Finally, a table of contents to all four blogs

Hey folks, I finally have a table of contents to all four of my blogs: Social software; Cultural Commentaries; Film; and Music. If you're like me, you probably don't navigate blogs by archive postings; so here's to one of the most basic navigation inventions ever, the TOC.

What if mass media went away?

Here's a thought experiment:
What if the internet were to absorb mass media? What if radio and television were to disappear entirely, their services absorbed into the net, handled by a number of competing players all capable of combining radio, TV, video and pictures with email, IM, chat and so on? We can learn something about our mass media, and how internet media relate to mass media, just by conjuring up what would happen....

• We would notice their disappearance


• Radios would seem strangely disconnected


• A silence would be more than just quiet; it would feel like a death, something wrong


• We would miss familiar voices


• And yearn to hear old routines


• After a period of sending one another urls to videos hosted at YouTube (Gootube? Goodtube? Toggletube?) We might then wish to just be entertained, no searching, no streaming, no dialog boxes necessary


• We might miss the sense that something live is happening


• That we're all watching it together -- common culture and all of that


• That familiar voice, and the ham it up routine performed by our favorite DJs on the radio morning show we would miss hearing during our morning commute, not possibly but probably


• We'd miss the ease of sitting back and allowing the professionals to gather up the day's news, stamping them with significance or undermining them with tongue in cheek delivery


• I'm sure we'd also grow tired of the ongoing chore of making selection after selection


• And of being asked to view or click, listen to, or forward, items sent along by friends


• Not to mention strangers


• But after a while, perhaps, these things would fade,


• Live broadcasts might take root online,


• We could Skype into radio shows


• Hear ourselves back on podcasts released later in the day


• Watch ourselves on our webcams as we pose questions to off color news anchors


• And send those around later in the day


• When they appear in "members in the news" widgets on mytube.Sfgate.Com


• We might all benefit, we might each enjoy such a post-modernization, play-shifting and time-shifting mass media for easier consumption


• The question that occurs then being: how would our culture change?


• How would it look to us if playshifting eroded our scheduled routines, if we ceased to participate in activities on the basis of time and instead participated on the baseis of interest and need?


• If the centrifugal forces of mass media lost their power, would the state, a body with fewer organs (state organs, organs of power, organ-izing organs -- to quote Gilles Deleuze), find its way into new media?


• When scheduled media disappear, does culture lose its metronome?


• Does culture lose its rhythm? Or do journalists just lose their beats?

Technorati tags: analysis, p2p blogging, google video, internet radio, media, media theory, myspace, podcasting, social media, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, social interaction design, social media, social network, social network marketing, social network strategy, social networking, social software, videos online, vlogging, webocracy, Youtube,

Webocracy, Mass media, mini media, MySpace, YouTube

An article in today's SF Gate caught my eye. It's title included the word "Webocracy," so I knew right away that it must have to do with web 2.0, Silicon Valley, and the like. Like the term "folksonomy," "webocracy" captures the new in something old. In this case, democracy done online, retooled and perhaps even improved. Folksonomy, similarly, refers to a kind of social economy that bypasses traditional markets but which uses online markets and economies instead. I'm no fan of analogies used as explanations, especially when the new thing isn't well understood yet. Analogies refer us to something familiar -- in this case democracy and the web -- but the claim that this thing is like that thing has a communicative function but little more.

Let's unpack this one real quick then. Webocracy. Is the internet, and more specifically, the world of web 2.0, a new kind of democracy? It is grassrootsy, it does invite direct participation, it does threaten traditional modes of political engagement (e.g. bypass the lobby(ists), go straight to the back, where the power is...) but it's not a political system. The web is a communication and publishing technology, one that now delivers audio, video, and other modes of information and communication. But it's not just a technology. It's becoming an integral part of all manner of social phenomena (to wit, YouTube as the new TV, MySpace as the new marketing media). Technology plus culture give us new social practices.

It's the new techniques (technology = technique or application of a rationalized method) for communication that fascinate me, and the ones that seem to affect us at the core most of all. I don't think web 2.0 companies or phenomena represent a new political system, as might be suggested by the term webocracy. The same could be said for the term folksonomy. But there's a change of mode, of connection, of the relationship between individual and information, individual and individual, and individual and mainstream media taking place whose engine is web 2.0.

I call them talk systems. And where they get interesting is when they offer a marketplace, and they create an economy. I think those are the phenomena catching our attention these days: online markets in which economies based on recommendations and social networking create a different kind of consumption, one that is moved by communication between consumers instead of messaging and marketing by mainstream media. I call mySpace mini media, in opposition to mass media: it's got all the stuff off a medium, but its content is its own culture (a culture which often refers to mass media messages, images, events, celebs, etc.).

If you figure that a market simply makes goods and services available, and connections between buyers and sellers possible, but that an economy involves the people, their consumption habits, desires, choices, motives, etc, then clearly an online marketplace isn't enough to get anything going. It'll need users, and those users will need to know how the market works. It needs to exist, to find expression in common culture (it needs to be seen and talked about). So in addition to a market that connects goods, buyers and sellers, and an economy to organize the people and their economic consumption (note that an online dating service has a market, and an economy), the system has to be seen, has to exist. Here's where "mini media," or online phenomena like YouTube and MySpace, veer off from the phenomenon of mass media to launch something new: they exist through the communication of their members.

So where traditional mass media use magazines, newspapers (e.g. print media), radio, and television, all of which broadcast their messages, these new web -based media reproduce themselves through communication among members. Like other media, they exist by observing themselves, but these observations are given us not by pundits, djs, hosts, anchors, journalists... Observations of the medium are produced as ratings, votes, tags, bookmarks, blog posts, comments, etc. A very simple flow gets going (it's been called viral but it's got nothing to do with viruses. viruses are duplicated perfectly when transmitted. communication doesn't work that way, it has to be compelling if it is to circulate). That flow is an economy, one that picks up signs, assigns value, has speeds and crowds...

Talk, talk, talk, is the observation mode of web media. User participation. Social interaction. Instant messaging, posts, comments, email to friends, forward, bookmark, tag and rate, vote, vote, vote. What does all that do? It assigns value, assigns value. It's a different medium: a mini medium in comparison to the mass media (if you think money), a medium that for the most part serves as commentary on and observation of the mass media (hence its value to marketers), and which is "susceptible" to its own delusions, rumors, gossip, trends, and wipeouts. YouTube and MySpace are not produced by corporations, they don't occur over those media (radio, print, tv). It's no accident that these phenomena have remained where they are: online. That's where they can lay claim to a new social practice: the talk system. And perhaps the talk marketplace, the talk economy. (The term is social media, social software, but the social is talk).




Technorati tags: analysis, p2p andrew keen, christopher alexander, google video, internet democracy, long tail, media, media theory, myspace, social media, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, social interaction design, social media, social network, social network marketing, social network strategy, social networking, social software, videos online, webocracy, Youtube


(cross posted in my culture blog also)
related:
Myspace as mini media

YouTube: videos are signs, watching is social

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, writes:

"What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs."

To say that YouTube is not just video hosting or video watching is stating the obvious. The social participation YouTube gets in the video posting, commenting, rating, and circulating is what made it the killer app of hosted video. It is precisely YouTube's popularity that set it apart, and earned it the ability command a huge acquisition fee (read: head count. It was the audience head count, which to Google looked impressively like loyalty, and they may be right, which is why they'll leave it as YouTube for a while and keep their little "video NEW!" link sandwiched between images and news)...

I asked in a recent post what the content of YouTube is, using McLuhan's formula that a medium's content is a previous medium: "This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the 'content' of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” Then if the content of YouTube is television, its value was measured in terms of audience share (not advertising or programming quality). YouTube was clearly the biggest of the online video networks.

If the content of YouTube was television, but modified because it is online, then its formal content was television, its content as substance is viewers (users). And why is this so important? Because it would be a mistake to see YouTube in terms of its core value proposition: watching video. YouTube is a communication medium, and its real value lies in providing a marketplace "in" which people gather to pass around videos they like. "Watch this, you'll like it" is conversation. It's a statement, and YouTube is full of them. Look up Robin Williams and the first page of results are all the same 2 min and 19 second clip of Mr Williams doing a Scotsman inventing Golf. Why? Because posting is, as we learned from blogging, the fundamental act of communicating. Not reading. Not watching. (Not listening!)

This will all get more interesting as we look at the nature of utterances and communication involving video as reference. We need to compare YouTube and related phenomena to the blogosphere and to blogging. Ask yourself, what is it to refer to a cultural commodity or object, in a statement addressed to friends (or anonymously, to the world). What is that act? Is it a "look at this" act or is it a "look at me" act?

Or is it a "look at me looking at this" act? Let's suppose that the videos on YouTube are like commodities, and that they have the sign value that we associate with fast cars, exclusive brands, and other status symbols. I'm not suggesting of course that some YouTube videos better brands than others — videos aren't brands. I'm suggesting that videos signify social relations.

Videos on YouTube, because they are on YouTube, accrue social significance. That a person wants to share a video with somebody, be it by telling a friend or by posting, or by commenting, means that person likes it. And wants to communicate that like. In a "public" setting, identifying with a commodity carries social connotations. I'm into guitar rock. Or stand up. Check out these Bush out-takes. etc. Each video, in addition to its own content, has a reflective signification also: to like something is a reflection of my likes. The particular (video) makes a general reference (this is my taste). That's the social move. Association with videos can now become social, using the commodity form, as other commodities are social (the status symbols mentioned above). And they're free! Fast! And the consumption of them is ephemeral, and it doesn't oblige anyone to post one back, or to applaud, even to publicly agree.

The social works in online marketplaces like this by establishing a communicable interest between a user and his or her selections (books, videos, music, blogs, etc). If the interest were personal only, it wouldn't need to be communicable. It could just make sense to the person and end there. Its communicability is a sign that it's social. But in each medium, in each application (social software site, community, marketplace, etc) the site has to successfully create an audience/public, and successfully enable the linking of user to interests, and communication of these selections to individuals, groups, and the audience at large. One cannot really wait for the other. Hence the importance of viral marketing, and hence the advantage that has returned to first movers.

Our next investigation ought to be into the changing nature of sign value, of commodities as form and of our relations to each other through these mediators.


Technorati tags: Google YouTube
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Youtube,

Pay Attention to YouTube!

I'm on a bit of a Marshall McLuhan kick this week, with YouTube's acquisition to Google still in the air. And Kim Jong Il leaping up and down at the far eastern edge of the map: living, ridiculous proof that power is all about getting attention (Dumb and Dumber: starring Bush and Kim Jong Il). I don't think Robin Williams could've scripted a better skit; nor the South Park team have animated it any better than Kim did himself. Let's all pay attention to lonely wittle Kim Jong Il.

But back to our original news... YouTube. Why did Google take it when they had their own video service? Because Google's wasn't as popular. And why not? Because Google approached video as information. Youtube saw it as television.

This is not about videos, it's about television, and the future of television most importantly. Which will be why Sumner and Ballmer and Murdoch are still awake at night unsure of whether they just were too stingy. Marshall McLuhan claimed that television was a social medium. Film was not. YouTube is the present-day television, not television. YouTube, aptly named, since "You" (= My) and Tube (= Television) precisely describe television's reconfiguration in the Communication Age. Yes, and MyTube would've sounded a bit weird. But MyTube would've seemed a bit, well, narcissistic (ah, the truth about teenagers and MySpace is written in the name!). And it would've missed the function of Communication as it's applied to television. Since television is configured as a broadcast medium, it's reconfiguration is as a communication medium. MyTube would've missed the point. YouTube captures it: television communicates only if it's seen by others with whom one is communicating (namely, one's friends, or social network).

The social aspect of television is the reflection: to see others seeing what you're seeing. To share the experience of watching. Well, we don't often watch television that way any more. Sharing couches and armchairs, turned and tuned into the same network broadcast, primetime, dinner tray, dog splayed out on the floor thinking it's all about him. We live in a play-shifted, time-shifted day and age in which communication is as likely to happen asynchronously as it is to happen at all: that is, over the internet and not face to face. YouTube is about watching socially, but of course from one's own computer, out of synch in time, but in synch in terms of the content.

Google missed this because Google saw video as indexable, searchable, categorizable and taggable content. Flickr misses this because photos aren't social (they're a show and tell, which is a bit different because it takes the form of speaker/audience, not broadcast/audience). I watch you watching television. Television directs vision to itself but in the social context of watching together. There's always at least a peripheral perception of others watching (Not in film -- room's too dark. Social's not the point there. In fact movies open with a warning to turn off your cell phone. Most definitely not social...ah, but the experience is social, yes. But not the medium.).

The new generation doesn't sit down to watch prime time tv together. It's on YouTube, which provides the asynchronicity of experience, personaliz-ability of tags, uploading, favorites lists, channels, and a play duration much better suited to consumption than tv. Content in minutes, not half hour blocks. And played, of course, over the medium that's mine, that's mobile, that's interactive, and that's connected: the computer.

Google bought YouTube. Makes perfect sense.


Technorati tags: Google YouTube google video, Marshall McLuhan, media, media theory, social media, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, social interaction design, social media, social network, social network marketing, social network strategy, social networking, social software, videos online, Youtube,

Marshall McLuhan on YouTube

There's a great scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall in which Allen, overhearing a guy in line for a movie refer to Marshall McLuhan, produces McLuhan with the words "as a matter of fact, I have Marshall McLuhan right here." It's a hilarious bit of comedy. I can't produce McLuhan, but I did find him on YouTube.com. I looked for him on YouTube because I wanted to quote McLuhan's theory that every medium has a prior medium as its content. I've been thinking about which medium YouTube has as its prior content (more on this soon). To find McLuhan as content on YouTube, is, well, a bit Annie Hall... (sorry, it's not the *real* McLuhan but only a trailer for a History channel special... the comparison deepens... is the internet a parallel medium to tv? Is an actor playing mcluhan in a video on youtube about a television program about a man who said the content of television is theater a simulation of the real thing quoted in a communication medium or a message circulated in the mass media sampled by a consumer and posted to the mini media or a marketing ploy by the mass media or is it simply the content of my post? things get strange in the mediated world...)

So, which medium is the content of YouTube?

"The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the 'content' of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph." Understanding Media, p 8.





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Youtube,

War is Peace: On Truth, YouTube, Snipers, and Death

The New York Times today had an interesting piece on YouTube, and it wasn't about Google's acquisition offer. It was on videos posted to YouTube that show killings of American soldiers. YouTube snuff? Or is it YouTube doing news? Is a sniping seen on Youtube more truthful than what news agencies are willing to show, or are these images reprehensible and sick? What is truth, when truth is produced, edited, narrated and told through media that put us "in touch" with events beyond our direct experience? How do we judge what's right and wrong? How do we get the better of our curiosity--when confronted with videos that capture the appeal of the appalling?
YouTube is a phenomenon, that like MySpace, represents the a paradigm shift from mass media to social media (my media, mini-me-dia). It is proof that user generated content is much more than the publication of end user commentary. The mass media now report on social media. They source content from social media. They've embraced social media and so use it to distribute themselves...
What's happening is not just a shake up in the ownership of the media. It's a shake up of the ownership of narrative, of telling the news, of creating our images and spinning the stories by which we reflect ourselves and through which we define and understand ourselves. And insofar as the media are always attached to a society's control and self-regulation, phenomena like MySpace and YouTube, which appear to have a tenuous (at best) relationship to monetization and profit are a real and present threat (to institutionalized power; status quo).
I'm not for sniping videos. But what's going on is clearly more than that. And it would be a pity if YouTube had to respond in the way that Google had to respond in China. And yet I'm loathe to say it like that. Things have gone topsy turvy.
War is Peace. Orwell, indeed.




Technorati tags: Youtube, anti-American, snipers, videos, news, media, media theory

What does tech do? To find out, turn it off

To find out what a technology, a gadget, or device does, we normally turn it on and hit the buttons. Social technologies are different, because what they do is not in what they do, but in what they help us do... Communication technologies, for example, serve no purpose until they're part and parcel of our daily routines. Social technologies are technoloiges + social practice. (One reason I think we designers need to move from user interface to social interface, user centric design to practice oriented design.) So to discover what a social technology does, you turn it off. What you can't do anymore, is what the technology "did."

A friend of mine was recently banned from using Tribe at work. His tribe is now dying off, and none of us here from him anymore. I used to think that online communities were just a supplement, but not a substitute, for the everday. It's a bit weird that some of our friendships owe so much to maintainance online, or in some other mediated fashion, that when the mediating technology is taken out we're surprised by the sudden distance they create...





Technorati tags: social software, social interaction design, sxd, web 2.0, communication, social media

You looking at me? Invisibility at Facebook

According to Techcrunch last week, Facebook has enabled the following updates to privacy controls, hand in hand with its grand opening (to the public; facebook was an invite only community):

• Block other users in specific networks from searching for his or her name.


• Prevent people in those networks from messaging, poking and adding him or her as a friend.


• Control whether his or her profile picture shows up in search results.

I don't have anything against Facebook. I'm a triber myself, but that owes more to being in San Francisco and discovering social networking years ago. Tribe today is a hidden gem, a hole in the wall in the bustling downtown of myface.

One can't help but see the remnants of cliquish antagonisms, though, in the new privacy controls listed above. It seems Facebook members are actually searched out by name (but only by members of a network (read: school/group)). Glad I didn't do anything terribly cruel to anyone in school. Glad I tied up all those aborted flings and unfinished relationships. Glad I'm old enough that my picture is probably not recognizable to anybody I knew intimately back then! And phew, I knew who my friends were -- because I wouldn't have anybody citing my friendship unless it was the real thing!

Privacy controls have a double function on social networking sites.

• they allow users to describe their relations, especially friendships, with others


• they allow users to manage their "presence availability" online, meaning that they allow users some control over access others have to them, be it simply referring to a user, seeing his/her picture in search results (to wit, new facebook features), or be it communication settings like IM, skype availability, commenting, emailing, etc.

One can't help but view Facebook's update as an attempt to head off attempts by new members to mine facebook for old connections, friendships, relationships, enmities... It's as if an online social network were gearing up to meet actual social networks: present, meet the past.


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