Urbane Sprawl

And while I’m on the topic of rationalization and its discontents, I must mention another darling of the zeitgeist — another phenomenon notable for its sharp break from a rationalized narrative: ChatRoulette.

Like reality TV, online communication has become rationalized over the past decade. We used to sign on, unfettered, to loosely categoritzed AOL chatrooms, for no other purpose but to converse with strangers about whatever came to mind.

Within the world of public online discourse, new structures popped up to help us find more quickly and accurately what — or, I should say, whom — we were looking for. Special interest message board sites for new parents, golf enthusiasts, and arthritis sufferers appeared. Surfers created sites for posing questions in deeply nested categories (Yahoo! Answers), while other sites for listing goods to buy and sell staked claim to their own turf (Craigslist, eBay).

For those of us who just wanted to talk, we got new tools to weed out the weirdos and promote interaction with our friends (or friends of friends): from a/s/l, there were Friendster and Facebook; from chatrooms, there were Google docs and groups and waves.

We gave ourselves better tools to find the right people and talk to them about the right things, but in the process we walled our communities in — and walled in ourselves.

That all changed (for the moment, at least) with ChatRoulette, a website that provides each user a complettely unfiltered video chat connection to another, randomly-selected user. One can stay to chat or click through to the next stranger out in the world of the webcams — an unmediated, unrationalized communication landscape. Like an early, almost empty AOL chatroom — with cameras.

Millions of users’ curiosity has been piqued enough to sign onto the site and see what they might find (even though they often find a close-up and uncensored view of some other user’s genitalia), and it’s easy to see why: ChatRoulette breaks down the barriers we’ve spent a decade erecting, and it unmasks us from the usual anonimity of blog comments and user reviews. It takes us from a bureaucratized present to a wild west past.

But, as is natural with all human processes, we may soon find ChatRoulette fall victim to a self-undermining rationalization that we saw befall reality TV. We will be moved to carve it up into interest-based rooms, we will “like” some users and “friend” others, and soon we will be building a city on what is now an empty landscape.

Sam Anderson described this rationalizing impulse in a piece on ChatRoulette in New York Magazine, at once predicting ChatRoulette’s fragmented future and exalting its unbridled present:

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that.

But that site would also lose a lot of what makes ChatRoulette, for now, so weirdly magnetic. If I’d been able to curate my experience, I might never have had what ended up being my favorite interaction: a half-hour chat with a twentysomething, vaguely Kurt Cobain–ish guy in Pittsburgh. We started with the obligatory ganja jokes, but suddenly he turned serious. “Actually,” he typed, “I’m a mystic.” When he offered me a tarot-card reading, I considered clicking “next” in search of more dancing Koreans. I’ve never had a psychic reading—in fact I’ve actively refused them on many occasions—but something about the strangeness of the context made me accept. Although I only vaguely remember the content of the reading itself (I like nature, have been thinking about taking a big trip, etc.), the experience was surprisingly powerful. It felt generous and deep and oddly very human.

Contemplating the filtered, statistically-tracked, rationalized version of ChatRoulette that Anderson fantasizes about  — while considering the losses that would come with an inhibited version of this paragon of inhibition — we realize that, even when we discuss a website built 90 years after his death, Max Weber was right.

Last week, New York ran a story by Boris Kachka about the impending demise of book publishing. It was called, depressingly, “The End.”

Lips are abuzz within the industry about the myriad forces that, like so many tribes looking to sack Rome, will weaken the centuries-old industry enough to banish print to the history books:

So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon .com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.

One by one, these would be difficult problems to solve. But as a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis—a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster—attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power. That is, if it’s not too late.

The article got me thinking about one force that I think has been overlooked. And even if it has nothing to do with the end of print, it’s an idea that’s led to a broader pseudo-economic theory that I call The Too Many Suitors Problem.

The print media is an industry that enjoys a large surplus of aspirant labor. Even while book publishers and newspapers shrink, the number of doe-eyed Ivy League graduates who want to board those sinking ships is growing. We need only look to reports-cum-cautionary-tales like Doree Shafrir’s in the Observer, “Ivy League Slaves of New York,” to understand how competitive entry-level jobs are in this industry.

But while it may seem like a boon to have the best and the brightest at the disposal of Human Resources departments everywhere, I’d argue that this large surplus of labor is actually a detriment to the quality of the young blood coming into the industry — the young men and women who could conceivably bring print into this, our new millennium.

At first blush, this probably makes no sense: the quality of the new class of media types should be better if the hiring companies have a bigger pool to choose from. But let’s take a step back.

Imagine you are a heroine in a Jane Austen novel. You have two suitors to choose from, and a finite amount of resources (in this case, time before you become un-marriageable) to make your choice. At first you think one is an asshole and one is charming, but, after a little more time and a few stalled marriage proposals, you realize that the charming one is immoral and the asshole is actually the man of your dreams. (Spoiler: your name is Elizabeth Bennet.)

Now imagine the same scenario, but you have 200 suitors instead of two, and you still have the same few years before you’re labeled spinster. The mechanism you’d have to develop to choose between the suitors would be much cruder than originally — instead of getting to really know each suitor, you’d have to do thirty-second interviews with each one (like they do on the first episode of the Bachelorette each season). With the same amount of time, but with a surplus of 199 suitors instead of a surplus of 1, you might completely miss Darcy in the pack. Especially since he’d give a bad first impression.

And that’s the crux of my Too Many Suitors theory: at a certain point, a surplus of labor supply (for skilled labor) will lead to a diminishing quality of the group ultimately selected. And this is because, as the surplus increases, the mechanisms for measuring quality become necessarily more crude.

Imagine you have a play with five characters to cast. You want more than five people to come audition, because if only five come and a few suck you’ll have a lousy cast. So maybe you want ten or twenty people to audition. But at a certain point, more auditionees will be detrimental: you’ll have to give each actor just a minute or two to read, and instead of gathering the amount of data necessary to see whether they are truly good actors fit for the roles, you’ll instead gather a smaller, much more chance-influenced amount of data; you’ll only know whether they happened to have a good reading of a one-paragraph monologue.

Here’s a concrete real world example about the cruder mechanisms that come along with too many suitors: Harvard gets a little more than half the number of applicants as the University of Michigan. Harvard, though it has to rely perhaps too much on SAT scores and class rank, gets to have an admissions officer carefully consider each applicant. UMich doesn’t have that privilege, since it gets nearly 30,000 applicants. Instead, it relies largely on a points system.

Obviously there is self-selection in the pools of applicants. But, I’d assert that if the 27,000-person pool applying to UMich were randomly cut down to the size of the pool applying to Harvard (16,000ish) and then the Harvard admissions office got to choose UMich’s freshman class, that class might be of an overall higher quality than the one they would get with their usual system and their bigger applicant pool.

We could do the same thought experiment for Harvard: cut the applicant pool in half and use the extra time and resources to let the admissions officers spend more time with the applications, get more essays and interviews, and ignore SAT scores. You might get a better freshmen class.

The Too Many Suitors Problem is, in some way, an application of the Tyranny of Choice (which asserts that having more options to choose between won’t necessarily make us happier) to the market for skilled labor, with Schumpeterian, i.e. self-undermining, consequences.

In print media, the sheer number of aspirants combined with the limited resources of the struggling companies means that the mechanisms used to filter people into the industry are crude and less meritocratic than they might be if the applicant pool were smaller. Job listings are posted on Mediabistro.com and on company websites as a formality; they’re filled instead through nepotistic connections and aggressive networking.

This isn’t sour-grapes complaining, though it’s true that during my junior year of college I applied to summer internships at the big publishing companies and never heard back. I promise I’m not bitter.

Instead, I understand the industry reality: this system is in the short-term interest of the companies. It’s simply easier and faster to fill positions this way — the alternative, filtering through the hundreds of summer internship and job applications and really trying to find the best candidates, would take far too much time and energy.

But perhaps it’s not in their long-term interest: because they can’t employ a truly meritocratic system, they are often scaring away the bright minds and high achievers who instead look to the clear(er) meritocracies of law school applications and i-bank recruiting. Those areas have large applicant pools but also have lots of seats to fill, so the proportionate size of the surplus is smaller than for the pressed-but-prestigious world of print, and so they’re equipped to handle the rush of prospective analysts and paralegals.

If newspapers and book publishers employed a truly energetic on-campus recruiting program at top-tier colleges, the short-term resource expenditure might pay back big time by getting the best applicants into the company walls — young minds who might be able to help fortify the industry’s walls against Kachka’s bogeymen and who might help figure out how to build print into a city for the future rather than a relic of the past.