Social Media: It's all Talk

Getting the talk right on social media sites is essential to success. And the range of tools and post types (blog, comment, discuss, video, etc) and messaging types available on social software sites has never been greater. Social media sites are "talk systems," built to facilitate and encourage talk among members. Each is designed to structure talk among users *about* a theme or topic.

On MySpace.com, we engage in a kind of social conversation centered on our interests, friends, activities and so on. The topic on MySpace is us. We are the subject of talk, and in talking to our friends on MySpace we're still talking about ourselves, really. What we talk about maintains our relationships with friends. The talk on MySpace is autobiographical.

On Yelp.com we talk about restaurants, bars, places we visit and like. But while we talk about our favorite coffee shops and hangouts, we're telling about ourselves. We're revealing what *we* are like by revealing *what* we like. Yelp is not built around social networking but of course creates thin social networks by making it easy to find people who like things that we like. Yelp, like MySpace, involves a high degree of personal disclosure; only it's captured through reviews of something else. The talk on Yelp is topical.

LinkedIn.com, which used to engage members in direct communication (contacting, making or getting introduced directly to members), now offers LinkedIn Answers. Unlike the direct communication that passed among members without creating visible talk on the site, Answers now allows members to demonstrate their expertise in front of the LinkedIn audience/community. By asking questions or providing answers, members not only draw attention to themselves—they reveal what they are interested in currently, or what they know something about, as well as how they approach it. Members are able to reveal the depth of their expertise and disclose some of their personality in ways that eluded the resume/bio that structures member profiles on Linkedin. The talk in Answers is autobiographical.

There are three central challenges to any social software site. Organizing what members talk about, and to whom, and why. And to solve each, we need only think about what we do in everyday talk. We talk to people we enjoy talking to. We talk about ourselves to attract interest and because we simply need to. We talk about what we like to disclose our interests. We talk about why we like it, or do it, or find it interesting in order to flesh out character, our motivations and goals. We talk about it in ways that disclose our passions, our curiosities, and our fears and trepidations. We reveal our competencies and expertise in how we talk: by proclaiming, declaring, challenging, making references, and so on. We create credibility in how we talk about things. We project authority also, in what we say and how we say it. We solicit advice, allegiance and respect in how we talk, and to whom we talk.

If talk is what social software organizes, we get engaged either by *talking to or at* other members, or by *telling* about ourselves. Blogs are well-suited to telling. We tell our readers (and ourselves) what we think. Blogging is highly self-reflective and self-referential. Sitting and writing a blog post is not about interaction but is a form of speech nonetheless. I'm doing it right now. Commenting is directed at a person or his/her contribution, so it's much more a kind of talk. It's direct because it is a response to somebody; but it's public also. Either the person commented on or somebody else in the audience may respond with a further comment. Tagging, digging, hot-listing and so on are all very small forms of talk, insofar as they are topical (to digg is to affirm a piece of content, in short, to "agree" with it or "like" it). These are small gestures of affirmation, agreement, preference, interest, and so on. The genius in keeping these simple is to create some amount of ambiguity.

All talk is ambiguous, there's no knowing with any certainty what another person is truly thinking. Social software not only thrives on our human interest and tolerance for ambiguity, it generates *extra* ambiguity to keep things going. Gestural forms of talk, such as the many icons and actions offered on sites for sending a wink, compliment, thumbs up, kudo, etc. are each a non-verbal expression built entirely around the ambiguity of communicating through cliche: the recipient knows what "it" means but not what "I" mean...

Flirting and dating underlie any healthy social media site. What makes elevators such a pregnant encounter is exactly what works for social media. Though it's impolite to talk in an elevator, it's equally impolite to acknowledge people in close proximity. The elevator ride can create tension or discomfort so easily because it places its riders in a double bind: don't ignore them, but don't talk to them, and don't show more interest than would be appropriate, even though the longer this elevator ride is, the more you have to "contain" yourself in front of others that by this time you really ought to be acknowledging more substantially! Thought experiment: how many floors would it take before its riders simply had to start talking? (We'll leave Aerosmith out of this ride!)

Social media are like the opposite of an elevator ride: people dispersed all over the place, able to talk or communicate but having little to go on and no sense of how involved others are, or for how long, or why. Talking is the only way through those ambiguities. But getting people to talk, about themselves as well as about topical interests, to others on the site, and capturing, storing, organizing and presenting what they talk about is the challenge of social interaction design. There are many ways to motivate talk. It can be anchored on attention getting; on autobiographical disclosure; on demonstrating expertise; on creating affinities; on producing attitudes (YouTube excels at generating attitudes and dispositions); and so on. But the biggest mistake social software site owners make is thinking that users want to talk about them, their service, or what they have built. We build for talk, and must hand it over when we're done so that our users can talk about themselves with others. To expect them to talk about what we've made for them, or even to ask them to talk about what we find interesting, won't work at all.

Related: I cover this in depth in a recent white paper on Review sites (Yelp.com), as well as in other white papers and in reading notes on my site.



Technorati tags: blogging, design, media, interaction design, social interaction design, social media, social networks, social software, sociology, theory, tagging, user generated, web 2.0, web

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).




Technorati tags: blogging, information architecture, interaction-design, interaction design, media theory, meme, online advertising, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, social interaction design, social media, social network, social network marketing, social network strategy, social networking, social networking, social software, sociology, systems theory, television, user-experience, user experience, user generated, videos, viral, web 2.0, web-20, web, web2-0, web2.0, youtube,

Eric Berne's Games People Play and social media

I've been busy working on several papers lately... blogging's been sparse at best... here's the first of three of the papers... reading notes on Eric Berne's notion of the transaction and the emotional "stroke"... must rest...

From the reading notes:
Eric Berne's Games People Play, popular during its time but no less fascinating and perhaps even relevant to a theory of mediated interaction, is a wonderful reading of the transactions of emotional "strokes" among people interacting with one another. For Berne, human interaction is always engaged in this fundamental exchange (his theory is exchangist, I think), one that seems to have an effect on the body and on personal well-being as well as having its obvious effect on emotional and psychological dispositions. Though we would have to conjecture as to how human interaction can even communicate with biological systems, I see no reason to so here: it's pretty obvious that we are capable of making each other feel good, as we're capable of truly stressing each other out also. That our moods affect our health is well, just as obvious.

What then of the interactions that occur when we're not face to face? What of Berne's stroke? Let's, for the challenge of it, take this fuzzy but genuine insight, this notion that we communicate in order to provision ourselves and others with a feeling of membership and well-being that has no content itself but is instead the subtext of all content of communication, and map its transposition into mediated social interaction.


Reading Notes: Eric Berne's Games People Play PDF, 17 pages. Eric Berne's work on transactional analysis has long fascinated me for its insights into a dimension of interaction that involves basic emotional acknowledgment and recognition: a dimension that would seem diminished by the online interactions and communication that occur without face to face transactions, but which might nonetheless motivate our interactions nonetheless. If it were the case that online interactions attempt to get at the emotional stuff of life that's not immediately present, perhaps through substitute signs, gestures, the use of etiquette or other displacements and substitions, then we could claim that the online world is thin, but offers promise. A lot can be done with ASCII.

All my reading notes are here.

Technorati tags: folksonomy, information architecture, interaction-design, interaction design, psychology social media, social-media-marketing, social-media, social-software, interaction design, 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,

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?

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

Webocracy, Mass media, mini media, MySpace, YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

YouTube: videos are signs, watching is social

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Technorati tags: Google YouTube
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Pay Attention to YouTube!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google bought YouTube. Makes perfect sense.


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Marshall McLuhan on YouTube

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

So, which medium is the content of YouTube?

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





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You looking at me? Invisibility at Facebook

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

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


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


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

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

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

Privacy controls have a double function on social networking sites.

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


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

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


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Alfred Schutz, F2F, Social Software, and Streams of Consciousness

“If I wish to observe one of my own lived experiences, I must perform a reflective Act of attention. But in this case, what I will behold is a past experience, not one presently occurring. Since this holds true for all Acts of attention to my own experiences, I know it holds true for the other person as well. You are in the same position as I am: you can observe only your past, already-lived-through experiences. Now, whenever I have an experience of you, this is still my own experience. However, this experience, while uniquely my own, still has its signitively grasped intentional object, a lived experience of yours which you are having at this very moment. In order to observe a lived experience of my own, I must attend to it reflectively. By no means, however, need I attend reflectively to my lived experience of you in order to observe your lived experience. On the contrary, by merely “looking” I can grasp even those of your lived experiences which you have not yet noticed and which are for you still prephenomenal and undifferentiated. This means that, whereas I can observe my own lived experiences only after they are over and done with. I can observe yours as they actually take place. This in turn implies that you and I are in a specific sense “simultaneous,” that we “coexist,” that our respective streams of consciousness intersect. To be sure, these are merely images and are inadequate since they are spatial. However, recourse to spatial imagery at this point is deeply rooted. We are concerned with the synchronism of two streams of consciousness here, my own and yours. In trying to understand this synchronism we can hardly ignore the fact that when you and I are in the natural attitude we perceive ourselves and each other as psychophysical unities.” Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, 103

• How important is simultaneity to meaning?


• How important is it to interaction?


• How important is it for the "binding" that occurs between interactants when they are in a cooperative type of interaction?


• How important is it for the exchange of truth, for displays and confirmations of sincerity and authenticity, between interactants?


• Does culture change when we participate in asynchronous activities, when our interactions involve less actual being together, less coordination of our interaction in shared space and time, less in terms of getting on the same page emotionally, or of creating a mood, disposition, and common attitude?


• How critical is this moment of shared stream of consciousness, as described here by Schutz, to the production of human relations?


• How much of it can be leveraged as a basis of interaction when interaction cannot be face to face and must be mediated? Or is every asynchronous and technically-mediated interaction a tiny death, a departure from home, a lesser version of the real human experience?


• As it is in the philosophical duel between Isabbelle Huppert and Lily Tomlin/Dustin Hoffman in the film I Heart Huckabees, the question (or one question) seems to be: are we all connected, or is there an infinitessimally small but ever-present gap and space between us? Does the shared stream of consciousness described here really happen, or does it only seem to happen?

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Folksonomic Value Proposition part 2 Revised

"First hoary axiom: Value comes from scarcity. Take the icons of wealth in the industrial age&emdash;diamonds, gold, oil, and college degrees. These were deemed precious because they were scarce." Kevin Kelly


It's The Folksomy, Stupid
Folksonomies add value in economies governed by surplus, not scarcity. Folksonomic value narrows down what is otherwise overwhelming and indistinguishable. It's value supplied in the form of recommendations, relevance, and knowledge and expertise.

In an earlier post on folksonomies I wrote the following: "I'm tempted to say that social media uniquely captures participation: a means of production that records its own consumption. And whose consumption is its distribution. Only electronic media can claim this, for it's only with digital media that consumption does nothing to the original, each product being a copy already."

The goal of folksonomies is the non-hierarchical and unbiased production of knowledge (value). This is no small thing and as an editoral pursuit it would have nobility and loft. As a goal for organizing participation, communicating to the public, and structuring social participation in a mass medium, well, it's downright revolutionary. Put it to social software types to think small!

Be it in urls or their categories, folksonomies (known also as tagging, and tag cultures) aggregate the efforts of many into a system of pointers that, in theory at least, represents a filtered stock of knowledge. Involvement of active readers in the organization of online content creates a vast "knowledge base" that offers an alternative to search engines (power in the hands of one: google), online directories (too unwieldy, who drills down any more?), and editorial sites (who do you trust?). What's more, tagging produces results that are more human than a search engine's and less hierarchical than a directory's. The process is participatory and open, which means (or ought to mean) that the results are dynamic, living, and democratic.

But the medium itself, that being the Web, plays a role in the production of folksonomies, as any medium plays a part in production of the content that comes out of it. There are far too many web sites out there, far too many blogs, news stories, etc., for any population to evaluate and organize without technical assistance. Information is not scarce&emdash;knowledge is scarce. Knowledge is the distillation of information into meaningful statements, judgments, valued insights and prescriptions. It's always less than the gross stock of information, and producing it is a matter of time. And time, as they say, is short.

The Age of Communication Needs Your Attention
If the key resource during the industrial age was power (labor and natural), it was information during the information age. And I'd venture to say that in our current communication age, it's attention that's scarce. Attention, as in getting information in front of a person and claiming some measure of their consciousness (mind share). Time-based mass media are meant to create and focus attention over a strip of time (e.g. half hour TV shows); participatory media like the web (which came out of print) also deal in attention. But the fact of digital duplication only compounds the state of excess and overload that characterizes our communication media, setting up a tug of war between anonymous, news and information-rich media and personal communication tools. All of which lay claims on our time and attention. What marks the communication age is not a scarcity of material resources, or power, or labor, or even information. It's scarcity of the user's time and attention. And when the scarcity is not in the environment but it's in the consumer (person), techniques for creating value switch also: from extraction to selection and value creation. And it's this process of value creation that folksonomies are known for.

Now, every technology is grasped through its use, and social technologies are no exception. As much as we might want to describe a technology for its features and functions, these aren't the sum of what it does. A more accurate take on technology would place it in the context of its use and then describe user practices as well as technical accomplishments. If you look at both, you see a technology that anticipates its uses and users, as well as a user community that knows its technologies. Neither the technical apparatus nor the minds and habits of the user community are enough in and of themselves to describe or explain use of social technologies. This tight mapping of technologies with social practices is my reason for being interested in what I call the social interface.

The Folksonomic Engine is Unique
The folksonomic production of knowledge is driven by a unique type of interaction: one that continuously maps the preferences of a living community's values onto non-structured data submitted by that community. How it does so is where it's unique: an iterative sorting and re-sorting that meets enough of the conditions of social situations for us to call it social. What are those conditions? That in any social situation, participants know what is going on, that knowing what is going on, they know how to proceed, and that they are competent participants (in this case, they know the technology's strange mix of publishing and user-generated content).

The Link is a Sign and a Phrase Whose Click May Doesn't Stick
Where the medium then intervenes in the production of knowledge that we get from a folksonomic culture is in how it claims, retains, archives, and sustains attention. In the case of the web, the medium's vast depth and reach is tunneled into a constrained spatial presentation (your computer screen) in which the navigation from one thing/page to the next is often a hyper-linked word or phrase. In this somewhat bizarre fact is one the strange grammatical cornerstones of the web: that a phrase understood as a meaningful word is also associated with something other than its linguistic meaning. Two associations where there is normally just one (the phrase and its meaning). Analogous to speech, then, the web's hyperlink is like an utterance. Only that we're not talking here of the intended meaning of the web when it states the phrase "Top Ten" (if you utter the phrase "top ten," I can distinguish between the meaning of the phrase and your intention in using it). I'd like then to introduce a term I have described elsewhere: social navigation. In the web 2.0 world, social navigation is that type of navigation that records and reflects its use. Items on a top ten list may change places as the list re-orders itself based on click throughs. It's a kind of content ordering that reflects social usage, hence "social navigation." No other medium is like this.

How is the folksonomy, as a participatory organization of content, affected by the medium? I would argue that the medium's reflection of its own use, as we just cited with the example of a top ten list, carries social and cultural bias. To wit, competition for attention in which the "most popular" is neither selected for its intrinsic quality nor because it represents the good or the best. What makes something popular is difficult to foretell precisely because there's an arbitrariness to it. The dynamics of communication, the hyperlink, the net, and countless other variables having little to do with the Object or thing itself combine in a self-reflexive social production resulting in popularity. Its unpredictable and capricious qualities qualify it for prime-time television excitement: watching more Americans turn up to vote for the Idol of American vocals than voted for our last un-President was exciting. (If only the real elections had been, too. On second thought, scratch that.) I'd argue that we see this self-reflexivity in both the power law and the long tail. It simply runs faster in the power law and more slowly in the tail. (A test of this hypothesis might be to remove all reflexivity and monitoring, all self-descriptions and updates from the systems that participate in these phenomena so that they are blind. If Idol, Netflix, Amazon etc gave us no stats, no poll results, no rankings, would we see the same results? I bet not. Conclusion? This is a communication phenomenon and system.)

Click the Lowest Common Denominator
Now how do we spend attention online? And how do social software sites and other social media capture it? Clicking ranks among the easiest to track and act on. But in part because attention is the achilles heel of online publishing, the medium's particular form of ranking by click can become a popularity contest even when seeming democratic, unbiased, and participatory. Clicks are easy and cheap, and capturing a link click through offers little granularity in terms of user intent, or degree of interest. All clicks are equal, even when some are more equal than others. (I can click to a profile on a dating site that really interests me, and click to see the profile of a person who viewed me just out of curiosity.) The data captured makes no distinction between the one and the other click. The vote, as a click, is a choice of the lowest-common-denominator kind. In digital audio they call this the quantization error: where a point on a waveform has to be assigned a whole number, even if in the analog waveform it falls between two points. In the binary logic of click throughs, we can capture only a yes or a no. Increasing the system's ability to handle ambiguities, to qualify ones and zeroes, will be the challenge facing social media as I see it. The social interface is yet young. But if you believe that technologies can serve us, and better society, then the art of mediating social relationships promises a great deal of interesting challenges!

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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.

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Podcasts and Podcasting on my mind

They say that hearing is the first of our senses to come to our awareness -- as our mother's heart beats through the early months of our lives. Marshall McLuhan, a mentor of mine and for a long time, "patron saint" of Wired magazine, made a career out of distinguishing media according to fundamental and primary relationships to our natural senses. His basic position: our perceptions of the world vary by the modes in which we perceive it, and cultures have preferences for the eye, the ear, the voice, the body, and so on (actually that pretty much covers it).

McLuhan wrote that Russians were incensed at our U2 over flights because they didn't like to be looked in on by spies; in contrast, Americans were outraged to find our Moscow embassy bugged from floor to ceiling, because we don't like to be listened in on. He wrote that some politicians would have failed during the TV era, that others were made by TV, an observation now famously used to describe the Kennedy-Nixon debates.

Along comes podcasting. Video blogging. Ipods that play video. Cell phones that play video. Televisions that don't play either (internet-based podcasts or videos). Media are getting mixed and mashed up in a range of consumer products, most of which would of course like to become hits, trends, and market makers.

I do a lot of walking and train riding these days, mostly to get out into the sun, but also to stick a pair of earbuds into my ears and shut out the world. (Kidding about that last part). And I'd like to share some thoughts on podcasts that pick up where this thing kicked off. To wit, there are:


Podcasts of the intimate voice. These are the ones you hear that stop you cold, no matter what you're doing, the voice in your ears literally speaking to you through those little buds.

Podcasts of the radio. These are the ones that could be on the radio, they have the music and formatting of a radio broadcast and you can tell the speakers aren't addressing you specifically. They're really annoying if you have headphones on and the broadcasters aren''t that interesting because you literally can't think if you leave them in there. These podcasts remain on your iPod as new because you never finish them.

Podcasts of the living room. These are the ones you want to share, because they're funny, accurate, familiar, and you enjoy grabbing a friend by the shirt to say "check this out." Whatever it is, you know what it is. These are the ones, too, that are the marketer's social marketing grail. (They'd like to know what it is that you know, but you can't tell them because it's like beauty: you know it when you see it.)

Podcasts of the event. These are the ones that put you in the stadium, the comedy club, on the conference floor, or in the hallway for snacks and refreshments.

Podcasts of the interview. Whether you enjoy these or not depends on the interviewer and interviewee, because an interview must be among the most hit-and-miss formats of information gathering that exists. All information is supplied as an answer to a question. If the questioner doesn't understand what his/her interviewee knows, how to approach it, with sensitivity for the person as well as a sense of the connection s/he's making with the audience, the podcast interview winds becomes more like a two-person conversation.

Podcasts of the speech. Speeches can be great podcast material, as long as the speaker's neither a mime nor a visual presenter, for the speaker is addressing an audience not unlike a radio audience. There's less danger that you will feel either like an eavesdropper or bystander, though there is a greater chance that you'll suffer memories of your sister's third grade Nutcracker ritual (meaning that this was an event you might have attended from the back row, aisle... Speakers can take a long time to get to their point, and podcasts provide us all with a virtual lectern.

Production-Consumption gap. There's a gap between production of media content and its consumption, a gap opened long ago when we ceased manufacturing things ourselves and handed the process over to industrial means of production instead (recall the Luddites who smashed looms because the sense their social threat). Now, this gap is interesting when what's produced is not an object, but entertainment. Add recording technology, and you have a fundamental dislocation of production and consumption: a slip-fault unique to production/recording media (and now also distribution media) that explains all the points we listed above.

The product is not produced in front of those who will later consume it. It is produced by participants: people engaged in an activity, talking, acting, filming, playing music, whatever it is is irrelevant. The separation of the podcast audience from the event is possible only when recordings are involved.

The consumption of media objects is also interesting: the thing consumed is consumed by our giving it our attention. (Hence the efforts of attentiontrust.org.) Giving attention to something as an audience member, but not of the live event, is of course asking for a lot. We've come to expect a certain professionalism, expertise, investment in production value etc from our media consumables. Well, as was said of the electric guitar (in relation to music and who makes it), we can all make media now. The results so far have been maddening, shocking, really interesting, even profoundly intimate and moving.

But you don't know which you're going to get when you spin the little podwheel. Here, then, enters another interesting McLuhanism, though I've made it my own and can't recall any longer how it was first put together. Attention is time, it's given over time, and while it can ramp up and cool off, approach and then ease back, get wide-eyed, glazed over, and weepy, it's only over time that it takes shape and form as a relation. Attention is user engagement; user participation (of a sort). That's why it's paid, taken, stolen, or given: attention is the new labor, and our surplus of it is as short now as our surplus of labor was when we scraped coal off tunnel walls.

Media content is informative. In fact much of it is information, and is meant to be consumed as information. A lot of podcasts participate in this economy, too. Given that attention takes time (as it takes time to pay attention), consumers get frustrated at not knowing what's coming. The dissociation of production/recording/consumption appears again and this time combines with our sensory modes (above): we get meta-information about a recording, text, tv or motion picture show, either by previewing the thing first, by using commentary given us in another medium, by hearing about it from others, so that we can gauge whether or not we want to give it our attention.

Podcasts, being often from a new source, ask more of a leap of faith; if they're no good we'll quit them (they're often free, so no big deal). Social networks and sites that rate, list, recommend and other-wise provide the meta information we need help too. Personal recommendations can be very strong influences. Fundamentally though, and unlike video, podcasts consume a great deal of our attention because they take time, they get into our head (try writing while following an interview podcast), and there's often nothing telling us where it's headed or whether the whole thing is worth it (i don't know what's on my iPod till I'm a block from home).

If you're in marketing, and you wish to market with podcasts, be they user-generated podcasts or something else, keep your audiences in mind. Because you're asking them to have you in their minds.

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