It’s nice to see HarperCollins UK foregrounding the gorgeous Richard Bravery cover designs for Michael Chabon’s backlist by at least making large versions available for download. As we’ve discussed before, there are some fabulous opportunities available for content distributors who understand how the packaging of their product engages in an ongoing dialogue with the content — and that there are more and more opportunities for exactly these exchanges with social media and digital distribution. Content mediators — publishers, marketers, retailers, distributors — who understand how to enrich and enable those dialogues are going to reach more people than those who do not. Making cover art available for download and sharing is the very least that they should be doing.
While there are now more book cover blogs than you can shake a stick at, The Art of the Title Sequence is another wonderful resource, foregrounding an art form which is too often seen as purely functional.
I’ve been thinking about Clay Shirky’s argument that ‘filter failure’ is a better model to explain what we are currently experiencing as a culture than the rather tired meme of ‘information overload’. It’s no accident that we Datachondrians chose that as the tagline that currently adorns this blog: Datachondria is about how various aspects of our lives — creative, leisure, work — intersect with the range of information that’s available to us, and the interfaces through which they do so.
For those of you who haven’t yet seen Clay Shirky’s presentation from last September’s Web 2.0 Expo, here it is:
Whose Filters?
A subtext of Shirky’s thought is that the burden of responsibility for filtering has shifted to the consumer, where in the past it lay with the producers and distributors (publishers, networks, studios, retailers) that selected which information was available to us.
This is a pretty fundamental shift. Think of the generations of TV consumers from the 50s through the 90s, passively consuming the schedules laid out for them by the networks. The YouTube viewer of today, by contrast, surfaces content for themselves and exercises selective attention on their own terms. It’s going to take a while for our systems — and our collective mindset — to catch up to change in approach. What’s more, we’re currently in a transitional phase wherein one generation is used to passive consumption; another is used to viral or voluntary distribution of content. The former associates content distributed by the viral means as amateurish and unofficial. The latter expects a certain samizat credibility with their content, and associates the waterhose model of content distribution as fundamentally suspicious, boring, bullying, stultifying, and uncool. Anyone who has tried to explain to their parents the appeal of a YouTube hit, or why Lost or 24 can seem so astoundingly dull, can probably sympathize with this.
Bridging the Gap
However, at this historical moment, content creators have to bridge this divide, which often means distributing and marketing in quite distinct channels. There is still a generation of music-buyers who buy CDs; bands who have found success in that market segment have to advertise and distribute in the traditional ways that best appeal to those consumers. And they have to do so even as the economies of scale that made that medium profitable are collapsing, and new listeners simply do not conceive of music as being available in high-street stores.
The kind of multi-faceted approach that this requires from content producers is obviously very expensive and difficult to achieve — and one for which most companies are seriously under-prepared. Consumers are poorly equipped to tune out content that is being broadcast in such a variety of ways. And there’s nothing to say that this isn’t the permanent condition that goes with rapid technological and cultural development. So while everyone grapples with these changes, things are going to feel broken, messy, misdirected, and confusing.
And it’s going to be a great deal of fun. Here’s why:
1. Filter failure is the engine of development
Walt Whitman would have had a hell of a Twitter feed
Those happy accidents which occur when one thought accidentally collides with another are essential to innovation. Modernism was — and continues to be — fueled by moments of brilliantly creative collision in which the discoveries of one field or medium were transfered to another.
This is an idea that Richard Rorty outlines in his fabulous little book Achieving Our Country:
[Walt] Whitman picked up [the theme of diversity] from Mill and cited On Liberty in the first paragraph of his Democratic Vistas. There Whitman says that Mill demands “two main constituents, or sub-strata, for a truly grand nationality — 1st, a large variety of character — and 2d, full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions.”
Mill and Humboldt’s “richest diversity” and Whitman’s “full play” are ways of saying that no past human achievement… can give us a template on which to model our future. The future will widen endlessly. Experiments with new forms of individual and social life will interact and reinforce one another. Individual life will become unthinkably diverse and social life unthinkably free. The moral we should draw from the European past…. is not instruction about the authority under which we should live, but suggestions about how to make ourselves wonderfully different from anything that has been.
This romance of endless diversity should not, however, be confused with what nowadays is sometimes called “multiculturalism.” The latter term suggest a morality of live-and-let-live, a politics of side-by-side development in which members of distinct cultures preserve and protect their own culture against the incursions of other cultures. Whitman, like Hegel, had no interest in preservation or protection. He wanted competition and argument between alternative forms of human life — a poetic agon, in which jarring dialectical discords would be resolved in previously unheard harmonies… This new culture will be better because it will contain more variety in unity — it will be a tapestry in which more strands have been woven together. But this tapestry, too, will eventually have to be torn to shreds in order that a larger one may be woven, in order that the past may not obstruct the future.
That “poetic agon” is exactly the kind of filter failure essential so that microcultures — ethnic, sociological, generational — do not remain barricaded behind their own ossified practices and prejudices. So that, instead, innovation can occur, leaving society, culture, and technology better equipped for the present.
2. Filter failure is the counterpoint to heat loss
The overt message of Shirky’s piece is that users (and interface designers) will have to become better at filters in order to to sift and segregate our inputs. reducing the extent to which we feel “overwhelmed” by information. The users who are most successful at this — pruning their Twitter follow lists, refining the feeds that they follow in their RSS readers — can feel good about themselves as they reduce the ‘noise’ to which they are exposed. And feel smugly satisfied as they become more efficient than their peers.
But left unguarded, this rigorous pruning of inputs can lead to entropy and feedback. All information sources have a tendency to decay: people stop updating blogs; institutional culture co-opts investigation; recognition stultifies the urge to innovate. In short, our information sources narrow. We need to be continually exposed to new sources, new voices, in order to even maintain the same volume of information. And the surest way to do that is by accident.
3. Filter failure is the insurance against Siege Marketing
When your filters are too good, you're going to face this
What’s more, content producers — to the extent that they remain discrete from consumers at all — are going to be up against filters erected in order to protect users from unwanted inputs. As these filters improve, there will be constant experimentation to get more and more information to the people who are perceived as being the most receptive market. At worst, producers will become belligerent in their attempts to penetrate these walls, encircling potential customers to capture every possible eyeball. Already, viruses and spam are the digital analogue of the worst practices of siege warfare, poisoning the water supply or hurling diseased biological material over the castle walls.
But there is a more benign model, in which none of this is necessary, because our filters failure with enough regularity to expose new customers to information at a rate that keeps our business models sustainable. It’s a question of balance. Better yet, intelligent businesses and information producers will use permission marketing to achieve wider distribution and more credibility by having consumers themselves disseminate information.
4. Filter failure is good for our institutions
We are already seeing how our traditional industrial institutions are increasingly inadequate to the volume and nature of new, networked data flows. These aren’t just institutions in the obvious sense: corporations being outpaced by open source development, nation state governments undermined by instantaneous distributed opposition. Conceptual institutions — copyright, privacy — are similarly under threat.
This is good for institutions: it requires that they remain supple, remain responsive to the needs of our society as it evolves. Open society requires institutions that serve social and cultural needs. Filter failure can be painful — even lethal — for those at its edges, be they grandmothers prosecuted for music piracy or underground bloggers hiding from failing police states. But filter failure is the only mechanism by which these institutions can be well maintained, preventing them from becoming bulwarks of power and guarantors of the status quo.
In short: consistent, habitual filter failure is going to be a fact of life for a very long time. Filter failure is the new black. Filter failure is good for you.
Back in 2006 Hans Rosling blew the minds of TED participants as he demonstrated the power of the structured data he had collected on developing countries. In 2009 the OECD has debuted a front-end for their datasets — called the OECD FactBook Explorer. Like Rosling’s data the factbook lets you chart fertility, population growth and the like. From the stats it seems we Canadians need to get busy having kids
Do you know what a MAC address is? Me neither. But until today my home wifi network was configured to filter for it. Basically, this meant that a mere password wouldn’t grant you access to the network. A password was required, yes, but that alone was not sufficient.
Laptop, desktop, Blackberry, visiting iPhone — without providing your MAC address you weren’t getting onto our network. And if you did cough up the digits we had to take the time to add it to the list of allowed addresses on our router.
Yesterday we bought an Airport Express and when setup proved to be more smug than plug-and-play we ditched MAC filtering, just to see. That did it. Music started flowing and we haven’t turned MAC filtering back on, leaving our network open to anyone who can input the password. And I’m so glad.
When I bought the Airport I wasn’t just buying a wireless access point. I was buying a party where the music sounds evenly awesome throughout the house. That was the image I had in mind: it was our housewarming from January, except instead of me struggling to patch my PC into the stereo I had music running throughout the house and it was easy I was happy.
When we have people over we want them to be happy, and as good hosts we want to offer them all that they’re comfortable accepting. What kind of a host would I be if, when they picked up their wireless device to show me the latest app I’ve asked them about or to google a point of trivia under debate, I required them to use precious megabytes from their 3G data plan when I’ve got a perfectly good wifi network that’s always on? Naturally, the thing to do would be to offer the network password alongside hors d’oeuvres and a glass of wine.
But with MAC filtering engaged it was like we were ready to accommodate any request as long as it was accompanied by a detailed recipe and permitted time for procurement and preparation.
Choices about devices and how you configure them aren’t just about personal use anymore. As our devices travel longer distances with us in our pockets, representing increasing value as software upgrades keep their functionality growing, we’re going to need to think about how to make them play nice when they meet other devices in other pockets. Which means first establishing a baseline for “nice”.
Is it possible that if we had guests over tomorrow and didn’t offer them free wifi we’d be regarded as stand-offish people? Probably not, but that’s how I’d feel looking across the dining room table at a person I’ve defined in practical terms as both friend and threat to network security. And maybe that would translate into some gesture or remark my wife or I would make (probably me), and maybe in the end I would come off as aloof.
So we’re open. Irreversibly. Which is how these things go, isn’t it?
All data on the web will become structured, and mostly available
More data sets (eg government-owned) will arrive on the web, and more people will participate in using that data to understand the world, and make decisions, to order nature
That reminded me that the Open Data Commons has finalized an open database license with “Attribution and Share-Alike for data/databases”. It is Creative-Commons-like goodness for data. Spread the word.
For the analytics obsessed among us, the new edition of Wired magazine (17.07) has a cover story about living by the numbers. This human compulsion to measure everything is old news except that therearenew tools to capture your personal metrics. One tool that Wired missed is DayTum.com a delicious-like service for sharing your data. I am coming around on this site after spending more time at FlowingData.com and following Daytum’s founder Nicholas Felton’s annual reports and other work. The site will be way more interesting when the dataset is large enough to show relationships between users — anonymously of course.
It’s nice to see HarperCollins UK foregrounding the gorgeous Richard Bravery cover designs for Michael Chabon’s backlist by at least making large versions available for download. As we’ve discussed before, there are some fabulous opportunities available for content distributors who understand how the packaging of their product engages in an ongoing dialogue with the content — and that there are more and more opportunities for exactly these exchanges with social media and digital distribution. Content mediators — publishers, marketers, retailers, distributors — who understand how to enrich and enable those dialogues are going to reach more people than those who do not. Making cover art available for download and sharing is the very least that they should be doing.
Do you know what a 
