I’ve read this phrase on a couple of blogs recently in reference to people who complain about new designs to services, e.g. Google Instant, New Twitter etc.

I’m very familiar at the moment with irrational hatred of any change. I live with a 2 year old. Like many toddlers, she thinks that if you do something once it is a tradition, if you do it twice it is a religious ritual that must always be done in exactly the same way. When you find yourself agreeing to throw out a bowl of cereal because the wrong person took the milk out of the fridge you know you’re in real “I fear change” territory.

There is a particular narrative of recent technological change (this blog post by Jeremy Keith in opposition to the Digital Economy Act is a pretty good exemplar) that sees change as progress and fear of change as irrational conservatism. And to a large extent the narrative holds true.

Keith quotes from John Philip Sousa on sound recording technology:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country… We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

Which is funny. But Sousa wasn’t entirely wrong, was he? Hannah Donovan gave a wonderful talk/Jam Session at dConstruct where she talked about the deleterious effect recorded music had on improvisation. Live, participatory, spontaneous performance did give way for almost a century to the primacy of recorded music. We almost lost our tail there for a second…

I suppose Keith’s point is that it is the fear that is silly. Not that change is always good. But that approaching it with fear prevents us from seeing it clearly. Of course, approaching it with excitement has the same effect. People (like me, a lot of the time) who are very excited about new things, often can’t really see what’s really good about them, never mind what’s bad.

I do worry a little though that continuity is underrated at the moment. There seems to be a cultural bias in favour of rapid change and a lack of patience with expectations that things continue in the same way for a while. Learning how to be constantly adapting to fast-paced change must affect how we behave and how we think of ourselves in the world. I’m far more interested in how this has changed us than whether Google/the Internet/mobiles phones are making us stupid (we were stupid already, let’s face it.)

Culture exists in institutions – old, venerable buildings that have continuously housed the same organisation for centuries, command a respect from us that speaks to a need for continuity. It is easy now to organise rapidly and temporarily, but that shouldn’t mean that we allow important institutions to be dismantled just because they are old. The same blindness that prevented people from seeing how video tapes would transform the film industry also prevents people from seeing why libraries are still important even when there are Kindles. Keeping good stuff around is as important for shaping a good future as making room for the new stuff.

The RSA has released a report called Connected Communities that looks at how studying social networks can help with regeneration projects. It’s all related to the Big Society blah that David Cameron used to talk about a lot.

I haven’t read the whole report yet, just the executive summary, but one of the key findings is incredible:
“A quarter of our respondents could not name anyone in their social network who they thought could help them contact someone with influence, power, or responsibility to change things locally.”

One in four people in the area studied don’t think they know anyone who knows anyone that can get things done in their area.

Yesterday I was listening to the New Web podcast and during a discussion about Google one of the contributors mentions how if you don’t like a Google product and you complain about it that the next release will include it. And I thought “that depends on who you are, and where you post your complaint”. This man’s experience of the world is that large technology companies are very responsive to the needs expressed by him and his peers. I don’t think that’s everybody’s experience.

But for the quarter of people in New Cross Gate who feel so removed from anybody who can help them make a difference to the place where they live? That’s a type of dislocation that is totally at odds with the ways I normally think of a world that seems to be making it easier for people to connect.

I just learnt a new phrase – social proof. It is when people believe that something is true not because of facts, or proof, or statistics, but because that is what everybody else thinks. I suppose it is what people call “common sense”, which I always think is a very different thing from good sense.

I’m going to keep my eye out for examples of this in the online world, I know there is often consensus around ideas that seems to me to be based on very little other that fellow feeling, e.g. people are not prepared to pay for content online. The ridicule of the Times for their paywall seemed to be mostly based on the idea that it “obviously” wasn’t going to work. Roy Greenslade in the Guardian was interesting on the reasons it might. We’ll see how it goes.

I recently read Clay Shirky’s second book Cognitive Surplus. It’s great, I recommend making time to read it.

He claims “in the whole of the developed work, the three most common activities are now work, sleep, and watching TV.” (p.6). His argument is based on what happens when one of these things (watching TV) starts to take up less of people’s time.

But what has struck me since reading it is that it’s not just TV watching that is undergoing profound changes at the moment. Work, the number 1 way of spending our time, is undergoing drastic shifts at the moment.

Today is the day that the latest unemployment figures came out in the US. They were better than expected, although the expectations were dismal. As Larry Elliot in the Guardian points out, the numbers are only a fraction of what is needed to bring down the unemployment rate. Paul Krugman at the New York Times is worried that unemployment in the US will become structural, and that the Fed will cease to see it as being its job to maintain full employment.

Employment figures in other advanced economies in Europe are not faring well either. In Spain unemployment is at a startling 20% and in Ireland it’s above 13%. Figures are lower in the UK at the moment, but even there they are rising. In both the US and UK new jobs that have been created since the financial crisis have mostly been temporary and often part-time in nature. Larry Elliot again says that many of the people in the US working part time are not doing so through choice. The same is true in the UK.

So people have even more “free” time than they used to.

Does this mean more cognitive surplus? More potential for people to undertake important projects?

Or might having “free” time rely on having “non-free”, or “paid” time. When you have no work, which part of your time is free? Is all of it free? or is does free time imply that some of the time you are not free and are engaged in more important activities?

I suspect the answer relies in part on your own disposition, financial circumstances, social network, other responsibilities, and the length of time you are left with a large surplus of “free” time. We are all familiar with “free as in beer” vs “free as in speech”, but “free as in time” is different again. It combines both freedom from constraint, and freedom from payment.

If Cognitive Surplus is an important idea and significant resource (and I think it is), the effect of increasing work insecurity will matter to how it is thought about and used. I’m going to be thinking about this, and seeing if I can get some other people to bash heads around it, over the next while.

Recently I’ve been wishing for something that could tell me which of the people I follow were following me back. It’s something that Twitter deliberately don’t make it easy for you to find out.

I recently found out about JustUnfollow, a service that gives you a list of which of the people you follow follow you, and which of your followers you aren’t following.

Its name is inaccurate: the service is not just about unfollowing – you get two lists, one of which encourages unfollowing, the other of which encourages following. The bias in the tool is towards reciprocal Twitter relationships.

I have different expectations of different people I follow – some I just want to read, others I want to interact with. Of the ones I want to interact with, some I value enough to follow even if they don’t follow me back, others I am only prepared to follow if its reciprocal. It’s only this 3rd groups I’m interested in getting rid of using JustUnfollow.

I often follow people I come across in my Twittering – not famous or renowned people, just people that seem like they might be interesting. I tend to favour people with a follower ratio of around 1 and people whose twitter name is their name (rather than some kind of description of their job, such as BallyhaunisMechanic, SocialMediaMaven etc.).

I’ve found some really great twitterers this way that enrich my Twitter stream, but most of those are the ones who’ve followed me back and with whom I’ve gone on to have conversations. I follow some people in Idaho that I came across through some unremembered Twitter digression, and they are funny. It all started with @WalterHawn, and I now also follow some of his friends.

But as well as a few goodies, there are quite a lot of people in my stream that I follow and I can’t remember why and have never read anything good by them. I might consider keeping them if we have a reciprocal relationship, but if they don’t even follow me back, they’re gone.

I was very surprised to find out that more than half of my followers are people I don’t follow myself. I try to keep a ratio of around 1:1 and I had lazily presumed that mostly I followed the same people as followed me, but although that was true in my early Twitter days in 2006, as time has gone one things have changed.

So I’m going to start manicuring my unkempt Twitter follow list. I’m following nearly 400 people and I don’t think increasing that number is going to make my experience on Twitter better. Better is going to have to come from quality rather than quantity. That means more unfollowing. I’ll still pick up some randomers to see how they work out. But I’ll cull them if they don’t offer me something back in the way of either making me laugh, making me think, or at the very, very least following me back.

Marshall Kirkpatrick on Read Write Web was inspired by the recent Library of Congress decisions to write a post in praise of Fair Use. He argues that Fair Use is not just acceptable, but that is it essential for the future.

I tend to agree that there is significant value in it being easy and legal to have certain rights to use bits of copyrighted material in other works. If fair use is essential for innovation in creative industries, what does it mean for the UK that we are bound by the far more restrictive Fair Dealing doctrine?

Fair Dealing sets out specific categories for exemptions, but Fair Use sets out examples of the kinds of things that might be exempt. The words “such as” make Fair Use something that can adapt and change, as the context in which copyrighted work is created and used changes.

The more restrictive the legal environment for using bits and pieces of the existing cultural landscape to create and talk about new work, the worse for the creative industries.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

© 2011 Dee Blind Mice Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha