Social media toolsets: The US vs UK

May 31, 2008 at 11:52 pm · Filed under communication, social media

I’m halfway through Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Forrester backed study on social technologies “Groundswell“. Their definition of groundswell:

A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.

100 pages in there hasn’t been anything earth shattering in terms of unexpected insight, though the case studies and different approaches of different industry are worth reading. What is great is the raw data that Li and Bernoff have access to and expose.

From a European perspective some of this data is more than a little troubling. Some hard facts:

Percentage of online consumers using RSS in 2007:

• US: 8%
• UK: 3%
• France: 5%
• Germay: 4%

And some figures on blog and UGC usage (US - UK):

• Read blogs: 25% - 10%
• Comment on blogs: 14% - 4%
• Write a blog: 11% - 3%
• Upload UGC video: 8% - 4%

Yet the percentage of users visiting social networking sites is much more evenly balanced with the US at 25% and the UK at 21%.

Again usage rates differ significantly when it comes to participation in discussion forums and postings ratings and reviews:

• Participate in discussion forums: 18% - 12%
• Read ratings and reviews: 25% - 20%
• Post ratings and reviews: 11% - 5%

And again when various social media roles are looked at the level of engagement of UK audiences are roughly half that of US audiences. Why is this? In some markets lack of broadband is cited as a reason, but it doesn’t take a 2 meg connection to use Google Reader. Similarly, engaging in review cites such as CNet isn’t a high bandwidth task.

Is there then sociological reasons at play? Are Brits simply less inclined to both complain and applaud products and services online? Are they less willing to experiment with new media and plaster the results all over Flickr and YouTube? It would appear so but keepfakingit isn’t so sure why.

Li and Bernoff ( or maybe I’ll call them Charlene and Josh, this is after all social media) point to the reasons for participation in groundswell technologies. Going through these let’s see if there are any pointers to this great Atlantic divide. So, we participate to:

1. Keep up friendships (Facebook etc.)
2. Make new friends, lovers, one night stands (Facebook etc. again)
3. Succumb to pressure from existing friends
4. Paying it forward (you use a review site so feel eventually obliged to submit your own review)
5. The altruistic impulse
6. The prurient impulse (Showing off is fun)
7. The creative impulse (UGC etc.)
8. The validation impulse (we all want to be assured of our place in the world, the rationale behind many blogs)
9. The affinity impulse (Big use case for sports fans).

Nothing in the above jumps out at me as the reason behind this US/UK drift. Let me know your thoughts.

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Media exclusion is plural

May 29, 2008 at 8:37 am · Filed under community, media

Keepfakingit writes one post on the impact of technology on society and then along come a whole bus-like fleet. So keepingitbrief, here’s quick comment on Jeff Jarvis’ post this week on the subject of media singularity.

Jarvis makes a couple of points.
1. The internet is not a medium but a place.
2. There are very few new mediums, just different ways (iPhone, online paper etc.)  of accessing them. This illustrates point 1.

Then to requote Jarvis quoting John Naughton:

While I’m blathering on about this, let me quote the wonderful John Naughton of the Open University and the Observer, who wrote this for an essay for an Ofcom report:

‘Media’ is the plural of ‘medium’, a word with an interesting etymology. The conventional, everyday interpretation holds that a medium is a carrier of something. But in science, the word has another, more interesting, connotation. To a biologist, for example, a medium is a mixture of nutrients needed for cell growth. And that’s a very interesting interpretation for our purposes.

In biology, media are used to grow tissue cultures – living organisms. The most famous example, I guess, is the mould growing in Alexander Fleming’s Petri dishes which eventually led to the discovery of penicillin.

What I want to do is apply that perspective to human society: to treat it as an organism that depends on a media environment for the nutrients it needs to survive and develop. Any change in the environment – in the media that support social and cultural life – will have corresponding effects on the organism. Some things will wither; others may grow; new, mutant, organisms may appear. The key point of the analogy is simple: change the medium, and you change the organism.

This way of looking at our media environment is not new. I picked it up originally from the late Neil Postman, a passionate humanist who taught at New York University for more than 40 years and was an unremitting sceptic about the impact of technology on society.

I posted yesterday on the dangers of social exclusion from an increasingly ghettoized social cyber space . Naughton’s point above illustrates the point I made that it’s increasingly important for the gate keepers of these communities to recognize these dangers and tailor  online environments to be inclusive and open space. Yes they will naturally self select their populaces, but this doesn’t mean we should allow and encourage the building of cyber walls between them.

Naughton is reminding us of Postman’s thesis that the medium makes the messanger, or at least the person that receives the message. As long as we control the medium we should have a duty of care to that end-user.

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The dangers of social exclusion via social media

May 28, 2008 at 11:15 pm · Filed under McLuhan, community, social networks

A week ago I was on a web seminar call with Nick Carr, journalist, dismisser of corporate IT and author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the world from Google to Edison.
Having just finished reading said TBS I was looking forward to getting up close to Carr’s ideas. The seminar was hosted by Google but so what, a lot of things are hosted by Google. What transpired though was an unfortunate sales pitch for Google’s cloud services. You get nothing for nothing so not much complaining coming from keepfakingit, but it would have been good to see Carr get stuck into some of the real issues he addresses in TBS.
Issues such as: Thomas Schelling’s theory of self selecting neighbours as applied to online communities and social networks.
Schelling’s thesis was that a randomly placed collection of nodes in a network, when given the ability to move independently at random, will eventually choose more like minded neighbours. for nodes and network replace ethno-racial families in city boroughs to get a real flavour for the social theory here.
Carr agrees with Schelling and points to examples of this happening in real life online communities. He argues that whilst many “Net defenders” points at a rich tapestry of life and opportunities online, the reality is an even bigger ghettoization of thought than happens on our streets. Net communities are more homogeneous  and polarized.
A great example is the inward looking nature of the political blogosphere in the US. A study of blog coverage of the 2004 presidential election found a clear split in red and blue blogs. Republicans talked about their issues, trashed Democratic policy, but for the most part only quoted and referenced their on blogs. And vice versa.
Crowd sourcing is another danger area. Take for example Amazon’s auto recommendations. I bought a Nick Cave album from Jeff Bezos six months ago so now every time I login to Amazon I get offered random selections from Nick and his Bad Seeds’ back catalogue. Not a bad service and it’s getting better all the time. Or is it? Is it not the case that what Amazon have created is the ultimate pseudo-AI feedback loop. Instead of refining, Amazon is narrowing my choices and the more I use it the narrower it gets. If I were to pay attention to Amazon I’d have all 14 Nick Cave albums in my collection within a few months but not a lot of other additions. And there’s only so much Anglo-Aussie guitar slinging anyone, or their neighbours, can take.

All this would seem to fly in the face of the logic that has made Amazon exhibit A in the case for a long tail economy but it is a social insight that must be paid attention.
This is happening throughout cyberspace. Is the internet becoming the world’s biggest feedback loop?
From first hand experience the online sports community follows similar patterns. The net has embellished and enhanced real world walls and barriers. Spurs and Arsenal fans rarely if ever congregate together. Even for an England match they’ll silo themselves. In fact it could be argued that in an online sports community the team allegiance is an even bigger social marker than it is in real life. And once marked, and outsider will find it even harder to integrate into a hostile neighbourhood. Ultimately in the case of the Premier League we’re left with 20 silos of fans who are even more divided online than in reality.
And as we spend more time online and when online in social networks the real life effects are tangible and numerous.
Of course this isn’t to say social networks are inherently bad, but as we start to port more of our real life tasks to networks (job hunting on LinkedIn, date hunting on Facebook, new band hunting on MySpace) we should be aware of the allies we’re running down. And there should be an onus on the gatekeepers of these alleys to clearly signpost them and keep them well lit.

Finally, this is something new media patron saint Marshall McLuhan warned against but ultimately was optimistic about in Understanding Media. On the subject of television he wrote that man rejects uniform integration because he becomes more deeply involved in the human condition…

 The entire approach to these problems in terms of uniformity and social homogenization is a final pressure of the mechanical and industrial technology. Without moralizing it can be said that the electric age, by involving all men deeply in one another, will come to reject such mechanical solutions.
It is more difficult to provide uniqueness and diversity than it is to impose the uniform patterns of mass education; but it is such uniqueness and diversity that can be fostered under electric conditions as never before.

It’s up to us to make sure that we’re constantly pushing the uniqueness and diversity envelope.

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Social Surplus: Are things really going to get better?

May 17, 2008 at 8:15 pm · Filed under community, content, media

Big thinking critical technology theory, yep, that’s what it takes to shake Keepfaking it from its slumber. Well that’s what we’re looking for in life and we’ve found plenty of it at Clay Shirky’s shirky.com.

But before we get into the heavy stuff, what is it with Gilligan’s Island? Talk TV studies to an American and it’s the most discussed program of the 60’s. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an entire episode. Sure I grew up on the wrong side of the Atlantic but I thought TV entertainment was a common language. The Cosby Show, Seasame Street, Bewitched, all shows that spoke the common language of TV-Land-eese. Gilligan’s Island, a foreign tongue if ever there was one.

But back to the theory. Shirky writes in-depth and rather cohesively about the concept of social surplus. Social surplus is the time people like us are clawing back from TV networks by creating internet content instead watching two minutes of Madison Avenue four to six times an hour.

The rise of the web, the blogsphere, social networks and most probably LOLCats means that this decade is the first in which we’ve started turning our eyes increasingly away from the TV and onto something different. Note, I certainly don’t think these new endevours are necessarily any more worthy. But Shirky does. Hence, coupled to Shirky’s social surplus is the notion of the heat sink:

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. This cognitive heat is now being directed elsewhere.

Let’s take that at face value. If we weren’t all stuck indoors watching plasticly enhanced actors living outrageous fantasies we’d all be doing something more worthwhile. Maybe we would.

Shirky then goes on to look more closely at the relationship between heat sinks and social surplus but I want for a second to dwell on the heat sinks. What else in society is a heat sink? Religion? Professional sport? Are these institutions sucking in society’s intelligence and thought time without reward? Probably, but so what if they are. Well, let’s go back and look at what’s happening to TV.

Traditional TV is imploding. A one to many broadcast model simply won’t work and the distribution model gets more and more confusing every year. One only has to examine the perilous state that ITV and Channel 4 are in right now to confirm this.

Organized religion in Europe is in exactly the same state. Turning up to church at an appointed hour weekly is a game more and more punters are unwilling to play. And how about pro sport? Well that’s a trickier one. Despite more money than ever going into Premier League football, average gates year on year are dropping. So maybe these heat sinks are cooling down and drawing less of the social surplus they once were.

So what does all this mean, for TV, religion and sport. Back to Shirky:

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

So Mr. CBS/Viacom/CNN/Sky/ManchesterUnited/RomanCatholicChurch, it’s easy, let us produce and create and share with you. Give us the content, some safety scissors and glue and we’ll go to town on the catechisms.

Again though I’m not so sure. Sharing for sharing’s sake. Are we merely dreaming of Life 2.0. a dangerous principle:

It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation.

Just why is the creation of badly photoshopped kittens a more valid use of brain space than taking in a dose of Desperate Housewives?

My thoughts:

Is this new creation on the internet actually good for anything? look at all the erroneous Wikipedia entries. Most of the content on PhotoBucket is rubbish. When did YouTube actually do anything for humanity?

Sure we have to find out where the users have been locked out of participation with big media/sport/religion. But “if we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?”

Ultimately we’re going to have to get the carving knives out, just let’s not fool ourselves that we’re creating a better, more cerebral society merely by letting the users play with the product.

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