2009 July | making edible playdough is hegemonic.

Archive for July, 2009

we’re kinda like the doozers, kinda like the fraggles: tweeting as identity play

Jul 28th, 09 / 1 Comment

I haven’t smacked the New York Times down for a woefully outdated take on new media in, oh, several weeks at least. But a recent column on how Twitter prevents us from making real connections with people forced my hand.

The piece, by novelist Lucina Rosenfeld, describes Rosenfeld’s attempt at joining the Twitter revolution. She joins but doesn’t know what to tweet, despite her editor’s advice:

Imagine you’re at a cocktail party, she said. The things you’d say to people you met there — those are the kinds of things you should tweet. Also, people like links.

I kinda thought we were past the “I don’t know how to tweet!” confessional fad. Apparently not. We’re apparently not past the “social media is ruining our ability to connect with others” fad, either: Rosenfeld goes on to identify what she suspects is our dirty secret:

that no one actually wants to see anybody anymore. It’s too much work. You have to dress nicely. And make actual conversation. And there’s a recession. It’s cheaper to stay home — and e-mail old friends about how “it’s been so long it’s criminal,” and “we really have to get together.”

Except we never do anymore. Which is kind of sad when you start to think about it. It’s hard to pour your heart out in 150 characters. It’s hard to have a great time, too, when the most you can hope for from a friend is LOL (note to Mom: that’s e-mail shorthand for “laughing out loud”) vs., say, being bent double over your bar stools while comparing notes on a mutual ex.

Last week, my friend Katie took me sailing for the first time ever. Afterward, over drinks, a young sailor named Aurelian turned to me and said “Why do you Twitter?” I paused, taken aback. Katie knew exactly what to say, though: “That question suggests twittering needs justification.”

What she meant was that people don’t ask “why do you go sailing on Thursday nights?” or “why do you take taxidermy classes?” or “why do you go to singles night at Kevin’s Pub?” They’re all just excuses for making a connection with others, just some basic scaffolding to hang our social impulses on. Rosenfeld’s caution, her resistance to engaging with participatory media for social purposes, is a throwback to the days when we still thought people got online to feed an addiction and not because of the deep social connection they felt by engaging with others across deeply personal, deeply social affinity spaces.

Twitter is one of those sites–like Facebook, which Rosenfeld acknowledges that she both understands and enjoys–that provides a platform for users to manage their friends across multiple affinity spaces. On Twitter, I follow Clay Shirky and John Seely Brown, two people who I’m sure do not yet know I exist; I follow (and am followed by) Henry Jenkins , Lance Speelmon and Mark Notess, colleagues who do know I exist; and I follow (and am followed by) Katie, my friends Clement and Stephanie, and my sister Laura.

Rosenfeld struggles with figuring out anything worth tweeting about. She couldn’t, she writes, figure out anything interesting to say or any link worth posting. That’s because she’s following the letter of Twitter and not the spirit. Posting updates and links isn’t a simple matter of finding interesting things that others might care about or figuring out what your followers might be interested in hearing; it’s a complicated dance both with and against the established norms of the space. Any twitterer worth her salt is both creating and constantly tinkering with her identity. Each link, each post, becomes part of a public persona both more simplistic and more complicated than the one we present in the physical world to the people we interact with in face to face encounters.

This is not, despite Rosenfeld’s implications to the contrary, a lesser social experience than those that call for face to face interactions. It’s actually not a greater experience, either. It’s simply different.

When faced with different, we have a couple of choices: We can react with caution and angst, as Rosenfeld does in her piece. We can embrace without caveat or trepidation the trappings of different, as many believe I do here. Or we can embrace different with intelligence, enthusiasm, and an analytic eye toward both its affordances and its constraints. When the NYTimes starts heading for that final category, I’ll start extolling its innovative approach to participatory media.

I also feel a nagging impulse to notify Rosenfeld that tweets are limited to 140 characters, not 150.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dXFWL7l7A0&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

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be nice or suffer the consequences

Jul 27th, 09 / 2 Comments

why it’s more vital than ever for corporations to value and empower their employees

Rumor has it that
Borders employees are being pressured into signing non-blogging contracts. It’s an interesting move since, as everybody knows, book stores are like the shangri-la of potential bloggers: overeducated, underemployed, and underpaid, they’re just dying for a pastime that challenges them without costing them any money or putting their health at risk, since a good portion of bookstore workers are also uninsured.

I know this because I worked for a Barnes & Noble for two years during and just after college. My coworkers included a classically trained musician, a budding writer who had just finished a master’s degree in Joyce studies, and a 30-something brilliant college dropout who called himself Sloth. This was the late 90s, so blogging was not yet a widespread activity, so instead we spent a lot of time…well, mainly we hung out and argued about books.

As A.J. Kohn, the author of the Used Books Blog, argues, this type of crew is well poised to offer Borders virtual reams of free advertising:

Imagine if Borders employees were encouraged to write about the great books just arriving. The hidden gems, the stuff they’ve just read. Tweets about upcoming readings. There are so many ways you could make this work.

There is, Kohn writes, “only one prerequisite, investing and empowering your employees.” And it appears, he writes, that this is the one thing that Borders has failed to do.

You can bet that policies restricting the use of social media indicate a deep sense of unrest among employees, many of whom are paid just over a living wage and hanging on so tenuously that they neither dare nor have the energy to vocalize their discontent. I know this well, from my previous experience in the employ of a corporation that restricted, as a matter of policy, social media use among employees.

The corporation was a veterinary hospital chain called VCA, and my branch was VCA South Shore Animal Hospital. (Will they come after me? Will they come after me? Bring it on.) When I worked there a handful of years ago, MySpace and Facebook use was on the rise among employees, and management cracked down on any employee who mentioned the company in entries there. Why? Because there was just so much negative energy that almost no employee who logged on to MySpace with the intention of writing about VCA had the intention of communicating something positive. It was a shitty place to work, with terrible management policies that served to disempower and disenfranchise employees. Wages were criminally low, and support for professional development was nonexistent. While the veterinary care was and still is excellent, customers pay through the teeth for it because of local administrators who value the bottom line over the service they provide to owners who would pay anything to help their pets.

When I worked there, many employees weren’t simply dissatisfied; they loathed coming to work. Several explained why on their social networks, and at least one coworker, a receptionist who was kind, caring, and hard-working, was released from employment because of a scathing critique she posted about hospital administrators. (Will they come after me? Will they come after me? I’m ready.)

People wonder how managers catch people posting negative material online. In this case, there was a snitch–someone who trolled MySpace and Facebook looking for fire-able offenses. When he found one, he brought it to the attention of management. Presumably, he was rewarded for this, though certainly not by currying goodwill among his coworkers.

Recently, social marketing guru Faris Yakob posted on his blog a presentation he delivered called “Be Nice or Leave.” The crux of his argument is that marketers who want to leverage social media platforms to sell their products don’t get to control whether or even how people discuss their goods; if they try, he explained, they will fail. We might apply the “be nice or leave” principle to corporate relationships with employees. It’s easier, though less cost-effective, to just oppress your employees and scare or coerce them into silence; but this becomes less possible (and more expensive) nearly by the day, as social platforms make it easier and more interesting to disclose bad policies and bad management.

The other, trickier and more time-intensive approach is to simply create a positive working environment, one that makes employees want to leverage their social platforms of choice to spread the word about their fabulous employer and the wonderful services it provides. Trouble is, lots of employers don’t know how to make this kind of environment happen or simply don’t care to try.

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it might not be a lot but I feel like I’m making the most

Jul 25th, 09 / 1 Comment

living and leaving with less

This is my last weekend in Boston. In a few days, I’ll be closing up shop, losing my internet access, piling some items into a truck, and heading to points midwest.

I’m not going to bother using this post to detail the emotional tumult inherent in this kind of move, because that feels lamely self-indulgent, even to someone who spends a huge chunk of her time broadcasting her thoughts on at least three different blog sites (here, here, and here). Besides, you’re probably reading this blog for one of two reasons: You know me and therefore care about my emotional state, but have received private updates; or you don’t know me and don’t particularly care how I’m feeling this morning.

Instead of tearing open my chest and splaying my guts across this post, then, I just want to focus on something interesting I’ve noticed while packing: It’s a whole lot easier to get rid of stuff than it was during my previous moves (of which there have been nearly two dozen in the last 14 years, including three major regional moves and multiple cross-town or cross-state relocations).

For one thing, I no longer need to carry with me certain types of materials. I’ve gotten rid of hundreds of books, including over a dozen dictionaries, thesauruses, and style guides. (I kept the dictionary I won as a spelling bee champion, but only for sentimental purposes.) I shredded and recycled reams of paper documents: tax returns, credit card bills, rental agreements and contracts. I don’t need them. They’re all online.

For another thing, we just don’t generate as much physical stuff as we used to. My friend and former coworker Debora Lui experienced a complete laptop failure–her second in a year–last summer as she was finishing her master’s thesis. While the first failure reduced her to working from “printed pages, (her) memory, or scattered hand-scribbled notes,” the second failure was a much different experience. She writes:

Miraculously – with all my Google Doc usage, emailing out, saving my information on remote sites – I found that I not only had one good copy of my thesis, but several copies, saved and transfered at different points of revision. I found that my other files like photographs and videos (which normally I would have been upset about losing) were also strangely distributed across the web through sites like YouTube and Facebook. While I had previously thought of my life as being contained in one place, it was suddenly shown to me as a vast network for links and uploads.

As Deb explains, we–and young people especially–collect and hold on to more everyday detritus than ever: More photos, more written communications, more logged and archived conversations. Yet because of digital technologies, the space this material takes up is so close to zero that it is, as Chris Anderson writes in Free, “too cheap to meter” and “too cheap to matter.”

Why not take a hundred photos of yourself posing in front of a full-length mirror? Why not save every email you ever received or sent from every single one of your friends? Eventually your gmail account may hit 5% of its total storage space, but it’s more likely that Google will increase storage capacity before you even hit that number.

My buddy Russell Francis, playing on Dorothy Holland’s notion of history in person, calls this phenomenon “history in laptop.” Summarizing a study he conducted of graduate students’ media habits, he writes that

Over time traces of students’ lives, past and present, become ingrained into students’ personal media environment through a process of inherited, evolved and mindful design. Archives of e-mails, letters, essays written as undergraduates, digitised photographs and digitised music collections also started to accumulate on many students’ laptops. Traces of Jacob’s participation in various environmental groups, traces of Jim’s participation in multiple human rights organisations and traces of Clinton’s long history of avid news reading were evident in the links, shortcuts and contacts designed into their personalised mediascapes. Furthermore, traces of their connections to others accumulated as entries in contacts folders and instant messenger ‘buddy lists’; tools that allowed students to remain in touch with former lives and former practised identities.

The point is well taken, though the term itself seems a bit of a red herring. The term seems to imply a history that’s located in a concrete place, albeit one that uses space in a way that’s much different than, for example, books and letters and mementos do. In fact, history in laptop may be a more accurate term for how identity was stored as recently (and as long ago) as 3-5 years ago; today, history is stored across a virtual space no longer constrained by such silly contraptions as hard drives and memory cards. If my computer crashes, I’m likely to retrieve nearly all of the data that was stored on it–okay, let’s say somewhere around 80%. Still, that’s an awful lot to retrieve, given that history that resides in the brain is gone as soon as the blood flow is cut off.

Anyway, my point is that I carry around less stuff, and the less will get lesser with every passing year. Interestingly, this makes it easier to drift physically but harder to drift emotionally. We can, and often do, maintain the types of everyday connections with family, friends, and acquaintances that at least approximate the experience of physical promixity. My sister can send me a photo of her wardrobe choice for her first day of law school; we can chat online about which shoes she should wear, where she should buy her books, and how heavy her backpack is. I can follow her blog, her Facebook updates, and her tweets, and she can do the same for me. And, more importantly, all of these things are equally possible for me to do with, for example, the cluster of people I met at a recent conference, whether they live in Boston, Bloomington, or Cape Town.

For now, let’s call it “history at large.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eweBFxI5LXU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

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the blogosphere is yesterday’s news

Jul 22nd, 09 / 1 Comment

The term “blogosphere” has run its course. Aside from the fact that using it in mixed company feels a little like saying “information superhighway” or capitalizing the word “internet,” it turns out the word was coined as a joke. (See its apparent first appearance here; see Wikipedia’s explanation of the term’s origin here.

Then there’s the fact that we’re slowly but surely moving away from using metaphors from our physical world to describe the features of the internet. We don’t call it an information superhighway anymore because the metaphor–and its imagery–began to fail us. Calling it the “world wide web” works out okay, kind of, but we’re increasingly dropping the www even when we share links with each other in the “real” physical world. (“Go to nytimes.com,” I say, meaning www.nytimes.com. And when you type in nytimes.com, the internet just goes ahead and adds in the www for you.)

For real, you guys, it’s time for a new word. I offered up blorizon, blorld, and blandscape; but these still link to the weird phenomenon of smashing blog together with a worldly metaphor.

My Twiend Mark Notess offered up these: Blatherworld. Bloviationspace.

So far, bloviationspace tops my list for its clever leveraging of our wordsmashing tendencies for a gentle swipe at all this weird neologistic nonsense.

Any ideas or suggestions?

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“noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles”

Jul 22nd, 09 / 3 Comments

My friend Clement showed me this video describing irrefutable proof of the existence of a higher power, starring Ray Comfort and our very own Kirk Cameron.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Best of all possible worlds, indeed.

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one thing I’ll miss when print journalism finally dies

Jul 21st, 09 / 0 Comments

what will we do without really good exposés of cults and such, like a recent shredding of the Church of Scientology?

Aside from skimming the occasional story about Scientology’s hold on celebrities or following the campaign of the civic protest group Anonymous, I really don’t pay a lot of attention to the day-to-day workings of the Church of Scientology.

A recent three-part expose of the Church of Scientology’s leaders, including its head, David Miscavige, caught my attention. The piece, published last month in the St. Petersburg Times, points to a long history of verbal, emotional, and physical abuse codified in the tenets of very religion itself. Members of the church are pressured to confess, in writing, all transgressions, and these documents are held in order to be used against defectors. According to the piece, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard

wrote a policy stating that a person leaves as a kind of noble gesture when he can’t help himself from injuring the church. To justify leaving, Hubbard believed, the person thinks up bad things to say about the church.

Anyone who leaves has committed “overts” (harmful acts) against the church and is withholding them. The church is obligated to make such people come clean, Hubbard said, because withholding overts against Scientology can lead to suicide or death by disease. They must write down their transgressions to remain in good standing when they leave.

The story hinges on the word of four former executives in the Church of Scientology, all of whom paint a picture of extreme dysfunction (regular beatings, cruel and avaricious deceits, and the death of one emotionally troubled young woman while in the care of the notoriously anti-psychiatry church) and all of whom have suffered ongoing smear campaigns in an effort to discredit their accusations and their motives. The campaign, like so much of what this particular religion sets its mind to, is incredibly run–so well run, in fact, that though I’m predisposed toward suspicion of organized religion and especially cults like the Church of Scientology, I still wonder about the veracity of the defectors’ accounts.

Particulars aside, this series is about as thorough, intricate, and detailed as you can get. It’s the product of countless interviews and weeks of poring over legal documents, transcripts, and complicated news reports. The journalists, Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin, have done fine work that represents the best of the journalistic profession.

It’s one thing we’re likely to lose, at least for a good while, as the profession continues its steady decline. Citizen journalism is good for an awful lot, but it can’t offer up a detached, professional, and multi-perspectival story like this. At least, if it can, I haven’t yet come across a good example. I hope someone out there can prove me wrong.

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what’s a 17-letter word for mixed blessing?

Jul 19th, 09 / 0 Comments

You guys, I really love word and number puzzles–crosswords, sudoku, cross sums, word mines, the whole deal. One of my most long-standing hobbies is working through a ratty pile of Dell puzzle magazines. (Never Penny Press; I hate Penny Press.)

It didn’t occur to me until I read this post in Good Magazine arguing that the decline of print media may also signal the decline of printed puzzles. Suddenly, I’m terrified: What if Dell Magazines goes out of business? Would I have to turn to Penny Press as the only alternative, however distasteful and what if Penny Press goes out of business too?

My fear of losing my printed puzzles (there is, so far, no evidence to justify this fear) helps me get some perspective on the people who are terrorized by the notion of their local newspaper shuttering its windows and boarding up its doors. In Boston, where I live, the prospect of failure looms large at the Globe–a long-time money sieve–after its parent company, New York Times, Inc., began looking for buyers. The Globe is only the most visible example in a trend toward faltering print media sources as revenues decline amid the emergence of participatory media.

It’s a fair bet that the failure of a big chunk of our country’s newspapers won’t signal the death of journalism; it’s not the desire for news but the medium of choice that’s unsustainable.

But the readers who are most terrified of losing the Globe are a lot like I am with Dell puzzle magazines: If the Globe stops printing, they’ll have to turn to the dreaded Boston Herald (which really is one of the world’s lamest newspapers).

If the Herald follows suit, people may resort to the Phoenix, the Metro, or a non-local paper; and the more papers fail, the less likely readers are to find the features that drew them to a particular news source in the first place.

As a kid, I lived in a house that subscribed to both the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. I was drawn to the Freep for lots of reasons, from its larger comics section to its more interesting columnists (Mitch Albom, Susan Ager, Leonard Pitt) to its more readable print type. If pro-print media types were honest, they might say that the real issue is not (just) the potential decline of journalism but their deep affinity for the features of one newspaper or another.

Losing the small delights of a particular print news source means finding new sources of delight, just like I would have to do if my puzzle magazine of choice were to shut down its presses. I suppose if this were to happen, I might start reading books before bed instead, or crochet, or develop some other evening hobby to take up the slack. I might even be the better for it. The puzzle industry might be better for it, too, if it could find more cost-effective ways to deliver its product to the populace. It might, after all, be agathokakological.

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luddites hate jetskis

Jul 18th, 09 / 0 Comments

Today my sister and I almost missed the opening scene of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince because she misread her watch. I don’t wear a watch, see, and she wears an old-fashioned analog wristwatch so it was her job to keep track of time.

As our timekeepers get increasingly digital, it appears, we have a tendency toward being less capable of quickly interpreting analog time markers. So at 1:00, she thought her watch said noon. She caught her error five minutes before the show was scheduled to start and thanks to our ability to bustle when required and theaters’ tendency to start movies much later than scheduled, we got there with enough spare time for me to get my popcorn and for my sister to settle her smuggled-in candy on her lap before the previews started rolling.

The argument that relying on technologies makes us dumber is not a new one; Plato kinda started it by opposing writing because he believed that it would

introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have came to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

It was downhill from there, of course; and it may be that we hit bottom, at least in terms of networked technologies, with Nicholas Carr’s June/July 2008 Atlantic piece, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

In considering the changes to his own orientation toward text (he’s less able to read lengthy articles or books; he gets fidgety when he tries to focus on one text for an extended period of time), he writes:

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

In fact, in drafting this post I zipped along the surface of multiple different texts, from Plato’s Phaedrus to Carr’s piece on Google to Jamais Cascio’s response piece in this month’s Atlantic, “Get Smarter.” (It argues that technologies and pharmacology can help boost our intelligence.) I may not know what swims beneath the surface of any of these pieces, but I am familiar enough with all of them to use my spare cognitive energy and time to craft a blogpost that links the three. And I did it by typing (without watching the keys) at a rate of approximately 100 words per minute. I employed some basic html code, some of which I know by heart and some of which I keep on an electronic clipboard. I was able to publish it immediately, to the delight or dismay or general apathy of my intended reading public. I could (and, if you’re reading this, probably did) direct traffic to this post via Twitter, Facebook, or any number of other blogs.

God knows I could have spent the time reading Plato’s Phaedrus in its entirety, and I’m not disputing that I would have been enriched by the experience. But you can’t argue that what I did with my time instead (synthesizing, devising an argument, increasing familiarity with html basics, crafting the argument with an intended public in mind, then circulating it among that intended audience) was not an enriching experience.

Back to the jet ski metaphor: Comedian and philosopher Daniel Tosh argues that it’s impossible not to be unhappy on a jetski. “You ever seen a sad person on a waverunner? Have you? Seriously, have you?…Try to frown on a waverunner.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH-UHgluab0&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Watch the clip till the end. He talks about how people smile as they hit the pier–and they hit the pier because you’re supposed to hit the gas to turn–”it goes against natural instinct,” he says. Well, maybe at first, but once you get the hang of it, I imagine you learn how to use the gas in ways that keep you from hitting the pier. It’s just that most of us hit the pier once and once is enough: we stick to dry land, which is safer but far less fun.

Okay, I’ll confess: This entire post is really just a plug for Daniel Tosh’s amazing new show, Tosh.0. It airs Thursdays at 10:00 P.M. ET (9:00 Pacific) on Comedy Central, and it may be the funniest half-hour show I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Even so, it might get canceled because of low viewership. Please just give it a try. I guarantee you’ll laugh out loud at least once or your money back.

Tosh.0

Thurs, 10pm / 9c

Motorcycle Granny

www.comedycentral.com

Daniel Tosh

Miss Teen South Carolina

Demi Moore Picture

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the week in #lame

Jul 17th, 09 / 0 Comments

So much lame stuff has been happening recently that I’ve decided to manage it with a weekly post summarizing the lameness. This is the very first installment of ‘the week in #lame.’

Massachusetts gets all anti-immigration, protectionist, a tiny bit stupid
The country’s only commonwealth, the first to legalize gay marriage, the first to legalize universal health care coverage, has backed away from that last thing by lpassing legislation that excludes 30,000 legal immigrants from state-mandated health insurance.

The immigrants in question are, again, in the country legally but arrived within the last five years and fall into the low-income category. According to reports, the move is an effort to reduce state deficits, but given that this newly excluded group will most likely still get sick, still go to the hospital, and still require care–just the more expensive, unsubsidized kind–it’s not clear how this will actually resolve any budget woes over the long haul.

South Carolina governer, wife, still on speaking terms
According to the Associated Press, Mark Sanford skipped a meeting with economic advisors this week in favor of spending time with his wife.

Sanford, you recall, is in loooooooOOOOooooove with a hot Argentinian. Or…he was in love with a hot Argentinian. Or…he’s in love with his wife. Just when we thought his wife was going to do us all proud in the face of this scandal, she turns around and lets her husband be in her presence.

Italian boxer Arturo Gatti, known for “relentless violence” in ring, strangled to death
subhead: probably by wife
Gatti, 37, was beaten about the head and then strangled, apparently by a purse strap. He was, according to reports, on a second honeymoon with his wife, who is the prime suspect in his murder.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2009-07-15-gatti-wife_N.htm
Gatti’s widow, 23-year-old Amanda Rodrigues, has proclaimed her innocence despite being the only suspect in her husband’s murder.

A vocal minority in the news once again
subhead: some people actually believe America’s moonshot was a hoax
Incredibly, a group of people exist who still do not believe anybody has ever landed on the moon. As a recent New York Times article points out,

Forty years after men first touched the lifeless dirt of the Moon — and they did. Really. Honest. — polling consistently suggests that some 6 percent of Americans believe the landings were faked and could not have happened.

There are movies. There are books. There are websites.

Forty years ago, American astronauts landed on the moon. They really did. Honest.

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why I love social media

Jul 15th, 09 / 3 Comments

because social ties are inherently interesting–and media platforms that support new kinds of social ties are changing everything

Perhaps predictably, the best analysis of the future of news media that I’ve so far come across comes from technology guru Clay Shirky.

Shirky compares journalism to driving: the ability to drive spread from people who were paid to drive to the general public. “We still pay people to drive,” Shirky writes,

from buses to race cars, and there are more paid drivers today than there were in the days of the chauffeur. Paid drivers are, however, no longer the majority of all drivers.

Like driving, journalism is not a profession — no degree or certification is required to practice it, and training often comes after hiring — and it is increasingly being transformed into an activity, open to all, sometimes done well, sometimes badly, but at a volume that simply cannot be supported by a small group of full-time workers. The journalistic models that will excel in the next few years will rely on new forms of creation, some of which will be done by professionals, some by amateurs, some by crowds, and some by machines.

We’re not headed for a journalistic upgrade, Shirky explains; “[t]he change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained.”

This is precisely why Matt Jones’ recent provocatively titled article “Why I Hate Social Media”, is not only dangerously misguided, it’s also painfully short-sighted. Jones’ justification is fairly simple: media just isn’t that interesting.

People are interesting. Ideas are interesting. Stories are interesting. Real stuff is interesting. Brands are interesting (or, at least, some of them are). Even ads can be interesting. But media? Media just connects those things. It’s a conduit. Media is not interesting. Not even the “social” kind.

I reject the very premise of Jones’ argument and did so publicly in the comments section beneath his article. But in fact, I learned more about why Jones is so short-sighted by tracking readers’ comments. Here’s a gem from a reader calling himself Wildebees:

There’s a well known media theorist called Marshall McLuhan. Heard of him? He said “the medium is the message”. It’s not just the content of media that’s important. The way the content is transmitted itself significantly impacts how our world works. If you don’t get the medium, you are going to make the wrong suggestions to your clients….

Get this. All media is social. From the printing press, to the telephone, all the way to Twitter. But the process of becoming social have dramatically accelerated with the convergence of the telco and computer industry. Social media is not a trend, but a fundamental human urge to communicate. And now we have the media do do so.

Wildebees was fairly easy to track, and I’m now following him on Twitter. He is, in fact, the one who linked me to the Shirky piece in the first place. And this points to a big piece of why Jones is so very, very wrong about social media: new platforms offer us new ways to connect with like-minded people–to join a vast series of what network theorist Yrjo Engestrom calls “knotworks”: dynamically changing and distributed collaborative networks structured around participation in projects or tasks. The emergence of new media platforms means I can rely on a group of like-minded people–who are also relying on their own sets of like-minded people–to track, filter, and identify information that I might find useful. They do it for me, I do it for them, everybody gets smarter in the process.