Dee Blind Mice

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.

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.

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.

“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.