March 08, 2009
February 10, 2009
February 05, 2009
Snowman is an island
It was good to see all the positivity around the brief dump of snow that we had on Monday. It seems that most of London took the hint (no buses, tubes, trains, planes, taxis etc) and took the day off. People were out and about, interacting with strangers and, heaven forbid, talking to each other. Twitter is gaining traction rapidly as an emergent social phenomena and I was really interested in the tweets/map mashups that sprung up overnight. Twitter is still pretty immature but it's got great potential as a lightweight and intelligently networked social information system. It made the BBC Weather forecasts look lumbering in comparison, being able to see pictures from all over the UK was great. The inherent sociability of a big shared event was brought to life by a relatively simple (but extremely smart) use of technology. Our national obsession with talking about the weather will never be the same again.
September 09, 2008
Social suffocation
I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com.
An excellent article that picks out some aspects of social that face us all, participants and non-participants. It's a relatively balanced view but still manages to leave the impression that we've given away so much in return for so little.
Is it time to be honest with ourselves and do some cost-benefit analysis?
FB was was historically shaped by the needs, expectations and tolerances of students, not the people who currently use it. No matter how tightly you set your own privacy rules someone you know won't bother. It's really easy to become overexposed - there are numerous stories involving ex-stalking, career-ruining, friendship-losing aspects of the great social experiment.
Ambient Awareness is a very polite and important sounding way to describe being exposed to the banal details of other people's lives. Sure, I buy the theory but the practice leaves me cold. I'll side with Alex Beam, a Boston Globe columnist,: “Who really cares what I am doing, every hour of the day? Even I don’t care.” Either way, FB and the other aspects of digital social enhancement, might be described as "Awareness Tools" which is a provocative thought, although it doesn't make me less nervous.
There seems to be an age divide between the "get it", "don't get it" camps on microblogging. Some people place it around 30. There's probably a sociographic component and definitely a technographic component too, but I've not seen a lot of people addressing this issue. Probably worthy some additional digging.
There's a curious paragraph describing "Awareness" as a heads-up display of your friends lives, almost as if it were telepathy. The conseqence of this is that when people meet they can drop into conversations without the trivial small-talk gambits that we've become accustomed to. This is a peculiar notion - being exposed to digital banality means that we don't need to do it all again when we meet someone. I have always thought that being friends with someone means that I never need to engage in banal smalltalk with them, that's one of the main features of close friendship.
There's a note on how people who are already intimate are using awareness tools to generate "co-presence". For example lovers in distant cities pinging each other via text constantly during the course of the evening. The content of the message is relatively unimportant, the frequency strangely is what drives the emotional value of the communication. In some sense, banality creates intimacy, the lack of an agenda is the point. Just how distorted this emotional value gets when you're in the company of semi-strangers can be easily experienced (in my opinion) by have Twitter text alerts to your phone and following a few over zealous, attention-seeking, self-publicists. Are people trying to feel less alone in a disconnected but connected world? Nothing is more lonely than the babble of over-compensating nerds.
Points are raised about the volume of messages and the cognitive load required to process them. In the last few weeks there have been a number of articles citing how damaging email is to concentration and efficiency at work. FB, Twitter et al, are another aspect of the same problem. Personally, I'm erring on the side of turning it all off so that I can think straight.
Dunbar is sensibly cited. Most people discover that social software doesn't do that much to improve the quality of their real friendships, it just greatly extends the number of "weak ties" that you can manage. There are possible advantages here, but I often feel they are more imagined than real. Clearly, there are some people who derive advantages from a cloud of weak-tie relationships: job hunting, seeking peer review and so on. What's hidden is that the energy required to grow the network is way beyond what most people are ready, willing or able to commit. The example cited is someone who acts as a consultant on social-networks, pretty atypical then.
The next issue is that of "parasocial" relationships - this is where it gets really disfunctional. Probably the best example of this happening on a really massive scale was the death of Princess Diana where huge numbers of people seemed unable to distinguish between the death of a loved one, and the death of a distant member of a privileged non-executive elite. A more trivial version is the quasi-stalking behaviour of someone who worries about the health of a soap-actor, or more scarily, the fictional character that they portray. Does this parasocial aspect start to affect our real relationships with real friends? In other words do we start to lose face-time because we're observing their lives from afar? Are the social networks making us para-, or anti-social.
The article closes with the biggest problem of all - the loss of control over your public persona. Previously the ability of someone to seriously impact how lots of your friends perceive you was relatively limited. Typically you had to be someone that the public had an interest in, and the "defamer" had to be someone with access to the press. These days any old aquaintance can post a tagged picture of you. If Google can find it and your friend doesn't feel like taking it down, you're stuck with it. This is a huge problem and I think many, many people are becoming seriously overexposed to it - often these people are the sub-30 yo's who don't see why anyone would resist the social cloud online. Have we then reverted back to the pre-industrial village where everyone knows your business and you never lose touch with anyone. Back to the days when "people were shorter and lived near the water"? I hope not, modern post-industrial urban society is liberating and encourages dynamic identity roles and relationships - the alternative "where everyone knows your name" is suffocating, restrictive, undynamic and not remotely as interesting.
July 31, 2007
Pirates vs Ninjas
Last months vogue for all manner of Facebook apps on the theme of
recruiting your friends to be Zombies, Vampires, Ninjas, Pirates etc
etc has mutated in the last few weeks to combined efforts such as
Zombies vs Pirates, Ninjas vs Vampires.
The following link is a handy "keep it in your back pocket" presentation that may prove invaluable if you're confronted by a client troubled by which strategy to adopt here.
Anecdotally, Facebook ennui seems to be setting in amongst the 30+ late adopter crowd who cant see the point once you've done a basic trawl of your mates and stalked a couple of ex's. The problem is that they want the network itself to be intrinsically entertaining, but I'm not sure it is. It's what you can do with the network that yields the excitement, it's possibly more about people you don't know than the ones you do.
July 03, 2007
May 29, 2007
Where did all the virtual people go?
Seems like a growing wave of people pointing out the obvious. It's empty. The participant masses are spending their time in the "ordinary" social networks. Concurrent users is the real measure. It''s still a great social experiment, I think.
Marketers were quick to leap in. As this article points out, brands need to check the culture, geography and traffic before leaping in to plant their flag. However, if you're marketing to nerds who probably need to get out more, it's the sweetspot.
Second Life is a good thing, but very flawed. Until the UI experience is at least as good as a N64 game, (and I'm being kind), then mid-market isn't going to stick. It's too much work for far too much effort for most people, and that's the people who grew up on console interfaces. It's also, let's face it, quite dull for the uninitiated. Bad shopping malls, trashy nightclubs and porno. We will eventually spend more time in virtual space, but I'm far from convinced that Linden will get there first, unless Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft fail to move.
My avatar is currently sleeping rough under a desk in the Wired Offices.
May 22, 2007
Here be dragons
This map of the social networks is great - I got sent it by about 5 people today which is tribute to the social and collaborative nature of the internet. It's a useful reminder that when we travel in other lands it would be useful to have stuff like a consistent identity, perhaps we could even talk to people in other networks without having to keep an identity in each one. Now there's a concept. I particularly love the Noob Sea, but it's a shame they neglected to add the pirates.
May 14, 2007
The silliness of crowds
An eyewitness account of one of the alternate reality games organised this weekend in London by Gideon Reeling.
The party on Saturday was great.
We played free-form zero-sum Scrabble, with the pieces stuck to our heads.
I snuck into this photo, like a typo.
