networks » Dee Blind Mice

Facebook is to image as Twitter is to reputation

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

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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.

I am broadcaster

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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.

Not a growth industry

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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.

Free as in time

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Sep 032010

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.

Death of the throwaway comment

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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.

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.

Linking to comments

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Jun 302010

Earlier this evening I was reading on Mark Rayner’s blog about a new version of Rock-Paper-Scissors with 5 elements – monkey, pirate, ninja, zombie, robot.

I always read the blog comments and have often been justly rewarded for this effort, as I was today. Far down the page, a poster called HB invents his own 5 element game – Rock-Paper-Scissors-Steak-UriGeller.

Rock-Paper-Scissors-Steak-UriGeller is hilarious. Go and read it yourself and you will laugh. I want to share it with my friends on Twitter and on Facebook. This isn’t the first time recently I’ve wanted to link to a blog comment or a post on a bulletin board, so I’ve been linking to the URL and then giving instructions for finding the right post (similar to what I’ve done above).

What I want to do is link directly to the comment itself, but I don’t know how to do that, unless I can edit the page the post is on, which is not the case for most of the pages on the web. It is inconceivable that there isn’t a way to do this.

Weirdly I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone send me a link to a particular comment in this way. It’s as though you’re either part of the comment conversation, or you’re not. People tell their friends about the article, but rarely one or more of the comments. Which is weird, given how good some comments are.

What is also missing is a convention for doing this kind of linking, so that you could type something like “>HB” after your link to indicate that you were really recommending the comment by HB, rather than (or as well as) the entire article.

Actually I don’t believe there isn’t such a convention already. There must be, and it was invented in 1998 and I just still haven’t heard of it.

Sharing videos privately

networks, video No Responses »

Jun 232010

The New York Times has an article about A Site for the Videos You Don’t Want Everyone to See. The site is called VidMe, and the idea is that you can use it to share videos with the people you know and love rather than with the entire world, as is normally the case with video sharing sites.

Well actually it is normally the case that video shared online is shared with people you know and love, the entire world is vanishingly unlikely to be watching clips of your family picnic along with your Ma and Da. But they could, should they choose, and that might matter.

In the comments on the NYT article the objections to this service seem to mainly be
1 that it is not possible to make anything on the web truly private
2 that you already can limit who can view videos using existing video sharing sites

Objection 1 is a well-rehearsed argument about online privacy being a pointless endeavour. I disagree with it, but that’s not really what interests me here.

One of the sites mentioned in support of Objection 2 is SmugMug. Now you may very well be able to upload private video to SmugMug, but what it promises is that “You Look Better Here”.

Compare this to VidMe and its question “Tired of sharing everything with everyone?”.

SmugMug’s upfront offer is:

Unlimited photos
No ads or spam
Gorgeous galleries
Stunning HD video

VidMe’s is:

Privately share videos with only those you want
Always see who has access to each of your videos
Easily remove anyone’s access to any video instantly
Take control of your online sharing

As Clay Shirky would have it, these services are making different, in fact contradictory, promises – the first is promising to make your media look professional and slick (presumably in order to impress people) and the second is offering to hide your media from all but the people you choose to share it with (presumably to communicate with people you know).

You could post video online before YouTube promised to let you “Broadcast yourself”. The fact that is has long been possible to restrict viewing of your videos doesn’t mean that it isn’t important when someone thinks it’s worth launching a service based specifically around doing that.

This is a service offering (a clunky and inconvenient) way to use video not to broadcast yourself but to talk to your friends. Few enough of existing video sharing sites are about that. The idea of broadcasting yourself has become the main way of conceiving of online video, even personal video. This is different.

Older Entries

Dee Blind Mice

Facebook is to image as Twitter is to reputation

The Best of Everything

Filling in the blanks with video

Not a growth industry

Free as in time

Death of the throwaway comment

Linking to comments

Sharing videos privately

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