Death of the throwaway comment

networks No Responses »
Jul 292010

I read these articles from time to time about how people should be more aware that their online conversations might stop them getting a job sometime, e.g. Does Social Media encourage too much revelation?.

And I think: is the job thing really the biggest issue when we are now having conversations online that are both permanent and findable?

More and more of us spend increasing amounts of time online and the separation between “real life” and our online activities has all but broken down. The things we say and do online are stored indefinitely, and can be found easily by anyone.

What does it mean for social intercourse when the default setting is that interactions are both public and permanent?

This is a very recent development. People tend to be good at seeing the ways in which new things are similar to old things:
“this car is like a horseless carriage”
“this CD is like a record”
“this e-mail is like a letter”
“this Facebook is like a conversation with friends”

But there tends to be a lag before we manage to see the important ways in which the new things are different:
“this car is mechanical and so it doesn’t get tired and can cover far greater distances far more quickly”
“the media stored on this CD can be easily copied”
“this e-mail arrives instantly and can be easily used to have group conversations”
“this Facebook conversation is making information about me available to a lot more people than I am talking to and I can’t really take back anything I say”

Having to think about whom your message could reach, and how it might be interpreted far into the future is new. It is bound to change the ways we think about how we talk to one another. Along with that change we will get new tools that will make it easier for us to make smart and informed choices about how we say what we say.

danah boyd is wonderful on all things to do with online identity and privacy. She has just published a new article (with Eszter Hargittai) on Facebook privacy settings, which I’ll certainly be reading.

PS In the UK there are restrictions on what information a prospective employer may gather, as well as a requirement that the applicant is made aware of what information about them is being collected. The Information Commissioner’s website has relevant documentation.

Posted by dee harvey at 9:20 pm

Social watching

Uncategorized No Responses »
Jul 212010

Rupert Howe started a conversation on the videoblogging list the other day about a post Clintus McGintus made on his blog called The Videoblogger is Dead.

In the discussions on the list and on Clintus’s blog there is (among some people) a disappointment that videoblogging hasn’t turned out to be the rewarding social experience it once promised to be.

In 2005-2006, when web video was just starting to get easy to do I was very interested in what it would mean for how people would communicate with one another, and how online video would become a social medium. In fact, that was what my ITP final thesis project was about – the creation of short videos (recorded on a phone and sent to the web) to communicate with groups of friends. What I imagined was something like video twitter – short messages in video form sent to groups of friends.

Another ITP student, and a friend of mine, Eric Fino, worked on a thesis project that suggested a social tool for use when watching videos. People could watch a video together online and chat about it. It was a great project.

Four years later it turns out that Fino was right, and I was wrong. The ways in which people are social with video are all about the watching. In fact, while everyone was saying how TV was about to die, the real-time web came along with Twitter and made scheduled video that is piped into almost every house compelling again.

When I worked on my thesis I concentrated on how people would create and post video and not so much on how they would see it talk about it – how the message would be sent, rather than how it would be received. What I had worked out by the end of that project was that in order for video to be social you needed to make it easier to engage with it socially, not just easier to put it up there in the first place.

Sites like 12seconds.tv and seesmic are working on the watching and talking. I think that’s where things are going to get really interesting – when someone finally gets it right, truly social video is going to have a big impact on the ways in which we connect to one another.

I think the effort needs to go into the watchers. For all the talk of “the people formerly known as the audience”, they are often just assumed to be there, full suite of media tools at the ready, just dying to get involved. In fact their involvement doesn’t require media tools, it requires online video tools that lend themselves easily to rich social interactions. Of which, more later.

Posted by dee harvey at 10:06 pm

Great minds

Uncategorized No Responses »
Jul 152010

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (supposedly)

Where did this piece of codology come from? Surely nobody as well-respected as Eleanor Roosevelt would have said something as dumb as this out loud?

First of all, even if you accept that what people discuss (rather than the perspicacity with which they discuss it) is an indicator of how intelligent they are, surely the order is wrong. It should be

  1. ideas
  2. people
  3. events

in descending order of things thick people talk about. Talking about things that happened (or are happening, or will happen) seems to me to be just above “4 – things you might like to buy” in such a list.

Second of all, discussions of both ideas and events tend to be more interesting when people are part of the discussion. Events tend to be significant, and ideas important, because of their impact on people.

But most of all, the thing that annoys me about this little quote is the idea that there is a hierarchy of importance in things people talk about. Some of the most pointless, self-indulgent conversations are often about the supposedly profound, while some of the most well-judged and significant can be small talk. As in so many other things in life, context is everything and variety matters.

In early 2009 Jay Rosen decided that he was using Twitter in a way he called “mindcasting”, which he explained as answering the questions “What are you thinking?” rather than the standard “What are you doing?”. What he was really doing was being clear about what you would get if you followed him – he would use his own network to find stories he would link to and comment on related to his area of interest.

His neologism contains two crucial concepts:

  1. mind
  2. casting (as in broad)

Subsequent discussion of his idea focused on the first part of the idea and juxtaposed it with another idea he had made up to describe what he didn’t do – “lifecasting”. Lifecasting is often described in terms of lots of people talking about what they are eating, but that is shorthand for people talking about inconsequential details of their lives that nobody else could possibly be expected to care about.

Keith McArthur explained in a blog post of the time about the value judgments usually implied when the terms mindcasting and lifecasting were used.

The thing is though, that it is not just that there are important people telling everybody about their profound thoughts and silly eejits telling everyone about their nonsense. There are not just the serious “mind” people and the trivial “life” people. As well as the people who conceive of themselves as “casters”, there are also the people who behave as though they are part of a conversation, rather than in charge of a stream of information.

Not that Jay Rosen is not using Twitter well. On the contrary, he uses it very well and quickly saw how he could best use it to his advantage and the advantage of people who followed him (of which I am an admiring one). But he is a well-known journalism professor, who is likely to have far more followers than he can follow or interact with. He is famous on Twitter and so the mathematics make it impossible for him to chew the fat online about silly and funny things that might occur to him. Being in charge of a stream of information and adding his own insights is the best he can offer.

But it does not follow that that is the best that anyone can offer, or that Twitter would be better if we all concentrated on sending out 8 tweets a day with links to our current obsession,

One of the best tweets I’ve ever read is by @Eamonn_Forde – “There is a man walking up Kingsland Road carrying a mini trampoline on his back. Like a bouncy snail.”

That’s poetry. It’s an observation on life (an “event” in the limited terms of the Eleanor Roosevelt epigraph) that could only have come from the mind of the man that made it. Pure genius.

Posted by dee harvey at 4:25 am

Is Looking for Attention the new Paying Attention?

networks, video No Responses »
Jul 082010

I have not got much patience with often-repeated phrases, even ones that made sense the first time I heard them. You often hear these days about how “passive consumers” have been replaced (as if by magic) with “active producers”.

Now, quite apart from the tautological ugliness of the assignations (wouldn’t producer and consumer be sufficient?) I find the implicit approval for the active, and the disdain for the passive, troubling.

This is partly because I feel that often the words “active” and “passive” have been redefined. Using the consumer/producer model, it is considered passive to listen, or to watch, when in fact listening is an active verb, while hearing is its passive equivalent, watching is active, while seeing is passive.

Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about, but it’s everywhere, so these are just some samples that came quickly to hand:

I’m pretty sure the second example there, the blogger who saw Clay Shirky speak, has a more nuanced understanding of this issue than “producers = active = good, consumers = passive = bad”. I know that is not an argument that Clay is likely to be making.

But that simplistic argument does seem to have some currency, particularly when children are the target audience. Do we really want to be teaching our children that passive activities like listening and watching are a waste of their time? The old adage was that you should listen twice as much as you speak, the idea being that wisdom came from paying attention, not from looking for attention.

These days attention is bankable and, more importantly, measurable. It is easy to see from someone’s online presence how much attention they get, far harder to know how much attention they pay to what is going on around them.

My own particular area of interest is online video, and I read all the time about how new tools make it easy for people to film themselves and put their videos online. But surely the opportunity to watch videos made by other people is just as important as the ability to make some yourself? In fact, unless you think so, and act so, the producer/consumer dichotomy isn’t broken at all, it’s just fragmented into two billion tiny pieces.

If the response to the Internet and its ability to connect us to one another in new ways is to think “brilliant, now I can make my very own TV show and put it on YouTube”, then that’s pretty depressing and very limiting. If we’re all a little bit less consumer and a little bit more producer, then in fact we’re all something else entirely. It’s not what you produce (or consume) that matters so much as how you connect with other people and what use you put those connections to.

Posted by dee harvey at 6:43 pm Tagged with: , , , ,
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