Is Clay Shirky on complexity too simplistic?

From a recent post on The Collapse of Complex Business Models, Clay Shirky argues that mass media may continue to see its business cannibalized by new media if it fails to recognize the inherent dangers of overly-complex production models.

"The 'and them some' is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn't these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn't because they don't want to, it's because they can't.
....

"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact — we will have to pay them — but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

"Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don't know how to do that."
....

"Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
....

"When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It's easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future."




I have been offline for a few weeks working on a book tentatively titled Principles of Social Interaction Design. It's nigh on a first draft, and if you have ever attempted to write a book, you know that I'm eager to be well past nigh.

Ironically, paradoxically, or sensibly, I've had to be off social media in order to write about social media. I find that certain perspectives and insights come only with a good break from online habits and with a bit of critical distance. So it is with a bit of distance that I'm posting today. But there was a piece recently by Clay Shirky that I found interesting (I've allowed myself to lurk on google reader) and worth a few thoughts.

Shirky's piece is on complexity, and in the vein of the collapse of complex societies, as popularized by Jared Diamond. I'm no anthropologist, but I do like systems theory, and I'm very much interested in systems theory and social media. So there were some arguments in Shirky's piece that I couldn't connect myself. I'm compelled to write them up because they strike me as troublesome.

Clay writes, in essence, that complexity will be the downfall of mass media. But he writes also that tradition-bound methods of the past will be the downfall of mass media, too. And this is what bothers me. The argument is that old, bureaucratic, and overly complex systems of production, publishing, and distribution will succumb to new, simple, and future-oriented (read: internet) models of production.

I can buy one or the other, perhaps, but Clay seems to have conflated to arguments into one: old is complex, future is simple. Either simplicity trumps complexity, or future trumps the past. In fact, there have been many old and stagnant regimes that have failed. As well as many new and simple technologies that now beg for greater complexity (to wit, twitter's recent announcements). Both Google and Facebook are admittedly complex, and becoming increasingly so. The societies of the Mayans, Incas, and the Romans achieved high degrees of complexity, but so too did those of the conquering Europeans. Was the gun not a complex instrument of warfare; the galleon, a complex mode of travel; the Church, a complex bureaucratic institution; not to mention financing at the time?

I fail to see the intrinsic flaw in complexity, and the argument that simplicity beats complexity strikes me as, well, too simplistic. If complexity fails due to its complexity, then what new simplicity is needed to bring about this failure? Surely complexity would undo itself on its own. And if simplicity is better, is this not a comment on simplicity in process, or experience perhaps, and not necessarily a comment on production or organization? For if the experience is simple, what's wrong with hidden organizational or procedural complexity?

Complexity corresponds to greater organizational differentiation. The more complex an organization, the more responses it has for a greater number of environmental events or external change and stimuli. In systems theories, complexity is an intrinsic characteristic. The question is not complexity, but adaptability. Complexity, if it stands in the way of correctly perceiving phenomena, and if it prevents proper and commensurate responses to those phenomena, is a bad thing. But only on the basis of the response to change; not in and of itself.

Simplicity, in design, in user experience, in processes and interaction models, are generally-speaking, a good thing. There's no harm in wrapping a complex set of algorithms, processes, operations, and functionalities with a simple user interface. But this does not make the system simple. It makes its use simple.

It seems that Clay is for the simplicity of user experience, and against the complexity of bureaucracies unable to adapt when faced with environmental change. Both of which I can agree with. But I see no causal relation between these two dispositions. And I definitely fail to see how we might apply the laws of physics to get from one statement to the next, as Clay seems to do when citing the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That, to me, strikes me as facile, if not a somewhat bizarre failure to distinguish causalities and levels of analysis.

I'm harping on this only because I have a problem with certain internet myths — one of which I think is the myth of simplicity. Simplicity in structure is not the same as simplicity in process. Complex operations can be made simple if sequenced and stepped well. Complexity in organization can be made simple if its presentation is designed well. Complexity in relations can be simplified if navigation is familiar and sensible.

The world is only becoming more and increasingly complex, and in ways that are unavoidably tied to system interdependencies and connectedness. Simplicity, in itself, is not an antidote. Nor is simplicity in argumentation.

News and speed: are we better informed?

The acceleration of news delivery towards its degree zero — instantaneity — is inevitable. It belongs to the very concept and reality of news itself. The newest news is the news that just arrived now. No news could be sooner, or faster, than this news now. Now is the zero point of news. When it comes to news, realtime is just another way of saying Now.

News seeks ever faster speeds. "This just in" announces new news, redundant as it may sound. Our culture, for better or worse, places a high value on the novelty of news, the newness of news. Call it the "newsworthiness of now." As the media's staple ingredient, however, it's an empty calorie. Fuel good enough for baseline metabolic functioning, but little more.

News value informs what is newsworthy. When deemed to be newsworthy, news is issued as news and its novelty makes it so. In this way a piece of information acquires an additional value, a cultural valence, from which it attracts attention and by order of which it is set into distribution. The audience, which receives news, circulates news further in a fashion as old as the art of storytelling itself.

It is in this manner that mediated information becomes news in the mass medium, and becomes social fact in the social medium — irrespective of the inherent quality or claim actually wagered by the news item. Why is this?

Well, for starters there is no such thing as intrinsic value. Media by definition create reality. They do this in part by covering real events, of course, but in their coverage they produce a reality of their own. One that is observed, interpreted, and narrated.

The question then becomes: If mass and social media both serve to produce and circulate news in realtime (their respective means of doing so being increasingly less distinct), what is knowledge? What is it to be informed, and what is the relationship between information, being informed, and knowledge and being knowledgeable?

A social fact is information that, by being news validated socially (by its travels through social media), exists as fact because it has been observed. Social observation online involves posting, tweeting, re-tweeting, linking, and so on. Social facts come into existence in this way — and once in existence, can accrue a life story according to their ability to survive and persist past being new news.

At what point then does a culture produce knowledge from information? How is knowledge created from news?

It would seem that knowledge should be more than fact, more than news. That it ought to have validity for what it claims. That it make a claim upon the individual on the basis of being valid, for reasons that connect to more than what has been claimed.

Only claims that can be accepted or rejected as being agreeable fall into this category — statements not of fact (which are true or false), but of validity (which are right or wrong). Knowledge would be information that is not just true but which is useful because they can bind people by means of agreement about something — not just recognition of fact.

In the midst of the realtime revolution, and the rapid acceleration of news, we might ask whether we become more knowledgeable? Does the realtime web accelerate the production of knowledge? Or does it just speed up the distribution of news, and lend a hand in surfacing and establishing what constitute the social facts of our online worlds?

We might conjecture that realtime detracts from the sustained attention and effort demanded of knowledge production, by distraction as well as by sheer noise and confusion. Or we might suppose that realtime is imply the power law at work, and a means in some cases of vetting and surfacing the social facts that matter — after which perhaps knowledge forms along the tail.

This is an open question, and I don't take sides and can see the merits of either perspective. There is also a third possibility. It is that the distribution of news in realtime, rapidly and broadly laying down layer upon layer of social sediment (fertile, as well as the, uh, crap), not only grounds mediated social realities but also supplies communication with opportunities for connection.

Perhaps, by means of this third possibility, social news serves as a vehicle for relating and connecting. A common stock of information with which to discuss the stuff that really matters. The notion would then be that news has value as a form, for it is helping to build a shared cultural language — a requirement all the more acute in open and diversified populations like those of social media. Such that when events and of consequence occur, communication already has its legs.

Newspaper culture, authority, social media, and relevance

Stowe Boyd has an excellent post today on social news. While at first I was going to just leave a comment, my thoughts ascended from commentary to a post in their own right. Not wanting to blogjack Stowe's points, I'd like to continue the conversation by means of referencing the debate around newsprint's decline and the economic threat to journalism here instead.

As I see it the problem facing traditional news media is not just a problem of old media, new media. Indeed, as McLuhan argued, any new medium initially uses an old medium as its content. Old media methods and practices aren't about to disappear simply because attention is shifting increasingly to social media — a consequence of changing reading habits, advertising budgets, expenses and costs of maintaining and print publication in challenging credit markets, a shift from time spent by consumers in print and television to internet-based experiences, and so on.

All those forces are real and are exacting a punishing toll on traditional media, of course. But there's another paradigm shift in the works, and it has less to do with economic forces and more to do with the very social and cultural function of news.

News is not simply reported; it is produced. News media create the news. Their reporting not only documents facts, but through processes of editorial, publishing, and distribution, it also creates the news. The legitimacy of traditional media rested on the authority news media brought to this process. This authority in turn comprised of several "social functions," if you will. For there were different ways in which news media established their positions, defined their roles, and maintained their market leadership and service:

Authority can be had by means of reputation. This is a perception issue, and is maintained by consistent adherence by news organizations to internal (brand) principles, commitments, interests, style, judgment, taste, truth, personality, accuracy, speed, and so on. In this way news organizations might each command a different reputation, a brand identified with authority of a kind, or in a field, or within a genre. In other words authority can be had by a news media leader regardless of its actual credibility and service as a news gathering and reporting organization.

Left of center, right of center, news "lite," — the audience of readers either buys it, and thus legitimizes the organization's authority, or not. This point is important because we should separate authority from the "truth" of reporting events, and the "fact" of news itself. News is created: the process is owned by for profit institutions, and seeks market share and financial performance. News is never just an objective recording of events, but is always a selection and narration of events.

Authority can be had by means of position. This is a general perspective on authority. It claims simply that an authoritative social position bestows authority on the organization, entity, or individual who occupies the position. From a cultural and historical perspective, new media have long occupied a traditional position of delivering timely, relevant, significant, and objective reporting of events, topics, issues, and perspectives. This tradition is surely changing — not only because news media are no longer the best first source of news itself, but because other media (social) compete for the position of authority.

This argument does not claim that social media are better or more accurate, faster or more honest — these are some claims made by citizen journalists and I agree with many of them — it simply claims that authority is a social and cultural function, and that the function can be fulfilled by different entities. (Functionalism argues that the function remains relatively stable, but who fulfills the function is interchangeable.)

There are other ways of defining authority, but I'll leave those aside as they relate more to contexts in which power and force are in play. Now, there's an interesting change taking place in the migration of consumers from mainstream media to social media. It's not just in the content, the communication and "conversation," the social networking and personalization of media, but does involve all of these. We might characterize it more broadly as a change in modes of consumption and modes of production. And here it is where traditional media are at a distinct and overwhelming disadvantage, for their medium of choice is the wrong medium.

In the traditional medium, value is added to news by the production of news as a news medium for mass consumption. The work of producing news was the work that created value for the news organization, and which is consumed by readers and viewers. The mode of production of news was separate from the consumption of news. Social media, by contrast, involve consumers in the process of value creation. The mode of production is also the mode of consumption. There's no distance separating the two: distance that normally permits the transaction fees that cover distribution, circulation, and broadcast.

Furthermore, the value determined in traditional journalism by means of authority as described above, is now determined instead by means of social communication and interaction. This leads to a shift in the value itself: from the editorial voice and authority of journalism to the personal and social relevance of friends, colleagues, and other social relations. Value is no longer measured in degrees of authority but in degrees of relevance. Note the distinction, for there's no underestimating the significance of this shift. It's a change that, for better or worse, re-calibrates the consumer's interest in and consumption of news.

News is no longer "that which is important" and is now "that which is socially relevant." Social relevance rests not on value as determined by a scale or hierarchy of significance (what's worth telling, objectively assessed) but that which is distributed, shared, retold, cited, referenced, quoted, linked to, favorited, and otherwise socially ranked and delivered. Value of news in social media accrues by means of speed, distribution, reach and leveraged influence of individuals who get attention by means of paying attention. Value is a matter of "who chooses" not "what is worth choosing."

This shift from an editorial and journalistic version of objectivity — closely wed to the perception of an authoritative voice occupying an authoritative role &dash: to a unregulated, communicative production of value that is individually and subjectively chosen and socially proliferated constitutes an enormous rebalancing of media landscape. Not only are old media disadvantaged for their medium is non-social and non-communicative, but they are losing their authority and their traditional role occupying that authority. It is really only up to social media to better filter out noise, personalize news and content consumption, continually improve relational controls (friends, peers, colleagues — the whole personal/social/public thing), innovate interaction models to raise the medium's unique production value, and fine tune advertising business models for sustainability.

It seems to me unlikely that we will return, as a culture, to traditional modes of consuming news. There will always be a need for experts, a respect for their credibility and reputation, and interest in voices that can tell, narrate, and entertain. Those skills are platform agnostic. But the genie's out of the bottle. Regardless of how one feels about the quality of user-generated content, the noise of social media and irrelevance of much of its content, the most profound distinction between old and new media is in the relationship between production and consumption. New media content is sourced and distributed by means of social relations. It seems very unlikely that a culture would wish a return to the hierarchy of authority, when the proximity and immediacy of social media offer much of the same information, selected in a fundamentally different way.

No Twitter in Meme-tracking and News Cycle Research

Interesting research was reported recently in the New York Times about the relationship between blogs and mass media. The research, out of Cornell University, focused on the news cycles observed in mass media and in the blogosphere. News cycles were measured by the distribution of a "meme." Memes were defined by the researchers as quotes -- full or partial. The research observed a tight 2.5 hour echo, memes peaking rapidly first in the mass media and then in the blogosphere shortly thereafter.

The research pretty much stands for itself, and while the researchers claim to have found a faster peak and decay in the lifecycle of memes than may have been expected, there don't seem to be many surprises in their overall findings. Having defined a news cycle meme as a quote, it's not surprising that quote-able news peaks in a meme like fashion. After all quotes are quote-able and are easily tracked (the research was limited to recognizable variants on the original quote: hence it excluded other kinds of discourse). Quotes can be repeated with limited analysis and context: a quote speaks for itself. Quotes are a common thread in news, insofar as quotes are the juicy bits of what our politicians and celebrities have to say.

It is no surprise that blogs would pick up on these memes soon after their appearance in mass media. Many blogs serve as news sources themselves. And news blogs need news to blog about: news is no different in mass and social media. Nor should the news cycle be much different from one medium to the other.

That said, there might be other cycles unique to social media that would be different. Unfortunately the research doesn't cover these. Research didn't directly address conversational (realtime) social media, most importantly Twitter. Twitter poses some challenges to media research: posts of 140 characters lose context, are reworded, shortened, and otherwise corrupted in ways that make them difficult to relate reliably to source quotes and memes. I think we could comfortably assume that twitter echoes the news cycle in ways like the blogosphere, although faster, and often preceding the mass media. The appearance of twitter-sourced stories in mass media, then through to blogs, has been covered already (e.g. earthquakes, Iran protests).

There are a few reasons social media would make an interesting distinct study, were it possible to reliably constrain research. Social media are more than news media, and that they are frequently driven by talk, interaction, or conversation in the form of tweets, comments, and status updates. Were it possible to conduct the research, it would be interesting to know:

• Is there a long tail distribution of information in conversational (realtime) social media?


• Does the distribution of information in conversational social media tell us something about relationships of credibility, influence, trust, authority, intimacy, etc and how they facilitate the distribution of information?


• Are cycles of information distribution in conversational social media more "organic": subject perhaps to daily rhythms of users and their habits and routines of use?


• Does the "imitation" of information cited by researchers as one of two key ingredients function differently in conversational social media? Specifically, can it be determined whether or not imitation reflects social motives: retweeting for attention; retweeting for association; retweeting to get attention; tweeting for influence; tweeting for social inclusion; and so on.


• After a news quote decays, is there long tail pickup in social media that reflects depth of interest? Can the commenting depth (not addressed by the research but often used by analytics tools) expose a kind of media authority more participatory than mass media, and credible for insight, commentary, analysis and not just news.


• Is there a social graph ingredient in the distribution of news in conversational social media that is not explained by the echoing of news stories but which might offer valuable insight into lines of influence and which could render social relations of different kinds? Motivated not just to report the news, but to associate oneself, identify with a person, event, or to help tell a story, conversationalists can show us who they talk to, and about what.

Excerpts from Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle

Tracking new topics, ideas, and memes across the Web has been an issue of considerable interest. Recent work has developed methods for tracking topic shifts over long time scales, as well as abrupt spikes in the appearance of particular named entities. However, these approaches are less well suited to the identification of content that spreads widely and then fades over time scales on the order of days the time scale at which we perceive news and events.
....
As our principal domain of study, we show how such a meme-tracking approach can provide a coherent representation of the news cyclethe daily rhythms in the news media that have long been the subject of qualitative interpretation but have never been captured accurately enough to permit actual quantitative analysis. We tracked 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs over a period of three months with the total of 90 million articles and we find a set of novel and persistent temporal patterns in the news cycle. In particular, we observe a typical lag of 2.5 hours between the peaks of attention to a phrase in the news media and in blogs respectively, with divergent behavior around the overall peak and a heartbeat-like pattern in the handoff between news and blogs.
....
First, the set of distinctive phrases shows significant diversity over short periods of time, even as the broader vocabulary remains relatively stable. As a result, they can be used to dissect a general topic into a large collection of threads or memes that vary from day to day. Second, such distinctive phrases are abundant, and therefore are rich enough to act as tracers for a large collection of memes; we therefore do not have to restrict attention to the much smaller collection of memes that happen to be associated with the appearance and disappearance of a single named entity.
....
From an algorithmic point of view, we consider these distinctive phrases to act as the analogue of genetic signatures for different memes. And like genetic signatures, we find that while they remain recognizable as they appear in text over time, they also undergo significant mutation.
....
Outside of computer science, the interplay between technology, the news media, and the political process has been a focus of considerable research interest for much of the past century [6, 22]. This research tradition has included work by sociologists, communication scholars, and media theorists, usually at qualitative level exploring the political and economic contexts in which news is produced [19], its effect on public opinion , and its ability to facilitate either polarization or consensus [15].
....
We perform this analysis both at a global level understanding the temporal variation as a wholeand at a local level identifying recurring patterns in the growth and decay of a meme around its period of peak intensity.
....
We also show how the temporal patterns we observe arise naturally from a simple mathematical model in which news sources imitate each others decisions about what to cover, but subject to recency effects penalizing older content.
....
Among the fastest sources we find a number of popular political blogs; this measure thus suggests a way of identifying sites that are regularly far ahead of the bulk of media attention to a topic.
....
Some of the key research issues here have been the identification of topics over time [5, 11, 16], the evolving practices of bloggers [25, 26], the cascading adoption of stories [3, 14, 20, 23], and the ideological divisions in the blogosphere [2, 12, 13].
....
Our goal is to produce phrase clusters, which are collections of phrases deemed to be close textual variants of one another. We will do this by building a phrase graph where each phrase is represented by a node and directed edges connect related phrases. Then we partition this graph in such a way that its components will be the phrase clusters.
....
Notice how the plot captures the dynamics of the presidential campaign coverage at a very fine resolution. Spikes and the phrases pinpoint the exact events and moments that triggered large amounts of attention.
....
To begin with, there are interesting potential analogies to natural systems that contain dynamics similar to what one sees in the news cycle. For example, one could imagine the news cycle as a kind of species interaction within an ecosystem [18], where threads play the role of species competing for resources (in this case media attention, which is constant over time), and selectively reproducing (by occupying future articles and posts).
....
We argue that in formulating a model for the news cycle, there are two minimal ingredients that should be taken into account. The first is that different sources imitate one another, so that once a thread experiences significant volume, it is likely to persist and grow through adoption by others. The second, counteracting the first, is that threads are governed by strong recency effects, in which new threads are favored to older ones.
....
When there is only a recency effect but no imitation (so the probability of choosing thread j is proportional only to (t - tj) for some function ), we see that no thread ever achieves significant volume, since each is crowded out by newer ones.
....
When there is only imitation but no recency effect, (so the probability of choosing thread j is proportional only to f(nj) for some function f), then a single thread becomes dominant essentially forever: there are no recency effects to drive it away, although its dominance shrinks over time simply because the total number of competing threads is increasing.
....
In general, one would expect the overall volume of a thread to be very low initially; then as the mass media begins joining in the volume would rise; and then as it percolates to blogs and other media it would slowly decay. However, it seems that the behavior tends to be quite different from this. First, notice that in Figure 7 the rise and drop in volume is surprisingly symmetric around the peak, which suggests little or no evidence for a quick build-up followed by a slow decay.
....
The majority of phrases first appear in news media and then diffuses to blogs where it is then discussed for longer time. However, there are also phrases that propagate in the opposite way, percolating in the blogosphere until they are picked up the news media. Such cases are very important as they show the importance of independent media.

Authors: Jure Leskovec Lars Backstrom Jon Kleinberg

New York Times article about the news cycle research
Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle

What Goes Up One Way Comes Down Another

I've had a few notes sitting here in my text editor on asymmetries in social systems. For example, that when the stock market is rising, it has no upper limit; but when falling, its lower limit is very real.

• That in the stock market, the purchase of shares is an extension of trust on the part of the investor.
  
• That purchase, as a transaction between buyer and seller, is a bet on the future.
  
• That trust in markets is extracted, and invested, in the future : and set in the price of exchange.
  
• That the transaction uses price as its expression -- but is no less a system of communication than any other.
  
• That trust also characterizes social networks
  
• That this trust is also extended by means of a transaction -- in this case, however, the transaction is a "connection" and not an exchange
  
• That the medium or currency of the social marketplace is may be the "interest" that we take in each other, and which we can show one another by paying attention
  
• That the basis of transactions in a social system is a handshake (of sorts)
  
• But that in the imperfect social system that is social media, the handshake is rare : a form of unilateral and monological communication prevails, often unanswered
  
• That this produces a high degree of redundancy (noise), as participants post more than they acknowledge having read or viewed
  
• That in contrast to the stock market's vertical asymmetry (of up vs down), communication media, or social media, have a horizontal asymmetry (or sending/receiving)
  
• That possibly all social systems are inherently asymmetrical, in that no system can provide complete knowledge, or truth, or proof, that the meaning we intend is the meaning understood by others, or that the meaning we make of others is the meaning they mean also
  
• That the asymmetry between one's own experience and the experiences of others will always subsist beneath any communication or transactional system (Markets: trust in the future, certainty, ability to anticipate future events; Social media: trust in relations, ambiguity of the audience's interest, unknowability of the other's attention and interest)
  
• And will be a fundamental experiential currency of that system (and that psychology is unavoidable when individuals use systems to mediate their relations)
  

What was the point of all this? To think through the comparison of market-based social systems and communication based social systems. And to pose the question: might the intrinsic asymmetry between production and consumption, between acting and reacting, between intending meaning and interpreting meaning, not always govern and organize our experiences and thus account for motives and behaviors?

All the Commentary That's Fit to Print

There is an interesting example of the disruptiveness and transformation of new and social media in the New York Times newspaper today. Unfortunately, it really only comes through in the print version. That's because in today's article on the mayor of Moscow's recent infrastucture investments in South Ossetia, the New York Times has elected to print comments posted originally to its livejournal blog.

It only hits you when holding the paper version of the Times how the conversational DNA of social media has changed the ecosystem for news overall. Even when reprinted in the New York Times, comments come across as the slightly off-color and perhaps off-key commentary that they are -- the boisterous and proud weltanschauung of their spirited Russian authors audible between, through, and behind the lines.

The Times may have wished to make Russian responses available to the domestic US audience, the blog's popularity having become a bit of news of its own. It may have wished to feature some of the many perspectives Russians hold on their iconoclastic mayor. Either way, seeing blog comments on paper drove home just what we mean by "distributed conversation," and "conversational media."

Russians React to Article on Moscow Mayor’s Ventures

Succumbing to Immediacy

News this past few wks has been nothing short of remarkable, and with each passing day it has seemed that our political theater couldn't possibly get any more dramatic. And yet as the crisis we're in has unfolded, each episode peeling back yet another layer of this bad onion, we have borne witness with watering eyeballs glazed and stuck to the screens over which headlines flash and burn.

This crisis has indeed been televised, and by yesterday the stock market was again a live tracking poll on the political mayhem and congressional theatrics playing out up on the Hill. And the hill was heaping up a Dow of Pooh. Mudslinging by members of both parties has produced Paulson's worst nightmare -- an economic crisis become a political crisis. The walls are now sh*tstained by the cranked-up blades of the proverbial fan. Perhaps they should have held the debate in Vegas. They say what happens there stays there.

Mudslinging may be nothing new to the political process, but in this day and age it comes faster and harder, and from more directions, than ever before. And the sheer volume and velocity of it all threatens to bury us in a deluge of undifferentiated slag. We may have more news, from more sources than ever before, but when it all arrives at once thought and reflection and critical distance collapse under the sheer weight of immediacy. It's as if we're suffocating in the vacuum of our own echo chamber, trapped in a relentless Now, able to talk but always against the mind-numbing cacophony and din of endless sound bites.

Perhaps this is simply how it goes in a panic. But we need considered action, and lately our actors have succumbed to reaction, adrift in the immediacy of it all.

Social media: Social Approximity?

We have moved beyond "generation gap" differences in technology use and moved into the "experiential gap" in terms of use and understanding. Your experience with an application such as Twitter provides an understanding that cannot be communicated by reading about it or even being told about it.

Tom Foremski recently penned on twitter in which he notes the growing experiential gap that separates those who use new social media tools from those who don't. Those who use, get it, and those who don't, don't. Well, not surprisingly, this digitally dividing line is also the void that old media needs to bridge, if it, like its users, are to join the ranks of the initiated. The adoption curve sweeps like the arc of a #suspension bridge (!) plotting the line of escape from the old and tired traditional media landscape to the bright and shiny shores of the new.

As Marshall McLuhan (pictured above) insightfully observed:

"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."

Now that bit about the telegraph may be a bit out of dot dot dash date, so simply substitute in "social media" for telegraph and you're back in the present tense. Social media are a recontextualization of old print forms and contents within a new distribution and communication framework (social web). It's not surprising that so many of our social practices (tools and uses) echo, if not amplify, their old media (broadcast) forebears: celebrity, self-promotion, news, anchoring, commentary, top tens, ratings, rankings, and polls (diggs, votes).

Speaking of telegraph, there was also recently a fine piece penned as well as printed by the New York Times on the ambient proximity of new conversation tools like twitter. I prefer talk tools to "micro blogs" because I think the connection is stronger between the acts (talking) than the form (writing). Blogs had sought to be conversational, yes, but clearly twitter is more a talkie than it is a bloggie. (I'll skip the temptation to riff on silent films, inter-titling, and the arrival of the talkies, but the possibilities for extracting something out of "old content and new media" there are rife.)

This Times article artfully testified to the experiential gap, too, describing twitter with the pleasantly fuzzy phrase "ambient intimacy." The intimacy possible over social media is at best approximate, and the proximity at best ambient. Social media can only approximate the relationships and interactions of the real. And in spite of the close contact many of us now have on a daily basis with hundreds of friends and followers, there's an experiential gap between "being there" and simply "there."

French sociologist Jean Baudrillard mischievously likened contemporary media to the peripheral image of thought footnoted at the base of any sideview mirror: "Caution: Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear." Mass media, he believed, distort the real to such a degree that he warned of a new "hyper-reality." Not only do they distort the appearance of reality, but the ambiguity suggested by "may be closer" hinted that media are also destabilizing.

To reverse McLuhan's operational logic, we can deduce that in New Media objects may be more distant than they appear -- which might describe the proximity manufactured across myriad connective webs and online social spaces. In fact, I like to liken social media some times to "social systems in failure mode." Time is discontinuous, communication fails to communicate, relationships are unrelated, attention is unattentive, attraction is distracted, audiences are disaggregated, and so on.

But it is early days still for social media, and were we to look back to the first years of TV, we'd find naught but radio shows revisualized. The migration path from old to new media is yet writing its narrative, and that arc has many more dots to connect before its line can be fully traced. If we overuse (and do we?) mass media forms and contents in how we build and use social media today, is that so surprising? What will come next can arrive only when we have stepped up to it.

Only as cultural and social practices online mature to the point that we can see what we might build next can we stitch a tighter weave, and by warp and woof, wend our way towards a tighter experiential gap.

Of Military and Men, or Influencers in the mass and social media

<embed> Influencer </embed>
<type = "military man">
<look = "uniformed">
<display = "next to anchorman">
<play = "when Iraq goes poorly">

<repeat = "as necessary">


According to a feature-length story in the New York Times this sunday it seems that the military has been using Influencers to get its message out. These are the guys that you see on TV news and talk shows extemporizing on their personal and professional experience to lend unique perspectives and insights to what's happening "on the ground" in Iraq. Some of them speak to military strategy and tactics, appearing on TV, and sometimes in uniform, to guide news anchors and civilian discussants.

Apparently these guys have been courted by the Pentagon for years, and during the Rumsfeld years even provided him with talking points. How to reach the audience and simplify the story for them (us).

The military's been doing Influence marketing-style, but in mass media. (There was no mention of these guys having blogs, and I haven't the time to check.) A couple questions spring to mind: Are we surprised? (probably not.) Could this happen in social media? (probably not.)

Mass media according to the rules of corporate media, which is to say that they are owned by large profit-making concerns. While they are as keen on making the news interesting as the blogosphere, their tendency will be to weave new information into a tight and closed narrative form. They tell stories. We in the blogosphere opinionate, bug, goad, poke and disclose. However, the mass media still believe that their best narrative structure is the story. And when the story itself lacks a clear beginning, middle, and (in this case particular) ending, use of experts and authorities shifts the burden from narrative to narrator.

In this they have the gist of Influence nailed, absolutely. But in that Influence is embedded within official and even ideological, partisan, or agency dogma, its utility as promotional speech is exhausted on behalf of official and biased needs and interests. The influence of (ex) military consultants borrows from the professional role and position. It is not the same kind of influence that social media marketers, for example, use when embedded in messages among cultural influencers. These military experts must be brought into the mass media if they are to have and exercise influence. It's not influence borrowed (as in social media) but influence regenerated. Influence not from self-presentation but from re-presentation.

The common challenge facing those of us in mass media is commerce and maintaining the line between commercial and everyday speech that separates advertising and sales, which are discourses lacking authenticity, and ordinary talk, which do lay claim to authority and credibility. The type of influence used in the case noted by the New York Times, however, is one of "officialdom" and the power of position and normative authority.

If in mass media, influence of position and authority can be better maintained than in social media because mass media are top-down talking head news and reporting, sustained by the credibility invested in the medium and business of journalism and broadcast news. The medium, as well as its mode of distribution, more easily maintain the cycle and engine of legitimation that culminates in the appearance of professional experts on broadcast talk shows and the evening news. This is legitimation by control, by production, and by fabrication. It's expertise subject to the editing room.

Social media seek (in theory and in word, at least) a different kind of influence: peer review and approval. The medium and the form of discourse that it supports are wide open. In fact they can approach forms of conversational talk, even. This is no medium for the accreditation and credibility of the role and position -- it's a medium in which credibility is obtained from the risk and exposure of participation and interaction.

All influencers are equal, but some are more equal than others.

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,

Of You, Me, Mini-Me, Mass Media, and ... Mini Media

We think about social media, and social software (sites like Myspace.com, Friendster.net, Tribe.net) in different ways, but usually as software, or as a communication tool, online application or site. Though it was there the whole time, MySpace.com's growing presence in marketing boardrooms, butcher paper flapping on its easel as that giant sucking sound down on the street whines up to a terrible shrieking pitch as times a changing start blowing in the wind, has people truly nerve racked....
Notice that Myspace.com doesn't have "users," it has "kids." Software is for users. Kids, they have tools. Technologies. They have MySpace.com, and theirSpace indeed threatens mass media and for very good reason.
Modern marketing turns tall tales around a kind of language and grammar that, together with its images, celebs, experts, and trend-setters, can circulate messages that, when instructions are followed to repeat as necessary, accrue truthiness. Truthiness that's really a cognitive lapse of reason, a suspense of disbelief allowing us to believe these commercial messages, leading us ultimately to consume. In other words, because marketing speack doesn't come from a friend, marketing messages, and the mass media they're circulated through, have to do two things simultaneously: establish trust and believability in the source, and convey trust that they're telling the truth. Neither kinds of trust pre-exist the relationships we have with commerce, in other words, it's earned every time (and the media have become very good at it).
TheirSpace is a place where that kind of marketing isn't welcome. If the "kids" are going to launch a band, they'll launch one of their own, and they'll do it on theirSpace with theirFriends and theirWords. Marketers of course want in and want a piece of the action. They're worried that mass media may be losing its appeal in this "IM generation." Are we to believe that all it took was a crappy little social networking site to make the mass media giants wobbly?
Well, yes. Because MySpace is a tool of conversation, talk, genuine street-level hanging-out where commercial messaging is poo-pooed and laughed at. Like you wouldnt make a friend of Kraft singles would you, on a singles' site? Duh.
So I propose that add another term to our list of descriptors for social software: mini media. In fact we could nod to the grammatical necessities of urls like MySpace for fun: "MiniMedia."
Social software is a kind of mini mass media in which culture happens, as it does in the mass media, but through participation, profiles, social interaction, and so on. The critical difference being that the relationships are based on "friendship" (of varying thicknesses) and the talk is not commercial, it's just normal speech-like talk. This isn't your average software. It's a social system, it's got some amount of mass media in it, and while you may experience it through your browser, it's not just software, or web, or application.
MiniMedia, what do you think?

More soon on what a talk system and MiniMedia like MySpace means for the mass media, marketing, and messaging.

Technorati tags: Technorati tags: social-media-marketing,
advertising,
marketing,
mass media,
myspace,
social media
social-media,
social-software,
social interaction design,
social media,
social network,
social network marketing,
social network strategy,
social networking,
social software,
web 2.0,
web-20,
web,
web2-0,
web2.0