It's Fixed in the Next Release - Society

Social Media: Why Facebook; Why Twitter?

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:37:11 -0500

As either a younger member of the boomer generation, or an older member of Gen-X, I'm a member of a big demographic that seems to have a hard time understanding social media. The most common reaction I get to mentioning something on Facebook is "I will never have a Facebook account!"

I realize now that part of the bad reputation that social media has with middle-aged adults is due to the fact that most of these people are parents, and everything they know about social media sites has come from their kids.

This led me to a great insight. Good social media sites are malleable to individual users, and that's what makes them so powerful. I am certain that my Facebook experience is vastly different from that of your average teenager's, and that's a good thing.

A middle-aged friend recently asked me about Facebook and Twitter, with the subtext "I don't 'get' either of them." I've reworked my response a bit in hope that it will be helpful to others:

The main purpose of Facebook is to get found by people you already know but have lost touch with, think of the people you would invite to a high school reunion. Simple as that. It's also good for keeping up on the big stream of small things that winds up being news in a nominally mundane life. It works well if you're not "always on" the net. You can pop in every week or so and catch up. If you ignore the clever little time-wasting applications and notification noise, it's a useful tool. In short, Facebook is good at making an electronic link to people you already know.

Twitter is much more geared to making new connections and is really something for those of us who are "on the 'net" most of the time. What it's best at is finding new clever people, and getting breaking news. Information travels very quickly in Twitter, and to a large extent it's filtered to the interests of the people you follow, which means you get more information about the things you care about. As a writer, it's also superb at making you edit things down. The 140 character limit is brutal, but it enforces the practice of a clarity that can carry into other writing.

So how did I do? Is there anything else that "defines" these sites?

A List of Twitter Types

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 07:36:38 -0600

I've been "hanging out" on Twitter for about three weeks now. My interactions with it have evolved quite a bit over that time.

When I first got on, my attitude was "what's the point?" That became "okay, so this is the best part of Facebook minus the dumb applications and a lot of FB's cool-but-useless user interface." But along with this functionality came a challenging signal to noise ratio. How can you decide who to follow? It's certainly not by popularity. Some of the most followed accounts are little more than posts of the form "(hook text) (external link) more on (topic) at (posters_site)." In other words, "Here's something vaguely interesting on a topic we cover. Hopefully the first link will generate the expectation that our site has even more useful information, and you'll start using us as a source."

If that's all Twitter had to offer, I'd be gone by now. But despite the noise, there's quality in the signal when you find it. I have interacted with people with unquestionable intelligence, people with expertise in interesting areas, and people with humour and insight. Twitter is also undeniably a superb source for news, both global and local.

The other problem is that few of us are consistently brilliant, so even on an individual level there's no telling how many mundane posts you'll have to read before encountering the gem that makes it worthwhile.

So I have developed a list of user types for Twitter that I use as a guideline when deciding who to follow:

The "I am a Channel" type is interested in their follower count above all else. Every post they make returns to a gateway on their site, so they can pump up their traffic stats. Some are more subtle, but the ultimate goal is to make their web properties a destination.
The "monetize" type is intent on convincing you that they know how to monetize your online presence. Inevitably this leads you to a pitch for their e-books and/or training courses. Somehow I get the feeling that these people are all modern equivalents of the "Make $1 Million from Classified Ads" artists. why do I get the feeling that the way you monetize is by selling e-books telling people how to monetize?
The "I am a social media maven" type — which is distinct from an actual social media expert — is a variation on "monetize". All you have to do is buy/subscribe, and they'll show you how to get to the top of the social media heap. By and large, these folks would fare far better if fewer of them appeared to be laid off auto workers living in their mother's basements. The ones who seem to have some class wind up being the ones who value connections above all else. As I've said before, there's something unsettling about "hook up with me on LinkedIn as a trusted source, even if I don't know you from a serial killer".
The "random link" type finds purportedly interesting information and tweets it with a useless explanation, as in "wonderful (link)". I suppose that somewhere out there, the simple act of posting makes the link worthwhile, but in my experience so far, 85% of the links go to stuff that is old, dull, boring, or just plain not interesting. A complete waste of time. Explain what's interesting about the link, please.
The "topic feed" type usually picks a well-defined topic to post about and either relates facts about that topic or posts links with information relevant to the topic. Focus is the key to success here. If the topic is pig farming, it no good can come from posting random comments on abstract art.
The "expert" type goes one better than the topic feed. These are people with a real interest and some expertise in their field, and they regularly post observations and insights along with the "topic feed" fare. A significant number of posts from these people reference original content that hey have compiled or authored.
The "personality" type is someone who has a real world profile and is using Twitter as another channel for communicating to their audience. Think Obama.
The "community" type is a member of a smaller community that uses Twitter to keep up to date. This is what Twitter seems to have originally been designed for. Some of these communities have "personality" types, who have a significant profile in within the scope of that community.
The "shared mundanity" type posts nothing but tidbits from their life. As in "listening to x while doing y". There's a fine line here. Much of the charm of Twitter is getting a snapshot into other people's lives, but we don't need the whole film; odds are that you're just not that interesting. If none of these posts have any meaning, if they don't transcend mere observation, then the unfollow button is not far away.

The real challenge here is that most people exhibit a mix of these types, and probably a few more that I haven't identified yet. Twitter is all about constructing your own community and becoming a part of it. It's social media at its most fascinating.

Newspapers are Dead. Expect a Very Long Funeral.

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:42:22 -0600

Writing on ojr.org, Getty Storch asserts that "Papers must charge for websites to survive". There is a lively debate in the comments that follow, most of them are in disagreement with Storch's analysis.

This includes mine, which I reproduce here.

Anyone who thinks newspapers can survive on local content needs to spend a few weeks on Twitter. Here is a medium where news arrives in near real time, is reliable (since misinformation is rapidly corrected by others), and relevant. This applies just as well in a global environment. I have seen real reports from people on the scene of demonstrations in Thailand and Athens, and learnt about the supply of gas from Russia to Slovakia from people in cold buildings. Twitter and similar channels tell me about traffic jams on my route downtown, about power outages and emergencies in ways that no newspaper or even television station can ever dream of achieving.

Twitter has merely brought something that has been happening for a very long time into the mainstream. As a case in point, I learnt about the death of Princess Diana via an international online chat almost three hours before the local media picked it up. This is a decade ago. Times have changed.

Information is now free and it will remain so. Any attempt to charge for access to it is absolutely doomed. The only hope that news media, particularly "print" media have for survival is by adding value. This means aggregating sources, adding perspective, and performing astute analysis. Even so, most of the revenue from these activities will be derived from online advertising, and those revenues will be orders of magnitude below what the industry currently sees as normal.

The newspaper as we know it is dead. There is no model that will resuscitate it, period. Rigor mortis has set in, the patient just doesn't fully realize it yet.

A New Internet Term - Bacn (or is it BACN?)

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 01:58:55 -0500

Chris Brogan recently blogged about some people who coined the term "Bacn," defined as "any email you receive that isn’t spam, but isn’t exactly a personal message either". The essence is that Bacn isn't Spam, because you signed up for it somehow.
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Farewell, Dear Globe

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 14:29:22 -0600

I learned to read from the pages of the Globe and Mail newspaper. For longer than I'm prepared to admit (as in -- since Grade 2) opening that paper has been part of my morning ritual. I've stuck with it through thick and thin, borne with some of it's ill-fated attempts at investigative journalism, it's deep insights, it's left-wing sense of social justice and it's right wing apologists who heaped praise on (choose a pejorative) like Conrad Black, even it's tragically misdirected hiring of Christie Blatchford (complete with some contractual clause that seems to guarantee her at least a sliver of space on the front page every time she writes an article, no matter what).

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Intellectual Property in a Digital Era

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:28:34 -0600

Last night I attended a presentation by Doug Hyatt, Business Economics Professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Business. Although billed as focusing on the music industry, his comments were actually more broad ranging, even abstract.

I guess that is a telling indication of how early we are in the process of adapting to the digital era. When very smart people who make their careers from studying these problems speak in abstract terms, you know we have a long way to go.
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The Future of the Gardiner Expressway

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 16:37:00 -0500

Last month the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) released a report on dealing with the Gardiner Expressway an ageing elevated highway that cuts through the centre of downtown Toronto and pretty universally regarded as an eyesore.

In general it's a well reasoned report, but it's striking for its continuing embrace of car culture.
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Things You Can Learn from a Survey

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Sun, 14 May 2006 22:40:00 -0500

I just fielded a call from Ipsos-Reid, a large and reputable polling firm. The subject was Canada's "diplomatic and development" role in Afghanistan. The sponsor of the survey was the Federal Government. It began by asking what aspects of the media's coverage I was aware of. Then it went on to ask about how I felt about the role, conveniently ignoring anything to do with the military's current combat operations. Then it asked if I agreed or disagreed with various aspects of our non-military activities. After going through all of these items, it asked again how I felt about the overall role (still restricted to diplomacy and development, of course).

The repetition of the question is fascinating. You expect that really what's being measured here is this question: "If we keep telling Canadians about all the good things, will they change their opinion to support the mission, conveniently ignoring the occasional body bag (which we'll hide by blocking the media from showing them)?"

But that's not the reason for this entry...
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Abandoning the Blogosphere?

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 17:20:00 -0600

Leah McLaren recently wrote an interesting article, titled "Logging out of the blogosphere" where she describes the reasoning behind her decision to stop reading blogs. I must admit I find myself agreeing with her in many respects. Even correcting for the volumes of garbage from spam and search engine placement games, the signal to noise ratio -- the ratio of useful, accurate, or meaningful content to incoherent, unoriginal and redundant content is disturbingly low. This is a problem with ideas that get picked up en masse on the net. Universal accessibility implies average results. For this a favourite phrase comes to mind: It's almost like half the people have below average intelligence.

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When Advertiser Integration Goes Terribly Terribly Wrong

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:25:00 -0600

I caught an episode of HGTV's "Designer Superstar Challenge" last night. It's a pretty hokey pseudo-reality show where a bunch of hopeful "designer host" candidates compete in hopes of landing a job hosting a show on HGTV. Sound like a premise for bad programming? You bet it does. You keep on thinking that the winner will wind up hosting the next challenge, and they'll just keep on endlessly searching for a new host until they find one that's good. It's the perfection of cannibalistic programming, each new season consuming the previous winner.

What takes this from merely cheesy to "bad movie bad" -- as in so bad it's funny -- is Home Depot's sponsorship. More accurately, it's the gymnastics the show goes through in an attempt to integrate Home Depot that took this episode from bad to laugh-out-loud awful.

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Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a Waste of Time

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 15:23:00 -0600

I read a blog post today by Simon Phipps (DRM and the Death of a Culture) which was a well reasoned complaint about the constraints that DRM can place on use of content. Yet no matter how well reasoned, nor argued from which position, these arguments on DRM don't matter. They don't matter because DRM will never work on static content. This is so basic, so obvious that I'm not sure why anyone ever thought it would. In fact, let's make it more general: all copy protection technologies, past, present, and future do not and will not prevent copying of non-interactive media. In fact they're a colossal waste of time, effort, and money that only serve to inconvenience legitimate users (and as Phipps points out, kill culture).

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Terrorism as Economic Warfare

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:20:00 -0600

I did a quick search for the title of this post and mostly found references to "asymmetric warfare", meaning warfare where there's a large difference between each side's military capability or methods of engagement. It's a term frequently used to refer to terrorism. Then there's economic warfare, which can be part of a military effort or completely non-military in nature.

It's interesting to note that Osama Bin Laden's version of terrorism makes for some pretty fine economic warfare in and of itself. One wonders what Bin Laden's total investment has been in his adventures to date. Probably nothing over a few hundred million dollars or so, including labour, materials, equipment, etc.

But what has the rest of the world invested in fighting him? The U.S. tab is probably well over a hundred billion dollars. Add the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus in investments by other "coalition partners" like the U.K. and it's not unreasonable to double that.

So that's a thousand to one return on investment, conservatively. Worse yet, given a reasonably well established and autonomous organization, Bin Laden's cost of ongoing operations is a fraction of his investment to date. Yet the cost of overthrowing governments, replacing infrastructure, improving economic opportunities and installing a resilient democracy remain astronomical. Moreover one can be cerain that the U.S. has invested a mere fraction of its final cost in Iraq so far. What's that take the terrorist return on investment to? One to 100,000?

As far as I'm concerned the USSR collapsed under the economic weight of the cold war. With a far less efficient economy, it was only a matter of time before the West won. Now we find ourselves in a similar situation. All terrorists have to do is motivate the world's larger military powers to mobilize their resources a few times and then wait. We'll fall under the weight of being dramatically less economically efficient at the game. Asymmetrical economic warfare indeed.

Splice Babies

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 14:53:00 -0600

DNA testing has given sperm banks an interesting challenge. The concept of an "anonymous donor" has gone out the window. Now a simple, affordable DNA test can verify parentage. Perhaps of more concern is that as more people contribute DNA to public databases, it's becoming easier to identify previously unknown siblings, which leaves just a short step to the father.

With genetic manipulation becoming such an easy thing to do, how long will it be before sperm banks start offering "synthetic" fathers? A few genes from this donor, a few from that, and a few more from over here to finish the job. A baby born from the resulting DNA could theoretically have any number of fathers, none of them traceable to an individual.

Of course it might be a tricky business if there's more interrelationships between genes than previously expected. Then again, given sufficient care, the outcomes of various combinations could be tracked, selected for deireable traits, and in no time the banks would be out in the market with competing "superbaby sperm".

Now there's an ethical mess.

The True Cost of Commuting

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 17:27:00 -0600

Every time I see a freeway full of cars, I get angry. Aside from the environmental issues, which should get everyone riled up, I see a great mass of human brain power devoted to nothing. I see lost productivity. By lost productivity I mean not only in the traditional economic sense, but lost time. Time to spend with family and friends; time to play, to create. The "human capital" that we squander in service of our automotive fetish is astronomical. It's just an extra bonus that we're doing grave damage to the planet at the same time.

In the Greater Toronto Area alone, I wouldn't be surprised if we squander a million person-hours per day getting from home to work and back. If we say that this applies to a population base of roughly five million, extrapolate that to a North American population of 300 million, we come up with a cool 60 million hours. Of course, Toronto has legendary problems with traffic congestion, so let's be conservative. Divide by two and call it 150 million as a ballpark estimate for average. If everyone chose to work those hours, using an eight hour day, that represents a workforce of almost 19 million. Of course given the choice, probably 15 million of those would choose to watch television, but that still leaves four million to do valuable things, like think and create, to contribute to society. Even if my estimates are way out of whack, that's a lot.

Clearly there's a huge indirect payoff to building better, faster mass transit systems with comfortable environments that allow people to do something other than play human sardine. Then at least while you're stuck in motion, you have a chance of getting some work done instead of focusing on not getting in an accident. Is this likely to happen? No. Government policies seem to enshrine -- if not deify -- car culture. Support of the automotive sector is taken for granted as "the engine of the economy", when it's really an engine of decay. But trying to change this is tantamount to tilting at windmills, particularly since the capital investment required would probably be in the trillions.

Consumer Culture is Consuming Culture

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 16:19:00 -0600

The way I see it, there are two classes of activity that people engage in: creating and consuming. These classes apply quite broadly, from creating wealth and consuming goods, to creating art and absorbing information (a form of consumption) by reading a book.

Left to their own devices, I believe most humans have a need to create. Whether it be knitting a scarf or developing a cancer fighting drug, creating is an intrinsic part of human existence.

Yet in our mass-marketed, consumer driven culture, individual creativity seems to have suffered greatly. Cultural gateways such as large publishers and mololithic music and entertainment companies arbitrate and edit our views, selecting what we see based more on economic potential than cultural value. Thousands of people are creating works that may be of value, but we rarely discover them. Individuals who might otherwise be creating their own works are watching television with their minds only partially engaged, or worse, expressing their creativity by assembling the latest and greatest over-branded, over-promoted consumer goods into a "personal statement" of cookie-cutter uniformity.

The Internet is an immensely positive disruptive force that provides hope of to reversing this destructive trend. Once musicians discover that they can both find an audience and earn a substantial living by dealing directly with fans, record companies will cease to add value. They will lose control and become "disintermediated" in short order. New intermediaries who provide value that is relevant to the Internet age will thrive (officialcommunity.net is a good example).

Large entertainment companies will be restricted to projects that require large capital investments, but even then the prevalence of easy copying will limit their potential returns, which will be reflected in smaller production budgets. The days of the quarter-billion dollar blockbuster are numbered.

Sites like lulu.com will revolutionize publishing. Blogging and photo upload sites give a stage to hundreds of thousands of people with something to say, or with images to share; They provide a platform for creativity.

Idealists refer to this as the "democratization" of culture, but they couldn't be more wrong. Any widely distributed, truly democratic process is subject to displacement by larger commercial interests with profit as a motive. Ironically what's required are large, strong, profit-oriented corporations who embrace "quasi-democratic access" as a paradigm, and who find a way to profit without interfering with the mechanics of that paradigm. This is why Google, Yahoo, eBay, and even Amazon have become culturally important institutions. These companies will serve as the seed for a new cultural renaissance.