The coding for this project must be immense.

4. The article makes no mention of utilizing social scientists to help develop this project and analyze the data though the group behind it does have some social scientists on board.

On Facebook, it’s not 6 degrees of separation but rather 4.74 degrees

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One effect of globalization is that people are more aware of world events and are better connected to others. A new study using Facebook data suggests the average user is separated from any other user in the world by just 4.74 degrees:

On Facebook, however, the average user is only 4.74 degrees away from any other Facebooker…

That conclusion comes from a non-peer-reviewed study of 721 million active Facebook users, released by Facebook in collaboration with the Università degli Studi di Milano, the blog post says…

The Palo Alto, California, company says 99.6% of all Facebook users studied were separated by five degrees or less from any other Facebook user; 92% were separated by only four degrees…

“The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74,” Facebook says.

While this is indeed an interesting finding (particularly since it is related to Stanley Milgram’s six degree studies decades ago), there are bigger questions at stake here. With people 4.74 connections away, how exactly does this impact a user’s life or positively influence their life? We know that information and culture passes through networks but how exactly does this work on Facebook? Can the life of a user in Siberia really affect the life of a college student in Arizona?

One issue here is that Facebook itself currently allow for limiting connectability between users. Sources like The Facebook Effect suggest that Mark Zuckerberg would really like a more open network where people could see each other’s information and actually interact with others beyond the “friends” structure. However, it doesn’t appear that most users would want this at this time – most Facebook friends are people users are already know and there are concerns about privacy. How does the company move people into accepting a more open network so that users can openly take advantage of those chains 4.74 people long?

Also, who tend to be the people in the networks that help connect people the most? College students? People who live in larger metropolitan areas? People with the most friends? People with the most diversity in their own friend lists?

What is “The Big Data Boom”on the Internet good for?

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The Internet is a giant source of ready-to-use data:

Today businesses can measure their activities and customer relationships with unprecedented precision. As a result, they are awash with data. This is particularly evident in the digital economy, where clickstream data give precisely targeted and real-time insights into consumer behavior…

Much of this information is generated for free, by computers, and sits unused, at least initially. A few years after installing a large enterprise resource planning system, it is common for companies to purchase a “business intelligence” module to try to make use of the flood of data that they now have on their operations. As Ron Kohavi at Microsoft memorably put it, objective, fine-grained data are replacing HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinions) as the basis for decision-making at more and more companies.

The wealth of data also makes it easy to run experiments:

Consider two “born-digital” companies, Amazon and Google. A central part of Amazon’s research strategy is a program of “A-B” experiments where it develops two versions of its website and offers them to matched samples of customers. Using this method, Amazon might test a new recommendation engine for books, a new service feature, a different check-out process, or simply a different layout or design. Amazon sometimes gets sufficient data within just a few hours to see a statistically significant difference…

According to Google economist Hal Varian, his company is running on the order of 100-200 experiments on any given day, as they test new products and services, new algorithms and alternative designs. An iterative review process aggregates findings and frequently leads to further rounds of more targeted experimentation.

This sounds like a social scientist’s dream – if we could get our hands on the data.

My big question about all of this data is this: what should be done with it? This article, and others I’ve seen, have said that it will transform business. If this is just a way for businesses to become more knowledgeable, more efficient, and ultimately, more profitable, is this enough? Occasionally, we hear of things like discovering and/or tracking epidemics by looking at search queries or tools like the “mechanical turk” to crowdsource small but needed work. On the whole, does the data from the Internet advance human flourishing or concentrate some benefits in the hands of a few or even hinder flourishing? Does this data give us insights into health and medicine, international relations, and social interactions or does it primarily give entrepreneurs and established companies the chance to make more money? Are these questions that anyone really asks or cares about?

ASA pushing for better sociology Wikipedia entries

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This news came out earlier this week in the American Sociological Association’s Footnotes: the ASA is hoping sociologists and sociology students will help improve Wikipedia pages pertaining to sociology.

In an essay on the association’s online newsletter (scheduled to be included in the next edition of its print newsletter), Wright this week announced the Sociology in Wikipedia Initiative: a formal call to sociologists to help improve and expand Wikipedia entries that might benefit from their expertise and consider assigning their students to do the same.

“Wikipedia has become an important global public good,” Wright writes in the essay. “Since it is a reference source for sociologically relevant ideas and knowledge that is widely used by both the general public and students, it is important that the quality of sociology entries be as high as possible. This will only happen if sociologists themselves contribute to this public good.”

Not only might Wikipedia benefit from contributions by students steeped in academic research methods, but the exercise might help students learn how to read the crowd-sourced encyclopedia in the proper context, said Wright.

“What better way to get students to understand that it’s actual people like them who have written this stuff, than for them to write this stuff?” he said.

Is this “public sociology” at work? I don’t mind this call as it would help ensure that Wikipedia has accurate and in-depth sociology information rather than just a bare bones outline. Actually, I’ve thought the sociology Wikipedia entries weren’t that bad already, particularly compared to other disciplines. For example, the statistics pages on Wikipedia are technically correct but it is very difficult for a layperson to understand what is going on.

But how many sociology faculty will spend much time with this since there aren’t many professional incentives? Even publishing in online journals as opposed to more traditional print journals is not well-regarded so what’s the point of helping improve Wikipedia entries? This may seem like a move toward embracing technology and toward a younger generation of sociologists but the discipline has a long way to go.

At least a few leaders of major academic groups are admitting that they use Wikipedia as a source. Not too long, admitting this would not have been good for one’s status. How far away are we from Wikipedia being an acceptable source?

One of the new research frontiers: studying dating online

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There are now a number of academics studying online dating sites as they allow insights into relationship formation that are difficult to observe elsewhere in large numbers:

Like contemporary Margaret Meads, these scholars have gathered data from dating sites like Match.com, OkCupid and Yahoo! Personals to study attraction, trust, deception — even the role of race and politics in prospective romance…

“There is relatively little data on dating, and most of what was out there in the literature about mate selection and relationship formation is based on U.S. Census data,” said Gerald A. Mendelsohn, a professor in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley…

Andrew T. Fiore, a data scientist at Facebook and a former visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University, said that unlike laboratory studies, “online dating provides an ecologically valid or true-to-life context for examining the risks, uncertainties and rewards of initiating real relationships with real people at an unprecedented scale.”…

Of the romantic partnerships formed in the United States between 2007 and 2009, 21 percent of heterosexual couples and 61 percent of same-sex couples met online, according to a study by Michael J. Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford. (Scholars said that most studies using online dating data are about heterosexuals, because they make up more of the population.)

The rest of the article has some research findings about appearance, race, and political ideology derived from studies of online dating site members.

Researchers will go wherever the research subjects are so if the people are expanding their dating pools online, that is where the research to go. It would be interesting to hear if any of these researchers have received pushback from people within their own fields who scoff at online dating sites or ask them to demonstrate the worthiness of studying online behavior.

 

The NFL says the “All-22” camera angle is proprietary information

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The NFL is a TV ratings powerhouse and makes billions each year on selling television rights. However, fans don’t see the same action that the league and teams watch because the league claims its “All-22” view is proprietary information:

If you ask the league to see the footage that was taken from on high to show the entire field and what all 22 players did on every play, the response will be emphatic. “NO ONE gets that,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy wrote in an email. This footage, added fellow league spokesman Greg Aiello, “is regarded at this point as proprietary NFL coaching information.”

For decades, NFL TV broadcasts have relied most heavily on one view: the shot from a sideline camera that follows the progress of the ball. Anyone who wants to analyze the game, however, prefers to see the pulled-back camera angle known as the “All 22.”

While this shot makes the players look like stick figures, it allows students of the game to see things that are invisible to TV watchers: like what routes the receivers ran, how the defense aligned itself and who made blocks past the line of scrimmage.

By distributing this footage only to NFL teams, and rationing it out carefully to its TV partners and on its web site, the NFL has created a paradox. The most-watched sport in the U.S. is also arguably the least understood. “I don’t think you can get a full understanding without watching the entirety of the game,” says former head coach Bill Parcells. The zoomed-in footage on TV broadcasts, he says, only shows a “fragment” of what happens on the field.

Why does the NFL do this? Here are a few plausible scenarios:

1. It can do it so it will. The NFL won’t be bullied into doing something it doesn’t want to do. As long as the money keeps pouring in for TV rights, there is little pressure the public can put on the league for this footage.

1a. If enough fans and commentators picked up on this, could they force the NFL’s hand? It seems unlikely.

2. The NFL makes billions on TV rights and perhaps wants to package this video in a certain way. A later part of the story suggests the NFL has quietly floated the idea of selling access to this footage.

3. The league is worried about legitimate football competitors. There are not currently any viable threats but this could pop up again.

4. The league thinks this is the core data of the NFL, what actually happens on all plays, and will go to great lengths to protect its “intellectual property.” I find this a little hard to believe: aren’t there plenty of people who could understand and scheme what happens on a football field even if the primary camera angle doesn’t show it? Are teams really that worried about what the public might see or that other teams are missing things in the video?