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.
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"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."
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"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.
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"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.

ChatRoulette, I'm watching you (watching me)

Thus at bottom the message already no longer exists; it is the medium that imposes itself in its pure circulation ... the universe of communication ... leaves far behind it those relative analyses of the universe of the commodity. All functions abolished in a single dimension, that of communication. That's the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That's obscenity. The hot, sexual obscenity of former times is succeeded by the cold and communicational, contactual and motivational obscenity of today..." — Jean Baudrillard, Ecstasy of Communication

We "are now in a new form of schizophrenia ... The schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world's obscenity ... He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence..." — Jean Baudrillard, Ecstasy of Communication

"Now I think that it would be better to reveal myself" Mr. Ternovskiy, builder of Chatroulette, referring to a less graphic kind of transparency, in Chatroulette's Creator, 17, Introduces Himself, The New York Times


As is generally the case with a new application on the Internet, and with social applications in particular, users are queuing in large numbers for a peek into the random universe of ChatRoulette. The site is a rabbit hole for voyeurs and exhibitionists alike, mutually and symbiotically united in a simulcast trip through the looking glass in the age of social media.

Viewer discretion is advised, and if you are even mildly sensitive to social allergens, you may wish to keep the lens cap on and your eyes behind a good pair of wrap-arounds, for there is indeed a lot of flashing going on in the aptly named "surreal" world of ChatRoulette (@nickbilton).

What explains the proliferation of nudity and exposure in ChatRoulette (and video chat systems like it)? Is there, as Nick Bilton asks in his review of the service, "a nascent desire for anonymity online."

This doesn't add up for me. There is desire, yes, but not for anonymity.

Nick writes, in The Surreal World of Chatroulette: "our lives used to be private by default, yet with the advent of each new social network, privacy has become increasingly difficult to preserve." But were our lives private by default? Have we not, through practices social and cultural, always sought out and crafted arts by means of which to expose and express ourselves on stage, in front of audiences of all kinds?

The point that social networking threatens to undermine privacy is a point taken, but not as an explanation of the social practices that so easily and readily spring sites like ChatRoulette to life. It is much more likely that there is in ChatRoulette's ability to send users "parachuting into someone else's life" a kind of mediated proximity, realtime in that it's live, co-present in that it telescopes a kind of social watching, intimate in its on-screen coupling, and spectacular in how it attracts attention.

Take desire — a force most decidedly at work in ChatRoulette. Desire desires the desire of the other, as French philosopher Lacan put it. Desire would not desire anonymity — but the desiring person may desire to be seen anonymously. And to anonymously share this desire with another anonymous person. Desire is, when mediated in online adult webcam chats, and between consenting users of ChatRoulette, amplified according to its own internal social inclinations. Desire is for the other's desire: it is reciprocating. This is precisely what Chatroulette does: it shows you the Other.

The modality of the medium in this case is visual. And because it involves seeing people, and seeing them live, it will be about watching. This is the social modality by which users will relate, and the activity in this kind of sociality will necessarily involve the kinds of action coordination, synchonrization, mirroring, and other mutually-interesting aspects of watching one another remotely.

Watching, and being watched. Those are the perceptual senses involved, and thus the basis of communication. So if desire is at play, it is at play in getting attention. At play in self disclosure. At play in the thrill and surprise of synchronizing with another user. But by means of seeing and being seen (mutual recognition is being seen), of watching and being watched (anonymity is watched).

This coupling is an example of one very simple answer to asynchronous communication otherwise so common online. We push media for what they bracket out of social experience, and press at the margins to discover where the medium produces its most uncanny, unsettling, and weird effects. Webchats are live, are a kind of realtime streamtime that occurs in time (feedtime?). In time, not asynchronously and out of time, not in separate streams of user messaging flowing alongside one another's times. A live and streaming realtime. Which means co-presence.

Presence online can be established by artifact and extension, which is normally the case when we are present but not really (available but by notification only, and presented by means of re-presentation of text, messages, etc.). This kind of presence, which we have called ambient presence, is sensed but not seen, makes it into one's awareness but is not verified, and may be social without placing immediate demands on participation. One can be present and fake it this way too. One can be present by proxy. But there's no faking it on webcam, no proxy presence when there's immediacy and an intimate proximity.

Presence by cam is not mediated by text or other artifact. It's truly present. And here the co-presence of seeing and being seen, watching and being watched, and the uncanny special effect of closed-circuit mirroring in mediated interactions with which we also see ourselves seeing ourselves being seen, and can watch ourselves watching while being watched, couples us to others, anonymously or not.

This coupling resolves an ontological crack in the conventional online experience of asynchronous participation: the separation and disconnection of online connectedness. With the exception of webcam and VOIP applications, online social media are one-sided. They present us with a one-sided and unilateral view of interaction and communication.

Not on twitter, on Facebook, or any other social platform do we see what the other sees, view what the audience views, read what another is reading. Webcam chat hookups like ChatRoulette unify the experience in a single and shared (although mediated) reality. (Imagine that we might see another person's twitter view in a split pane. How would that change our sense of the social?)

I wrote last week about the possibility of coupling realtime activity streams, as in twitter, Facebook status updates, and the like. I speculated that coupled posts would permit communication to become action, as users would then be able to respond directly to posts across systems. And that action streams might also permit users to use messages to act — such as send or reply to invitations, purchase tickets, and so on.

Chatroulette is an example of coupled realtime streams. But being live feeds, and being webcam feeds, mutually-visible and coupled activities are up to the user's imagination. No meta is required for the transmission of live activity on camera.

Live feeds may be contrasted further still with the temporality of realtime message streams. I've argued that realtime activity streams are still experienced by users in their own time. That streamtime is not a shared experience of time. In webcam chat time is shared, users are in one another's time, creating a stretch of shared time together. This solves a problem that realtime messaging applications suffer from: the ordering of messages delivered in realtime.

Realtime messages are delivered in chronological order. But this order bears no relation to message content or context. It is simply the order in which they arrive. Consequently, the order created by design, and by means of which messages are posted and displayed, adds no value and supplies no narrative or conversational threading to the content itself (or for that matter to its authors). The realtime temporality of message delivery is extrinsic to its meaning.

Which is in part why the medium creates so much noise and redundancy. For in any social medium, attention is the resource with which the engine keeps running.

Attention is focused in webcam experiences fundamentally differently than it is in experiences that use the screen for display and re-presentation. (See yesterday's post.) The screen modality of webcam chat uses "windows" through which we see the other user(s). Obviously, then, our attention is on what we see (including ourselves seen seeing). And because social media are about giving and getting attention, we hold the attention of the other by visual spectacle. In visual media, attention goes to that which is the most compelling, riveting, ridiculous, funny, or obscene. In short the "sociality of the spectacle."

Which brings us, finally, to devolution and the corruption of social media experiences. Communication and attention being the scarce resource in a medium that produces surplus and excess, a seemingly unavoidable systemic process of negentropy often accompanies the rise of noise and redundancy that occurs with system growth. Negentropy is the phenomenon of increasing order, and it appears in uncoordinated social systems as self-reinforcing dynamics emerge around common practices. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, order will generally emerge around the lowest common denominator: the form, content, performance or expression most likely to communicate (get attention).

In Chatroulette, this is already the obscene. Obscenity, like the raunchy and ridiculous, make for compelling viewing and will thus always attract attention. Attention is sought after by the individual, and secured by the sustained engagement of one other viewer (or roomful of viewers, but one view). The spectacle is singularly interesting.

But in realtime streaming services like twitter, attention is sought amidst a massive audience in a constant flow of messages. Thus repetition is the lowest common denominator in twitter: the trending topic or bit of news whose headline and social significance are gaining the attention of the audience at large. A reference to common knowledge and news, including gossip, rumor, and hearsay, secures attention. Not the spectacle of the singularly fascinating sight, but the spectacle of the massively popular hit or trend.

The sociality of twitter thus involves the attention-grabbing awareness of an audience becoming community or populace. Focusing the awareness of all on one unifying theme. The sociality of ChatRoulette involves the attention-getting focus of one, creating the intimacy of a couple for a stretch of time outside the view of the rest.

And so it is, in my view, that the answer to Nick's question is not that in an age of public social networking we desire its opposite, anonymity. But that in any mediated social experience a number of intrinsic transformations of experience that involve our senses, our interest in others, communication and its modes, and the construction of unique mediated realities, together fashion the constraints and opportunities for paying attention in new ways. Hulu would do well to consider a co-viewing option (perhaps initially pre-screened and using community flagging norms) instead of a messaging platform. After all, ChatRoulette shows us that if it's not anonymity we desire, we do desire new experiences with others.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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].
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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].
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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

Twitter: the Self-ish Meme?

I'm thinking this bright and clear Monday morning about some thoughts I had last night, when my mind slipped into philosophical musings. I went to sleep reflecting on the state of modernity, and of the rapid rise of communication technologies and their relationship to who we are and how we are. i was thinking about the Self, a concept used with so much abandon as to have little stable or secure meaning left. But clearly an important concept nonetheless.

In the two thousand or so years since the Greeks handed us the western sense of self, we have journeyed through many variations on the theme. We have had the the authentic and virtuous self: the Greek Self. Self as the locus of truth and personal accountability: the confessional Self. Self as the individual, hard-working and ethically-minded: the protestant Self. Self as personal power and critically engaged: the political Self. Self as status, fame, and fortune: the me-oriented Self. And possibly, now, with tools like twitter and Facebook mainstreaming madly: the networked Self.

To riff on a biological claim and metaphor, is there, like the selfish gene, a self-ish meme? Twitter is indeed a self-ish technology, and in its uses, a self-ish habit. But if it is a tool of the Self, and if it fits in with the long-running historical narrative of modernity, how is it self-ish?

Modernity was launched on the harnessing of industrial power. Resources extracted from the earth replaced the domestication of animals and farming techniques to extend and unleash transformations on an exponential level. After thermodynamics and mastery of fluids, heat exchange, and engines, modernity's inventive ideology gave us communication: wireless radio, the telephone, early calculating machines, and broadcast. Modernity's engines were now applied not only to industry but to information. And then, with the arrival of the internet and the PC, the information age segued into an age of communication.

Talk is now everywhere. It has become the medium of distribution, our means of production, and in ways still taking shape, our mode of Self. If the industrial age harnessed the body, the information age the mind, then are we now collectivizing talk? Are the "labor" and "surplus capital" of today our talk and our attention?

These are gross generalizations, but

• if Virtue was the Self of the Greeks


• if Truth was the Self of the Middle Ages


• if Knowledge was the Self of the Enlightenment


• if Labor was the Self of Industrialization


• if Information was the Self of the Information Age


• is Speech the Self of the Communication Age?

Media mediate the Self; that's Marshall McLuhan. Mediation extends the perceptual senses and thus also our abilities. McLuhan understood that mediation is transformative -- and that in mediation our presence in the world, and thus our relationships, and our very experiences, change. Today we think nothing of being connected to people far away. Our ability to communicate has itself changed.

But lost in mediation is our sense of being with. Connectedness is not the same as togetherness (the German word Mitsein is perfect). Connectedness is some strange combination of access, availability, presence projected into and through the wire, and expectations that take shape in our awareness. Hence the ambivalent but canny phrase "ambient intimacy" (an oxymoron, if you think about it).

Not only is connectedness a different kind of experience, it is a different form of media too. Media are not what they are, but how they are used, and are never properly understood in technical terms alone. New social media extend mass media, socialize it, and to some degree are assimilated back into it. Media have traditionally been associated with forms of control, influence, and messaging (if not also power, propaganda, seduction, and so on).

Power and authority operate differently in the age of communication. They are flat, de-centered, and networked -- and they work by means of control and regulation. Traditional organizations exercised power and authority; Modern systems control and regulate.

But tools like twitter, and more broadly, net-based communication practices escape control and regulation. The weekend's events in Iran being just a recent, but exemplary, case in point. This weekend twitter was political -- a distributed, networked, and subversive line of communication, lines of flight unravelling the organs of the state. The personal as political, as feet on the ground and word of mouth.

There is I think a self-ish meme here. Social media are personal media. A personalization of media unfolding particularly in the transformation of talk. Talk as a means of production of the Self, in how we talk, to or in front of whom, and about what. Also as a reflection and projection of the Self, as Self reflection and Self as project. We disclose ourselves in our tweeting: whether we reveal our moods, interests, tell news, make requests, provide help, or simply pass along.

And this self-ish medium is socializing. For it socializes mass media as it socializes the Self. Self-ishness now in the form of social status, audiences, attention, influence, even social capital. The memes are media-based. Status and position, relevance and influence, not by means of money, power, authority, or control, but by means of talk, as signs of status, audience reach and attention, and distribution.

An about face of sorts, it seems. Or a post-face kind of communication. Talking is our new labor, communication, our new work. For better, or worse.

Reflections on Social Media's Next Phase

While it may be tough times for many social media startups, there could be a silver lining in the industry's future. Interest in social media doesn't appear to be waning, and in fact this week there's been a growing realization in the mainstream media that social media played a significant role in Barack Obama's campaign success. If the history of technology innovation is any guide, the next phase of industry growth will come from the markets and industries that adopt social media for their own purposes. And the same can probably said of the media's evolutionary path, too. In fact mass media, which is an industry that observes events, news, and by necessity, itself, is practically destined to assimilate social media.

But added to historical tradition is another obvious but rarely noted reason for social media's ongoing durability. It's in social media's DNA: that social media collapse the distance between production and consumption.

Unlike traditional (mass) media and in contrast to past modes of production and manufacture, including information production, social media co-locate the means of production with means of consumption. Video is recorded, edited, posted, and viewed on the same platform. Opinions, news, and stories are told, shared, commented on the same platform. Music is made, distributed, branded, and listened to, on the same platform. This conflation of means of production with means of consumption not only presents a threat to mass media (and one which mass media will respond to by co-opting the social), it promises opportunities for those who can see them.

All commerce involves some amount of marketing, whether it's based on brand identity, "real" utility and value, pricing, or whatever else comprises a marketing message and campaign. Social media disrupt marketing by eliminating much of the distance between the marketing/sales/branding medium and its audience. In social media they are one and the same: the audience does the branding and marketing, through communication, and often without the brand's direct intervention or participation. Distribution by means of communication among friends and colleagues (social media users) is not only natural and organic (non-commercial), it reproduces itself without any help from commerce required. In other words, it's self-referential and non-commercial.

This might cause palpitations for those who make a living by imagining, imaging, wrapping, crafting, and distributing brand and marketing campaigns, but it shouldn't. Conventional branding requires that value be created away from an audience, to then be introduced to an audience, resulting in (hopefully) consumer interest, desire, and spending. The distance between the brand and audience not only allows those on the brand side to finesse their presentation, it allows them to control its release. Traditional means of course are print, television, radio, and outdoors advertising. Lifestyle, affiliative, demographic and other types of market segmentation and targeting serve the purposes of campaign management. The whole process relies on a separation of brand from its audience, and time during which to conduct, refine, and steer the campaign.

Social media disrupts all of this with the sheer immediacy and proximity provided by its tools -- tools that serve the needs of talking and communing. "Word of mouth marketing" is a fancy way of saying "we let it go and our fingers are crossed." Control over the marketing or brand message is but a residual inclination to stay one step ahead of the market, to use the distance between traditional media and their audiences to steer outcomes in a company's favor. But control is precisely what is sacrificed in a medium that conflates means of production and consumption; a medium we sometimes call an "echo chamber" because there's no telling where the noise is coming from.

Future and successful marketing campaigns that leverage social media will benefit the startup and social technology space by extending what's been designed for daily use into soft commercial use. The budgets, while trimmed, are there. It would behoove social media companies to consider the ways in which soft commerce may play along. Just as mass media should entertain new forms of conversational and social marketing, from new types of creative, to compelling serial "talkies": brand stories, interactives, games, and other new forms of what I'll call "participatory branding."

Social media are notorious for giving rise to unintended social practices, and those of us who design and build social applications should not for a minute think that we know everything that can be done with them. Any more than television manufacturers would be expected to develop the TV programs shown on them. Current market conditions make this a perfect time for creatives to get inventive, and for social media companies to reflect on where they will fit in.

Post Writing: Social Self, Private Self, Post(ing) Self

The lights went down at the Fillmore and with a roar a reconfigured Smashing Pumpkins lit up their instruments. The crowd moved forward and you could feel the place slot into full-on sound and fury. I was one among friends, gutless pride at having scored an extra ticket, and lost in the crush that any honest concert goer yearns for on occasion: lust for a total experience.

And there I was -- only one of many to hold up a camera and shoot a brief bit of video, when the lights went green, like neon rails, oscillating to a beating wall of sound. Around me, phones came out of pockets and were held aloft, too many for security to have done anything about. It had become OK to take a memento. We got ours, LoFi.

This was just over a year ago. It took that long for the music industry to realize the free marketing power its brands (bands) enjoy from the posted concert videos and pictures that are such a cultural staple on Youtube. But this post is not about marketing -- it's about the experience. That night, doing that, I felt there was something "elsehwere" about seeing all those cameras and phones dancing over heads and straining for an angle on the show.

There was this strange blurring of here and there, or here and elsewhere, that all those phones seemed to suggest, and which in many ways stained the purity of being there. Akin, in feeling at least, to watching overzealous tourists snapping away at an art museum without so much as absorbing the real thing while standing there in its presence and singularity. Something that suggested the ambivalence I have personally felt, nearly always, about bringing along a camera to important social rituals -- and to nature especially -- fearing that I might not manage the negotiation from observing to being there.

The slippage between being there and not being there seems real to me. Not only does taking a video at a concert involve a small number of technical hurdles, and the matter of paying attention to the camera long enough to miss some of the show. There is also the mental shift of considering the person, or site, audience, etc. that we do it for. Recording for the purpose of sharing always involves "for whom is it done," even when this is nobody in particular. And this step in the recording or capturing of a live event seems at a step removed from being in it.

This "being here" and "being there" comes up in other cases, I've noticed, where a mediating technology is involved. I've watched panhandlers approach friends hanging/smoking outside a bar, and deliberately choose to interrupt the ones engaged in conversation instead of the person on the phone. Interesting, and even counter-intuitive, it seemed to me. Until you realize that the panhandler can negotiate the interruption with two people who are co-present better than with only one person (the other being at the other end of the phone).

Being here and being there, or the slippage between private and social, comes up in social media all the time. Twitter is a great example of a tool used to post in front of "everyone." Inspired in part by Facebook's status feeds, Twitter allows users to post to a greater audience. Unlike the member's audience on Facebook, which is most often his or her friends, audiences on Twitter are a mix of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and other unknown followers. (UFOs: Unknown Following Others. ?!!)

The kind of audience we find ourselves in informs and shapes our behavior. When the context of interaction is mediated, however, we are bound by the kind of audience that we imagine, expect, or believe. When we tweet, we have a notion of who's reading us, whether we believe that it's just one person or a lot more than one person, and whether we believe others are online now, paying attention, or not. Any medium that puts us in front of a "virtual" audience must have a way of presenting that audience back to us. (This is another reason that lifestreaming applications present content, which is messages from people, in a stream or flow, rather than on a page.)

And there, in the gap between the act of posting and the post itself, there seems to me to be a gap of presence. A juxtaposition of here and now, and there and elsewhere, that coincides with the act of youtubing a concert live. Why do we do it (use social media), and for whom, if and when the medium is built on a radical uncertainty of presence: a gap composed of parts discontinuity, distraction, and disconnection?

Answering this question seems imperative if we are to grasp the root motivation behind participating in social media. For we all recognize that in all things social media, presence, attention, intention, and connection frame the medium's usage as well as its application and extension across markets and industries. Social media produce presence and as such are means of producing the Self.

This line of reflection came back somewhat jarringly while I was reading the compelling article on the late and magnificent author David Foster Wallace. DFW had suffered depression most of his adult life, and it manifested in a kind of writing that he used to quiet his self doubts and profound lack of a sense of true self. Occupying an other's voice, getting under their skin, writing through them, was for him a way of occupying a Self.

"He once said to me that he wanted to write to shut up the babble in his head. He said when you're writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying 'You're not good enough, you're a fraud.'" -- Rolling Stone

This navigation between a genuine and true Self, and a false, inauthentic Self, limns the article. To Wallace, this was not only a depressive symptom, it was a matter of writing itself. Writing for and in front of an audience is a production of the Self -- but one experienced very differently by the author than by his audience. In his own words, Wallace described the gap:

"There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation, of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is gonna be," he said. "It's a very precious asset that really needs to be turned off sometimes. My guess is that writers probably make fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate partners for other people. But that the experience for them is often rather lonely."

And as the Rolling Stone author David Lipsky observed, Wallace's inner experience of Self not only inspired his best work (as when he made his characters his own), but may have also manifested a profound dislocation of being himself.

"In a way, the difference between fiction and the nonfiction reads as the difference between Wallace's social self and his private self. The essays were endlessly charming, they were the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style. Wallace's fiction, especially after Infinite Jest, would turn chilly, dark, abstract."

(From Rolling Stone, October 30, 2008. See also: Getting to Know David Foster Wallace)

This resonated for me, as I can often feel a shift in my own relation to social media, as if they are sometimes near, sometimes far. I am sometimes more aware of my inner experience, sometimes more aware of the audience. Sometimes more aware of what it is I want to say, and of how to say it; and sometimes more aware of how it might go over, what effect it may have. These seemed to be the way in which David Foster Wallace wrote his way through life. Being comfortable with the switch, with being here vs being there, was not a problem DFW experienced online -- it was a problem he experience in daily life. Again, DFW:

"For instance, if I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried a out whether you like me."

I can't imagine how difficult the days must have been for Wallace. A fan for years, I hadn't known that his writing was in some ways symptomatic, if not pathological. That he needed to write in order to produce Self, and that a fictional Self was at least better than a doubt-ridden Self.

Coming back then to social media, and of the juxtaposition of two modes of presence that they sometimes engender (here/there), I wondered whether or not our relation to the medium might in itself create the types of conditions that Wallace experienced most acutely. Granted, the subtext to the "follow you, follow me" phenomenon is a simple and basic condition (it would seem) of the human experience: validation, acknowledgment, recognition. We all need it, as much if not more than food or any other kind of sustenance.

But getting it is a matter of interacting with others, and this raises the contingency of experiencing oneself while being in the world, with others. We wish to be with, not next to, one another (IMHO). I have often believed that any mediation of communication and interaction disables and hobbles this process. Here is one of my favorite sources, the sociologist Erving Goffman, on the matter:

"These two tendencies, that of the speaker to scale down his expressions and that of the listeners to scale up their interests, each in the light of the other's capacities and demands, form the bridge that people build to one another, allowing them to meet for a moment of talk in a communion of reciprocally sustained involvement. It is this spark, not the more obvious kinds of love, that lights up the world." Erving Goffman

Which gets us back to technologies like Twitter and the cameras out at the Pumpkins concert, which certainly did light things up. Is there in writing, and in mediated writing, a doubling up of the Self experience, along the lines described by Wallace? A kind of "You're Ok, How am I?" (which is an old Transactional Analyst's joke) that comes packaged perhaps in "I'm Ok, How are You?" A sort of linguistic doubling of the exchange, required to compensate for the obvious fact that one is not with the other -- one is not able to look the other in the eye, and scale interests up or down to create a shared stretch of time and mutually shared experience. That when there is a gap between the production of self, say in posting to social media, we anticipate the effects of our contributions while authoring them? That the doubling up of private self (the self that experiences participation) and social self (the self that sees itself seen in social media) might always result in ambiguity?

And that, unable to engage in "sustained involvement" with one another, we supply as much of the meaning as we can by using the writing, the speaking, the posting, sharing, and other contents of posted participation as possible. For the media are so thin on the ritual, ceremonial, and contextual aspects of the interaction that we can't use the normal social scaffolding of face to face interactions to prop up the encounter. The result being that in participating on social media, we over-invest in expression, and under-invest in reciprocation. Thus lending a bias to all mediated interaction in favor of unilateral experiences: a social, in other words, that's not very social.

I think that, at the end of the day, social media trade in the ambiguity of human relationships and communication. Failing to close the loop on proximity, they offer a nearness that is still disconnected, or to quote the title of the Wim Wenders film, "Faraway, So Close." And it is this unresolved ambiguity that underlies our motives and behavior on social media. We might close the loop now and then when a conversational turn or run develops, on Twitter or in commenting for example, but we still pump the space with a high level of communicative redundancy (posting overwhelms reading). We want to know the effect of our participation and this condition of the user experience is reflected in our use practices.

Media transform experience, and while they amplify and extend some of our abilities, they bracket and constrain others. As we increasingly adopt social media as means of being social, whether to author, share, engage, search, or consume each other's contributions, it does those of us who make and trade in social media well to understand that a medium is used as much for what it does not do as for what it does do.

Social media dis-embed the experience of being in a social encounter from the fact of being in a social encounter: they represent and manufacture a semblance of social context on the basis of dislocated presence. This is what grounds the individual user experience, from which social practices emerge as new forms of mediated interactions. These are not media of information to be searched and browsed, but of communication and presence sensed and solicited: to wit, the power of absence and the possibility of ambiguity.

When I think now about where this began, with the matter of being here and being there, and of a private self and a social self, the doubling of experience might be summed up neatly, in a double entendre. For the question of motive can be captured, indeed, with the words: "for whom is it done."




Related:
Games People Play post
Reading notes on Transactional Analysis and Social Media
Social media: Social Approximity?

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

Inspiration from Elsewhere: Social Media and Film Theory

Summertime rolls on here, and when the weather is this good I have a hard time staying online. Months of cold fog and wind loom in the coming winter months; these days of lazy autumnal warmth beckon to be enjoyed. Panic in the markets and economic distress all around haven't been good for job prospecting of late. So my gut instinct this past week saw me outside with books and a thinking cap.

Which has all been very inspirational, as it turns out. There are times when inspiration comes from elsewhere. I found it this week in film theory. I enjoy film theory primarily because I'm a film nut. Film is the art form of the twentieth century, and as it incorporates image, technology, dialog, story, genres, production, characters, performance, and industry, it epitomizes the artistic and creative opportunities of modern times. Like social media and web cultures, film is fascinating both as a medium and as a cultural production. It can be enjoyed as is, and when thought about.

Dipping back into the film theory of Gilles Deleuze this week, I re-discovered a number of concepts that have me very excited. They had to do with my three part model of the social media user experience, and with the construction of various narrative forms in film. The former has me thrilled because the three part model keeps popping up in a number of theories and their resonance with an approach to social media interaction design is encouraging, to say the least. The latter has me thrilled because I've been scratching my head of late when it comes to applications of social media in marketing and branding -- and the huge variety of narrative and film forms explored in film theory offers a cornucopia of ideas for online conversational marketing.

I just want to touch on these briefly, because it may be a while before I'm able to punch out in-depth blog posts. So if you are a theory geek, or interested in how social interaction design can draw from film theory, read on. I'll post later on how these ideas may be applied by practitioners and organizations. I know it doesn't take a film theorist to make a good film -- but it is fun to find confirmation in theory of what makes the film good.

Deleuze uses the sign system, or semiotics, developed by Charles Saunders Peirce to build a system of "images" and signs designed for film, which is unique in that it produces not only image but time. I've written about the difference between page and time-based social media recently -- and I often return to film theory because it offers a means of understanding how time is captured in contemporary representational media. (Where social media differ, of course, is that time is captured in the medium -- take twitter as the best example of a tool that organizes content chronologically -- but is not experienced or consumed in a straight and continuous run of time. Time is continuous in film; discontinuous i social media. And yet in both, time is an ordering principle for the presentation of content to the user/consumer.)

Peirce's signs are, to simplify, the firstness of the thing itself; the secondness of a thing reflected, and the thirdness of a relation. Very cool to me, as my model is based on Self, Other, and Relation. The resonance here works well for social media because the "firstness" relates to the content of a user's direct and immediate expression of Self online; the secondness relates the reflection and orientation to another user (Other); and thirdness to the relationships and social relations captured in social activity (Relation). I had been thinking that my Self, Other, Relation approach resonated well with a view of social relations that distinguishes among monadic, dyadic, and triadic organization. Monadic being Self expression, Dyadic being interpersonal interaction, and Triadic being mediating and relationship-oriented interaction. I know this is theoretical stuff, but the three-part model keeps coming up, and I think that thinking in terms of individuals, pairs, and threesomes (or groups) makes sense as a means of grasping the nature of "social" online.

What Deleuze's film theory brings to theory of film "genres" (a term he would disapprove of) and film forms (he calls them "images") is also contributing to my approach to conversational marketing. I've been thinking of late that the key to social media branding involves first moving away from an "image branding" approach to one that is more communicative and participatory. But getting from the insight to actual applications has been a challenge. Knowing that the medium is young yet, and using film theory and history as a source of comparisons, however, has opened up possibilities for what the future may still hold. If commercial efforts are to successfully use social media at all, I don't expect it to be by simply extending mass media branding and marketing approaches. The arrival of the talkies, and development of filmic techniques (inventions in camera work, lighting, editing, montage, and so on) as well as framing and an acute understanding of the effects of film, have all conspired to produce fascinating forms of entertainment.

I really think the current social media landscape is practically waiting for creatives to take over where the engineers have left off. Would you want television designers to be responsible for what's on your TV? Well that's where we are today: having built the stuff we need the content creatives now to show us what we can do with it.

So back now to summertime ideating -- and to bringing concepts into the daylight.


Related:
My own research notes on the theorists Niklas Luhmann, Gilles Deleuze, and Harold Garfinkel in relation to understanding social media, and theorizing social interaction design.

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.

Some sociology on the coupling of social media and mass media

Reading Notes: Social Media, Mass Media PDF, 45 pages

The Reality of the Mass Media, by Niklas Luhmann, and Anthony Giddens' Modernity and Self Identity together provide a rich basis for unpacking how online media, and social media (user generated content) in particular, couple with the mass media. Each observes the other, further extending and enriching the content of news, advertising, and entertainment through the participation of members of the audience on blogs, content aggregators, social networking sites, and even on recent hits like Youtube. These reading notes are theoretical in tone and substance, and are intended for those interested in social interaction design, especially in how it maps to theories of mass media and a sociology of the media's construction of a reality reproduced daily by social media users.

Reading Notes: Social Media, Mass Media PDF, 45 pages

From the reading notes summary ...


Social Software Design Notes (SxD)

Reading Notes on Modernity and Self Identity by Anthony Giddens and The Reality of Mass Media by Niklas Luhmann

Summary
These reading notes describe a systems-theoretical view of mass media and web and social media that posits a) that users, regardless of their individual intentions and interests, engage mass media in form and in content, and that b) the social web extends the domain and reach of mass media while also presenting it real challenges, and c) that this exchange occurs through the social practices of online communication and interaction as well as through the structural and functional coupling (e.g. business) of web media and mass media. In short, the social web offers users a chance to communicate and interact around cultural narratives, news and events as told by the mass media, and more without themselves belonging to the mass media, and the mass media, by observing this user generated content, can inform itself and adjust accordingly. But the social web and the mass media are doing more than observing one another (blogs on movies, cited in newspapers or on TV, and so on): the very forms in which many new online phenomena (call them social media, social software, web 2.0, etc.) take shape implicitly, if not explicitly, refer to forms of mass media communication. In other words, the social practices users engage in refer as much to the mass media as to daily social interactions. This, if it were accurate, would offer an interesting view of social media, for it would suggest that people understand and can engage with the online world through the mass media world and can make the mass media their own. To suggest that users don't simply take what they do in every-day life and adapt it to the online world, but refer also to the how content is produced on the radio, on TV, in films, in advertising for examples of form and representation if not also narrative construction and distinctions between truth and fiction, truthfulness and falsehoods, would be to suggest that the way forward for social interaction design should involve merging direct and immediate communication interests of individuals with the indirect or mediated means of production of media's abstract forms.

The above thesis is constructed in these reading notes from the sociologies of Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann. It offers a bridge from user-centric design to media theory and avoids the weak subject position common to many structuralist theories by suggesting that users put their understanding of the mass media to their own use. Mass media constructions of a world can equally serve individuals who, engaging in mediated communities and social interactions, need forms of representation with which to package their communication so that it can be understood by those who come across it. Unable to be there when communication occurs (online), users rely on the familiarity of packaging to provide context for their communication. Packaging provides the promise of control over the reception and interpretation of their communication. (Utterances uttered in face-to-face interactions don't serve users of online social media insofar was users can't be present online to utter the utterance in the presence of others in the first place.) And what better source of forms of presentation than the media, which invented the possibility of representational languages and systems in the first place? Media theory takes a functional view of mass media, claiming that the production of stories and events not only sustain business, industry, politics, law, and so on, but connect to consumers by producing news of interest to them. These reading notes suggest a view of new media that connects online and web media to mass media with the difference that users are involved in social practices that engage the Self in relations of trust and trust commitments. Seen from a business perspective, then, social media extend the fictions, and to some extent the functions, of realities constructed by mass media. This time, however, individual users are the systems' "producers," storytellers, journalists, and so on. Communication and interaction extend mass media distribution, and accelerate and extend the reproduction of news and events. Social media also contribute the truth and authenticity that belongs to interpersonal communication, and which can only be emulated by mass media.

Investigation
Social software systems vary in theme, or genre, as well as in their UI and design. Dating sites (match.com, eharmony.com) focus on personal information; their users are interested in people. Career networking sites (linkedin.com) focus on people also, but present the professional in the context of professional networks and histories. Both dating and career networking sites are thus biographical and representational. Myspace and Facebook also deal with people, but this time more actively than dating and career networking sites, for they not only capture social networks but produce them. In many ways they resemble interactive mass media: they're involved in creating social scenes, they spawn and promote bands, clubs, events, news, and so on. Blogging and discussion sites also engage in the creation of news, but this time emphasizing news, viewpoints, perspectives, and expertise more than member personality. There are recommendation sites and systems too, which tend to subordinate the biographical presentation of a person (e.g. personality and character) to the objects reviewed: books, movies, music, restaurants, web sites, travel, products, and so forth. All of these systems engage similar technologies, user interface techniques, and user practices. It seems highly likely that as users, our use of these sites is informed by our understanding not only of the genres of mass media programs, but also their means of production. In other words, we know something about how to present news, we get the difference between news and advertising, we know a lot about celebrities and why we're interested in them, what makes them popular, and how to talk about them. Social practices of social software use, in other words, are informed by existing mass media. But now we can participate in a world online that is coupled to the mass media through observation of it, at a minimum, and structurally, at a maximum (where social media are functionally, economically, and structurally coupled to the function, economics and structural organization of mass media). Mass media do not permit two-way communication with their audience; social media of course do. These reading notes cover two sociologists (Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann), whose work can help us unpack the social practices emerging around social software and social media within a higher-level analysis of mass media (media theory).




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The deep paradox of the link

I'm nearing release of some 120 pages of social interaction design material, all of it around the action domains and social practices, as well as design of content and action systems for social software (social media, or web 2.0, web 3.0) sites. Along the way, I've come upon a strange logical paradox in the form of the hyperlink. Here's how it goes. It seems to me now that we have no choice but to read social softgware as a form of autopoetic system....


The click is a yes, an affirmation, but is not an affirmation of what is represented in the links, given that links are explorative and that clicks are undifferentiated. The recursive logic by which we assess and interpret clicks means that we can only, at best, suppose that a click affirms what has been clicked.

Methodologically speaking, cessation of clicking would offer the surest sign that a link clicked has provided what the user seeks, but as we know such an interpretation would often provide us with a false positive. By extension, further clicking of links would seem to indicate that a link has not provided the user with his or her satisfaction, but that too would be to overburden observation and interpretation with a necessary and paradoxical bifurcation: that the clicking of any link might simultaneously represent its affirmation or rejection.

If we were to assume that action of clicking links affirms user intentions, then we would like to conclude that the user affirms the links clicked. However, the act of clicking is the means by which the user determines whether or not the links clicked are appropriate, and thus every act, or click, is ambiguous. Every click is ambiguous, and every link is ambivalent. This follows from the fundamental dual operation of the link: to serve as a means of navigation, or action (user's selection of the link by clicking) and the representation of an actionable medium within the same form. The possibilities of action are collapsed into form (the link), and at the same time intention of actions is deduced from form (its content, or meaning, or the link).

The link is a kind of utterance already uttered (it's shown as a picture or statement that is a clickable link); and yet in deducing user activity, we attribute the act of uttering it to the user who clicks it. Every impression measured is read as an expression of user action. Reading clickthroughs is tantamount to mapping a pedestrian's destination from the footprints he leaves behind while wandering about, lost. Clicks record what they have produced, and produce their own recordings.


Technorati tags: folksonomy, information architecture, interaction-design, interaction design, links 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, sxd, tagging, user-experience, user experience, web 2.0, web-20, web 3.0, web, web2-0, web2.0,

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?

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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