Twitter allows two things to happen very well: mobs feed on themselves, and the slippery slope gets very steep and extremely slick. There’s also the snowballing analogy… Bottom line, there was a lack of respect for the topic, a clear void in researching the audience, and just bad presentational ability. A perfect storm, if you will. And once the tweeting started, it simply became more fun to be in the stream than put up with the presentation. In a way, it was less about being snarky towards the speaker, and more about amusing each other by sharing and exaggerating the pain.
We touched on this a few months ago: the idea that Twitter is, as yet, a social space largely unregulated by norms of behaviour. There are furtherthoughtselsewhere about this particular example and some possible lessons: are we moving from a model of passive consumption in conferences to one of active participation? Does the ‘unconference’ model so successfully employed by, for example, BookCamp Vancouver last week, provide more value to attendees? Has the burden changed from audiences (to pay attention to the presenters) to presenters (to better know their audiences)?
If social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter were ever digital dorm parties, those days are long over. Everyone who knows you — your mom, your boss, the guy you were hoping would call, that pain-in-the-ass client — knows about Facebook, Twitter, and the next big thing. And when they find you on one of them they’ll expect that they’ve found the you that they know, and you’ll expect the same from them. But that’s not who you or they really are, is it?
At any given moment we perceive our social circle to be divided into segments. What divides them is usually a combination of circumstances largely beyond our control, but for the most part the divisions are organic in nature and not rigid. Who’s my colleague? Who’s my friend? Who’s family? While Facebook presents the language of social segmentation in checkboxes, implying that every 1-1 human relationship can be captured in a word, in normal practice the language of relationships and social segmentation is actually highly elastic, depending on who’s asking how I know so-and-so.
Social networking offers the illusion of social segment control. Facebook lets you give varying levels of access to different contacts and Twitter lets you hide from would-be followers while letting you brush off the ones you wish you hadn’t picked up. These features have in common the basic function of filtering. The trouble is, you only filter when you’ve got something to say that you’d rather not everyone heard. Shielding someone entirely from certain types of information hardly fits the bill as a means to acting naturally before each member of your social circle in the manner closest to your nature as they know it. It might not be your aim to make your mom think you have no social life, but that’s a typical effect of contact filtering.
One idea I’m hearing brought up with increasing frequency is to employ multiple accounts, one for each social segment (usually dividing work from family from friends). I don’t think I’ve seen anyone actually do it, but then if it were done well I wouldn’t perceive it, would I?
Let’s say I were to set up multiple Facebook/Twitter accounts for each of my social segments, letting alone for now the inevitable overlap of friends who are also coworkers and cousins I invite to parties, as well as the possibility that some of my contacts are are themselves running multiple accounts for each of their social segments, including me on some but not others.
Even if I managed to sort out each of the people in my life into the appropriate bucket, how would I decide which of my identities to speak through at any given moment? That is, if each account is a filter to the world, how can I effectively filter the data of my life into the appropriate account? Is a work-safe life event also parent-safe? How can I spin one event so everyone can hear about it in the most appropriate way?
Looks to me like a mug’s game. At some point I’m going to say something through one identity that I probably should have said through another, thereby degrading the integrity of each. Or everything I say is going to run together, leading to a situation indistinguishable from the one that the creation of multiple identities was supposed to depart from, ie. “real life.”
If anyone is successfully employing multiple accounts to deal with multiple social segments, I bet they’re having a hard time being anywhere near as interesting there as they are in person.
Social networking doesn’t facilitate the creation of different identities, or the rigid differentiation between segments of one’s social circle. You don’t actually have multiple faces. You never really did.
These platforms just let each segment hear what you’re saying to the others, and in turn show you what goes on when people step out of your life to get on with their own.
Remember how it felt to run into your teacher at the mall on summer vacation? I think we’re going to start getting used to that feeling.
Can I interest you in some slightly used veterinary supplies?
We just got back from a trip to Saluda, NC’s Coon Dog Day. While I’m trying to figure out what there is to be said about the 2 days I spent thinking nobody else was tweeting from there because I didn’t see any hits for #coondogday09 other than tweets from wifey and me, let’s consider how I can mitigate an egregious veterinary expense with the help of Twitter.
While getting our dog caught up on all the vaccinations we knew she’d need to get across the border (note: they don’t check) we took the added precaution of buying a flea & tick treatment to last the duration of our trip (note: it was a good idea). Cost: $72 for 4 individually blister-sealed doses. Each dose is good for a month.
Thing is, we were only gone for 5 days. We administered a full dose only because it seemed to be an all-or-nothing sort of deal. The other 3 in the pack are each going to expire in airtight isolation before we have occasion to use them. What to do?
I’m going to post them for sale online and list my Twitter ID along with contact info. I don’t expect anyone would buy pet medication from a total stranger (cheap as I am, not even I’d do that) but I think I might have a chance to recover a bit of my expense and spare someone else most of the cost of the meds if I open myself to a background check. I’m hoping that my 600+ tweets taken in whole or in part will give a perfect stranger sufficient confidence in my character (or at least the part that applies in matters of veterinary commerce) to take advantage of a bargain price. Good, bad, or indifferent, I’ll post the results here.
A number of people have remarked recently that the environment in which someone can switch from being a Twitter neophyte to a true believer is a business conference.
Conferences give Twitter users the opportunity to provide commentary (and factual corrections) to what is being presented; to provide updates to a remote audience; and to engage with one another on a number of levels from professional networking to semi-anonymous flirtation.
It’s fascinating that the feeling of a ‘back channel’ can provoke not only a more open and participatory discussion, but can also license behavior that would otherwise be frowned upon. A ‘kids at the back of the class’ mentality can develop, wherein the shortcomings of the presenter’s style or of the venue are called out. These kinds of things would not be considered appropriate if they involved passing notes or calling across the room. But Twitter doesn’t just make these things surreptitiously possible; it is also so new that the ground-rules for social behavior have not yet been established.
But part of it may be that the medium itself allows such a broad variety of messages that social norms can never become established.
Within this, of course, lies that rather tedious discussion about the extent to which one’s online identity — masked by some measure of anonymity (or, at least, not-there-ness) — can exist distinct of one’s “real-world” identity. But it’s telling that several newcomers to Twitter ask questions about whether they should establish separate accounts for personal and professional identities. That’s part of the appeal of a Facebook app like Selective Twitter: it allows you to filter your output for potentially different audiences.
But as you spend more time with Twitter, it becomes clear that people’s expectations of the media are that it provide a constant mixture of personal and professional. It isn’t at all unusual for you to learn what a business contact ate for dinner, or to read a friend filtering a technical business conference. Part of that is the openness of the platform: you can choose who to follow, be it Neil Gaiman or your best friend. With that range of participants, what kinds of social rule set could we collectively agree to apply?
These are, of course, just a handful of the social reasons for Twitter’s popularity, quite distinct from its more frequently cited technical adaptability. It provokes an extra level of interaction that simply didn’t — couldn’t — exist before. And it may remain, to some extent, permanently wild.
For various reasons too boring to get into, I’ve been handed an awful lot of business cards over the last few months. It was a relief, while attending BookCamp Toronto a couple of weeks ago, to escape the day w entirely ithout any of those sorry floppy items being apologetically proffered. I felt like some kind of temporary respite had been granted from my tenure in an extended episode of Life on Mars.
What was behind it, of course, was that most of the participants at BookCamp had made the leap that something like Twitter is not just an improvement on Cro Magnon technologies like email, but geological epochs ahead of the Neanderthal business card.
That’s not just because you have to carry business cards around and remember to input them into some kind of storage system later (usually, let’s be honest, the desk drawer). And it’s not just because, while they are occasionally gorgeous, creative, and inspiring, business cards usually showcase the most appalling and amateurish use of appalling and amateurish typefaces like Comic Sans. Let’s not even mention the clip art.
No: these folks didn’t give out business cards because exchanging contact details is, counter-intuitively, pretty much the worst way to go about developing contacts. It places an enormous burden upon first impressions and upon your powers of recall. Is that person you met several months ago at a technology conference really the right person to email about the idea you have just had at work? Did the person seem reliable and personable? Can I glean some insight into either of these questions from the sorry-looking creased piece of tree bark in front of me? Probably not. So I just won’t bother.
The barriers of the medium just prevented me from getting something done.
Following someone new on Twitter, by contrast, allows you to enter their orbit — to see what they think on the topics which, presumably, are of some shared interest. And, because of the mixture of personal and professional that Twitter allows, permits, and almost requires, you can develop some sense of whether their approach to life is likely to be conducive to yours. It will also allow you to get a glimpse into this new person’s ability to engage (and survive) in a medium that allows all of that to happen. Does this person seem good at managing multiple streams of their life — and maintaining the contacts necessary to do so?
You can then use Twitter to continue to lurk until an opportunity presents; to participate in a public conversation which by default is a casual interaction requiring less formal follow up; or to contact them privately via a direct message.
What’s more, because there is only a single piece of information — the username directly associated with you — you don’t risk losing every potential contact the moment that your phone number changes and those pieces of card you so diligently distributed become, everywhere, instantly, obsolete. (For those who simply can’t live without lines and lines of personal contact information that you have to remember to update whenever they change, you may want to check out twtBizCard.)
In short, exchanging contact details is a waste of time. Don’t give me a list of fourteen different means to contact you and try to entice me into doing it via some showy logo design. Give me access to your orbit. I’ll take it from there.
First thing tomorrow morning, destroy your business cards. Let’s make a stand.
Can I truly be interested in everything all of the time?
There are two kinds of things I want to know about right now:
things that are important, world-shaping, and deserve my immediate attention, and
things of very little value that aren’t going to have any value at all unless I know about them when they happen.
Twitter serves up both equally well and at exactly the same rate. Is that a problem?
We’re all guilty of boring our families with diatribes against the 6 o’clock news when they jump from coverage of violent revolution in some temperate clime to the discovery of a family of squirrels that resemble various ex-presidents. But left to our own 3G devices are we any better? What would “better” look like? More sombre? Serious? Erudite? The opposite of frivolous?
I’ve been watching the Twitter stream on Iran’s crooked election today and found myself by turns horrified and inspired. But I’ve also kept up with friends. I’ve had a nap. For dinner I had leftover curry with a cold beer. I’ve listened to Queen.
I don’t have any profound moral conclusion to draw at this point (and I hope for the sake of the readership of this blog I never do). But I wonder whether, as the power to filter information shifts downstream, our increasing responsibility for the use of our own attention comes with a moral imperative to attend to certain things that wouldn’t be otherwise accessible, or is this just a transition towards people acting more like themselves?
Nathan and I had one of those “we’re not as smart as we think we are” / “thank god we aren’t crazy” moments at BookCamp Toronto last weekend while listening to Peter Brantley talk about the possibilities of “the networked book”.
When your regular conversations about the implications of digital distribution tend to be vociferous discussions about publishing — intellectual property, maintaining cost structures, etc. — it’s easy to find yourself thinking far less about the implications for reading. But the discussion that Peter initiated was an exciting tease about some of those possibilities (before it veered, perhaps inevitably, to the “safe ground” of industry change). And it was reassuring that they are some of the things that we Datachondrians have been kicking around for a little while, in particular about technologies that will enable granular user-generated metadata.
... will not fit into your North Face Jester backpack
There is a vast amount of content out there that already exists, but is barricaded behind forms — whether physical items like books or intellectual concepts like genres — that prevent it from reaching its natural audiences. Exposure to a larger audience is always a win-win situation: more readers, more reading experiences, and an exponential increase in contacts to even more audiences. That isn’t just more entertainment value or more revenue: there’s an obvious gain to society when more people are exposed to more ideas: those ideas can be put to better use, often in ways not imagined by the original authors. As the exhaustive discussion about long tails and fragmented markets has shown, we’ve already seen tremendous progress in bringing content to previously unrealized audiences. But to some extent the physical forms and intellectual conception of cultural items like “the book” and “the film” remain obstacles. The weekend visitor to Yosemite might love to hear what Theodore Roosevelt had to say about Half Dome, but doesn’t necessary want to read through (still less carry) his diaries alongside essential camping gear. Why not direct them straight to the paragraphs that matter to them?
There is, of course, a lot of institutional resistance to breaking down these units and releasing this content, which would essentially to allow readers to make use of it in whatever ways they can imagine. Some of these forces are legal (copyright); some are economic: what business model would continue to allow the production of value that the publishing industry is currently structured around? Some forces are more purely conceptual: what is the role of the author? Where does the involvement of the author — their original idea, their intent, their control of presentation, their control of interpretation — end? Where, for that matter, does it begin?
But there are tremendous countervailing forces — namely the interpretative processes that readers already employ while consuming content. Readers, listeners, and viewers already associate the content they experience with memories, relationships, and other pieces of content. In the past these have been primarily personal associations. They have been communal only in the narrow set of situations that technology allowed: discussions among friends, within book clubs, and so forth. But they have been there, obscured somewhat by the fact that they left no physical mark upon the transmitter of the content (although many of us treasure a particular edition of a book because of the emotional associations that it carries: who gave it to us; what we were doing while we were reading it). As more than a few participants in the BookCamp conversations pointed out, some of the most meaningful “reading” experiences we have had were due to the conversations that they provoked with colleagues and friends, or the access to memories that they allowed.
All this, now, is possible to a degree and in methods hitherto unimaginable. You can already see it taking place. Set up a Twitter search for the title of your favourite novel and you will see, in realtime, the ways in which it is slotting itself into other people’s lives. In doing so it is enriching those new readers and (since it is happening in ways so different from your own experiences) actually enriching the book itself as an amalgamation — a touchstone — of collective experience. For the first time, books are visible not just for what they contain but for what they release.
And users, given the tools, will enable, organize, and share that universe of possibilities.
3. A World of Associations
So what could that look like?
Suppose that users could geotag passages of text, works of art and design, pieces of music, audio clips, moments of film. This would allow you to engage in tours of cities, landscapes, and parks with a variety of contextually relevant materials (further reading, illustrations, maps; music and artwork inspired by these locations). Art galleries and museums would not only be augmented by those now ubiquitous curated audio materials, but by user-generated recommendations and commentary on what to see, how to look at it, and what music and writing has been inspired by or associated with it. As these user-generated elements age, they become instant historical tours, sitting alongside (for example) the impressions of Samuel Pepys, Thomas de Quincey, and Charles Dickens to enrich your experience of Oxford Street or Charring Cross Road.
There are obvious business applications — the links to real-world and online goods and services, where you could purchase a poster of that William Turner painting, that reproduction of Harry Beck’s first underground map, or a copy of the Dickens novel that you where just listening to an excerpt from.
Imagine purchasing a work of literature with an interwoven ‘annotation’ pack to provide explanatory material — or a ‘translation packs’ for ESL students? A book club pack that could allow groups of users to share tags and embed conversations about specific passages. Imagine a book at which — within the text — the author and readers were staging a real-time discussion on specific passages. Imagine if cookbooks would suggest similarly-tagged recipes or dishes appropriate to a menu, and point to the location of a local specialty store for cooking materials.
In short — imagine everything that can happen to content if it can be broken into distinct pieces which can be rated and evaluated on the basis of their contextual usefulness, rather than only on their relationship to ‘the rest of the book’.
4. Liberating Content
Much of the challenge will of course be about the interface design — a theme underlined, in a variety of contexts, in a number of Saturday’s sessions. What is the physical product design, and the information design, that would enable this reading experience? As Nathan pointed out, we should not assume that this need be a traditional book-based reading: a device should allow ‘media switching’ to let you to continue to enjoy the content regardless of your current physical activity. Should each chapter, point, paragraph, sentence, or word contain ‘hooks’ on which readers could hang associations, discussions, and other aspects of metadata? Should this entire question, as we have argued before, be available for constant redefinition in whatever terms make sense for the “reader”?
These appear to be narrowly technical points, although there is a big conceptual debate behind them. As Peter Brantley suggested, the recent Google book search settlement, by entrenching the concept of “the work” as a unitary entity defined by authorial intent, may reinforce the legal and conceptual walls mentioned above.
But the possibilities here are enormous, and the pressure may become unstoppable to liberate content from the old physical forms we built to allow its distribution. Ultimately, if our legal, economic and conceptual receptacles cannot adapt, then writers and readers may simply opt out of the system. Their cultural works will emerge independent of the copyright/publishing system and immediately sit in an open-source universe alongside Antony and Cleopatra and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, awaiting the arrival of content from a historically narrow period — the period in which copyright held sway and books were closed from the designs of their readers.
An interesting generational moment (one of many, to be entirely honest) at BookCamp Toronto yesterday. At the end of one session, the panel made a plea for all concerned to share any ideas, practices, or projects that might overlap with (or contribute to) the initiative that the team had spend the last 50 minutes outlining.
A member of the audience asked for the resource at which this sharing would take place.
One of the panel members pointed to the email address that he had pinned to the wall about fifteen minutes earlier.
There was an awkward collective silence — one of those “ah, what?” moments — as everyone realized that, yes, that email address (an email address) was going to be the conduit for idea-sharing and contact management for the project.
Email is a terrible media for this kind of thing, and to this crowd — a significant proportion of which had their Twitter usernames pinned to their chests through the day — it carried a heavy implicit message. Email is not only a closed hatch, behind which activity is invisible, but it also suggests a very distinct model of information management. By emailing your information or ideas to someone, you are putting yourself at their disposal. It’s a private communication vessel — entirely inappropriate to a public plea for information sharing, and implicitly antithetical to an open source model of participatory innovation. And it’s completely dependent on the recipient’s ability to efficiently manage their inflow of information — not something that most people are good at.
Twitter, to pick only the most obvious contrast, may allow for private ‘direct messaging’, but it is a public medium. The default means of a conversation — the @ reply syntax — makes the dialogue visible for all to see.
Positioning your email address as a the place at which I should post my ideas or contact details requires that I trust you to efficiently do the following things:
Receive and record my information.
Understand it completely, not only within the terms which I used to express it, but in all the possible implications it might carry for other people coming from a complete diversity of backgrounds.
Distribute it to the most suitable members of the community.
Do all of the above in a timeframe that is most appropriate to my ideas and best rewards my sense of engagement with the project.
Warehouse all of that information in such a way that you can repeat steps 1-4 if someone new comes to the table later whose ideas and identity might have a fruitful relationship to my own.
In short, you’re asking me to bet on your superhuman efficiency to understand information in all its possible permutations and maintain an encyclopedic knowledge of the network. But for most people of my generation that just isn’t how we’re used to interacting with the world. We like the instant public archiving of the internet (including the kudos and bragging rights that that provides), and the distributed networking that exposure to the crowd allows. In short, we’d rather rely on a network to do the things that a network does well.
I can understand that the team at this presentation might not yet have had time to put together a robust software solution (a forum? wiki?) at which open participation might take place. But a Twitter username or hashtag would have been better — much better — than someone’s email address. Particularly when the topic was technological innovation. You guys know that email is 40 years old, right?
An interesting generational moment (one of many, to be entirely honest) at