Google+ Is Great, But...

As much as I love Google+ as a social networking platform, there is a naive optimism among other Google+ enthusiasts about its virtues and its inevitable rise to pre-eminence.

Some of its most vocal proponents, such as Mike Elgan, tend to obfuscate the obvious things keeping it from really exploding. First and foremost is the still quite low active user base. Even though the user number is growing rapidly, the activity rate for the average user is not. There are probably hundreds of thousands of accounts that are either stone dead, or that see very minimal activity.

Proponents have tried to convince me that that is not really a problem because Google+ makes it easier to connect with new people -- rather than people you know in real life for example -- and people of common interests. I've found this to only be true to a limited extent. If one of your main interests happens to be technology, or Google itself, then this is definitely true. If one of your main interests is photography, I've also found this to be true. For whatever reason -- some of them obvious -- Google+ seems to be a fertile environment for online communities of photographers and tech bloggers. The other main interest that Google+ caters to well is interaction with people itself. If you're interested in engaging and interacting with large numbers of people with diverse interests, on widely varying topics, then Google+ can definitely cater to that. And it even provides a pretty unique tool for doing this with hangouts. 

However, if your interests are hip-hop music, Christianity, or literature (for example) you may have trouble finding many interesting communities or people to connect with that are consistently active on these subjects. And it's not as though I haven't tried to find them. I regularly search posts on these and other topics and very rarely find an active poster worth following. Though it's very easy to find "tech bloggers" or "engagers" -- someone I follow just shared a circle of 500 of them. They are everywhere. The problem is, I don't care about tech blogging or shallow 'engaging' with random people on diverse subjects, many of which I have no interest in. Neither do hundreds of thousands of other potential active Google+ers. We want people who share common interests and are active in discussing them in some depth, and these don't yet exist on Google+, for many interests. 

And even when you find an interest that you share with a fairly large number of people, like politics, it's a  very vague and general connection with other people. Rather than a more specific kind of connection i.e. not just politics, but Burkean conservative politics, for example.

Part of the reason Google+ hasn't fully taken off is because a lot of people who try it don't want to put the effort into essentially 'building' and contributing to a new social network, and some others don't really 'get' Google+ and think Facebook meets their needs well enough. Still others, even if they 'get' and enjoy Google+, want to be able to share and interact with their friends, most of whom are still on Facebook and won't be wrested from its clutches. And so, rather than complicate their life, inertia makes them stick with what they know. And it doesn't help that there are no real easy tools for integrating Facebook and Twitter with Google+ (like there are for integrating your Facebook and Twitter together). This makes it an either-or choice for a lot of people rather than a both-and one.

If Google+ is going to ever rival Facebook as an alternative, it has to figure out how to turn the explosive number of users into active communities of posters on a variety of topics. It also needs to find a way to make the transition smoother for people, by catering better to their already existing social networks. Otherwise it will only fill a fairly narrow social-media niche. I agree that Google+ is different in nature from Facebook and Twitter in its fundamental makeup, but it doesn't yet have the content -- in terms of active users supplying it -- to truly be competitive.

The Top 10 Things of 2011

Keeping in the spirit of this blog -- in which I write about my haphazard interests as inspiration strikes -- I decided to simply do a "Top 10 Stuff of the Year" list, rather than a Top 10 books, films, or albums list. Another reason to approach it this way is that I haven't seen 10 films I loved, or liked 10 albums that much this year. Part of that is me just not keeping up, but another part of it is that it has been a somewhat lackluster year in film and music, for example, not withstanding some stellar stand-outs. This also frees me up to highlight things that didn't necessarily arrive this year, but which I discovered or appreciated this year. Many of these things I've already blogged about, and so I'll mostly just quickly describe what was great about each thing and link to other more in-depth posts. Without further ado:

The Top 10 Things of 2011

10. Lakers Meltdown

Though I don't expend much energy following sports these days, as an avid, lifetime Laker-hater, I felt compelled to include their getting swept earlier this year in the playoffs in the top 10. Not only did the Mavericks sweep them, they did so in spectacular fashion, blowing them out by 36 in the fourth game, sending the Lakers into a pathetic temper tantrum. Kobe humbled, Phil Jackson sent into retirement, the dynasty very likely reconciled to at least a near-future of mediocrity; the sound of that legacy crashing with a thud is sweet, joyful music to my ears.

9. Drive

Though the thrills are somewhat tawdry and cheap, this stylish flick by Nicolas Winding Refn is one of the better of its kind that I've seen in recent memory. Ryan Gosling plays a part-time mechanic, part-time Hollywood stunt driver, and part-time robbery getaway driver that gets embroiled in a situation with a host of shady characters which explodes into violence. There's not a whole lot to the film, especially with Gosling's playing it in such a stoic fashion, but what it lacks in depth it makes up for in flair and pizzazz.

8.  The Republican Primary Campaign 

This is something I imagine 99% of the populous won't understand -- and I fully sympathize with your antipathy or apathy, whatever the case may be, I assure you -- but as a political junkie I have enjoyed following the campaign. Whatever it says about me, I religiously watched every televised debate but watched almost no other television this year -- you might have noticed the conspicuous lack of anything television related on this list. From Cain's downfall to Perry's flub to Newt's late rise to Romney's steady presence it has been interesting and disheartening, compelling and disappointing.

7. The Expired Dictator

While I think the Obama administration has been a travesty, at least he gave the go ahead to kill Osama bin Laden. It's hardly a feat deserving of much credit -- any president that didn't sign off on it would be incompetent -- but he is a Democrat and conceivably could have backed off on the War on Terror altogether, but he didn't, so that's at least worth a small amount of recognition. Gaddafi and Kim Jung-Il also met their demise this year. Of course, the rate at which evil replaces evil in this world is often astonishing, so these developments may not have any significant, lasting impact, but the passing of these wicked men is something to be thankful for.

6. Google (Google+, Google Currents, Google Music etc.)

I'm not really much of a tech guy, and while I'm sure there were probably much more significant developments in the tech world, I mostly enjoyed the rolling out of these excellent Google products. I just finally got a smartphone this year, so these products having Android apps to go with them made Google a noteworthy contributor to my universe this year. Google Music? Upload your entire MP3 library and have it accessible from any browser anywhere. Delightful. Google+? The best social-networking experience available (though it still doesn't have enough of an active user base to be the runaway best, it is the most enjoyable to use). Google Currents? A slick, aesthetically and functionally pleasing way to read online news, blogs, articles, and essays. Total cost? $0. The technological age has a lot to be said for it, and Google is near the top of that list for me.

5.  The Attributes of God by Shai Linne

Highly related to entry number three, Shai Linne's Holy Hip-Hop album The Attributes of God was released in November of this year, and is by far the best rap album that I have heard this year. Titled and patterned after the book by A.W. Pink, The Attributes of God is an album-length meditation on just that: the attributes of God. His goodness, faithfulness, justice, wrath, love and grace, to name a few. Each attribute is addressed in a separate track (though there is some cross-pollination, of course). Shai Linne spits creative, incisive reformed theology of such high quality it's somewhat unfair to classify the album as "just" a hip-hop album. It's a legitimate theological treatise and an intense act of worship. Provocative, wise, and relentlessly christcentric, the album was unlike anything I had ever heard (though it led me to Lampmode's back catalog, where there were other similar gems). To add to the revelation that the album was, even aside from the content, the beats and rhymes themselves are more impressive than anything the secular rap world currently has to offer, and it isn't even really close.

4. Tim Tebow 

Try as I might, I was unable to resist the magnetism of the Tim Tebow phenomenon. A strange confluence of events on and off the football field led to one phenomenal football story as Tebow led the Broncos to a 6-1 streak while winning in bizarre, seemingly miraculous fashion week after week, and praising Jesus while doing it. How could this story not send me into fits of rapturous ecstasy, especially when Tebow's humble glorifying of the Creator of the universe actually raised the ire of critics? What's not to love here?

3.  Holy Hip Hop / Lyrical Theology / Reformed Rap

I've said almost all that I can say on this topic in my previous post. To summarize: I discovered Lampmode records -- most notably the rappers Shai Linne, Timothy Brindle, and Evangel -- along with the whole Holy Hip-Hop movement this year, opening up a new dimension of hip-hop to me, as well as providing a tool for spiritual education and edification. Not only are these guys making extremely intelligent, Christ-centered, theological music, but they're doing it with a very high level of skill, making the exact kind of hip-hop music that I enjoy. Hallelujah!

2. David Bentley Hart's Writings

If I make a similar list to this in years to come, I expect this to be a mainstay right near the top (especially with him having at least two big projects coming up soon). The Eastern Orthodox theologian's massive erudition as it relates to history, culture, language, and religion, and his penchant for being a delightfully acerbic polemicist are some of the reasons he's my favorite living writer. Not content to merely excoriate Christianity's facile critics and make significant contributions to high theology, he also displays a great amount of literary creativity, humor, and wit in many columns which may fully blossom in his upcoming short story collection.

1. The Tree of Life

I've written more about this film than any other subject this year, so I'll spare you too many more adjectives of adulation. But the gulf that separates The Tree of Life from every other film released this year is titanic. The scope and ambition of the film is gargantuan as it tackles the subjects of the universe, humanity, death, sin, family, existence, and God deftly and without pretension. Through the prism of the life of one family, as remembered by one man, the mystery of the exquisite savagery, grace, and beauty of the universe is explored and unraveled. I will be marveling at this work of art for some time to come.

Marx in the Market

I hardly ever watch television, but this weekend I happened to catch a 30 minute lecture titled Capitalism Hits the Fan on the the Free Speech Channel by Richard Wollfe. His lecture was on the recent financial collapse and how it was -- and is -- a crisis of capitalism. For this reason, he doesn't believe -- with most of the mainstream left -- that we can just return to the pre-Reagan, post-FDR era of regulation, when everything was hunky-dory. No, the problem is deeper than that.

Clearly I disagreed with the vast majority of Wollfe's presentation. Though much of his recounting of the events that led to the financial collapse was, more or less, correct, the conclusions that he drew from these facts were often non-sequiturs. Especially the conclusion that capitalism is the problem since most of the events described either had little to do with capitalism, or were examples of markets being significantly disrupted and intruded upon by government.

For this reason, when he attempted to venture a "solution" to the problem it was utterly nonsensical. He makes the same mistake that Michael Moore made in his film Capitalism: A Love Story. Specifically, he told the identical story about the more democratic and egalitarian internal organization of certain successful start-ups in silicon valley (I assume he's talking about things like Apple, Google and Facebook, but I don't really know) that rejected the typical hierarchical structures of corporate American businesses. Having held positions at firms such as IBM and Sysco, these start-ups consisting of computer-savvy friends had a distaste for the culture of corporate America and wished to offer an alternative way to do business, internally. So, according to this speaker, they did. Just like the bread company in Capitalism: A Love Story, the founders of these companies wanted a more equal, democratic and lively culture where everyone is involved in business decisions -- and therefore more equitably distributing the profits -- rather than the small number inhabiting the board of directors making all the decisions. In so doing, the story goes, these companies had explosive creativity and productivity and made tons of money. Therefore, these companies and their products are not triumphs of capitalism, as they are usually heralded, but really the triumph of quasi-Marxist business principles!

Not being a techie, I don't really know how true this story is, though I doubt the reality closely matches how he presents it. Still, even if we grant the complete truth of this story, it omits one hugely significant fact: these firms are making their money by competing in a free market. Their different ways of organizing themselves internally competes against the way in which other capitalist firms organize themselves. The profits that they bring into their companies are being made within a capitalist system, and without the system, it wouldn't matter how you decided to internally organize. Whatever internal incentives their employees have that typical corporations don't, they would be irrelevant if all of society was organized according to Marxist principles because the wealth generated in the marketplace would not exist.

This is no solution to our current financial situation. If it's a superior way to organize a business, then it's a way for certain capitalist firms to get an upper hand on other capitalist firms who adapt less quickly and efficiently. Even if implementation of this business model across the board resulted in greater productivity for corporate America, and is therefore a good thing, the financial crisis wasn't caused because of a lack of productivity. There were fundamental instabilities in our markets that would manifest in a more efficient and productive America -- perhaps slightly less quickly -- all the same, if the institutions and policies that led to them remain unchanged. But there's a difference between organizing a business on certain principles, and organizing a society, economy or government on certain principles. What works for the former doesn't necessarily work for the latter. Among other reasons, because employment is a relationship one enters into voluntarily; citizenship is one that one is born into.