It has never been easier to express yourself in public. Whatever you might want to say, the online tools to let you say it to a (theoretically) worldwide audience are innumerable. Say it long, say it short, say what you want, when you want and how often you want. As the title of a forthcoming book about blog culture puts it: “Say Everything.” You have the technology. The only thing the technology cannot do is solve this problem: What if you don’t really have anything to express?
Ah, but technology can solve that problem for you. Plinky.com, which officially went online in January, exists specifically to offer what it calls prompts, meant to inspire interesting thoughts to share with the world. Users respond on Plinky.com and can feed their answers to their own blogs, or to their Twitter or Facebook accounts. Its chief executive and founder, Jason Shellen, worked for the company Pyra Labs, which created the pioneering software Blogger, and stuck around when Google bought that firm. Blogger continued to attract more users, but “people were struggling with what to say,” he says. “They could create a blog; we’d made it easy enough to do that piece. But they were struggling with what to put out there — ‘Do I talk about personal things? Do I talk about work? What do I do?’ ”
Frankly, this sounds unfathomable. The Web is a vast sloshing sea of individuals, sharing what would seem to encompass every conceivable thought about foreign policy, financial bailouts, the N.B.A. playoffs, delays at O’Hare, the new “keyboard cat” video, that jerk in the next cubicle and being bored. There’s a reason the word “oversharing” has entered the vernacular, yes?
That’s not the whole story, Shellen insists. While the history of the Web is at least partly the development of a Moore’s Law of expressive ease — it seems to take half as much effort to say twice as much every couple of years — this has had side effects. With so much chatter, how do you say something that will be part of a conversation rather than a monologue in a virtual empty room? “There’s been a little bit of the death of the shared experience,” is how Shellen puts it. He points to the popularity of gimmicky questionnaires that circulate widely on Facebook, like “25 Things You Don’t Know About Me,” “5 Cities You’ve Lived In” and “5 Albums You Love,” (or my personal favorite, “5 People You’d Like to Punch in the Face”). Similar tropes have circulated among bloggers as they tag one another; the upshot seems to be that sociability demands structure.
Thus Plinky’s daily prompts: Which movie’s characters would you befriend in real life? What will you do when the zombies come? Who would win a fight between a bear and a shark? Plinky users responded to that last question by the hundreds. A prompt about songs for a road trip got more than 2,000 replies, making it the most popular query to date. The intentionally innocuous nature of the prompts makes them reminiscent of canned cocktail-party conversation starters. The difference is that while a tongue-tied party guest can at least try to cultivate an air of brooding mystery that might lead someone else to start the conversation, the Internet wallflower is totally invisible. Chime in, or you’re forgotten. Thus a Plinky slogan: “Hey, didn’t you use to have a blog?” Poignant.
Nicholas Carr, who is at work on a book, tentatively titled “The Shallows,” about the culture of instant information, points out that blogs evolved from something to be updated on occasion to being updated daily, then many times a day; now social media services invite updates hourly, or constantly. “There’s a subtle, or not so subtle, form of competition,” he says. “You’re getting this constant stream of updates of whatever everyone else is doing; it kind of creates pressure that if you want to be in the flow, you also have to contribute. Frequently.”
Like the various “Top 5 Things” on Facebook, then, Plinky is an automated version of the person at the party who takes an interest and asks you a question. Shellen says his company has more projects in the works that are “centered on conversation” but for the moment has been learning more about what sorts of prompts are effective. He is not even bothered when users chime in to criticize a question. “It still got them to write,” he says. “We’re grist for the mill. We’re just trying to elicit some kind of response.”
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