Craigslist
"I was there..."
by Lee Felsenstein
Let’s take a look at one social media app that has been in widespread use for decades, provides its users with what they apparently need, and is not run for malign or greedy purposes. I give you—Craig’s List. Its history is available on its Wikipedia page. Craigslist is quite successful economically, supporting a significant range of philanthropic projects under Craig Newmark’s guidance and its nonprofit corporate structure.
Craig’s List is what Community Memory might have become if the project had decided to “go commercial,” even while trying to remain true to the founders’ ideals. Metaphorically, it is a multi-room space through which the user walks. Rooms are dedicated to interest areas and notices are posted on the wall—in most rooms the notices are so thick that they coalesce into scrolls. There is a degree of organization in the form of a poster's responses to category questions—price ranges for items for sale, general and specific details for advertisements—all chosen from predetermined menus. Some types of items are posted without charge, others for a fee. All expire after terms ranging up to 90 days. In general, it is a reasonably faithful simulacrum of the classified advertisement sections of newspapers when they had no competition.
It is not easy to use given that only items posted within a day or so are adequately accessible, despite attempts to categorize and provide search capability. In effect, the user must re-post their item every day, and prowl through the same room daily to see new postings by others. I experimented and by using the “hide duplicates” option found that only about 5 percent of items (bicycles in this case) are not duplicates—the duplication rate is 95 percent! In the bicycle case, that amounted to 270 items through which to scroll. Users unfamiliar with using the selection options in the margins of the page will apparently only scroll through the most current postings on their topic of interest, abandoning their search quickly when gratification is not immediate.
The Erotic Aspect
Brenda Laurel, a friend and former Interval colleague who has made investigating gender issues her lifetime field of interest (as well as story-telling and game-playing), has stated that “a communication technology comes into its own when its erotic function is discovered.” As she points out, movable type print books took off during the Renaissance when erotic and suggestive novels appeared. Moving pictures found their popular audience when they began displaying “bathing beauties” wearing full-body tights to display their form and fire male imaginations. Later, when close-ups could show made-up female faces casting suggestive looks in full detail along with osculatory titillation (for example, The Kiss, produced by Thomas Edison in 1896—before Griffith invented the close-up and one of the earliest commercially-released motion picture films). Home video burgeoned when used for low-cost user-produced pornography, as did personal computers.
“Personal classified ads” provided the economic mainstay of the underground press in the 1960s, as I observed close up, with thinly-veiled prostitution filling multiple-page sections of the more successful underground tabloids. To be sure, the degree of exploitation varied greatly—one man selling “unusual pictures” (nude Polaroids of himself) commented to us at the Berkeley Tribe, “I don’t know why anyone would buy this garbage, but they sell.”
Craigslist’s Wikipedia history describes their travails attempting to keep their erotic marketplace at an acceptable level of decorum, the same issues we in the underground press faced when our breakaway publications discovered that they needed policies in place to keep the law at bay.
The seedbed for Craigslist was Usenet, the back-channel messaging and connection feature developed by Unix programmers and maintained on commercial and academic computers through implied blackmail—programmers needed by employers expected to have access to Usenet as a condition of working on these computer systems. So long as they constructed and maintained it themselves and kept it invisible to those outside the programming and hacking community, it was permitted by system managers. Craig Newmark was one of those programmers and decided to start a bulletin board for use by other programmers for finding work and housing. It was a hit and Newmark went along with it, always steering his efforts to supporting the programming community.
Among Usenet’s community, sex was rarely commercial and solicitations were muted. When open to the more general public, Craigslist eventually found it necessary to diminish the listing of erotic network structures sought or offered, with “men seeking men” being the first such category shut down. None survive today.
While print classified advertising could be edited and all submissions were paid, Craigslist handles such volume that editing of casual ads has generally been considered impossible, because those advertisers are typically unwilling to tolerate any delay in publication.
The overriding feature of Craigslist is a negative one—the lack of any interpersonal communication among users while using it. Those rooms with postings on the wall contain only one person—the user. The design and construction are such as to maintain users in isolation at times when they would naturally desire to hold conversations, which did happen in the Usenet world, a much more homogeneous and educated community.
(Ed. Note: In the process of excerption some words defined in previous parts of the book appear undefined and the author recommends reading the whole book un-edited to fully understand his meaning.)
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Excerpted with permission from:
Me and My Big Ideas: Counterculture, Social Media, and the Future
by Lee Felsenstein
published by FelsenSigns