“Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.”

Love this quote from David Hulme used in Jay Rosen’s piece on what he calls the generic Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators article. Factors and causes. It shouldn’t be this hard to differentiate.

via The “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” Article » Pressthink.

If scholars of the industrial revolution are to be believed, around about 1800, for the first time, humanity probably had in its grasp all it needed to work a 20 hour week and kick back, relax the rest of the time. We had machines, automation and specialisation. Obviously things have not progressed quite like that these past 200 years, though some content we should now re-examine that concept and give it a proper going over. Either way, ever increasing (socio)technological advancements over the past couple of centuries have led to Clay Shirky’s elegantly monikered ‘cognitive surplus’. That surplus is the time left over after we are finished butchering, baking and candlestick making. From the 1950s until the turn of the millenium we put that suplus into TV. Now we have the internet. Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. William Gibson’s unevenly distributed future, today; some of us have more of that time than others, but most of us in the western world have a considerable chunk of time to spend. And despite the neigh-sayers dismissing clicktivists, maybe Twitter and the tools of tomorrow really are finding a role in making the world a better place.

That’s the thing about Twitter, it helps distribute the future. But one has to want that future. Of course many come online and stay in their cultural ghettos, hanging off the words of Wossy or Kanye and broadcasting their meal choice, inebriation level or the football score, whatever, I’m not interested in being condescending here. My point is this, millions more Twitters are putting that cognitive surplus to an altogether more ghetto busting use. Exhibit A: belated happy tenth birthday Wikipedia and your 15,000 strong army of English language regular editors. Exhibit B: #UKUncut, sniping the parts other campaigns can’t reach and yes, I am about to make my point any moment now, exhibit C: Twestival, the likes of which was simply not possible ten years ago. @amanda tells the story better than I could, it’s her story to tell after all, I have just a couple of observations below.

For me, Twestival is not simply a fundraiser, but a platform, a methodology for doing what so many of us in the world of online campaigning find so hard, turning online activity, sentiment and intention, into real world relationships, action and okay yes, raising some funds. And the legacy of Twestival Local 2011 I hope will be long term sustainable connections in communities all over the planet.

Can we change the world on the web? I don’t know, but I do know we can meet and introduce fellow world changers online, switch off the power button once in a while and then go to it. Right now Twestival is organising, or more to the point, facilitating the organising, of hundreds of events around the world on March 24th. Thousand of  people who live in the neighbourhoods (online and off) that have never made eye contact are planning parties, bbqs and get-togethers because that cognitive surplus has overflowed into one glorious pot. Twestival. And I am am unbelieveably excited to be part of the the global management team. What’s more, I’d love to hear your ideas on how we continue building on Twestival’s great work and make March 24th 2011 the ultimate day of online / offline local community building, in whatever shape that looks like where you’re at.

Think about this next time you’re blown away by some citizen journalism.

From Paul Carr’s article on Techcrunch.

Photo (cc) Maia C

The future of the medium, a digital strategy to implement now.

Radio isn’t sexy. Radio has never had a point release number added onto it. No such thing as Radio 2.0. When was the last time you heard a new radio station get VC funding. Actually, when was the last time you heard of a new radio station starting up at all. But radio is a remarkable medium having survived pretty much intact and on the same model for the past 50 years. Despite the hype of Last.fm and pandora, of podcasts and RSS, of satellite in the US and DAB in the UK, radio still exists and plays an important part in communities world wide.
But seismic change is enveloping the entire mediascape right now, not least of all because of massive advertising budget cuts. Here’s my take on why and how radio will have to adapt to changes in technology and more importantly its audience.

Before looking at radio exclusively in the digital space, I’m going to take a helicopter view on the situation right now.

To look at what’s happening to radio now let’s first take a look at radio as it emerged in the sixties the loser of a two decade battle with television. This was how Marshall McLuhan saw it in the Understanding Media, 1964.

One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous informations system. News bulletins, time signals, traffic data, and, above all, weather reports now serve to enhance the native power of radio to involve people in one another. Weather is that medium that involves all people equally. It is the top item on radio, showering us with fountains of auditory space or lebensraum.

[And]

Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. The resonating dimension of radio is unheeded by the script writers, with few exceptions. The famous Orson Welles broadcast about the invasion from Mars was a simple demonstration of the all-inclusive, completely involving scope of the auditory image of radio. It was Hitler who gave radio the Orson Welles treatment for real.

The antithetic electric power of instant information that reverses social explosion into implosion, private enterprise into organization man, and expanding empires into common markets, has obtained as little recognition as the written word. The power of radio to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has gone unnoticed, So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions.

[Here comes the payoff:]

Centralism of organization is based on the continuous, visual, lineal structuring that arises from phonetic literacy. At first therefore, electric media merely followed the established patterns of literate structures. Radio was released from these centralist network pressures by TV. TV then took up the burden of centralism, from which it may be released by Telstar [25 years before Sky launched this was a good guess, but really it was the internet that is doing this job - Cian]. With TV accepting the central network burden derived from our centralized industrial organization,  radio was free to diversify, and to begin a regional and local community service that it had not known, even in the earliest days of the radio hams.

Since TV, radio has turned to the individual needs of people at different times of the day, a fact that goes with the multiplicity of receiving sets in bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, cars, and now in pockets. Different programs are provided for those engaged in diverse activities. Radio, once a form of group listening that emptied churches, has reverted to private and individual uses since TV. The teenager withdraws from the TV group to his private radio.

This natural bias of radio to a close tie-in with diversified community groups is best manifested in the DJ cults, and in radio’s use of the telephone in a glorified form of the old trunk-line wiretapping. Plato, who had old-fashioned tribal ideas of political structure, said that the proper size of a city was indicated by the number of people who could hear the voice of a public speaker. Even the printed book, let alone radio, renders the political assumptions of Plato quite irrelevant for practical purposes. Yet radio, because of its ease of decentralized intimate relation with both private and small communities, could easily implement the Platonic political dream on a world scale.

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I’m not going to have to labour the point here that you have merely to replace ‘TV’ and ‘radio’ with ‘internet’ and ‘social networks/platforms’ at various junctures above to see we have transitioned into a new media age again. Neither am I going to labour the point that it’s TV that has lost more and has more to lose whilst radio continues to serve well the masters McLuhan writes of.

There’s another point arising from the above worth considering. TV took the responsibility and “radio was free to diversify”. Whether or not this diversification has continued apace over the 45 years since McLuhan wrote this is irrelevant. We’re now at an end of history juncture in media evolution where all media is being forced to evolve, or die. Audience migration to other media, general falling advertising revenues and stale formats all play a part here. But let’s not dwell overly long on the past.

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Current radio landscape
Okay, so we know where we’ve come from. Let’s take a look at the current radio landscape and

Radio does an awesome job of building relationships between listener and presenter. In the listener’s view this comes down the mainline. One to one. And great relationships are always built on the same thing; trust.

To see just how important this trust is lets take an example of trust failure. The Sachs / Ross /  Brand incident. I’ll leave for now the fact that the original airing didn’t produce a single letter of complaint and it was only after other media outlets picked up the story it snowballed.  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/27/russell-brand-jonathan-ross-andrew-sachs-calls]
No, the interesting angle is that Ross and Brand pulled their prank on on radio. Would it have produced the same reaction on TV? I suggest that on TV we would have seen the footage aired back to back for a news cycle or two. And then? Then the news editors become interested in something else. But the relationship, the trust we have with our radio hosts, is very different. We invite them in to our space, one on one, and nobody wants that space violated in this way. It wasn’t just Ross and Brand leaving voice mails, we were all collaborators and we didn’t like how that made us feel ultimately.

[As an aside it's interesting to note that during the his enforced sabbatical Ross became one of the planet's most followed Twitterer. More on this some other time.]

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If this were a full on research piece I’d be forced to bring more examples to the table, it’s not and I don’t have time right now. So onwards.

Let’s take the step into tomorrow’s world. With us we’re taking a (pseudo) one-to-one relationship between the radio and the audience. Singular. So let’s survey the new digital world we’re entering. A few notes and buzzwords if you’ll permit me.

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Facets of future radio

• First of all it’s distributed – it’s anywhere you like
• It’s post-scarcity – the means of receiving content/information/communication/media is not limited by atoms (Like it was when we pressed music onto plastic discs), or even airwaves.
• It’s always on – ditto
• It’s hot in here – because it’s really really crowded. With content creators and content users and it’s hard to tell these guys apart.
• It’s noisy in here too – ditto
• It’s remix ready – Somebody younger and smarter than you is going to take your media and pass it on to someone else in ways you never imagined. You may as well make it as easy as possible.
• It’s a bit like a cult – Yep, everybody just wants to say hello. And we don’t care if you have

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The future of news organizations.
Adapt or die. Emily Bell recently described ITV as belonging to a “Sunset industry”. It is unlikely the broadcaster can survive the current recession without significant change, and it is questionable whether they can implement that change quickly enough.

Whereas the BBC, for all it’s “scandals” and “-gates” has managed to do something revolutionary. It has, though the wildly successful I-Player, turned itself into a platform. Yes it still produces world class content, but it now has an end to end distribution solution for all of this content too. The value of that can’t be valued.

Commentators such as Jeff Jarvis have been long telling all old media outlets to drop the commodity content and focus on the differentiators. For newspapers this means this means letting go of glamours foreign bureau and putting more resources on the local beat. Big media has started to listen; the New York Times last month announced a hyper local initiative with bloggers and reporters stationed throughout the cities five boroughs and in surrounding states. Over the past couple of years Guardian News and Media (GNM) has been slowing acquiring and partnering with leading blogs in order to bring specialist content and expertise under the Guardian.

And this week GNM took the brave step of opening up ALL it’s databases: news; demographics; statistics etc. to any potential third party application developers. They have an unproved advertising revenue model backing this up which may or may not bring in serious cash, either way it’s a revolutionary move. Whether it pays or not GNM have reacted quickly and boldly to the changing outputs (distribution, audience etc.) that the IT revolution has brought us.

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Audience
Let’s bring this back to audience.
Radio’s job is to engage audience, engender trust thus keeping the listener tuned in and  bringing the audience back regularly. A radio station is that familiar comfort zone a listener can go to.
What can a radio do in the digital space to back this mission up. Can it offer the same services, the same comfort zone? Where the answer to these questions is no, can it drive audiences to places where

Up until now a radio producer has dealt with easy one way flows of information.
The talent speaks down from on high and the listeners have two choices and the second one is turn the dial. Sure phone-ins and texts, emails and letters have their place. But in all of these the producer or talent act as gatekeeper. They control the flow both ways.
All of this has changed.
Using realtime tools like Twitter and Facebook status, listeners can now self organize. They can take the conversation

If radio stations don’t tap into this information ecosystem the talent is reduced to the role of conversation starter. The answer? I can’t tell you, but it will involve both the talent and the station becoming part of their listeners’ social graphs. They will be deeply integrated into this new ecosystem. And a conversation in this space doesn’t end at 7pm when the drivetime slot turns into the SportsNight. The conversation is 24/7. Or at least 7-23. Are radio stations ready to play under these rules. They’d want to be. Can they take part in an audience relationship that’s listener-to-listener and not talent-to-listener.

The big paradigm shift producers are going to have to deal with is two way communication. you have to talk back to stoke the trust engine

There are some facts we should keep in mind. Content. The great reliables in life; taxes and death. These are still the subjects “listeners” will engage in. They’ll simply engage wherever the barrier to entry is lowest. There’s room, and a distribution platform for niche, but the big issues remain just that, big
And let’s also remember that not everybody out there wants to be involved in a global discussion. There is still an appetite for expert opinion presented professionally. In fact as the hum of the crowd (in places like Twitter) grows, the need for the professional content, clearly identifiable as such, grows. So give the people what they want.

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Filters
On the subject information overload, of modern media which is cheap, globally distributed and always on, Clay Shirkey suggests we don’t have a problem with too much media, merely difficulty filtering it. Our traditional filters were newspaper editors and radio producers.
As we bypass these forms of media we lose an important buffer. Many of us are now utterly swamped. I have hundreds of songs lined up in iTunes and Last.fm I’ve never listened too and never will. I have podcasts downloaded that will never be synced to my mp3 player. I’ve got 15,000 articles in my RSS feed reader that presents me with a chronological impossibility.

Linear radio offers a wonderful reprieve from this constant barrage. When I turn on the Today programme in the morning I’m trusting that the Oxbridge educated editors and researchers have programmed a breakfast’s worth of topical and insightful content for my consumption. It’s the only time of the day many of us are now letting these decisions be made by others.

There are a number of example of automated filtering services online that are based on recommendation and database “intelligence”. Last.fm/pandora for music [automated]. Digg taps the wisdom of the (mostly tech) crowd [human].

I would argue that the radio producer is already one of the media ecology’s best filters. From Jimmy Saville to John Kelly, the DJ too is an original filter and filterer. There is a natural role here for radios to play in being society’s live content filterer.

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Remix culture - beyond the airwaves
It has never been easier to take existing cultural artifacts, songs, images, video, and combine them to create new culture. Dangermouse’s Grey Album (the worlds of Jay Z, the music of the Beatles) is the oft-name-checked pinnacle of this remix culture. It could be argued that 2008 was the year of the remix presidential campaign; Obama Girl could never have been created by a campaign themselves, but when mixed and remixed by amateurs.

The same remixing culture has taken hold on websites and databases all over the internet. Flickerverse.com was a personal favorite. It took photos uploaded on Flicker, peeks at their geo-tags and maps them in realtime on a Google Map of the world, sadly it is no more. Twitterverse does the same for tweets against geographical location.

Can we mash-up real radio stations. What would that look like?
Radio stations touch local communities. Police forces and media outlets all over the world are starting to produce Google Maps mashups of crime data against city maps. Does a news and talk based radio format have a job to do here. Can it in fact own this data (ownership in the curatorial sense).

Visualize, Visualize Visualize.
This may sound counter intuitive for a radio station. But open source data and the open APIs of visualization tools have led to a new wave of online services. Here’s a map of Chicago crime data. Surely this is something local radio should be all over.
(Check this map of Twitter conversations about the Superbowl out). And remember, these services aren’t necessarily there for on-air talent to direct.

Questions:

• Can a radio station OWN some of these services within its “broadcast area”?
• Radio is part of the fourth estate. The four estate’s job is in part to keep an eye on the third estate?
• Is there a job to do to aggregate politicians’s expenses, blogs, twitter accounts. Keep an eye on them all?

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So some practical suggestions if you reached this far

All I wanted was some website advice?
I haven’t  spent much time thinking why someone would want to go to a radio website. I love radio. I never go to radio websites unless it’s to listen live or on demand.
Ten years ago we would have stuck a picture of DJ BigShot on the front page and had another page devoted to him. And nobody who ever visited it would ever go back. And most galling of all a design and build agency would have walked away with a decent sum of money for their brochure-ware.

Can we do something smarter that that around the talent? Instead of using the website as a shop window let’s use it as a set of open doors. Let’s figure a way to start the relationship. Or rekindle the relationship.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this in recent times is Stephen Fry’s ClubFry page. This isn’t his homepage. And it’s a lot more than a shop window. Fry has flung the doors open and is asking people to come inside. He’s opening himself up in as many ways possible, with twitter, with replies, with email newsletters, with podcasts, with photostreams. And he’s done this using existing networks that his audience are already on.

Another interesting campaign recently is Skittles. The crunchy chewy confectionary ditched their website entirely and instead pointed the URL skittles.com at various web 2.0 sites. These included a Twitter search page on the phrase “skittles” to the newly created Facebook Group page on Facebook itself. This was Skittle telling their customers, we dwell amongst you, not on an artificial construct you have no interest in visiting. The online equivalent of running a radio show from Bewleys café perhaps.

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Conclusions
This piece is long enough as it is. Drawing up practical applications to the ideas discussed here will take up twice the space.

• Radio CEOs and owners can’t hide from a digital strategy of some sort. The format, audience demographics and geography are going to dictate the size and scope of this to some extent. Taking wallpaper But there are some clear directions imo.
• Radios can become content filters. Their websites can play important roles in telling people where the best, most important content is.
• Visualizations and mashups of crime and of happiness indexes.
• Listening to our audience. How can we aggregate their discussion better. I’m thinking of the like of Seesmic etc. here.
• Google. How are users finding the radio station. The content. can google drive this.
  Or live twitter search. Live search is being billed by people like Batelle as key. And it ties really well into radio.
  Interesting idea here. Radio stations can have twitter feeds that are meant ONLY to capture search, not friends for ego-following’s sake.
• Radio website should aggregate the personalities, not brochure-ware them. Like stephen Fry’s twitter page.
• Radio’s don’ need websites to communicate with their audience. They need digital strategies and friend feed / skittles type things

Future of Radio: We assume relationships and communication between radio and audience. My big question to the radio industry is what is your role in the relationship between your audience and your audience.

If I take the trouble to write up some basic thoughts on Wikipedia and Britannica you know only one thing can happen. Yeah, within a week they both announce they’re changing their knowledge models. Kind of.

The great Brit is turning wiki (again, kind of) and Jimmy Wales has proposed building some editorial decision gates into Wikipedia.

IT World carries this:

A version of this policy, called Flagged Revisions, is in place at the German-language Wikipedia.

The decision to test Flagged Revisions on the flagship English-language Wikipedia was prompted by changes to the entries of U.S. senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd that incorrectly stated the men had died.

“This nonsense would have been 100 percent prevented by Flagged Revisions,” wrote Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in his “user talk” page.

A poll of Wikipedia users showed that 60 percent support applying Flagged Revisions to certain entries, according to Wales. Contributions would be held for approval at most for one week, but ideally “a lot less,” he wrote, adding that Flagged Revisions will be tried out “for a time-limited test.”

My take: Great move by EB. They add some small amount of user contribution/suggestion and an old brand is suddenly brought bang up to date (in its own eyes). For WP though it’s a little more uncertain. Is Wales acting like the father of a teenager who has come to realise  his progeny has a mild case of ADD and is searching for some meds to calm things down? Looks like it, he better make sure those pills have been FDA approved.

I attended a NESTA related screening of Us Now,  last week. Despite featuring George Osbourne and Ed Milliband it presented a pretty optimistic vision of a future-present in terms of “the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet”.

Here’s the feedback, collated by hand on paper handouts. Kind of old school for a documentary about collaborative networks. Mine’s on slide 10 I think.

There are lots of clips from the really well shot film available here.

And just to get all 2.0, here’s my immediate reaction:

twitter feed of UsNow conversation

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.

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.

This is my last post on SXSW. It may be the most important one though. As I’ve written, I went to SXSW thinking it would be a tech event. I’ve come back to London with the realization that it’s not about bits and bytes. It’s about people. It’s about the keynotes and the audience who take on those keynote speakers. It’s about regular panels and the individuals who stand up and wait for a turn to ask a question at the mic. And it’s about all those lunatics who see a twitter calling for a mid-afternoon tweet-up at a random bar and despite knowing nobody turn up and make friends. Thanks for that twitter.

I would like to briefly go through some standout panels and keynotes at SXSW. He was subsequently outshone, or certainly out hyped by other big guns, but for me Henry Jenkins really brought his A-Game. Thesis: Society and its leaders and its media are switching from an ‘I’ culture to a ‘we’ culture. Examples: Survivor and Lost’s level of audience participation. These prime time shows do not exist without their online audience examining every last secret detail of every frame of every episode.
Exampe: Barack Obama talks using the post-boomer inclusivity language of ‘We’. Hillary Clinton does not. ‘I’ plays a big part in Clinton’s speeches and represents a person born of a political generation that wholeheartedly embraces the one way medium of TV. That’s over Mrs. Clinton.
Daniel light adds to Jenkins’ thesis in his excellent post:

“This isn’t presented as happening at the expense of individuality or self-determination. On the contrary, this is not communism but communalism, seeing the interests of the community best served by the divergent creativity and initiative of we, its constituents.”

Social Networks such as Twitter and Seesmic are obvious manifestations of this communalism. They represent the audacity and urgency of intimacy that I think Jenkins talks about.

Mark Zuckerberg
A whole ton of stuff has been written about the Zukerberg/Lacy interview. It was a cringe worthy affair. So what, let’s get on with the show. Neither Zuckerberg nor Lacy came across as particularly interesting individuals in person, but I do want to examine a few points Zuck tried to get out between acts of audience revolt. Sure, audience participation via online social network back channels is interesting but not in a huge manner right now. Come on, this is one of the biggest geek fests on the planet, if it’s going to happen anywhere it’s going to happen here.

One interesting side note is the reference Zuck makes to how Facebook is helping revolutionaries in Colombia. Look at the Guardian piece on FB’s backers. Is this thus a huge surprise. Government and big business have sought to control information and access to information since mankind invented media. ie forever. The reformation was enabled by Guttenberg’s wresting of information control from the Catholic church after all. If I’m the CIA, you better believe I want to control, or at the very least have readily available access to these information paths.

One worry here is that as with Google, as large corporations start to gain an ownership on our information and relationships they can massage these in different ways. McLuhan’s statement on medium and message rings true. Our thoughts and the way we think adapts to the medium. Control that and control the message.

Zuck stated quite audaciously that Facebook represents the biggest paradigm shift in media since the launch of the newspaper industry. Maybe he’s actually right, did anyone think of that?

Newspapers didn’t shift society’s thought functionality on their own, it took the invention and adoption of the telegraph to put them over the edge. The telegraph removed the limitations of space and time on the newspaper industry. The newspaper press was then free to become the first medium to involve human interest and sentiment en masse. With that the telegraph ultimately dimmed the privacy of the book form.

Nearly 200 years later social networks are doing a similar job in dismantling barriers of intimacy in our communications. The generation of school children on Bebo has grown up with almost a complete, non-technological, tool set to use social networks to communicate.

Commentators in their twenties and older wonder how this generation is going to grow up and hit the work force with all their teenage trials and tribulations shared online for the potential employer to vet. But that isn’t the employee’s problem. They are comfortable with their shared intimacy. It’s the employer who’s going to have to deal with it. In the past decade we’ve had two presidents in the US and a leader of the opposition in the UK who have crossed this Rubicon in terms of records and recollections of student drug usage. This is surely the start of a societal change from punishing past indiscretions to an open acknowledgment of mistakes.

We’ve already stated that the newspaper press wasn’t the catalyst for the changing of media consumption in the 1800’s. It was the Telegraph. And so social networks. Flash AJAX deployments and integrated APIs aren’t the killer app here. These aren’t changing society. But what might do that that is the integration of mobile devices. This is why Google is spending so much on Android and wireless. It may be that Social Networks will finally come of age and be the instruments of change that MZ proports them to be when they fully embrace a mobile world. This is the only way they are going to penetrate Africa for example.

So to Frank Warren
I’ve been a fan of PostSecret since I first saw it in some Sunday supplement or another. It’s collage like art/intimacy I think connects with a lot of people. We’ve all got something hidden inside us.

However seeing Warren’s name up beside Jenkins and Zuckerberg was something of a surprise. This guy’s an artist/currator. How does that fit into an interactive conference?

Well let’s look at what interactive means. Warren has created more direct interactions than perhaps anyone in the auditorium. And on an incredibly intimate level. It’s fair to say that Warren knows how to extract the intimate in just about anyone. The hour long talk featured quite a few tales of anonymous secrets, but the amazing thing was what this outpouring of secrets did to the audience. The Q&A section, or rather mass secret section produced one spontaneous proposal of marriage, lots of confessions and one hug from Frank for a woman who fell into floods of teams in front of 2,000 super-geeks. Wow. Nothing I write here can do him justice. Some of his talks are online. Find them.

Four points from Jane McGonigal’s talk on the happiness industry. All recent research on happiness points to four key areas that are pre-requisites for bringing happiness to a life:

1. Satisfying work to do
2. The experience of being good at something
3. Time spent with people we like
4. A chance to be a part of something bigger

What’s this to do with interactive? Jane’s a multi-player game expert. And multiplayer games bring all four of these in spades. If your industry doesn’t it’s time to think why not.

So on to other highlights. George Kelly gave the most sombre talk of the weekend. He read like a Telegraph obit. The funeral was that of the newspaper industry and George obviously cares. Not that that’s going to stop the declining sales, slash and burn approach to the world’s news rooms and a mass exodus of advertisers to green online pastures.
That leaves me with this question though which I want to explore over the coming months. is it a given that these forms of communication and participation will jump the gap between international geek community and mass adoption. Facebook has done it, but can Twitter and Seesmic really go mass market in their current guise or will they simply be sold off for their API’s. Does the real innovation lie in ancillilary apps?

Finally some learnings at a basic level. Despite our web 2.0 tools it’s vital to connect in a real way, not just at a Facebook or MySpace level. Without real interaction, and maybe even face to face communication these web2.0 relationships do not mean a whole lot. Gary Vaynurchuck understands this. Watch how he communicates with his audience. But big media doesn’t. It they get Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, it’s at a marketing level. Useless.

Nike is a company that I find absolutely offensive for their continued outsourcing/labour issues, BUT they get this. They are using their brand and social status to connect people in the real world. More companies need to get this too. And like Nike they may well be companies that haven’t done this before. If you work in the world of sport, an area that is invented to accomodate social interaction you better be thinking this or you’re going to be left way out by your audience.