Archive for community
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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Cian O'Donovan
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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Cian O'Donovan
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.
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
March 25, 2008 at 8:13 am · Filed under McLuhan, communication, community, media
SXSWi finished a fortnight ago. Over those two weeks I’ve traveled home, read what others have had to say on the event and tried to pull some of those thoughts together. No apologies for the delay, there have been some advantages to waiting this long before writing about SXSWi.
Below I’ve attempted to distil and bottle my version of the SXSWi elixir. Maybe it’s easier to start off with what for me SXSWi is not. It’s not a tech conference in the manner of E3. It’s not a West Coast think-in á-la TED and it certainly isn’t an economically driven cock-fest such as Davos. It shares common factors with all of the above, as well as some PodCamp, BarCamp and any other kind of tech/media trade camp show that you may care to list. It takes elements from all of these, cross pollinates and spits them back out into one very social and sociable long weekend in Texas’ capital. What struck me most of all was the insights into current media culture on display. By that I mean media in its truest form, as extensions of our senses, not the definition of media limited to depressing discussions on the state of our commercial mass media such as network TV and the newspaper industry. I was so taken with this big picture look at media that since the event I’ve dusted off “Understanding Media” and gone back to McLuhan to structure some of my thoughts.
Of course I’ll put an asterisk against the opening words here. This is my take, there are a thousands others many of which will show deeper and more informed insight than myself.
It is human nature to look for patterns and assign themes where only true randomness exists. I’m most definitely guilty of that below, but I think it still worth while to look for common threads across the five days of SXSWi. Reading the discourse coming back on the event online one concept is calling out over all others. With the year that’s in it let’s call it “the audacity and urgency of intimacy”
Through posts on the themes, technologies, events and questions of SXSWi I intend to show that the out of control freight train that is new media is pushing social communication into truly new places and there isn’t anybody out there who really knows where it will ultimately take us too. Not Mark Zuckerberg, not Eric Schmidt and certainly not myself.
So let’s take my newly minted paraphrase backwards. The Intimacy comes from the new level of connectivity society is embracing, particularly those under 20 and living in the West. We’re connecting and sharing our lives at a base level never before done through a mass medium. This is urgent in that we’re pushing these connections right now and regardless of consequence. The teens of today may be in their thirties before the ramifications of this new connectedness comes homes to roost (that sounds like a warning, it isn’t, I’m optimistic for this Bebo generation). Finally the audacity. Anyone who has heard Mark Zukerberg speak his enthusiasm for Facebook’s mission can’t help but describe him using the adjective ‘audacious’. He believes he’s fueling a media revolution not seen since the dawn of the modern newspaper. And he thinks that despite the very public pushback the likes of Facebook’s Beacon are getting. Zukerberg may well be right though.
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
February 21, 2008 at 7:43 pm · Filed under community, magazines, media, social networks
What Fast Company are doing in terms of integrating amateur and pro content is pretty interesting. Right through their site they are erasing the boundaries between their highly paid internet A-Listers, Scoble, Israel etc, and their readers. And the truly amazing thing here is that Fast Company is at heart a magazine, the oldest of old media types.
One thing that makes this work is that the pro bloggers and writers are really pro. And the community editors are doing a good job of bringing the very best amateur content to the surface.
Jeff Jarvis weighs in with his ever definitive thoughts on FC and co here.
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
January 17, 2008 at 12:51 pm · Filed under communication, community, media, social markers, sport
Blogs with cartoons, that’s the way it should be done, and nobody does it better than Hugh McLeod.
His post on “social markers” has some great insights. But it’s the example Hugh uses that really catches my attention. By using the Boston Red Sox, McLeod points out probably the greatest social marker on the planet. At least for the 50% of people with “Mr.” in front of their names. Sure beer and pussy are pretty big ones too for us males, but if sport wasn’t invented for this purpose someone like Mark Zuckerberg would have to round up some funding to do it.
So why do so many sports websites fail to get this? Sure there are some great community sports ventures, I’m thinking sportingo.com and the like, but big media hasn’t done a lot of note other than the standard web forums as seen on the likes of espn.com and skysports.com. These simply do not engage users the way social nets do. Sports news and analysis is piled high on the back of an 18 wheeler running red lights on a one way street.
This is something Setanta.com can build on. Right now Setanta is showing the best slate of big-time boxing fights the UK has seen in years. It’s a sport with renewed vigour because of the likes of Joe Calzaghe, Ricky Hatton and David Haye. And the boxing community has jumped in and are using any available means of communication to tell us how much they like it. We simply have to give them a better way of communicating this passion than web forums, reply boxes to articles and email addresses.
Great cartoon btw Hugh.
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ds
January 6, 2008 at 10:07 pm · Filed under communication, community, content, media, politics, social networks, sport
Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer have put together an interesting collaborative media review tool over the past few days. It’s worth checking out at http://twitcrit.scripting.com/changes.html.
The technology is simple. Get a Twitter account, track down and start following @twitcrit, then message @twitcrit with any media review that takes your fancy. So far so easy if you can script and rummage around an api. But let’s step back from Jarvis’ critique of the latest Democratic prez debate (hey Jeff, why all the hating on you boy Barack?) and look at what this approach does to media interaction.
The wonderful thing about Twitter is that it is a nice simple lightweight medium for one to many broadcasting. Using a browser, a desktop app or a normal SMS from a phone, anyone can send 160 characters of love, hate or debate to those that “follow” their tweets. There’s no walled gardens (Facebook etc.) which means the user can get information in and and out of Twitter with the minimum of fuss.
Up until now Twitter has been great in situations such as conferences, where, for a short period of time only, people need a one-to-many communication structure. It also did a job during recent Californian fires. But all of these uses have been somewhat simplistic. There’s not a lot done with the data on either side of the transport. Message is entered into Twitter, Twitter sends it on it’s merry way, tweet is read at the other end. Bosh!
But how about we start some smart aggregation as Jarvis is suggesting. How about instead of treating each tweet as an isolated many-to-one message, we aggregate it with other likeminded tweets so that we have many many-to-one tweets all sorted and bunched on the receive side. We then start building a picture of what the crowd is thinking on any particular subject, and importantly (as this really comes into its own in live situations) we get a picture of how the crowd’s collective mind is changing as the debate/show/movie/game is progressing.
So how’s this different from those calls to action for standard text messages during X-Factor and the like? Twitter is the difference here. All of this messaging takes place within a defined (but relatively open) infrastructure. We can follow our tweets. We can reply to others and we can interact on a plethora of devices in different ways.
Two applications immediately jump to mind. Elections. Live sport. Howard Dean and the rise of the A-List blogger made blogging the big story of 2004. Can Twitter have an impact this time around?
As for sport, we have a bit longer to think about that, but at the very least a live play-by-play of the Super Bowl, or the multimillion dollar 30 second spots that surround it is a goer in a few weeks.
Now, one final issue. What and how does big media get a piece of this action?
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ds
January 2, 2008 at 11:32 pm · Filed under McLuhan, community, media, social networks
In the week that Big Brother once again pokes its nasty head out of room 101 here’s some words from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media pp 67:
Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at least, we shall be able to program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own gimmickry.
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of informations seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?
Adding McLuhan’s two points together: if we get social we get rid of Big Brother and the rest of our navel gazing “reality culture”. Yet it could be argued that “reality” media is the apex of media development in the four decades since McLuhan wrote the above. It’s not an argument I’m going to make right now though. That’s one for Andy Duncan over at Channel 4.
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ds
December 27, 2007 at 2:51 pm · Filed under brands, community, content, media, social networks
From Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture:
The specific content of gossip is often less important than the social ties created through the exchange of secrets between participants - and for that reason, the social functions of gossip hold when dealing with television content. It isn’t who you are talking about but who you are talking with that matters. Gossip builds common ground between participants, as those who exchange information assure one another of what they share. Gossip is finally a way of talking about yourself through critiquing the actions and values of others. As cyberspace broadens the sphere of our social interactions, it becomes even more important to be able to talk about peope we share in common via the media than people from our local community who will not be known by all of the participants in an online conversation. Into that space step the complex, often contradictory figures who appear on reality television.
Jenkins mentions this in relation to building community around reality TV. But really this applicable to all relationships and Jenkins brings it up after a discussion on building brand champions/agitators in the community.
So the questions arises, how can brands and media owners facilitate this gossip? Is this where they interact with the social networks or should they even be trying to own this or merely interact with it.
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ds
December 3, 2007 at 4:59 pm · Filed under community, content, magazines, media, politics
Interesting piece from Jon Friedman of MarketWatch on the decline and fall of the magazine. And what the modern American editor is doing about it (not a lot in many cases).
Five easily bloggable points jump out:
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Take a page out of the playbook of what differentiated MSNBC.com from the pack. Have almost as many graphics and design experts as writers on staff.
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Provide a feature that you simply don’t have space for in your newsstand product:
namely, the back story. Readers love to know the Inside Story on a big event. Let your reporters explain HOW they covered big news, and give them an opportunity to tell their stories. Yes, some blogs do this, too, but not often or well enough.
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Make the sites as interactive as possible. Time took a good step in this direction by having its readers pick the questions it asks celebrities in its regular feature.
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Use the Web to explain the news as comprehensively as possible. Don’t simply report the story on the Internet — give such information as a chronology. The Wall Street Journal’s Web site routinely does this, and it pays off.
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Keep the staff nonbelievers as far away from the Web as possible. If editors or reporters are ambivalent about or hostile to the Web (like many have been at Time Inc., and you can’t fire them all), don’t let them corrupt
your site with their lethargy or disapproval. Listen, the Web is the most exciting part of a modern journalism enterprise for ambitious writers and editors. If they haven’t figured it out by now, to hell with them.
The point on graphics design vs extra copy writers I think is massive. It’s all too rare on news websites to see good illustration and it’s something that fits very well into the more protracted deadlines magazines allow.
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