dee harvey

How Facebook (and Dara Ó Briain) made my Mom redundant

Sep 102011

A few years go (not that many, maybe 3 or 4) my mother said to me “do you know who I met down the town? Dara O Briain’s mother. Apparently this comedy thing is working out really well for him”

This after Mock the Week.

Hmmm, really? “Mam, Dara O Briain is really famous now. If you turn on your TV any time of day or night and flick through the channels, eventually you’ll find him.”

When I go home to visit my parents, my mother likes to tell me all the latest about people I went to school with, or knew when I was a teenager or a child. She will crack open the Bray People and show me pictures of people I once knew, getting married, or winning a prize of some kind. It’s a little ritual we have.

In the 90s, I was in college with Dara O Briain. We used to occasionally get the 84 home to Bray from UCD together. My Ma knows his Ma, so for years when I would head home I would hear what he was up to among the many others.

But it’s not just Dara O Briain that I know more about than my ma these days. I’ve recently become facebook friends with some of my old school friends from Bray. I know how many children they have, whether they are married, and to whom.

One of her roles was in maintaining that low-level intimacy that keeps you loosely connected to social groups you’ve mostly moved on from. But now facebook does it better than she can, with less real human interaction.

Now if she hears a rumour about someone in the extended family, she rings me up demanding to know whether I got any messages on facebook.

I could encourage her to just join. But I don’t. There’s a part of me that will always be 16.

Simple, powerful idea makes Twitter exciting again

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Jul 172011

Not that I ever really got bored of Twitter, but I really love this:

Shuu.sh

It takes your Twitter feed and displays it so that the tweets of infrequent tweeters are larger than those of people who tweet all day long.

The user experience still needs a lot of work, but the basic idea is great. It reminds you that so much of the way we use Twitter is predicated on how we access the data.

The advice with Twitter is always to tweet frequently, and it’s easy to spot the organisations and people who’ve taken that advice to heart. Or who just never shut up. Some of those motormouths are my very favourites, no criticism of those with plenty to say is intended.

But I use Twitter to follow people – I follow some blogs and feeds, but mostly I like it for hearing what people are talking about. People I know, people I admire, and random people I have picked up along the way because they said something I found hilarious, or smart or weird. And some of those people are mostly invisible to me, because they don’t tweet that much and they don’t get copiously retweeted.

For me the really exciting thing about Twitter is short messages of interest from all over the place. I don’t really give a toss about trending topics. Shuu.sh makes that explicit again – what are the quiet people saying?

In a world where everyone was using Shuu.sh-like services, people would use Twitter entirely differently. If you knew that every post would make subsequent utterances less visible, maybe you’d think harder before pressing send.

Hat tip to @article_dan for introducing me to this service.

Facebook is to image as Twitter is to reputation

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Feb 182011

I was having a look at bolt the other day, for a piece of research I’m doing. The story of bolt is worth reading as an object lesson in how not to manage an online community.

As I meandered around the site it came to me that there is a big difference between creating an image and maintaining a reputation. Teenagers engage in an almost constant process of public self-definition. Figuring out who you are, and having that confirmed by your peer group, is a central part of teen life.

When you’re a teenager, it is acceptable to reinvent yourself entirely – to suddenly have new interests, and new image, new friends, a new attitude, even a new personality. Once you are an adult that is only permissable if you do it on TV with Gok Wan.

So it’s no wonder that social networking sites like Facebook, or bolt, or MySpace, or any site that lets you spend a lot of time presenting yourself to the world, appeal to a young audience. They have both the time and the motivation for cultivating an image.

A reputation is a more adult thing. It is built up over time and demands consistency and application. A professional reputation is not about who you are, but what you know, and who knows that you know it. Twitter lends itself to a type of communication that enhances reputation – each individual offering is short, but the accumulation of tweets over time gives people who follow you real value.

The lack of reciprocity in following people tweets is part of why this happens, as is the simplicity of the service. You can pretty up your Twitter profile all you want, but all you know for sure that people will see of you is 140 characters and a small avatar. Changing that avatar frequently will reduce your visibility in the busy world of Twitter rather than making you more conspicuous, as would be the case in many other social networks.

The last word to @Shaylamaddox:

Twitter makes me like people I’ve never met and Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life.

The Best of Everything

networks, radio, video No Responses »

Feb 102011

One of the BBC’s founding principles was that it would “bring the best of everything to the greatest number of homes”. It started life as a broadcast monopoly dedicated to improving and educating the population.

In The Master Switch, Tim Wu likens attempts by the forces of closed media – a combination of Apple, Hollywood and AT&T – to provide a seamless, perfect consumer media experience to the BBC’s claim that it provides the “best of everything”.

In the same way that openness is written into the design of the Internet, could it be that closedness is written into the very concept of the BBC?

John Postel wrote “be conservative in what you do. Be liberal in what you accept from others.” into the TCP protocol. A commitment to openness is a part of the specification. John Reith’s view of the BBC’s purpose as being to “educate, inform, entertain” (presumably in that order) is still a big part of how the BBC conceives of itself.

John Naughton wrote a great article in the Guardian a few weeks back about the outcome of the Strategy Review and the cuts to the Online budget. The choice quote was

What the cuts to BBC Online signify is that the internal battle within the corporation between the few who understood that push media represent the past, and the many who think that the Wibbly Wobbly Web (as Terry Wogan used to call Tim Berners-Lee’s invention) is really just the newest way to convey visual stimuli to couch potatoes, is over. And the past has won.

Filling in the blanks with video

networks, video No Responses »

Jan 302011

Through Deirdre Straughan I became aware of a 2008 blog post by Derek Powazek called Meaning-Making Machines.

It’s about how when we interact with people using computers there are gaps in our knowledge of the situation caused by a lack of social cues that are present in face-to-face human interactions. We fill in these gaps with images of our own making. Powazek claims these images are a product of our own insecurities, and they may sometimes be, but I’m not sure he makes the case that they are necessarily so constructed.

Every fortnight I take part in a telephone conference. This week I went to the meeting in person for the first time. The gaps I had filled in were not particularly different from the reality – they were just unspecific. Of course, the phone at least gives you voice rather than just words on a screen, so I did already have some social cues. But it was fascinating to me how much more I cared about the meeting having met the people involved in person. And I will care about the conference calls more too from now on, because my non-specific imaginings were a lot less engaging than the reality of the individuals I met.

Obviously video can’t provide all the social cues that text-only communications lack. People act differently in front of a camera than in face-to-face communication, and there is still a sense of distance. But some kind of video interaction, even minimal, with people you interact with online would seem to me to fill in at least some of the gaps.

In defence of reinventing the wheel

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Jan 262011

Often in meetings about new ideas, which happens fairly regularly in my professional life, someone will say something about how we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. It’s a truism. Everybody nods sagely and on we go with our discussion, having at least that agreed between us.

And yet, I’m not sure it’s such a no-brainer. Is it impossible that the wheel could be improved? Haven’t there been multiple improvements since the original design? Imagine if people had told the man who invented pneumatic tyres not to bother reinventing the wheel.

I think creativity demands that people are free to think their own thoughts and make their own stuff unconstrained by fears that it has been done before. It is worth doing something your own way, even if it has been done before.

One of the frequent complaints of students at ITP was that there was no database of previous projects we could use to make sure we never repeated an idea. But I’ve always thought that such a database would have had a massive chilling effect on our sense of possibility, enthusiasm and willingness to just give things a try. I’m pretty sure wonderful Red Burns had similar misgivings. Knowing that every single idea you had had been done many times before would be dispiriting. But the fact that your idea isn’t brand new and completely unprecedented doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile or that you won’t be the one to finally get it right.

I am broadcaster

networks, radio, Uncategorized No Responses »

Jan 132011

I’m reading The Master Switch by Tim Wu. It’s really great, well worth a read. In one of the early chapters he talks about the early days of radio and how amateur radio enthusiasts came up with the idea of broadcasting – metaphorically casting the seed of their message broadly.

How did people come to think of themselves as speaking to anyone who might be listening? At first people were using radio kits to talk to each other. But at some point some of them started talking to an audience rather than a group of people. And unlike a theatre audience, or a group of people gathered around to hear a speech from the bema, this was an entirely imagined audience – you couldn’t see them or hear them, smell them, feed off their reactions. You just had to imagine that they were there and act as though they were listening.

It’s an interesting conceptual leap to realise you have the means to talk and potentially have many, distant people listen to what you say. What would you tell them? How would you present yourself?

The ability to send you message to an audience, rather than to one or more people in the same location, came with writing. That was one of the reasons Socrates was suspicious of it as a technology. Speech is direct, you must engage with the person you are speaking to. But the written word is a medium that comes between the person sending the message and the person receiving it.

Writing necessarily involved a delay though – you wrote your diary to be discovered after your death, or your book to be read after it was published. The early radio amateurs realised that they could talk to an audience that was distant, and potentially huge, but do it live. And do it using their own voices. It must have been an amazing thing to experiment with.

That’s what’s so great about the Internet – it has made the written word instant. Social media makes it easy to broadcast a message with the option of immediate interaction with people who want to respond. There’s a lot of talk about how the Internet has done away with the idea of “the audience”, but in some ways it has just made it easier for everyone to imagine themselves their own audience. And I suppose that changes the concept in a very fundamental way.

Busy doing nothing

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Oct 142010

87 people (including me) retweeted this aphorism from @alaindebotton:

What gets called ‘laziness’ is usually a pull towards another conflicting kind of work rather than a desire to do nothing.

Only a few of that 87 said things like “yeah, right”.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with the proposition though, because I think there is a case to be made that sometimes

doing nothing = a kind of work

When people describe themselves as “doing nothing”, often they are engaged in the things they do without thinking.

They might be writing, or reading, thinking, fixing or making something, but it is very rare that they will be doing nothing at all.

When I am “doing nothing” I’m usually thinking, writing, or reading, sometimes talking to somene. When Seth is “doing nothing” he’s often fixing something or cleaning. To him making a phonecall is a job he puts off by cleaning his walking boots. To me calling a friend something I do to put off cleaning my boots (and then by the time I get to it, he has already done it – hurray!)

There is a lot to learn about work and collaboration by looking at what people are really doing when they are doing nothing.

Not a growth industry

networks, persuasion No Responses »

Oct 082010

Doug Rushkoff wrote a really interesting, damning article about the publishing industry called Why I Left My Publisher in Order to Publish a Book.

It’s well worth a read (and he’s a pacy writer so you’ll read it and take it in in about 2 seconds flat). This bit, almost an aside, grabbed me though:

Luckily for writers, however, the editors, marketers, and publicists booted from the corporate publishing industry are starting up little companies of their own. The corporate book industry can’t grow at the rate required by publicly held companies, anyway. This is why it is failing. Publishing is a sustainable business, not a growth industry. So it needs to be run by people looking for sustainable projects and careers—not runaway profits.

I love the idea that away from “growth” industries, the people who don’t get on in the corporate world can make a living doing interesting, sustainable projects. I like the idea too much to be objective about it and I don’t really want anybody to tell me that it won’t work. While growth capitalism is eating itself and puking up its workers, opting out and making good things differently has to be at least worth a shot.

The dynamic dream of the future

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Sep 302010

Still making my way through the dConstruct podcasts.

John Gruber’s talk, the Auteur Theory of Design was an interesting counterpoint to Hannah Donovan’s wonderful Jam Session: what improvisation can teach us about design. Donovan’s arguments really appealed to me, because I’m fascinated by collaboration and the processes you can employ for productive group work, what with being an ITP alum and all that. Gruber’s argument is that ultimately all worthwhile creative endeavour is the work of one mind. No matter how many people are involved in a project, creativity only works well as a benign dictatorship.

It’s an argument that reminds me of the lionising of CEOs – the absolute identification of the success or failure of a company with one person at the top. The guy at the top (and it’s nearly always a man) is the one who makes everything else happen. He is the prime mover. The corollary is that he must be paid enormous sums of money. David Prosser wrote about the Cult of the CEO in the Independent some months back:

It’s no coincidence that it is impossible to talk to a modern chief executive for more than five minutes before he begins using words such as vision, transformation and historic. These messianic leaders often regard actually running their companies as secondary to working on the dynamic dream of the future.

Prosser talks in the article about the tendency to see people in binary terms – the good guy and the bad guy. The more important binary to my mind is that between the people that matter and the people that don’t. The men at the top who earn massive salaries, have visions, and create success (in whatever form), and the rest of the drones who carry our the orders bring the vision to reality. That’s what I hear in Gruber’s argument too – that in creative endeavours involving multiple people, one person matters and everyone else is just doing their bidding. One person has vision and everyone else buys into it.

I guess I am more interested in what is happening with the people downstairs than with the bigshot thinking the thoughts and giving the orders. There is creativity down there, and ingenuity, even if it is not so well remunerated or celebrated.

Older Entries

Dee Blind Mice

dee harvey

How Facebook (and Dara Ó Briain) made my Mom redundant

Simple, powerful idea makes Twitter exciting again

Facebook is to image as Twitter is to reputation

The Best of Everything

Filling in the blanks with video

In defence of reinventing the wheel

Busy doing nothing

Not a growth industry

The dynamic dream of the future

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