schrockmedia

Looking at hotspots in a multi-ethnic community

2010-08-07T21:50:00.001-07:00

Long Beach is a highly heterogeneous community. According to the 2000 census, 36% of the population was Latino or Hispanic, 15% were African-American, 12% were Asian, and 45% were White/Caucasian. Since that point, Latinos have edged out non-Latino "Caucasians" for the majority. For a recent paper that will be presented at IAMCR 2010, I sought to locate several communication hotspots where residents of various ethnicities congregate and share neighborhood stories. My study looks at the communication ecologies and motivations of the two dominant ethnic groups in Long Beach (Hispanic and Anglo) for vaccinating (or not) against the recent H1N1 flu. Following from Holley Wilkin’s upcoming ICA paper, I decided that this was a good example of a time when participants who are difficult to locate through the storytelling network can be found by looking at the communication action context, or CAC. Therefore, my goal was to find communication hotspots of activity where these two groups would be present.

I started at the Healthy City website, which has a useful feature for mapping demographic data over geographic area, such as zip code or city. Latino populations are most prevalent in central Long Beach in an area to the southwest of Signal Hill, but also throughout the city with the exception of the southeast and northeast. Next, I considered the how green spaces and other features of Long Beach created places where people congregate. I started with parks, because they are easily visible on a map, and I found them to be areas where residents don’t mind being approached (as compared with bus stops or stores, which have more specific purposes, as residents are en route from one place to another).

It’s important to consider how much of a role time played in the type of activity occurring at communication hotspots. A few hours (or the same time on a Sunday vs. a Saturday) can be the difference between a quiet, subdued atmosphere and one that is packed with families grilling, playing sports, and celebrating cultural milestones (e.g. birthdays, quinceañeras). For instance, the Veteran’s Pier is quiet during the week, but on the weekends it becomes a hub of activity for athletes, beach-goers, families, fishermen, and tourists. A similar type of transformation can be seen when late at night, an open, friendly area can turn into a place that elicits fear of residents because it’s where gang tensions are played out. One surprise to me about the pier was the sheer variety of residents of differing ethnicities that use it, even ones that are not dominant in the immediate area.

The second street shopping area (1/2 mile away from the pier) is busy but more homogenously Anglo. I had much less luck running surveys here; maybe it was because Anglos are more used to being polled, or there were other people-with-clipboards in the area at the time (Greenpeace), so residents readied their stock declining response as soon as I was in range. Even with a good introductory pitch and appearance (I always snap my student ID on) it was tough going. The most useful hotspots for me were the ones that were not centered around the spending of money. Rather, they were nondenominational destinations with a range of uses, none officially prescribed. For instance, Recreation Park (at 7th and Park) serves as magnets for larger gatherings, which would be far more difficult and expensive to organize in private spaces. It’s in a liminal zone between more Latino-heavy areas and those that are Anglo-dominant. From my frequent visits with my daughter, I would say 90% of visitors there are either Asian or Latino. Gatherings tend to peak in mid-afternoon and go until dusk, while mornings are still quiet.

One aspect of community hotspots that I came away thinking about is how they are connected through cheap and easy transportation. Long Beach is a relatively (for southern California) bike-friendly community, and the path along the beach connects Latino-heavy areas with areas such as downtown and the pier. Groups are connected through mobility, which makes them particularly difficult to speak with, and makes timing all that more important. Previous Metamorphosis investigations have not found very much neighborhood talk on busses, but I remain optimistic that the unseen pathways of busses, bike paths, and walking routes serve valuable purposes in the creation of diverse neighborhood spaces.

I had much better luck in recruiting Anglos from two street fairs, one a monthly “art walk” and the second on 4th street, tied in with Bike Week. I quickly found that it was easier to get people to fill out surveys if they are already not in motion (how Newtonian), such as those waiting in line or watching a musician. This unfortunately affected the type of person I could engage with, but it seemed to be a necessary trade-off. I recruited two bilingual students from the Latino community to help administer the Spanish-language version of the survey. They were able to get similar response rates as I was, around 8 – 10 per hour for a short 10-question survey.

iMac and netbook sync'd for academic work

2010-02-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of talk in my cohort about technologies for academia, so I thought I'd post up my experiences. At the beginning of the semester, my iBook was dying. I could splurge on another iBook, which didn't hold much appeal because it was pretty heavy and expensive. I had just purchased a powerful home machine, a large-screen iMac, so had no desire to buy another one. Instead, I was interested in a smaller and cheaper netbook that could be used independently of the mac, and was full-featured but light. My requirements were:

1. A light netbook I can take with me. Operating system was not important, but I wanted a large screen, bluetooth, battery life, and keyboard.
2. Nothing of consequence will be stored on the netbook.
3. Must be able to run office and do in-text citations (linked between netbook and iMac)
4. All files, notes, and references from the laptop should be seamlessly shared with the iMac
The netbook I chose was the Aspire One with a 11.6" screen, because it was cheap ($329) and had bluetooth (can't deal with trackpads), a nice big screen, moderate battery life (a "6-cell" that lasts around 7 hours), and a full-sized keyboard. At about 2 1/2 pounds, it's still half the weight of an iBook and about a third the price.

Initially I installed Ubuntu on it, which ended up being a mistake. The video card wasn't supported, meaning anything graphical was sluggish. Videos were unplayable. I couldn't get Zotero (a references program based in Firefox) to sync with Open Office. Ubuntu has no reliable software for marking up (highlighting) PDFs. The Evernote client was buggy, both the web-based version and the Windows version run through Wine. Audio would drop out every 5-10 minutes when watching a movie.

I slogged through for a semester before breaking down and installing Windows XP. It ended up being a good move, because everything runs just fine. The video card runs accelerated, which makes the 11.6" screen usable. I'm not thrilled about running Windows, but Ubuntu was getting torturous. All class notes and bits of information are dumped into Evernote, and all other class files are sync'd with Dropbox. So my netbook can get run over by a truck (or dropped in a storm drain) and I've lost no data. All Dropbox data are backed up with Time Machine on the iMac side. For software, I'm running:

Openoffice
Zotero (for citations)
Firefox (for Zotero)
Evernote (for note-taking and organization)
Dropbox (for sync'ing class PDFs and anything not in Zotero)
Dia (for diagrams and wireframes)
VLC (for videos)

NBC + Comcast = TV Nowhere?

2010-01-05T08:46:00.000-08:00

The new year started out with fallout from the (contested) merger between Comcast, the largest cable service provider, and NBC-Universal. Their new product is called "TV Everywhere," which will deliver streaming cable service over the Internet to subscribers. Much as the entertainment industry has previously, these companies spun the removing the access of millions to television as benefiting consumers. The argument goes something like: choice is king, and subscriptions improve the quality of content. This frames seismic shifts in control, which have consistently eroded public access and utility, as being beneficial to the average citizen. This attitude is pervasive even among those who ostensibly police broadcasters.

"The consumer will be king," said Colin Crowell, senior counselor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. "You'll be able to get your own set-top box that does all the whiz-bang things you want it to do, and you'll be in control."

Unfortunately, it's not a good situation for consumers. The goal of companies, of course, is to maximize revenue. They seek mergers to add value to existing properties, and this one may open up entirely new ways to monetize content. The Internet is a goldmine of contextual subscriber information, which can inform advertisements directed to consumer tastes. Most importantly, "TV Everywhere," which would forbid cable channels to stream for free online, would add to the cable companies existing empires, while attempting to tame the Internet by restricting free content. As Josh Silver points out, cable companies are terrified of subscribers canceling their subscriptions in light of widely available online content.

NBC and Comcast are set to appear at a Senate hearing later this month, but don't expect the deal to be blocked. They never are. At most, Kerry & co. will demand minor provisions and make several bold statements. As McChesney points out, questioning the commercial nature of the established media system is verboten. Making demands of them, such as ensuring a reasonable amount of educational programming or universal access, is out of the question.

The other more ominous threats are that this merger would make it easier for Warner to prosecute those sharing their content online, or even throttle connection speeds for connections to competitors to NBC on Comcast. If "TV Everywhere" spreads, well, everywhere, there would be little incentive to continue providing broadcast signals to non-cable-users. They are generally lower on the socio-economic ladder, and have the least amount of disposable income. Network broadcasters who broadcast through television frequencies are already trying to extract retransmission fees from cable companies, to get the same double-dipping revenue (ads + retransmission fees) that cable networks currently enjoy.

On the lighter side, two buddies in Florida went through Morgan & Morgan (who notoriously run late-night commercials to dredge up injury claims) to file a petition against News Corp, who was negotiating with Time Warner Cable, who were threatening to cut off access to Fox stations. Suffice to say that when Americans are filing lawsuites about a football game rather than vocally complaining about the sorry state of our fourth estate, we are in a very bad place.

Their complaint, filed by Morgan & Morgan law firm, claims that the two men "can never be made whole" if they miss the New Year's Day game.
According to the filing, Thomas Moore and Richard Anderson "have alleged and will demonstrate that [News Corp.'s] actions are immoral, unethical, oppressive, and unscrupulous."

What to leave in 2009?

2010-01-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

It’s the first day of the New Year. I woke up, ate some of the almond cake I baked for last night, put my daughter down for her first nap, and looked again at world to see what has changed. My resolutions are to ditch certain trappings I’ve been locked into for the last few years. This break is a necessary one, part of the shift I must go through to re-focus my energies on topics of importance and interest.

1. “Social media” research that focuses on adoption and interface questions on advertising-driven websites. Generally, social media have been adopted by various players – advertising, media, and entertainment – as a tool. It is part of the picture in online media use, but by no means the entire one. Much of my repulsion derives from my moving away from business-related topics - been there, done that, tired of the same old Los Angeles rhetoric. On its own, social media just doesn’t raise very interesting questions in 2010. This year there was an abundance of conference papers on SNSs, which I believe mostly stems from young researchers arriving who have a familiarity in the area. My inclination is that researchers in industry and academia will thoroughly cover questions surrounding social media.

2. Denying the intensely conflicting (and highly moralistic) effects transparency has. Online shaming is seen as a solution to various problems, such as social inequality and government accountability. I’ve come to believe that this is intensely problematic, but most, including some very sharp thinkers, aren’t yet considering the ways that general transparency will serve to level power. Much of this is because examples are case studies. Still, there’s at least as much evidence to suggest that transparency is, at best, limited in benefits and problematic - see: publicizing information on women seeking abortions in Texas, and the intensely ironic lack of transparency exhibited by online companies that are part of this latest wave.

3. Being a “technology guy”... enough said. I’ll likely always integrate technologies with my thinking, but the context will be richer and quite different.

4. A focus on individual characteristics. From my work with media system dependency, demographics and individual psychology have limited effects on the relationships individuals develop with media. Much of the action in media research is at the meso level, in communities and organizations. Here there are also rich connections with political science and cultural studies, the import of which is lost if we isolate our focus to, say, individual psychology.

5. Demanding immediate reactions. We really can’t keep this up, people. The media do not need to cover news contemporaneously, and I don’t need to email you back within 5 minutes. It takes much effort to keep up, and there are so few items that are truly important.

Simulacra in Film

2009-11-24T23:37:00.000-08:00

Posting from a class reaction paper.

For a change, I thought I’d take a different tack for this week’s paper, and discuss film. I feel that Baudrillard’s observation that Los Angeles is fed by Disneyland, like a power station, is reversed. The media coming out this city feeds on its own decentralized power, through writers and producers in love with their own perceptions. I saw Thom Andersen’s obsessive Los Angeles Plays Itself immediately before I moved here, which addresses how we have encountered this city before we arrived here, through characters and scenes floating in fictional movies that have become our reality. I knew Los Angeles through Michael Douglas in Falling Down, navigating south central Los Angeles, in all its supposedly foreign glory; Charlton Henston rocketing through the streets in Omega Man; the starkly-lit Bradbury Building in Bladerunner; and the LA river chase scene in the cult punk flick Repo Man, which paints the city as a wasteland of mundanity, full of, as Harry Dean Stanton (as Bud) put it, “ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate em,” as they pursued drug dealers, aliens, and money. I learned that Los Angeles in films was an urban wasteland: unearthly, dangerous, and complex.

Anderson shows us how much reality has dissolved behind a veil of simulacra, and there is indeed no underlying ground left. Polanski’s Chinatown in 1974 set Los Angeles remains among LA’s most memorable film appearances, despite that it is a fiction, woven from various myths and personalities that resonate with the audience. The antagonist is frequently ephemeral, as the plot revolves around a water dispute. The plot was even built on a myth of the founding of Los Angeles on water stolen from the Owens river valley. The gritty film noir Los Angeles films might refer to corruption and greed in the city’s past, but are merely dealing in symbolic touchstones. As Andersen narrates, “there once was a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.” The Los Angeles that has been propagated is gone, replaced by a false edifice, while the city itself has shifted and grown beneath it. The city has been defined by its rapid growth, and recent immigrants change the city before it has time to be illustrated.

Still, entertainment needs fodder, and the mill is always churning, squeezing every last location in Los Angeles County. Dexter, ostensibly taking place in Miami, is shot on-site in southern California, particularly in my city of Long Beach, which despite its size (500,000 people), is typically acknowledged only as being part of Los Angeles… Long-Beach-plays-Los-Angeles-plays-Miami. Visible throughout the series are the marina, El Dorado park, and the beach next to Shoreline Drive with the building in the opening scene of Die Hard. Even though my hair stylist came home to find a note on her door from Dexter producers to see about renting her house out for a shoot, there is no way to, as Baudrillard posits, “inject the real” (p. 22) to battle amorphous media entities. Michael Bay quite literally destroys downtown Los Angeles in Transformers, which is strangely treated with no irony. “The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power” (p. 21), and with our Governator, how could we? Our state is literally run by a media creation.

Unlike the comparatively united front of Disney, which has a location in southern California, Los Angeles is playing shades of itself, fractured narratives of truths, myth, and complete fictions rooted in geographic locations that have only the pretense of reality. There is nothing to inject, because nothing can be injected – truth has been subsumed by the entertainment mill in an ongoing hegemonic process.

The most affecting film I’ve seen on the effects of post-modernism and globalism is Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Shot on a low budget and using stock footage alongside hand-held shots taken worldwide (particularly in Asia), he does not so much peel away the layers of the post-modern onion vainly in search of that “ground” that Andersen does, so much as examine the way globalism and media collapse space and time. Sans Soleil follows on themes raised by La Jetée: time as a cause of history is questioned through image series. Here he goes further, searching for a way to disembed (as Giddens would have it) imagery from their political and social meanings. He here takes inspiration from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, referring to The Zone. In Marker’s interpretation of The Zone, here a digital video filtering system, authorship is disembedded , released to be appropriated in art. Marker demonstrates the new meaning footage can have when processed and deployed in a different space or time, although his conclusions are elusive. Certainly, according to Marker, using images of a past as a history presents a dangerous over-simplification (Montero, 2007). As Butler observes, released from concerns of the subject, “agency is always and only a political prerogative” (p. 163). Perhaps in Marker’s Zone, images are searching for a context, reversing the typically causal connection of context determining images, much as La Jetée plays with narrative by questioning time. This raises similar questions as Butler’s example of critiquing Powell’s euphemisms for bombing in Kuwait, removing the subject to open up questions of victimization and meaning in an intensely communication-based context.
Ironically, given Baudrillard’s concept of “museumification,” the most real place I’ve been in Los Angeles presents myth as scientific fact alongside historical iconoclasts and oddities. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, housed in an unmarked building in Culver City a stone’s throw from Sony Pictures, is positively sincere in its desire to inject reality back into its subjects. Here, bats can fly through walls, you can cure stammering by eating mice on toast, and horns can grow from human heads. Yet, there is also a rather comprehensive set of dioramas on the history of trailer parks, and upstairs, the rather intense (and complete[!]) collection of paintings of dogs from the Russian space program can be found next to the tearoom. Even the bathroom has real flowers, which I can’t help but feel is a gesture to the real. Authorship is here revered, but it is also inconsequential, likely a lie you must critique to be part of the experience. You begin to question everything. Is that machine that has been out of order for two years deliberately presented as broken? You are permitted to discover and evaluate, to pick up and touch, as the space is “to be traversed, not penetrated,” as Barthes puts it. It’s refreshingly not entertainment, edu-tainment, or a game – these are genuine exhibits that play with the idea of museumification and interrogate the real, ostensibly just outside the door in the city of Los Angeles.

Montero, D. (2007). Film also ages: time and images in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Studies in French Cinema, 6(2), 107-115.

Back to the Classroom

2009-08-14T21:37:00.000-07:00

I'll be a student again tomorrow, starting a Ph.D at USC. This shift has been a long time in coming; I've been thinking about doctoral programs since I received my MA and moved to California some three years ago. On one hand, I'm completely thrilled. I have a big list of research topics that I am dying to crack open. The lifestyle will probably agree with me, as I've been known to be a huge geek. (I'm brushing up on my APA style as I draft this by reading the 6th edition manual) On another, it's a proclamation that I have much to learn. In that, I can't help but feel humble. The state of communication research is highly fractured, fast-paced, and high-stakes. My past research interests seem like they need more focus and specificity to fully mature. Expect this blog to turn into an area where I'll draft new ideas and proposals over the next few years.

Meaning from Iran's Watershed Moment

2009-06-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

There is no other post possible right now than one on the Iranian elections, where Ahmadinejad’s claimed victory over Moussavi has resulted in continued fallout. In western perceptions, this is going to be a watershed moment for Twitter, the moment where it proves its worth. Communication coming out of Iran is at a crawl due to lack of cell and Internet connectivity, and journalists have been officially banned from the streets. The number of videos coming out of Iran since the elections has lessened in recent days. So, when the world cannot be watching (as the 60s cry goes), it is certainly tweeting.

Twitter hasn’t so much filled in the communication gaps to get messages out of Iran (creaky old email appears to be the primary method) but it has served as a valuable mode of propagating grassroots information. #Iranelection is still a top-trending topic and will likely be so for some time. The fact that CNN is now examining Twitter feeds live (which Jon Stewart recently lampooned on the Daily Show) makes a case for the downsides of the new agenda-setting role of the technology: our desire for a constant stream of news may simply not be possible, and by using unreliable or unverified sources, we risk entirely changing the role of news.

The Neda video (warning: very graphic content) in particular is extremely affecting. It's a short film of the last moments on this earth of a woman who has been shot in the chest. This small moment has been extrapolated from its surroundings and presented as symbolic of a movement. The moment of death can be replayed over and over. This is both extremely problematic (basically a snuff film, and a private moment that arguably shouldn’t be seen by millions of strangers) and gives agency to an important meme (hopefully provoking discussion and thought on the Iranian election). #Neda has emerged on Twitter as an important tag of its own.

The end result of the protests is unclear, but will certainly be referenced as a pivotal moment in history. As of today, the numbers of protesters has dwindled due to the government crackdown. Although it has been painted as only a middle-class affair, there is dissent
about how true this is.

Mirrored at Annenberg Online Communities.

Thurston Moore's avant-garde want list

2009-06-19T23:01:00.000-07:00

In my off time, I'm a record collector. I'm a record collector to the point that I sometimes look back on my habits and wonder what's wrong with me, and wonder why I can't be happy just listening to top 40 commercial radio. I mean, when you get really amped about the Michael Snow LP on Chatham Square or a Folkways record called "Music from an equatorial microcosm," a switch has really flipped inside you. If you're similarly afflicted, check out the below.

A while back I got a copy of Thurston Moore's avant-garde wants list (PDF). It's pretty impressive that way back in the day Thurston was after Raymond Boni on Futura, Drum Dance to the Motherland, and OFAMFA. It's a worthwhile read, if heavy on lots of european jazz that I don't personally find too interesting. It's easy to forget in 2009 how difficult it was back then to find overseas and private-pressed records.

When schwag goes bad – eBay sends me a gift

2009-04-02T14:06:00.000-07:00

I have a little eBay problem. The auction website has grown my minor record collecting habit into a full-blown epidemic. I’ve been on the site for 10 years, and have thousands of searches stored in RSS format, which I compulsively refresh every few hours. Sometimes sellers use techniques for upping hits on their items, such as using blocks of keywords unrelated to the item. This makes my searches return dozens of unrelated items. I flag these auctions, which takes about 30 seconds, no more than a few times a week. Today eBay sent me a weird little notebook in thanks for being part of their “enhanced member reporting program.” Is that what I was part of? I had no idea.

What’s the problem with this? Well, symbolic recognition (stars, votes, friends) is the standard for online communities. When I reported items, I was mainly just happy to get them off my screen, and the sellers rarely spammed again. To receive a physical object for activities I didn’t intend to get paid for was a strange violation of accepted standards. It made me feel like some kind of paid informant - an e-snitch, if you will. The gift itself seems made for snitchery, too, like I’m going to sit around and take detailed notes on items I deem to be unfit for posting. In short, it had the opposite effect on me that eBay was hoping for.

That said, it is a pretty nice, compact, real leather notebook that I will likely use in the future. At least, when I won’t be made fun of for having an eBay-branded notebook.

Is social media an industry? Sometimes yes, but mostly no

2009-03-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

This is an edit of my response to “Is Social Media an Industry?” on mashable

I was surprised to see that nearly 70% of people who voted in an online poll believed that social media was an industry. To my mind, the answer is both yes and no, depending on how you conceptualize “industry” and “social media.” First, there is the issue of the impetus for the question. Just because many people are interested in it, that doesn’t mean it is an industry. There is no established measure of how Google search terms relate to the size of industries, although increased searches do correlate with general interest by individuals.

Social media could be considered an industry for non-market information economies, of the type Yochai Benkler identifies as being critical for the success of the Internet and vastly different from market economies. For instance, social network sites could be considered an industry, as they quite literally build on and trade in social interactions. However, they are poorly, if at all, monetized.

More generally speaking, in market economies, I would argue that the vast majority of applications for social media are not related to a specific industry, but instead are tools used by various industries. Social media (plural: blogs, Twitter, SNSs, etc.) are not an industry. Also, industries are not defined just by popularity, but by the products they create and professionals they involve. "Social media" is a rather ambiguous term used to describe a collection of (mostly) online technologies that rely on connections between people to operate. These technologies are quite disparate, and often individuals and companies use them for entirely different purposes.

In this sense, social media are a vehicle for other industries, such as advertising, journalism, and software development. Each of these industries has very specific products and practices. Social media are integrated on various levels across these industries, but alone, they don’t amount to very much. Social media are tools for various industries, but are typically not their own industry.

Thru-you Mashups

2009-03-21T23:01:00.000-07:00

Much as I initially didn't want to like Kutiman's YouTube mash-up compositions, I've come to the conclusion that they are undeniably great. First they are compositionally solid tunes that hold up as more than just tinkering or experimentation. There's also a utopian vibe to kutiman's mash-ups. Musicians of all types - old and young, male and female, of all races and ethnicities - come together under the umbrella of music. Guided tutorials are layered with private bedroom vocalists, product demos, and student performances. In Kutiman's eyes, everyone's videos are equally fair sample fodder.

Ultimately, what I think makes Thru-you succeed is that the personalities of the musicians comes through in their performances and little visual cues. I find myself wondering what the story is behind the mother singing soulfully in "Someday," smiling while holding her toddler, or if the cornball guitarist on "The Mother of all Funk Chords" sincerely believes in his rocking solo. Kutiman takes care to show the musicians' little performance quirks, pacing or talking as they warm up or (god forbid) give the camera a "solo face."

There's a touch of magic here; it seems so improbable that the vocalist, keyboard, flute, and wind chime in "Just a Lady" could mesh together and come out sounding like a dead ringer for Portishead. If ever there was a case to be made for fewer restrictions on copyright (a la Lessig or Negativland alike), here it is.

Reaction to "Dunbar number" hype

2009-03-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

The recent finding that Facebook members communicate regularly with a very small group is not surprising. Sites such as Facebook exist to keep track of a range of friendships, which some have taken to be a test of an online Dunbar Number. There are number of reasons why this is a difficult comparison to make. As danah boyd succinctly discusses, there are a number of reasons why the “Dunbar number” simply does not apply to online relationships. It is a theoretical number based in the real world, describes “grooming” activities by primates, and was developed from observations by anthropologists in non-first-world countries. And, of course, Facebook connections do not capture the entire range of social connections of an individual, just the connections on a single site. Even if you accept that a “Dunbar number” exists online (to play devil's advocate), this does not disprove the utility of these sites.

Many SNS connections are ultra “loose ties” that would seem to fall outside of the purview of a Dunbar number, while others are connections with close friends or family. My personal feeling is that even loose ties can come into more central play in a person’s life through these sites over time, regardless of whether these friendships began online or offline. There are a number of reasons that people may productively use SNSs to maintain large groups of extremely loose ties. These are friends from work or around town that may emerge as close ties at a point in the future, business “contacts” that are not friendship-related but need to be maintained, and individuals who used to be close ties but now have fallen out of favor due to geographic limitations (such as the classic old school buddies).

People gain personal satisfaction, financial security, and community benefit from online socialization with online groups. These groups have very tangible beneficial effects, and tie groups of close-tie groups together, providing valuable “bridging” that facilitates propagation of ideas. These sites are also increasingly a platform for other activities, including bona fide applications that expand the reach of SNSs beyond text and images, a convergence of activities as well as socializations.

Why individuals only interact consistently with a small number of friends can be explained, in part, by Facebook's filtering. Filtering is a key part of social promotion, without which it would be difficult to harness the “wisdom of crowds.” Facebook recognizes the people you communicate the most with, and promote their news feed items above those of others. This is completely natural utility – why would you want to have daily updates from someone you haven’t spoken with in ten years? Unless of course, you renew your friendship and start to interact more with them, at which point Facebook would recognize the increased activity. And you are always free to select “I want to see less from [user]” in the feeds. Even if people are exposed to an over abundance of messages from online “friends,” I doubt this can be shown to contribute to a meaningful negative effect. This “overload hypothesis” is frequently promoted by the media as a death by distraction (so to speak), making bugaboos of everything from cell phones to email. Never mind that if you show someone too much information, they simply do not retain everything, only what they frequently access or are useful in their life. Excess information is not retained, mentally urinated out like an excess of water-soluble vitamins.

RIP Ian Carr

2009-02-25T22:34:00.000-08:00

Another musical giant has left us; I was profoundly saddened to read today of the passing of the British trumpeter Ian Carr. He wrote and performed the most beautiful jazz music of his generation in the 60s, particularly in a quintet with Don Rendell. He was also one of the few musicians who was able to gracefully make the jump to "electric" jazz in the 70s, recording key sides on the Vertigo label (more known for its rock offerings). In addition to his work as a musician, he was also author of several books, including, in my opinion, the best biography of Miles Davis ever written. The world is a less bold, vibrant, and musical place without him. Even if you've never considered yourself a "jazz person," you owe yourself to listen once, late at night, to "Dusk Fire"...

Online Solicitation: why is it still all about chatting?

2009-02-21T14:04:00.000-08:00

It strikes me as amazing that with all the attention on Internet safety, we don’t yet even have a taxonomy of online “solicitation.” This lack of definition has led to all kinds of misunderstandings on the part of parents, the media, and those seeking to understand studies on the topic. For instance, “online solicitation” includes unwanted (and in many cases, wanted as well) contact with a sexualized theme. This includes teasing (say about real or fictionalized gender preference), sexual harassment (designed to intimidate or threaten), and, coercive requests for cybersex or pictures. These communications range from the merely risqué to those designed to threaten to entice youth into sexualized online discussions. Depending on their age, it could be difficult to get youth to even understand the distinctions between these various modes, which have vastly different goals and motivations.

The latest media blitz, partly in response to the Berkman report, attempts to simplify the issue by focusing on the number of sexual offenders online (See: “MySpace: 90,000 sexual offenders removed from site”). This follows a pattern of individuals less interested in solid research and discourse than sensationalized presentations, and of course, overlook the role of the minors. I’m not going to revisit the areas of concern that danah boyd, Amanda Lenhart, Mimi Ito and others have covered well (minor-minor relationships, everyday usage, etc.). Rather my query is techno-social in nature: why do a majority of online solicitations (77%-86%) still predominantly occur through chat (Wolak et al., 2006)?

Also, from the perspective of law enforcement, 86% of Internet solicitation incidents that resulted in arrest involved communication that first occurred over chat or instant messaging. This is a fascinating topic, and one that is not simply explained by the popularity of online chat with youth. Chat room use itself was found to be correlated with depression (Ybarra et al., 2005), which to me says that youth are using these online resources as support mechanisms. In other studies, youth have reported that dating requests to other youth are popular using text messaging, because it can always be explained away as a joke, deflecting a refusal of affection. A certain amount of contact is likely this motivation, and similar flirting activities that are developmentally normal for teens.

Then there is the solicitor side of the equation, where individuals delivering sexualized messages to youth get a certain charge (arousal?) out of the experience. By comparison, it probably simply isn’t as exciting to send an email or MySpace solicitation to a youth. Or perhaps typed chats are an analogue representation for brief verbal contact in the real-world: honking at or yelling lurid comments out of a moving vehicle at another individual. Harassers do this full with the knowledge that there is no possibility of it coming back to haunt them, but it offers increased power and satisfaction. In this sense, sexualized online solicitation might be more like a test to see if a response is gained, more like passing words yelled out of a vehicle than other dynamics. This mode of harassment, while not entirely benign, is far less dire than the perception of many that most forms of online contact by adults are designed for seducing youth into offline relationships. This idea is not supported by the data; Internet-initiated connections by adults with youth that result in offline contact are typically friendship-related, nonsexual, formed between similar-aged youth and the parties are known to parents (Wolak et al. 2002).

putting the "media gap" in context

2009-02-17T12:50:00.000-08:00

In 1980, Tomita created a simple chart of communication technologies, mapping the number of participants by speed of communication. What was revealed in simple terms, and popularized in 1991 in Neuman’s “The Future of Mass Audience,” was a “gap” in the functionality in existing mediated communication. Online communities clearly fit easily here, providing new ways for audiences/users to communicate in nearly real-time speed. Nearly 3 decades later, the question is: has this area been saturated, or is there still room for expansion?

Certainly, it is here that Internet communicative modes and collaboration has experienced growth that continues to this day. According to a recent study by the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, around 11% of American adults use (and 20% of adults 25 – 34 have ever used) a service that involves “status updates.” However, this is inclusive of Facebook, which has couched status updates within a more familiar website framework, and is doubtless more popular than the newcomer Twitter. Even more popular, worldwide, is messaging (SMS or otherwise) on mobile phones.

I’d go so far as to say that we’re reaching a saturation point for short-message, different-place, fast-but-not-quite-synchronous communication. Message boards famously filled this gap quite well decades ago. Rather than being a purely functional issue, the question becomes whether average users, on a fundamental social level, find a need for a micro-blogging such as Twitter. RSS feeds are my favorite example of a technology that never reached mainstream use. It has always remained on the cusp of acceptance, but used more by leading edge adopters, and is more used as a common format to transmit information of various kinds across a network behind the scenes. There is another roadblock to Twitter: it offers functionality that can be easily replicated. And if Twitter never acquired significant usership, and doesn’t emerge as a brand name a la Yahoo or Google, users could easily be poached by another service that offers significant advantages - less frequent downtime, closer mobile integration, or multimedia capabilities.

Five terms not to use to describe yourself online

2009-02-07T19:30:00.000-08:00

My friends and colleagues can tell you that I am somewhat allergic to the outlook and self-promoting nature of Los Angeles online culture. Scenesters and professionals alike are constantly involved in a one-upmanship of terms that sounds at times like a terminology land-grab. Maybe it’s the financial downturn, but I’ve noticed lately that people are declaring themselves all manner of hyperbole online, from the simply self-promoting to entirely absurd. The situation has turned south with LinkedIn. What was previously confined to back room conversations and bouts of braggadocio is now publicly available for perusal. With that in mind, here are five terms that you should eradicate from your resume:

Expert – expertise is demonstrated, not self-awarded. Even true experts don’t just stand up and declare themselves experts on a subject. They write books, speak, and pursue goals. More likely, if you call yourself an expert (or even doubly so, a “success expert”), you’re a shady pyramid scheme type.

Visionary – this is a word that literally means you are able to see the future. Ironically, people who use this word to describe themselves rarely find others, later, using it to actually describe them. Talk about a lack of vision.

Pioneer – makes me misty-eyed for the Oregon trail video game.

Entrepreneur – appropriate if you are involved in venture capital, angel funding, or other entrepreneurial investment. You are not an entrepreneur just because you have ideas. Double no-no for “Internet entrepreneur” just because you use the Internet.

Innovative – innovation isn’t so much a bad idea, as overdone. I predict that it’s that adjective of the moment that captures the current energy, but will age badly. At its core, innovative is frequently used synonymously with “new.” “New media,” whose Wikipedia entry is a baffling mash-up of references and concepts, has suffered greatly for being unable to remain contemporary. Also, similar to “expert,” innovation is more difficult to put into practice than it is to simply declare.

Bonus:

Guru – Namasté!

Playing the waiting game

2009-02-03T16:22:00.000-08:00

I've been deep in a post-application malaise for much of January. As some people know, I've applied for doctoral programs starting in fall, 2009. The prospect of joining a doctoral program still felt very unreal, despite all my applications being in. (Maybe it was just the bronchitis talking, which I was saddled with for 2 weeks) Yesterday I received word that I got into an R1 school, which jolted me back into reality. Even though I've been spending years doing research, teaching, and working, it's still a surprise that somebody I've never met would want to bring me on board and work with me over 5 years based solely on information contained in my C/V, GRE, GPA, and a few letters of recommendation. Now I'm going back to my current projects and started listing upcoming conference deadlines and possible fits; the thrill of a new shift just does that to me. It still will be 2 months before any serious decisions get made, but that's no reason I shouldn't keep pushing forward.

Case studies in social software development

2009-01-20T20:06:00.000-08:00

One of my goals this semester is produce a small portfolio (maybe 10-12) of detailed case studies on how professionals are successfully implementing social media in their various roles (product design, campaign manager, media analyst). One of the biggest issues with social software and social media is that there is rarely a willingness on the part of professionals to…. well… admit we are wrestling with ideas beyond our understanding. Yet, we are bound to be wrong more frequently than right, when confronted with a landscape we do not fully comprehend. Certain rules to integrating user-generated content are obvious and over-stated. If I hear mantras such as “listen to the customer” one more time, I’m going to lose it. But the entire life-cycle of locating talent, producing media targeting new technologies, and tracking its success, are rarely brought to the public eye.

The format of these would ideally be concise and easily applicable to the classroom environment. There are already papers out there that are either quite business-oriented or excessively stuffy and academic. These are, for different reasons, not applicable to the classroom; students tend to get bogged down in academic theory and terminology, when the emphasis should be placed on making decisions and evaluating possible solutions. Business case studies tend to present solutions in terms of revenue, money, and individual team members, which I feel is not appropriate, at least for the program I teach in. My series of studies would follow a model that’s basically a modified multi-step model of Jossey-Bass’ (who wrote “Educating Professionals” in 1993):

1. Identify the global problem
Clearly state the problem
Reveal and gather information
2. Develop a first step to address the problem
Develop hypothetical solutions
Select a possible solution that solves the problem
Analyze the important factors in evaluating success
Reveal how the step was actually solved
3. Repeat step 2 for as many steps as necessary (for instance, a surprise might emerge that necessitates a re-evaluation of the suggested course of action, or the case study moves into a new phase of development)
4. Final discussion
Discuss conclusions that can be drawn on how the entire problem was actually solved
Discuss ways to monitor and evaluate success

Media Responses from the ISTTF

2009-01-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

Several interesting articles have been written since the Internet Safety Task Force document went live on 1/14. I'm happy to say that most of them have got the primary message correct, although few discuss the important areas for future research that will likely be the topics for similar articles in a year or two.

ARS Technica
CBS News
NY Times
SlashDot
Technology Review

Internet Safety Task Technical Force Research Document Draft

2008-11-16T17:52:00.000-08:00

A draft of "Online Threats to Youth: Solicitation, Harassment, and Problematic Content" is now completed and available for public review. This document is a review of research literature on the risks posed by the Internet to youth (children and adolescents), as well as from specific technologies and social media. The focus of the document is on quantitative, national-level studies based in the United States, although qualitative studies and those involving more localized populations are also referenced. It will ultimately be used to advise the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and attached as an appendix to the Task Force when it is released in January.

This document was authored by myself and danah boyd. We received incalculable assistance through comments and suggestions from the research advisory board, which includes David Finkelhor (Director, UNH Crimes Against Children Research Center), Eszter Hargittai (Associate Professor of Communications, Northwestern University), Sameer Hinduja (Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Florida Atlantic University), Amanda Lenhart (Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet and American Life Project), Kimberly Mitchell (Research Assistant Professor, UNH-CCRC), Justin Patchin (Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire), Larry Rosen (Professor of Psychology, California State University, Dominguez Hills), Janis Wolak (Research Assistant Professor, UNH-CCRC), and Michele Ybarra (President, Internet Solutions for Kids).

The purpose of posting this document for public review is to get feedback, particularly on new areas of research, and more generally on the scope and accuracy of the summarized data. Please feel free to review the document and give us feedback on danah's blog, or over email at aschrock@cyber.law.harvard.edu and danah@danah.org. I'll post more details about the document in the coming weeks, and look forward to your responses.

The Role of Online Communities in the 2008 Presidential Election

2008-11-08T12:09:00.000-08:00

Following the election, there’s been a lot of talk about the role social media played in Obama’s successful campaign, and how he may use these connections in his administration. Here’s a few of the points in the ongoing discussion of how the events resulting in the election of Obama to president unfolded using online communities and convergent media.

Henry Jenkins forshadowed the Obama win at an Annenberg speaker series. He posited that, if Dean was the first campaign to recognize the value of a digital campaign, Obama was the first campaign that was truly transmedia. Successive endeavors by his campaign underscored the truth of Jenkins’ statement: Obama purchased the first political advertisements in a video game, forwarded news links were resoundingly pro-Obama, and the pro-Obama amateur (and semi-pro) fan videos were particularly popular (see the McCain/Obama “Dance-off” and Sarah Silverman’s “The Great Schlep”).

Post-election, Mashable had an excellent article about the alignment between Obama’s digital connections and offline political plans. His vast SNS connections, SMS info, and email addresses could be used to further social service in public life (such as Peace Corps), direct communication with politicians, and possibly help elect officials that align with his vision. This would be more than an endorsement, but a call to arms for millions of dedicated political enthusiasts. What remains to be discussed is if he will continue to use and control these contacts, and not give them up to the Democratic Party. Personally I am skeptical about the role of Twitter, as it’s not yet and may never be a mainstream mode of communication.

On November 5th the Social Media Club LA held an event, paneled by Jason A. Kiesel (freedomspeaks.com), James Lee (Lee Strategy Group), Tony Katz (www.tonykatz.com), and Leo Briones (Centaur North Strategic Communications). What was the effect of social media on the election? Certainly, Obama used it more effectively than McCain to communicate with his ground team, similar to two-step mode of opinion change. Yet, panelists agreed that it was difficult to separate from the immersive campaign environment.

Immersive transmedia efforts may be the next big challenge for research and industry alike. I just got an iPhone. While I’m pessimistic about ubiquitous computing, it’s difficult to dispute that it not only blurs the communication modes (one-to-one, many-to-many) but makes these distinctions increasingly irrelevant. I found the ease with which switching modes and media can be performed quite soothing. If you get a call while you are listening to music, when you answer it, the music fades out gently and eases you into a person-to-person discussion. Or you can check your Facebook account while texting. It’s smooth and graceful, which may be why I find it so subversive… and right around the corner is 2010, 2012, 2014…

Convergence and Society 2008: Journalism and Communities

2008-10-11T13:47:00.000-07:00

The Annenberg Program on Online Communities (APOC) was represented at the 2008 Convergence and Society conference at the University of South Carolina (aka, “the other USC”). Conference organizer Augie Grant wisely selected the topic of “The Participatory Web.” Many presentations throughout the conference were peppered with references to online communities. I presented the APOC curriculum, teaching methodologies, and overall perspective. The feedback I received reinforced my perspective that our program uniquely considers online communities as more of an entrepreneurial venture, and our close relationships with industry place us on the leading edge.

For the entire blog story, please see my post on the main Annenberg Online Program site.

Interesting story on ORJ: "Newspapers need to learn that great online communities should not be dictatorships"

2008-10-03T11:04:00.000-07:00

Robert Niles posted an interesting story in the Online Journalism Review, talking about the reluctance of journalists, editors, and publishers to incorporate user-generated content in their websites. I called this a "crisis of identity as well as function," which I think appropriately sets the issue in terms that I have heard over the last several years from many older journalists who are more hard-line traditionalists.

Online Communities Play Key Role in Henry Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling

2008-10-02T17:13:00.000-07:00

Henry Jenkins of the MIT Media Lab visited the Annenberg School for Communication today to discuss his ongoing research in and writing on Transmedia Storytelling. He refers to this as the aesthetic dimension of longitudinal fiction, where plot and narratives are drawn out over multiple media. This “expansion” of the typical narrative offered by a movie dramatically adds to the storytelling experience. Some contemporary examples of Transmedia Storytelling include comic books and manga, as well as movie franchises, such as the Matrix, which transpose a storyline over not only the movie, but related games and websites. They frequently include “encyclopedic” amounts of information (a term credited to Janet Murray). Transmedia Storytelling has been applied to many genres, including science fiction and crime dramas such as The Wire, which features multiple simultaneous and deeply layered narratives.

Even small amounts of information can provide fodder for fans. For instance, the dream of an origami unicorn in the director’s cut of the movie Bladerunner posed the question (more clearly stated in the book, but not in the officially-released movie) that Decker may himself be a replicant. Fans can take this nugget of information and craft new narratives around it. This happened with Boba Fett, a minor character from Star Wars that became a fan favorite. The original character was quite vague in motivation and backstory, yet he spawned his own novels and toys. Jenkins concludes that the more specific the character, the less inviting the world is to our own construction, and it is in the best interest of producers to not limit the areas for this kind of fan activity.

Online communities are particularly important to Transmedia Storytelling, because they are where fans meet, discuss, and share content and new ideas that will be added to the world of choice. J. K. Rowling, Jenkins said, made a critical error when she “closed down opportunities for audience participation” by resolving timelines in the final Harry Potter book instead of leaving them open for future development. While fan/amateur culture and journalism can be seen as conflicting, they may merely require a restructuring of narrative to tell Transmedia stories. Although, “mass media still has more power… than anything that takes place in grassroots communities,” the new forms of participation offered by online communities clearly are important developments for nearly any area of media production or dissemination.

Jenkins also drew connections between his work and the current presidential race. Dean realized that much of fundraising would be done digitally, while Obama fully embraced the possibilities of Transmedia Storytelling by fostering narratives outside the realm of traditional media (such as the YouTube hit “Obama Girl”), to great effect. Clearly the production of amateur media, propagated online through sharing sites such as YouTube are important ways that individuals are participating in the democratic process well outside the sphere of print, radio, and television. Perhaps this will be the year people will finally “vote naked” (to use a term from his book, “Convergence Culture”). In other words, will they gain the kind of enthusiasm for online politics in 2008 that they do for online popular culture?

For more pictures of the event, please see this set on Flickr.

On Joshua Atkinson’s “Towards a Model of Interactivity in Alternative Media..."

2008-08-31T22:48:00.000-07:00

Atkinsons’ investigation (in the latest issue of Mass Communication and Society) of the interactions between social networks, local media producers, and global media outlets is worthy, but suffers from several outdated perspectives. Part of the issue is that papers from 2004 are only now being published in leading journals. The paper appropriately considers three types of “interactivity” – user-to-system, user-to-user, and user-to-document. However, it primarily examined print media, mostly ignoring the rich modes of online communication that have given alternative media groups agency, and primarily examines in-person feedback. For instance, one of Atkinson’s primary findings was:

“The global producers revealed that they received content-oriented interactions from audiences via e-mail, which corresponded with data collected from the local producers who claimed to interact with global producers via e-mail” (p. 227).

That global media producers interact with local producers (and audiences) over email is not exactly a shock in 2008, as it’s the most popular one-to-one communication medium. The model Atkinson produced is worthy as a starting point, but does not address the sheer variety of channels audiences use to engage with the media and local producers. Truly multi-level and interactive relationships are being developed through asynchronous and synchronous media, including blogs, instant messenger, Twitter, SNSs, polls, message boards, and so on.

These present a serious theoretical and methodological challenge for researchers. They include direct (one-to-one) modes of communication, as well as entirely new ones (many-to-many). There should be some investigation of public-facing channels versus private ones. E-mail, even if it serves as a venue for comments about content and for encouragement, as Atkinson suggests, is hardly news: this is what letters to the editor have traditionally done.

Another finding was that there was little impact of the individual in impacting global media outlets. This brings to mind media system dependency, which I applied in my thesis (in a way that I am now convinced wasn’t entirely appropriate, but that’s another story). Implicit in all the agenda setting and gate keeping discussion is power. Global media outlets have the majority of power, and individuals have little. The Internet has fundamentally changed the discourse occurring in online mass communication. Manuel Castells' concept of "mass self-communication" is, to me, more coherent and encompassing.

RIP Isaac Hayes

2008-08-10T15:12:00.000-07:00

RIP to one of the last true legends.

Quarterlife.com in freefall

2008-07-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

A year ago I started consulting for Quarterlife.com, and helped with the initial sourcing of talent and getting the project off the ground. I haven’t kept track of the site since I started teaching, but did wonder what its fate would be after the television series went the way of the dodo.

In the month of June, the site’s reach dropped from .006 to .001. Admittedly, the most drastic part of the plummet is with reach and rank, but clearly it’s not a healthy social network site. I’m not sure why the drop - it’s too late for it to be due to college students leaving for the summer - but certainly new users aren’t coming to the site like they once were. There’s nothing that says “crash” more than Google adsense advertisements for incontinence showing up on a site’s main page. People notice when you’re selling out the most prominent area on the site for a low CPM rate. It screams desperation.

The whole Quarterlife story is tragic, because if it were successful, it might have ushered in new opportunities for those in the entertainment industry. Chalk it up to short-lived buzz not lending itself to a long-term business. The idea was to get the buzz around the show to feed into a social network, but the may just not be enough opportunities on the site to fill in the gaps between the peaks in popularity. Although promised, the contests have yet to appear. To my mind, this would be the “killer app” of Quarterlife, which would retain users with other activities, similar to OurStage.

Alan Moore's Watchmen Preview Reactions

2008-07-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

The Watchmen was arguably the most coherent and mature DC novel of its time. I came to it through DC Vertigo (Sandman, Shade the Changing Man), and was immediately attracted to it. To my mind, the Watchmen was about a set of older superheroes struggling with their individual challenges, in light of threats they were trying to understand (killing of The Comedian) or were fundamentally unable to understand (the ratcheting up of tension with the then-Soviet Union). The changes that they went through, especially as concerns them being out of step with the current day, was a key component of the drama, and gave the novel more depth than its contemporaries.

Now, the trailer that was recently released doesn’t look altogether shabby. The effects look sharp, and Dr. Manhattan looks how I imagined he would. It appears to keep to a relatively strict interpretation of the story, as there are several shots that are easily identified as key points in the storyline.

But a few things are nagging me: In the movie, Nite Owl looks positively ripped (he could give Batman a run for his money), Silk Spectre (II) looks like a Playboy playmate, and Rorschach takes a back seat. I never imagined Nite Owl or Silk Spectre as being in their prime when the storyline took place, and Rorschach was the lead narrator. Despite being the most violent and flawed of the heroes, he moved the plot forward, and ultimately was revealed to be the most fragile and mortal.
Nite Owl, as depicted in the graphic novel

Nite Owl, after seriously hitting Bally's and getting a wardrobe upgrade from The Matrix leftovers

Alan Moore is, of course, not hopeful about the movie adaptation, but this isn’t really surprising; when was the last time he was? He does have a few good points, though, particularly about relying on the Director of 300:

I would rather not know [about the movie],” said Moore. “[Zack Snyder] may very well be [a very nice guy], but the thing is that he’s also the person who made 300. I’ve not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn’t particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: that it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that’s not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but… I wasn’t impressed with that… I talked to Terry Gilliam in the ’80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ”Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, ‘I wouldn’t.”’ And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can’t.

Who wants to try and show up Terry Gilliam? I wouldn’t.

Comments on Josh Quittner’s “Who Will Rule the New Internet?” in Time Magazine

2008-06-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

…I'm rooting for everyone in this war because it sounds as if—the concerns of Harvard's Zittrain notwithstanding—we all win here. Andreessen is right when he says the Web is so vast that it defies attempts to control it. With Google riding shotgun, it strikes me as unlikely that Facebook or anyone else can pull too far ahead. Also, I believe Zuckerberg when he says Facebook will continue to open over time. It's the smart move, and he's a smart cookie. Finally, I want to get my hands on the new iPhone. Its time will come and go. But for now? Great technology, today as always, renders us as gods.

I had a few comments on Quittner’s article up to this point, minor corrections, but this paragraph made gave me pause. Quittner would have us be grateful for technology that “renders us as gods.” If we are confronted with powers that offer us godly powers, the least we can do is be wary, even suspicious. Otherwise we each become a potential Prometheus, worthy of punishment.

One claim he might be well of being more cautious about is that the Internet is naturally too large to be controlled. First, from Andreessen’s quotes in the article, I don’t see evidence that he, as Quittner claims, declares that the web, “is so vast that it defies attempts to control it.” Andreessen discusses how the iPhone is significant, that an open API provides access to a wealth of potential developers, and how multiple platforms may prove successful. Is Quittner projecting his own beliefs here or is there an un-cited source from Andreessen?

Regardless of the source of the sentiment, any mature discussion of Internet regulation and evolution must accept that there is not a natural course that a technology takes. I’m unconvinced that we will “all win here.” Zittrain, another Berkman professor, is hardly the only one wary of claims that the Internet enjoys an untouchable status. In “Code,” Lessig discusses the combination of factors (economic, social, market) that regulation encompasses, and how they can be applied to the Internet. The Internet is not tabula rasa. The freedom we currently enjoy may be merely the first stage of the evolution of a new medium. For example, radio frequencies were initially given away when FM first emerged, but then later, tightly controlled. How musicians and labels make money is arcane, and has nothing to do with the innate rights of recorded and broadcast works. (in San Francisco’s Prelinger Library, where tomes are organized according to their relationship with books surrounding them, the section on copyright is next to that of western philosophy)

Zuckerberg is well intentioned, but he is also so inclined to paint a glowing picture of his company’s latest efforts when interviewed by Time. Clearly, Zuckerberg wants to show Facebook is not a “walled garden,” despite that it has little to currently offer as far as options to break down those walls. Whereas Google is naturally comfortable with openness, Facebook and Apple are somewhat analogous in their closed-ness. Both feel that there is a safety inherent in their products’ user experiences through a clean, uncluttered interface and reduced propagation of viruses and other rogue programs.

When Zittrain wrote “The Future of the Internet” Apple hadn’t yet offered up a public SDK. Now that it exists, his criticism of the iPhone as a “black box” is, in my opinion, less valid. Initial adopters, the innovators, are most concerned with guiding development of the product. To play devil’s advocate here: when technologies enter the mainstream, is the demand for malleability and programmability outweighed by need for a cheaper, more efficient product? The two may be synonymous, but not always.

My personal feeling is that as products mature, the need for this innovation doesn’t entirely disappear, but certainly diminishes. The market acceptance of Android compared with iPhone will be interesting to view as a test of this question. It would be unprecedented if Android-based devices break into the mainstream. I would argue that iPhones have yet to go mainstream, either, but Apple’s recent announcement of the new $199 price point may give them the needed boost to their new consumer electronics image. This is a competition, despite what Quittner writes - both being mid-range, Internet-enabled cell phones with touch screens. How it plays out may very well signal the next chapter in the Internet’s evolution.

How dangerous is posting personal information on Social Networking Sites?

2008-06-01T21:38:00.000-07:00

The most recent findings by Ybarra and Mitchell (2008) address the assumption the posting of personal information on social network websites (SNSs) is dangerous. Their results show that when other factors are accounted for, a young person’s posting of personal information online does not significantly increase the likelihood that he or she will be harassed or solicited.

While much more research needs to be done on the topic, it is apparent that other communication mediums are far riskier. Namely, chat rooms and instant messaging (IM) are particularly problematic for adolescents. In the last year, 43% of youth stated they had been solicited over IM, 32% by chat rooms, and 4% by SNS. In the last year, 55% of youth stated they had been harassed over IM, compared with 4% by SNS.

Also, the posting of personal information may be a lesser risk factor when compared with behaviors such as talking with strangers online. Factors in family life also have a strong correlation with likelihood of harassment, such as whether the young individual in question has been abused. This refocusing of concepts is in-line with the ongoing efforts of the CCRC, which in recent years has illuminated why certain young individuals are more vulnerable than others.

For a broad overview on the state of research on cyber-predation, see Wolak, Finkelhor, Mitchell, and Ybarra (2008). Also see: Hinduja and Patchin (2008) regarding their analysis of the rate of disclosure of information on one particular SNS, MySpace.

Lessons learned from teaching “Technologies for Online Communities” - a new course on creating “social networking” websites at APOC

2008-05-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

Last semester I taught a groundbreaking course in the Annenberg Program on Online Communities at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. It’s the first (and as far as I know, the only) one-year MA program that focuses exclusively on building and cultivating online communities. Titled “Technologies for Online Communities,” it’s a grad-level introduction to technical concepts and managerial/collaborative methodologies. Now that the semester has ended, I have a short bit of time to reflect before I start the next course in the program sequence - a research methodologies course led by Mathew Curtis in the psychology department, where I’ll be teaching online-specific research concepts and tools.

The goal of the course was to create product developers and project managers for “social networking” websites. Half (50%) of the surveyed class described their experience with technical concepts at the start of the class as “novice.” This was a pretty tall order: bring the class from novices to managers with a strong understanding of core concepts in 16 weeks. The course was a success, but as always, teaching is also a learning experience. Here I present a few takeaway lessons for instructors or professors considering similar courses or approaches.

1. Teach concepts as they are encountered, not how you learned them

I introduced concepts in a top-down fashion, because it’s how I was taught and how I best understand the material. By top-down I mean bringing in technologies and collaborative methodologies as they exist structurally: start with the client side, talk about HTML and web browsers, then move on to the server side, and talk about databases and client-side development.

The sequencing of materials will definitely be altered to better reflect how they are encountered during the design and development process, particularly how product design integrates with technical development. On the last day of class, Karen North, the director of APOC, handed me a syllabus for a similar course in online development. This course sequenced material in order of how it would be used to create a website. The course was basically one large problem-solving activity strongly connected to real-life, similar to a semester-long PBL exercise. Concepts were introduced based on how they are encountered in the development process. For instance, at the start of the development process, a server would need to be secured, which would also entail discussion of how servers work. This altered sequence would address requests throughout the semester for more examples and provide an ongoing, coherent narrative with real-life applications.

2. Splitting your brain is okay, to a point

The course material was split thematically into technologies (programming languages, client-server development, APIs) and collaborative/managerial methodologies (agile, recruiting talent, writing specifications). Students completed the same coursework, with the exception of the final project. The final project, which was among the highest-reviewed course components, was to create a presentation on either technical or managerial concepts. Most of surveyed participants found the technical portions of the course “beneficial” (averaging a 4.0 out of 5) while slightly fewer positively responded to the managerial portions of the course. While students generally found the two sections of the class to be overall beneficial to their learning, several offered suggestions on how course material was sequenced. These suggestions were mixed, and included a reversal of the order of material presented, de-emphasizing coding, and separating this single course into two courses.

I’m sticking to my guns here; I would like to preserve the ability for students to focus on either technical or managerial concepts in the final project, while encountering in all the class material through discussions, readings, and homework. While I think two separate courses would be appropriate, it’s unlikely that the program can support both. Throughout the semester I found students either naturally gravitated to either programming or managerial concepts. Students will naturally end up being professionals that accentuate either one or the other, depending on their personality and interests. By the end of the course, students should have a much better idea of the type of role they will play upon graduation. So it makes sense there is no “one size fits all” solution for students, and they will become more specialized.

3. Create managers who develop sites, not programmers who develop sites

Deciding how technical to get in an introductory skills course is a risky balancing act. Too much technical focus may lead to confusion, while too little technical information may not give students the core understandings they require. One of the decisions I made early on was to not turn the course into simply a raw programming course in, say, javascript. Students in a one-year MA program on online communities aren’t going to become software engineers over the span of one semester. Even if they did become wizzes in javascript, they wouldn’t receive enough tangible benefits to the larger picture: creating living, breathing, online communities.

So, from the start I was aware that the course could not create software engineers. Even aware as I was, I went a little too far; one place the class stumbled was in understanding object-oriented programming (OOP). This core concept could have been introduced more coherently, more slowly, or omitted entirely. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say meta-programming packages might be a more approachable alternative to “true” programming for novices. Drupal, for example, while esoteric in setup, allows students to get a social networking site up and running immediately. Being able to quickly create and modify a site in real-time offers both technical and attitudinal benefits.

Technically, students would encounter concepts such as PHP and database design within a safe framework. They would get the thrill of quickly creating and taking ownership of a database-driven website, which would be otherwise impossible for novices to accomplish in a single semester. The big downside to closer incorporation of a package like Drupal is that its inner workings (PHP, databases) would need to be appropriately described, otherwise its value as a teaching tool would be diminished. For instance, AJAX requires a solid understanding of javascript (client-end dev), client-server networking, and remote APIs (e.g. REST). Even if AJAX somehow went away in 2 years time or was replaced by Flash or Flex, the remaining concepts would still be valuable. If all students learn is how to use a particular type of CMS or templating system, which doesn’t exist in a few years, they may not have these valuable core concepts to fall back on.

4. Jettison components that aren’t accomplishing what you hoped, add new ones

Quizzes were the lowest-reviewed course component (which were: homework, readings, quizzes, in-class exercises, lectures, and final project). Ideally, viewed through Bloom’s taxonomy, quizzes help retention of low-level cognitive concepts, leading into higher-level understanding and application. But if students aren’t finding this part of the course beneficial, I may reduce it or cut it out entirely in future years. Quizzes are useful in undergrad courses as, frankly, a salient threat to do the reading and pay attention. For a grad-level course they may not be necessary, as grad students are more involved, driven and attentive. As long as students are involved with the course, low-level knowledge acquisition may better occur through small group activities or lab exercises.

Even though the course was paired with another course, which had industry speakers every week, the connection with industry needed to be stronger in this class in particular. I’m taking time over the summer to collect first-person reports from industry to roll in with next year’s course, particularly as concerns APIs (such as OpenSocial), monetizing contextualized data (directed marketing), and more freeform collaboration in the building process (e.g. Google-style project development).

5. Encourage direct and immediate classroom responses

This isn’t so much related to this course as teaching as a whole. As much as we talk about listening to our users, the same mantra applies to students. There is no substitute for an aware and receptive instructor. The semester is rather short, and the material is at times imposing and demanding of students, particularly novices. The overview skills course should be an agile u-boat that can turn at a moment’s notice, not an overgrown tanker that takes time to alter course. Noticing immediately where students are encountering difficulties is absolutely necessary to adapt the material to their needs. Additionally, paying close attention to them may offer perspectives that are more likely to reach fellow students than your own. In the case of this course, many students were well-versed in one or more topics, even if they didn’t have a grasp of all areas. For instance, one student had a deep knowledge of widgets, and was helpful in contributing practical examples of how her work life centered on interacting with developers to create widgets. It’s even possible to get students to focus their questions on each other, as well; peer learning is vital to the grad school experience, and was entirely appropriate for the online communities theme.

on hype and cloud computing

2008-03-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

The term “cloud computing” has gotten a lot of shine lately. Forbes blows the security issue out of proportion; the majority of files stored on services such as Amazon S3 are not critical. Documents are passed every day over email, the most popular and among the most insecure of all applications on the web, which also uses a client-server model. It’s also hardly a new idea - distributed computing, where multiple machines share resources, has been around since the 60s. Sharing resources of a central mainframe computer from a remote terminal used to be the ubiquitous interface. This is an issue that has always been present in computing models, if not always visible to consumers on the web. In the short term I can see cloud computer and related client-server relationships taking the strain off of devices that cannot handle full-fledged versions due to hardware restrictions (interface, processor speed, memory). This may very well spur a new wave of innovation in hand-held devices. At the same time, there’s a lessening of perceived ownership. This may play well with younger, tech-savvy generations who are used to software and media being free, but may also lead to a nervousness over if their data are "safe" if they don't know exactly where and how it is being stored. It also bears mentioning that the infrastructure of the Internet is also simply not up to the demands of mass scale use of ideas such as cloud computing and streaming of HD quality video to the home. What might be the solution is higher-bandwidth, commons-based wireless networking - still several years away at least for the United States.

De Zengotita's "Mediated"

2008-03-11T22:58:00.000-07:00

De Zengotita’s central tenet in “Mediated” is that images and forms the media produce serve primarily to cater to our self-centered nature, here called the “flattered self.” These feed the meaningless, amorphous “blob” of postmodern consumer culture, which serves no purpose in society. As the media becomes more fractured and prevalent, messages and truths become essentially meaningless. One problem with his “blob” concept stems from its primary characteristic: amorphousness. It flexes to encompass all of De Zengotita’s ideas. Ironically, in doing so, the concept of the blob diminishes the bite of his arguments, allowing him leeway to wiggle out of more detailed descriptions of his theories.

He posits that the new power afforded to individuals alters various aspects of our lives, including puberty, politics, and entertainment. People no longer are able to “fill in the blanks” in the lives of their heroes, so heroes naturally become more local and less monolithic. Individuals are afforded god-like modes of power, making the “extraordinary” commonplace. The increased rate and type of interactions become overwhelming to individuals, who find themselves unable to process or deal with them. In reality, I would say this is a straw man argument; people rarely feel overwhelmed by information. What is not useful or required passed quickly through, not remembered and not harmful.

Like many scholars of a certain age, De Zengotita’s is pessimistic about the possibilities of media. One of his many suggestions is that a music concerts now “provide fans with the only experiences of transcendent social belonging most of them will ever know” (given that they are not religious and not “joiners”). It’s a provocative statement – but would he recognize such an event if it he found it? I believe he would be less likely to recognize such an event than other scholars who gives new forms of mass self-expression more credence. On other fronts, he is more convincing - take for instance his examples of interactions between “real” versus artificial through the complex interactions between audience and players in reality television, or the public revelation and cleansing of talk shows.

The “flattered self” and “meworld” cannot fully explain the multitude of interactions and motives encountered in modern life. It’s a difficulty we encounter since the rise of mass media, where the media are inexorable from its audience and participants. On the dust jacket, Norman Mailer praises the book, saying “there are anywhere from three to ten stimulating ideas on each page.” Indeed, De Zengotita’s ideas are poignant, and excuse his occasional overreaching or unconvincing example. (still, using one’s own children is an example of the latter… “weak tea” as a professor of mine frequently said)

The idea of the “flattered self” is an entirely appropriate metaphor for the current age. This basic concept is primarily what makes this book a provocative read. At one point, this was its title. If this remained as the title, the focus refined, and its arguments condensed, “Mediated” would be a true classic. Unfortunately, it’s not quite at the level of Neil Postman, although one can detect a few strokes of his felt-tipped pen in De Zengotita’s carefully considered arguments.

OJR article on YouTube and commentary

2008-01-26T22:31:00.000-08:00

A recent story in USC's Online Journalism Review prompted me to comment, particularly about the need for greater and more detailed statistics in analysis of the success of convergent media efforts.

Hockenberry's insight, The Wire's possible deficiencies

2008-01-02T23:14:00.000-08:00

David Zurawik's negative early review of the latest (and last) season of The Wire, which focuses on the media, was a profound disappointment to me. The Wire creator David Simon worked at the Sun, and news media is frequently referenced in the political story arcs. In season two, episode 11, Simon even had a cameo one in a crowd of reporters asking Sobotka for a response to political rival Valchek taking him away in handcuffs. So I was hopeful his talent for depicting enormous economic and social realities of American urban life would carry over to current challenges in new media. It sounds like this season of The Wire is not nearly this timely. Instead of addressing contemporary newsroom, it instead focuses on the ability of one journalist to pursue a particular agenda. While this fits in with the highly personal tone of the show, it doesn't sound like it offers as astute a critique of the media as, say, the educational system in season four.

Hockenberry's searing indictment of the media is everything that The Wire, it seems, won't be. (disclaimer: I write for the online version of Technology Review.) The media has screwed the pooch on possibilities of new technologies and news, choosing to focus on human interest side despite overwhelmingly more newsworthy stories. As we've become self-involved as a society, we refuse the intellectual challenge news offers, looking inward instead of outward. Reminds me of De Zengotita's idea of the "flattered self." is our society so interested in endless line of stories that cater exclusively to our own self-interests? That pander to, not challenge, our preconceptions?

New article on mobile advertising

2007-11-27T09:54:00.000-08:00

Another article of mine has appeared in MIT's Technology Review. It discusses the acquisition of Enpocket by Nokia, and how this affects the state of online advertising.

Also, somewhat related, one of Douglas Crockford's main points in his recent discussion of the state of AJAX is that because of the fast 2-year replacement rate and increased control over the environment (versus PCs), mobile devices may lead the introduction and acceptance of new Internet-based technologies.

new iPods: new hardware, but more importantly...

2007-09-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

Today Apple revamped its iPod lineup, and I am doubtless one of thousands commenting on it. What isn’t news to me is the range of hardware selections in the iPod family. What caught my attention instead were the availability of the iTunes music store to “Touch” wireless iPods and the free availability of the service at Starbucks. Despite my aversions to Starbucks, I have to admit this is killer marketing for this capable device.

This idea of immediate sales of digital music direct to devices has been the grail for developers for years. I was involved in 2000 – 2001 with a company called ETC Music, Inc. We were developing one of the first direct-to-device MP3 point-of-sale stations. The biggest obstacles we faced were the hardware wasn’t available and the music industry wasn’t ready.

No clear winner had emerged from the range of MP3 players, and the iPod was not quite a household name yet. Bluetooth was not yet implemented and everybody had their own proprietary connector and software. WiFi was newly integrated into Apple products, but hadn’t yet gained the widespread acceptance we see today. Additionally, the music industry was reluctant to offer music online - Napster had the labels spooked about the future of their format.

Apple has taken care of both of those issues by integrating purchase functionality into wireless iPods and building up a strong enough customer base (and industry rep) with iTunes. Direct-to-device may be the nail in the coffin for brick and mortar stores. But it will also open up far more opportunities: buy albums right at shows. Go to a movie and if you like the soundtrack, you can buy it right there. These examples may sound unbelievable or cheesy, but they offer a high convenience value to consumers and present POS opportunities anywhere.

Directed advertising on Facebook

2007-09-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

Facebook plans to provide personal information to advertisers, but will it help or hurt the website? On one hand, Facebook needs to increase profits to entice potential buyers. But his could come at the expense of cheesing off users, who may find it invasive. Many are turned off by the concept of companies knowing what they’re into.

There’s a wealth of information out there about why directed advertising, which shows you ads for products you are more likely to want, functions effectively; people don’t mind advertising as much because they don’t perceive it as irritating, and companies get a higher click-through rate.

The ways Facebook has implemented this kind of openness has received mixed reactions. Facebook’s got into hot water when they added listings of all the recent activities in your user group. However, their public API has been well-received. MySpace has not opened their website up with a similar offering, so this sets them clearly apart from the competition.

My personal feeling is users may find it invasive in theory, rather than in practice. Users are already exposed to hundreds of advertisements in their browsing day, and other advertisers are already using such placement technology. Additionally, my own research suggests that, in the case of MySpace, people who use social networking sites are more likely to naturally self-disclose information. That is, they are more open with information about themselves. For this reason they may find directed marketing less offensive than, say, a message board devoted to techno music or computer security.

The downside for Facebook would really be if people started putting in bogus information to foil the directed campaigns, much as underage MySpace members put in fake birth dates when registering. This would reduce clickthrough rates and overall effectiveness of directed advertisements. But if Facebook is successful, and especially if this advertising entices a buyer in the next year, directed marketing could become more prominent in online communities.

Quoted in New York Times

2007-08-28T09:55:00.001-07:00

An article I wrote for MIT's Technology Review on the implicit effects of web advertising was quoted in the New York Times.

new Technology Review article

2007-08-04T13:37:00.000-07:00

An article I wrote on online video revenue sharing is available through MIT's technology review.

implicit and explicit memory activation with online advertisements

2007-07-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

A recent study by Chan Yun Yoo in the latest Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly draws distinctions between explicit and implicit memories when viewing online advertisements. Explicit memory is used when recalling specific information, such as a name, while implicit memory is unconscious, not linked to active processing, and can be triggered by an image or phrase. The measure of implicit memory in the study is a word with missing letters, which are filled in by the subject to create a word from the advertisement.

Yoo found that while explicit memory recall increased when ad processing increased, implicit memory recall remained constant. One conclusion of Yoo’s findings is that impressions, typically used to measure print and television advertising effectiveness, may still be a meaningful way to measure certain effects of web advertisements. Also, it bears mentioning that explicit and implicit memories are not mutually exclusive. As Yoo reports, “This does not mean that implicit memory is more important than explicit memory or click-through behaviors. Rather, it suggests that an implicit memory measure would complement the shortcomings of these measures, especially in cases where consumer do not extensively engage in Web ad processing.”

These findings make sense to me. Low clickthrough rates are not necessarily an indication of a failing web advertising economy, any more than a television ad that does not immediately cause a subject to initiate purchase or explicitly recall aspects of the ad is a failure.

Boundaries to "Mash-ups" going mainstream

2007-06-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

At the risk of writing yet another pessimistic anti-technology polemic, here is a post I created at the Innovation Journalism Conference at Stanford a few weeks ago.

My primary reaction to the Innovation Journalism Conference is: the idea that humans can overcome insurmountable obstacles using merely ideas is both laudable and debatable. I would agree that innovations can cause dramatic positive impact. Yet, harnessing the power of innovations was a subject not addressed in a fashion I would consider reasonable or logical. Rather, innovations were treated as inherently beneficial to all populations, a view I’d consider slightly too rosy in light of the variety of unexpected failures and triumphs of technologies.

One specific reaction I had was in response to Stefan Andreasen, CEO of Kapow Technologies, Inc. On Monday he gave a compelling presentation at the Innovation Journalism conference in Stanford. This post responds to his assertion that he did not see obstacles to “mash-up” technologies going mainstream and becoming profitable. As such, my response is a friendly polemic. I will here present several obstacles I see to online “mash-ups” making a jump to mainstream usage. Specifically, the obstacles to mash-up technologies are social, technical, or economic, or a blend of two or more of these categories.

On a social level, people may simply not find mash-up technologies usable. Or in other words, is a mash-up of two technologies always more useful than separately? Or might there be instances where there combinations are less useful? Stefan pointed out current data (provided by Mackenzie) suggesting that time between task is an issue with the current range of activities we perform. A carefully crafted “mash-up” may indeed reduce time between task. But we do not live an isolated environment. People make daily decisions based on many factors, not just to become more efficient. There may very well be social and cultural reasons for the decisions we make in everyday activities that are even larger obstacles than benefit.

One of the primary lessons Rogers’ ideas of innovation adoption showed was that relative benefit is not a powerful enough force to ensure success. History is littered with examples of technologies that failed despite seemingly overwhelming benefit, or succeeded despite being inferior: the introduction of guns to Japan largely failed and were only revived when Perry opened the country to the west, the QWERTY style keyboard remains only because a now-defunct benefit (it deliberately made people type slower as to not jam typewriters), and Betamax failed despite better picture quality. The latter technology, home videocassette, is a good case in point. It succeeded because of a number of factors, not the least of which is it was picked up by the adult film industry (a battle currently being re-played with blue-ray and HD-DVD). VHS was inexpensive, but the industry was also slow to realize that people would be willing to sacrifice cinematic experience for a cheaper video deck and media.

I have also found few truly parsimonious “mash-ups,” and even fewer that have a clearly understood metaphor guiding their use. For instance, my mother-in-law finds her FM radio easy to use and uses it daily when going on walks. Despite being given an iPod for free, she continued to use her FM radio. She didn’t feel a need to learn another piece of software just to have different music on her walks, and the iPod didn’t yet have the shows she listened to. It was too complex for her needs. Similarly, I feel that mash-ups are frequently too complicated or do not fulfill a need in a way a person can easily understand.

Economic barriers to wide adoption of “mash-ups” exist in business, which are related to the inability for the Internet to adapt to different technological models. Open APIs require the willingness of business and also ample bandwidth and servers. The need for increased transparency and openness in the business world has been demonstrated politically, but many businesses may still not be enthusiastic about opening up their bandwidth and servers, and consequently time and money, for what is essentially un-regulated ad-hoc usage.

The revenue stream for and profitability of “mash-ups” are unclear. If an advertising model cannot be used with the technology, and it fails to drive business, companies may realize they are delivering content at a high cost to a very small demographic. Is it even possible for “mash-ups” to become mainstream in the same way as other technologies, such as television? I do not question the ability for individuals to process great amounts of information, for people have shown impressive abilities to encounter and deal with large amounts of data. Claims of Internet "addiction" aside, there has been little to no data showing that the average person is subject to “information overload.” That a minority of individuals has an interest in new technologies is not surprising, but many of the obstacles to mash-ups going mainstream lie elsewhere.

On being "pro-browsing"

2007-04-23T20:35:00.000-07:00

In a recent Harper’s article discusses Rick and Megan Prelinger's library in San Francisco. Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote,

“For the most part, it is easy these days to find what you’re looking for;
one hallmark of digital efficiency is that the more specific the query, the
most efficient the query-based search. Megan and Rick, however, would
like to help you find what you are not looking for.” (p. 48)

Instead of organizing by dewey decimal system, they opt for a system inspired partly by Aby Warburg, who had a burning desire to present a collection of objects such as books as a guided experience. Each book is thematically connected to its immediate neighbors in a section, and each section would lead to the next to encourage discovery and browsing. As Fritz Saxl, a student of Warburg, put it,

“…the books together – each containing its larger or smaller bit of
information and being supplemented by its neighbors – should by their
titles guide the student to perceive the essential forces of the human mind
and its history.” (p. 54)

I couldn’t help but apply Warburg’s “law of the good neighbor” to online music. Beyond bringing to mind jokes such as Cusack’s character in High Fidelity organizing his records in the order he bought them, this idea perfectly captures what a good collection should be: personal. Because personality is what is lacking in online browsing.

By contrast, a website like Amazon.com is eerily accurate in its recommendations, but not good at transitions and contextual relationships. It points out books that should be on my bookshelf based on what I have already bought, but probably not those that would best appeal to interests not easily expressed or quantified. This is the dark side of the “long tail” phenomena - we might be trapped by our own choices in a world that is forever of our making. If there is a failure in the online music shopping model, it because it works too well.

This is a different argument from the “paradox of choice” argument presented by Barry Schwartz, which states that people are confused by and cannot appropriately process choice. I claim that instead of being overwhelming to the average person, the technology that guides people to potential products (thus eliminating the “paradox”) borders on being too clinical. In a way, we have overshot the goal. Automated recommendations are accurate in guiding our tastes, but lacking in contextual information or the leaps of logic that a good librarian will routinely make. By comparison, online recommendation engines have us stewing in our own tastes.

When I need to be rescued from entirely-too-efficient music recommendations I go to a local record store. There, you’re never quite sure of what the result of your musical foraging will be. The only certainty is that you will find music there; the selection, organization, and presentation is up to the owner. If the owner is particularly savvy s/he will distinguish between “funk” and “soul” but more frequently they would both be funneled into “R&B.” Reggae and latin genres might all get lumped into “World.” What may be contiginous sections in one store might be fractured and re-arranged in another. Plus, you’ll feel like you’re looking through the dustbins of history, where the almost-could-have-beens and non-charting albums live. It’s a breath of fresh air from the paint-by-the-numbers world of online browsing.

Contextually there’s little connecting The Cosmic Jokers on Ohm, a German rock band, and Sandy Bull on Vanguard, a spacey folk artist. However when set side by side they have an uncanny common love for excessive effects, jamming, and side-long tracks. A fan of one would no doubt be interested in the other, but the likelihood of a that recommendation being made is slim. I would enjoy bossa nova, despite the fact that I have literally no knowledge about the genre. Browsing online record stores by genre only brings out the most popular in each category, not the most relevant to your tastes. A good record store will present these moments of surprise by its selection and sorting. It’s Warburg’s “law of the good neighbor” all over again. The mere fact that there’s so much knowledge online to sort through makes retrieving it more challenging. Similarity measuring algorithms are still, even in 2007, no match for the instinct and depth of knowledge of a talented librarian.

There is also a limit to what Amazon.com knows about me. It doesn’t know I enjoy funky covers by steel bands. I’ve never searched for them, nor would they have any in stock if I did. I picked up one of my favorite records at a dusty Florida flea market for a dollar for the interesting cover and track selection. The LP featured a notable Isaac Hayes cover that was simultaneously funky and strangely mournful, and started me searching for the cream of the steel band records. After intense searching through several hundred limp covers of “Yellow Bird,” I found some gems: Amral’s Trinidad Cavaliers Steel Orchestra (phew) doing Gwen McRae’s “90% of me is you,” The Dutch Rhythm Steel & Show Band covering “Down by the River,” and St. Peter & Paul C.H.S. Shooting Stars Steel Band (is there some rule that steel bands must have long names?) doing tragically bad versions of “What’s Goin’ On” and “Kool is Back.”

To be able to find these records for me an automated system would have to incorporate semantic tagging or be an exceptionally intuitive neural network, to say nothing about the scarcity of these titles and how they would be input. The commercialization of the online space also presents certain restrictions on what is available. A few months ago I heard an album by the Lijadu Sisters. My reaction to the album couldn’t be predicted. Although I enjoy Fela Kuti, it would be difficult to extrapolate this preference to an out-of-print album by identical twins on a different label, if for no other reason than it is not commercially available. No sale, no price, no reason for a music website to tell you about it.

Searching and browsing in the real world is still a necessary and worthwhile pursuit for the active mind. The presence of infinite answers online may lead to a lack of patience people have for looking and browsing. When a world of knowledge is at your fingertips, it’s easy to forget it wasn’t always this way, and for the most part, still isn’t; for every record or book that has been digitized, there are dozens, if not hundreds, still on shelves. Guy Kawasaki calls increasing your breadth of information intake “perching in other trees.” The human mind has an amazing ability to draw connections. But if we just sit in the same tree, analog or digital, we’ll never get the opportunity.

Obligatory Twitter post

2007-04-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

I give up – you’ve got me, blogosphere echo chamber. With all the discussion about Twitter, I feel obliged to at least offer an opinion on it. So here goes:

I’m currently in the middle of a collaborative, qualitative study of undergraduates. We are using journals and focus groups to examine how younger individuals use multiple mediums or modes of interaction. A response that came up time and again is that taking the time to talk with another person is less common than texting, emailing, and using other less (graphically, contextually, information) rich modes. The causes are anybody’s guess: narcissism, lack of time, or too many acquaintances to take the time to interact in a meaningful way with all of them. But the trend is clear: individuals seem to prefer modes of interaction and technologies that allow them a large degree of control paired with convenience. Twitter tickles that sweet spot perfectly.

That said, despite other opinions, I do not believe Twitter will impact the majority of individuals’ social relations. Certain people with addictive personalities indeed might have difficulty using a service such as Twitter because it offers a near-instantaneous stream of information. However, Twitter isn’t any more responsive than, an Internet connection, which can facilitate all manner or near-instantaneous interactions, or text messaging. Perhaps it engages people who may otherwise not feel this style of technology is “for them,” but I am not sold on mobile technologies being the next major online movement.

When a new technology is introduced, critics are ready with proclamations of how it will drastically impact our lives. These claims include but are not limited to: television disassociates you from reality, Nintendo makes you dumb, and the Internet diminishes your capacity to connect with others. Rarely these warning come to bear in any significant fashion. It has been repeatedly shown that most people do not have difficulty processing large amounts of information; the excess gets ignored, or the information source avoided. In this and almost every case of a new commodity, the technology can be easily avoided. Cell phones, for all their connected-ness, still have an “off” button.

ORJ.org response to "can grassroots media be commercial?"

2007-02-17T12:25:00.000-08:00

I've jumped into the fray of a discussion on Annenberg's Online Journalism Review. It's a rough cut, but coalesces some of the ideas floating around my head lately.

Community Next Reactions

2007-02-11T23:29:00.000-08:00

As I type this, my wife and I are still in San Francisco. We’ve had about enough of parking on hills in the rain and are heading down the coast back to flat Long Beach, where the parking spaces stretch far as the eye can see and rain sends people scattering in terror.

Here I’m going to extrapolate a few commonalities from yesterday’s Community Next conference. The presentations fell under a few general categories:

Simple, practical suggestions for increasing monetization
Product demos & histories
More freeform discussions of online communities

The monetization discussions were helpful on a practical level. In contrast, the product demos were probably the least memorable because they were so similar, and all seemed to work off the MySpace idea but with a niche community. The exceptions to this rule were device-based software/sites such as Jingl and Loopt. Generally I found the more freeform discussions the most interesting because they offered a greater variety of perspectives and ideas. The ones I tuned in for centered around one or more topics:

Increasing user experience

Authenticity

Involvement

Niche audiences
Monetization (this must have been a buzz word because it is shorter and sounds better than “make your online business profitable”)
Device-based development (cell phones, PDAs, etc.)
Branding and other marketing concerns

The 4-person panel in the first half was excellent, even under time constraints; Hiten Shah, Matt Roche, Mike Jones, and Joe Hurd responded to audience questions with concise and resourceful suggestions. Hurd in particular had helpful comments about the use of advertisements to monetize (there’s that word again) online video.

The presenters leading off from lunch were in my opinion the strongest: Jake McKee (Big in Japan), Heather Luttrell (Indieclick), and Fred Stutzman (UNC/Unit Structures). McKee is best known for his work at Lego, but these days consults at Big in Japan. Luttrell brought her experience in a successful online advertising company, Indieclick. Her powerpoint was compelling, as were honest answer to questions such as (paraphrased) “how many monthly hits do you need to have a service such as Indieclick consider me as a client?” (answer: in the ballpark of 2 million) Improved transparency among professionals is ultimately not desirable under most circumstances, but it’s what people flock to conferences for to get that edge.

Stutzman is a Ph.D student at UNC who has contributed heavily to the (surprisingly scant) quantitative research on social networking online. Although he focuses on Facebook many of his ideas, such as “social objects,” can be extrapolated to other online communities. He was also one of the only people to question how many more golden eggs the online community goose can lay – the elephant in the corner of this whole discussion. After all, how many more niche audience websites can the world support?

When viral campaigns attack: lite brite Boston bomb scare

2007-02-03T11:51:00.000-08:00

When viral campaigns attack: lite brite Boston bomb scare

If only youtube had a time machine...

Whether you happen to think it’s funny, tragic, or happy-sad (respect to Tim Buckley), what happened Monday in Boston will set a precedent for viral campaigns. Advertising is highly saturation. In place like New York City almost all public wall space is taken up by stickers, flyers, and graffiti. You could easily make the case made that this is a ridiculous over-reaction to a harmless prank. Still, advertisers in America get off pretty light, and one of the minimum responsibilities they have is not to incite panic where foreseeable. It’s a little ironic that over-zealous media pounced on a careless advertising campaign. Certainly there’s enough neglect to go around.

What they did wasn’t art. It was an accidental result of an advertising campaign. Incidentally, this may be what saves them from legal prosecution. However, as my wife put it, in retrospect they should have put their own art up instead of a cartoon character, because at least then their creation would have been instantly world-famous.

To my mind this event really highlights the symbolic nature of the media. One person’s filth is another’s beauty, and one person’s blinking toy is another’s potential bomb. You had to recognize this single image and know what it meant, because there was no explanation provided on the light boxes. In this case I’d argue the context was most important. Attaching pretty much anything box-like to the bottom of a bridge is probably a bad idea, and it’s best not to rely on our police force to be hip ‘nuff to the Internets to recognize a character that doesn’t come on until midnight on cable. If you didn’t make the connection between the cartoon network and the character on the devices, you certainly couldn’t find information on it quickly and easily. What would you google for, “robot giving the finger?”

As a teenager, I grew up going to the MIT flea market, buying odd electronics to solder together with big blobs of solder. If I were lucky, and didn’t zap the components by not wearing ESD protection, I might end up with a theremin. So I’m sympathetic, these guys seem to be a similar breed of tinkerer. Peter Berdovsky (“Zebbler”), one of the arrested, was a student at the Mass Art SIM program. (my wife knew him briefly when she was getting her MFA) Both him and his buddy took great joy in taking the piss on the news, as a daft attempt at turning the situation around to make it into some kind of promotional tool. Kind of funny, but again, kind of sad.

Media convergence: slicing up the pie

2007-01-29T10:58:00.000-08:00

The topic of “media conversion” should be recognized as an umbrella term that covers several ideas that are thematically related but with distinct implications for research and business. Henry Jenkins described converged media as being different functionally for institutions as compared to individuals. He said, “...convergence represents a paradigm shift – a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communication systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 243).

The ideas of “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” are familiar to those involved with sociology or even Marxism’s discussions of power. Generally speaking they refer to how changes move through the structure (societal, technological, political). “Top-down” vs. “bottom-up” processes are in many ways two sides of the same coin, making a terribly useful distinction; people will use provided resources as suits their needs, and corporations will maintain these resources only as they feel it is profitable. This meeting place, the Internet, has much duplicity as a result. Individuals feel it is a right to have free and total access, while companies jockey for more and more eyeball time.

A recent article published through AEJMC by Edgar Huang and a team of graduate students takes a slightly different perspective. They describe areas of active convergence not in terms of power structure, but in terms of purpose. Their literature review supports several areas of active research under the general heading of convergence: content convergence, form convergence, corporate convergence, and role convergence (Huang, 2007, pp. 226 – 227).

Distinctions between these categories are fairly intuitive. Content convergence refers to the deployment of related content through multiple mediums. For instance, newspapers might have an online version that requires primarily the same content but delivered in a different way. Jenkins calls this “trans-media.” Corporate convergence is the natural result of content convergence: company mergers. Form convergence is the elusive idea that we will have a (I would argue impossible) “black box” for receiving all our media. This is still a hotly debated area in research and business. Finally, role convergence is the way our professions are migrating. Professionals are increasingly expected to perform convergent tasks, such as creating content simultaneously for print, broadcast and the web.

These categories are non-exclusive and are anything but set in stone. Rather, they represent a starting point for discussing the different areas convergence is occurring. The study goes on to primarily examine role convergence as viewed by educators and media professionals, touching on other areas such as corporate convergence. I think it was revealing that Huang (2007) found that the most in-demand skill by media industry employers was not computer skill, but old-fashioned good writing.

References

Huang, E. et al (2007). Bridging Newsrooms and Classrooms: Preparing the Next Generation of Journalists for Converged Media. Journalism Communication Monograph, 8(3).

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Now is the Time

2007-01-26T11:26:00.000-08:00

Signs of life are few at the schrockmedia desert complex. You can see the large metal door embedded in the mountainside, a blinking LED of the video camera pointed at it, and a thumb print scanner covered with a fine layer of red dust. A hot gust of wind whips by, bringing scorching air up from the valley. The day has quickly warmed. You raise one arm gingerly to the neutral unblinking eye of the video camera. Why no doorbell?

In the cold hermetic air inside, a figure hunches over a MacBook ringed by a semicircular wall of monitors. They display images from a world in disarray: periodically updating analytics from websites, populations across the world in all states of activity, a badly burned-in antique screen from the middle of last century displaying an enormous unblinking eye. The figure that was waving on one of the monitors is now doing sweaty jumping jacks. Steam rises from the vintage hand-pulled espresso machine tucked underneath the counter.

The figure sighs and takes a vinyl record down from the towering shelves cut directly into the mountain wall. Pulling it from its waxy sleeve, he lays it delicately on a Rockport Sirus turntable. “Hopeful, optimistic music today” he says quietly to nobody in particular. Music begins to play as he pulls up a chair to type...