New slideshow on social media user competencies

This slideshow introduces a view of the social media user that emphasizes the sociability, communication, and interaction skills and competencies. In it I make the argument that user experience and interaction designers approach social media with the user's social interests in mind -- and not "needs" and "goals."

I set the user's interest in his or her self image, interest in others, and relational interests. These can be used to build a set of social media competencies, from "telling" about oneself to moderating conversation. Based on social skills but modified to fit the particularities of web and social apps, these competencies might offer a better approach to grasping the user experience than concepts based in a model of user needs.

The big idea here being that social, communicative, and relational "interests" are radically different than the interests based in a cognitive science-based view of the "rational actor." That said, the presentation's light on theory!

A follow-up presentation will look at psychological personalities and propose alternate "personas" for use in social media design.

Downloadable versions of this presentation (keynote, ppt, and pdf), and on slideshare.

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Directions for research, theory, and a general update

I've been off blogging it seems for quite a while, and while I feel out of the loop in some respects as a result, it's been healthy and productive for a number of reasons. That said, I'm going to try to resume short post blogging as a means of thinking out loud, and sharing my plans for research and conceptual work in the year ahead.

When I took time off blogging I got caught up in Twittering and Facebooking instead. I like to immerse myself in new applications to get to know them from the inside, and last summer and fall I managed to build a new conceptual, and much more psychological system of analysis, by means of using tools and observing my own and others' use at the same time. I have to admit that for weeks at a time I lost myself in a variety of user and personality positions, and managed to go deep into a number of different use cases, modalities, "personas" or personalities, user motives and intentions. I couldn't do that and blog at the same time, for to adopt and play out a user position while reporting it publicly just wasn't possible. I took scores of pages of notes and over December and January wrote up what is now another social interaction design tome, this one on the psychology of the user experience in social media.

While also doing client work for several startups and social media companies, I've been researching the industry and state of theory, user psychology, media theory, and social network analysis and metrics, for the past month. It's now time to integrate my own theory development with current practices — a project that will probably take me through spring.

I made a decision, after becoming senior fellow at SNCR, to also focus some on purposeful social media — networks and communities, and social media marketing, for social good and global change. My own social media fatigue has left me hankering for evidence and best practices of social media used to promote real and offline transformations. The "pure forms" of social networking (profile-based friend and socializing sites) have run their course for me, I think. That said, I've noticed an increase in calls to participate in professional community designs and thematic social networking in non consumer-oriented markets — a sign that even if consulting opportunities in viral verticals drops off, interest in the utility of social networking among communities of practice is growing.

MySpace and Facebook continue to spark compelling opportunities in markets and among brands/companies that see the potential in cementing latent communities. So even if time has run short for companies seeking success in social netorking for movies, music, pets, and so on and so forth, there seems to be a growing sense that more structured and thematically-contained sites have a future worth exploring. Even if facebookers are rapidly uninstalling social apps, and users are consolidating their network memberships down to the few that offer real social utility.

A few points then, for those interested in what I've been up to during these last quiet few months, on the areas I've been digging into:

• A set of psychological profiles and definitions of user types loosely based on self psychology, communication styles, and pathologies that defines up to 15 user types by their interaction and communication competencies and inclinations. Roughly and simply, these user types contrast with those more commonly used to characterize influence and brand advocates, or mavens/connectors (models we see referred to frequently). I've instead sought to design a set of personalities around the user's encounter with the medium and his/her self presentation, communication, and interaction styles. It's a complicated model but is based on: the user's sense of self and sense of the other (audience); the user's interest in the medium itself; and the user's tendencies and communication styles as they pertain to interacting with others online. I see the user as having a self image; a sense of how s/he appears to others; a tendency to become involved in a social application and activity (call these their interests in being online); and a personality-based cluster of habits and tendencies to read, interpret, and become engaged through mediated communication that correspond to the individual's characteristic handling of ambiguities of intent, motive, sincerity, truth, and so on. I know, it seems complicated, but my model is tailored to online communication; most others are not. I view the screen as alternately a mirror, a surface, or a lens/window. This has helped me develop models for interaction that ground user engagement either in themselves, and self image, or in the content/interaction published to the screen, or in communication with the other. I'll wrap this up by spring and post as a white paper. This one should round out my social interaction design work (previous papers addressed culture/community and epiphenomena of social practices; and the architecture of screen and interaction design and its role in organizing and structuring of social interactions and communication).
• Social media marketing and the potential for commercial messaging in everyday social media practices. Clearly we're only at the beginning of what could emerge as a burgeoning industry, and possibly the next phase of web marketing. Not banners (phase 1), not contextual ads (phase 2), and not search engine advertising (phase 3), but activity, news, and friend feed product placement and social practice-embedded advertising and marketing. I was preparing a presentation on the challenges of feed-based advertising when Beacon up and flopped, and have tabled this work for the time being. Though I personally believe that social (graph) marketing, not one-to-one relationship marketing, is the Holy Grail for commercial market, product, brand, and event promotions of the future. This is a tasty field for its linguistic, trust, and relationship issues alone, not to mention the more and currently conventional issues of social graph analysis, "influence" analysis, semantic, and sentiment analysis. 
• In close relation to my research into social media marketing, I've mapped out a blueprint for social media analytics that accounts not only for relational attributes (the social graph), but also content (which is notoriously difficult) and intention (also difficult) and which is based on an understanding of the user engagement as measured by onscreen actions, longitudinally tracked, and matched to the psychological profiles I mentioned above (since all button clicks are not equal). I'm fascinated by the possibilities for social media analytics, and while user agency is extremely difficult to interpret online, especially because we can only capture "positive" actions and have no purchase on "negative" choices (there's no tracking of "not clicking"), an analytics is necessary if social media marketing is to achieve accuracy in reporting and campaign management. This work, too, is tabled at the moment.
• I've been hunting down all the research I can possibly find on the impact of social media on mass media, and on the value of social media in topical conversation and cultural discourses of climate change. I think I wanted to know if social media can help save the world. This research is extremely difficult to conduct. There's no semantic tool out there that can scrape and measure the topical content and map the discursive practices on, say, Facebook or Myspace. After browsing and using a number of social change/green marketing and environmentally-oriented social action, activism, and discussion communities, I've not been able to figure out how to conduct rigorous research or analysis of either their impact in motivating other users, changing behaviors, or augmenting news and coverage of climate and green topics and themes. There's simply too much noise in social posts (posts to communities that get attention, or are biographical, or are too short, or are simply spam/junk). There is anecdotal evidence that mass media is informed by and assimilates the blogosphere, citizen journalism, youtube, and other social media contents — but it's anecdotal. Were one to attempt to show that social media can help change the world, I'm afraid it simply couldn't be done. Too much user participation has the intention of producing presence and self identity, of attracting friends, or of distributing user presence across groups and communities that it's simply not possible for us to know that a user means what s/he says, or says what s/he means (feels, cares about). And as participation rates increase on social networking sites, so too does noise and the meta-communicative byproducts that result from user behaviors and participation that seek attention, popularity, like-ability, and so on. That said, and not to toss a wet blanket on what clearly concerns an awful lot of people, stuff is happening, and the social web is clearly a player in producing discourse, reflection, critique, coordination, as well as green branding and marketing. I just can't see how to measure it.
• Lastly, I'm continue to take and keep notes on social applications, widgets, and all manner of social interaction and communication systems useful for the direct and intended purpose of a specific user experience, or indirectly for the production of practices and pastimes. A social interaction designer needs to know what works — whether it was meant for what it does or not! I still believe that social software is functional when as software it is dysfunctional. And for this, as a software development practice, social networking tools and applications are still an interesting domain. But man, are there a lot of silly apps on facebook... Somebody else is going to have to use them all! 

Well, that's my update. I'm working on what research I can conduct, hoping that it will validate my psychological profiles and cement my blueprint for social analytics at the same time. I may have to give up, for the time being, the idea that a "MyChange" can save the world. And instead focus on the use of niche networks to realize community potential and produce practitioner knowledge and relationships. That's what a gigger does to get the gigs. 

But if you have an opportunity, and the resources, with which to do something really big, don't hesitate to call!

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Social Media: It's all Talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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Getting into social video

I've been poking about the social video space of late and absorbing as many moving pixels as can be safely beamed at a pair of analog eye sockets without producing tissue damage, seizures, or abnormalities of the brain. It's an interesting space less for what companies are doing than for what it suggests they might do, but the signs are there. In terms of content, well I'm inspired to yank a line out of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing... "eyes glazed insanely behind tiny gold-rimmed greaser shades, screaming gibberish." That's Hunter at a traffic light in a state of mind. But it seems to apply to the cumulative experience of watching short video clips online at social video sites.

I've said before that I think YouTube is a social system in failure mode. That in a way, the video is a substitute for the blog post, presenting something about its poster that's neither expository nor opinion, but is in some way reveals the poster's personality and taste. That the video is in a way an "utterance." That's the only way it makes sense to think of YouTube as a talk system (to me, at least). But I really do think that's what makes it interesting. Short videos can function as a kind of sign system, or symbolic language perhaps. They're identifying, moreso than Flickr pics for example, because they use content as a reference. In the case of videos shot of the person posting, and by the person posting, they're obviously even more of an "utterance." Where blogging requires a person to say something interesting, the video says it for us. It's faster, its more easily consumed (perhaps), it's often more easily liked, and as a "linguistic" phrase it is is easily accepted. (How would you reject a person on the basis of their videos?)

If YouTube is social because it creates visibility for posters and involves a communication system in which videos are member contributions, statements or messages through which members identify themselves, then the similarities among different kinds of videos provide a quick route to group identities... The social on YouTube can then differentiate itself: videos have styles, contents, references, and so on. The popularity of comedy, music videos, and TV shows us that YouTube samples popular culture, and that members identify themselves through pop culture clips. We speak TV on YouTube.

What comes next then is where things will get interesting. As video players become richer, and as they embed chat, commenting, rating, lists, and forms of gestural communication and action within themselves (Joost, Click.tv, Clipsync are a few in this space; Jumpcut as an editor system, is communicative but not in the way I'm thinking about at the moment), the challenges of communicating through video, about video, and to other viewers (friends or anonymous) quickly complicates the user experience.

What social practices await us on the other side of video clips, channels, ratings, tags, and lists? Will we use our camphones to create group videos that we then annotate for group memories and video scrapbooks? Will we finally see what really happens in Vegas? Will we send each other video postcards? Will dating profiles link to clips of our stupid human tricks on YouTube? Or will new video intimacies and confessionals provide us with a much richer view of each other (Is that what we even want? Most online daters prefer to pique curiosity by telling about themselves in text form; video is too revealing, and is a direct and less-flattering way to present ourselves than the text profile, over which we have much more control!) What kinds of games will we play with each other through video?

Will social marketers be able to extract good preference data from our social video use? How will we solve the challenges of getting meta data from chats (which are notoriously poor at revealing what it is they are about, given as they are to directing attention among chatters, not what is chatted about)? Will users get together for synchronous video viewing, or does that just fly in the face of the time-shifting benefits of the medium in the first place? How will live social video allow members to manage their presence availability (as any IM tool does today)? How deeply can we become engaged in video content, and between typing, talking, pressing buttons, and turning on our own webcams, which mode or combination will win?

Interesting developments are certainly just around the corner. I would like to think that this time, the moving image might realize some of its educational potential (TV was hailed for its potential in democratizing and distributing knowledge -- think Marshall McLuhan or Ed Murrow in Goodnight and Good Luck). If content is king, the king this time is us.

Technorati tags: design, media, social interaction design, social media, social software, social video, sociology, user generated, Youtube

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The Opacity of Users in Transparent Technologies

Social software and social media sites present an interesting challenge to those of us interested in the user experience. Where the user experience in "conventional" software can be examined according to assumptions we (know how to) make about the user's goals, needs, and objectives, when it comes to social media we have to think outside the proverbial box.

The conventional view taken up in the world of software draws a straight and unbroken line from the user to the software application. The user's agency is goal-directed, values success and effectiveness, and engaged in needs-oriented activity (e.g. transferring funds online). But in social software sites, the user uses the "software" to engage with other users.

The user's activity is an encounter with the world of meanings produced by other users participating in some form of organized, structured, formal or informal "interaction." At times the user simply reads the contributions of others. At times s/he communicates with those others. At times s/he is in a self-reflective mode, aware of how things reflect on him/herself. At times s/he becomes immersed in an online encounter and is taken up with it.

Each of these variations--and I've sketched only a handful--involves a complex set of relationships, real and possible, among known or familiar, present or absent, individual, group, or collective, identified or anonymous participants. Investigating this matrix creates immense and radical challenges to UI, UX, and interaction designers. Psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology each suggest theoretical approaches worth considering. But few of them can accommodate the medium, the technology itself, without upsetting some of the fundamental positions from which they are argued.

The intervention of a communication and publishing medium and the substitution of interaction tools functioning asynchronously --often through text, image, and sometimes video, but always involving a representation of the user's presence--requires us to think differently about what users are up to when they head online. These technologies shift ourselves away from ourselves, giving us a screen on which are painted words, statements, links, lists, pictures and whatnot, in place the other (person) him or herself.

If we are to make progress on the user psychology and relation to his experience of social media, we need to accept the basic fact that the "social" in social media is optimistic, perhaps deceptively so. Sure, we encounter others online. We "talk" to them through our blogs and comments. We "collaborate" with them, sharing files, bookmarking and tagging sites, creating photo sets, group blogs, and more. But communication that is mediated neither unfolds like it does when it is face to face--when people take an interest in each other as well as a shared social encounter--nor does interaction move through the rhythms, speeds, or intensities of activity that are possible in a live situation.

A new set of relations is emerging. They are not the obvious ones, those we've described until now as organizing activity on social media sites like those that serve dating, career networking, learning, socializing, buying/selling or other themed social practices. This new set involves the self to him or herself. It engages psychological factors like projection, introjection, transference, internalization, externalization, and so on.

It involves relations of number, from the couple to the triad/triangle, to clans, tribes, groups, crowds, and audiences. It might engage in the shifting and circulating economy of attention, of debts and gifts, governed by etiquette or set in a chaotic classroom melee. It can compel a user to an insight of self-realization, or develop into a fascination with an other (user). It might be organized or informed by acts of communication, suggestion, flirtation, admiration, appreciation, and these might become known through blog posts, emails, comments, discussions, messages or other gestural substitutes such as those offered as icons at many social software sites. And there are many more possibilities.

But they all engage a relation of self with self, and involve an impression of the other that is founded on the other's own attempt to present/express him or herself. All of this culminates in an enormously-varied experience of developing awareness of the other and of oneself at the same time, sometimes as a reflection off the other, sometimes as a projection of one's interpretation of the other. Interpretation and projection, substitution and displacement, talk as conversation and as its short-form exchanges--all unfold on a ribbon of time itself unreeling through discontinuities, fragments, segments, chains, and aborted episodes that do not come together so much as occur concurrently.

The social world online is a hall of mirrors in which it's hard to hold an image standing still, let alone in motion. More on this in the next few weeks.


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

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Here's talking at you, kid... It's all talk on social media

"Of all the gin joints in all the world, you have to come into this one..." Ever get that feeling that there's a whole lot more talk going on here than there is listening? That perhaps the medium itself is biased? That the writing medium only captures statements and utterances, posts. It only captures us when we talk. It doesnt capture us when we don't talk. And because the screen here can only show what its design is capable of seeing, nothing exists that is not added to it. And we know that. The web's speed has increased these days to such a velocity that it's become impossible to think without having to communicate about it (as i'm doing now, if just to make a point).

I'm reminded of the Fawlty Towers Germans episode in which Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), in the middle of hanging a moose head on the hotel lobby wall, has to climb down from a stool to answer the phone, at the other end of which is his hospitalized wife, calling to ask if he has hung the moose head. And his response, something along the lines of "I'm doing it! I was just... I mean, what is the point you stupid bint? I was just busy doing it and then i have to stop doing it to pick up the phone to tell you that i was in the middle of doing it?! I mean is there anything esle I can do for you? Move the hotel a couple feet to the left?'

There are of course many ways of talking. But this mode, which is for the most part "talking to oneself", produces a strange conversational effect when it involves attaching comments to others' posts, responding to comments in posts, posting on posts, and so on. I wonder whether we'll recognize each other, some day (and I hope far away). We'll recognize ourselves, of that I'm sure. But will anyone else? Well there'll be gin joints to stop into. And some day, some where, in some far off gin joint along the norther coast of Morocco, in a town known as Casablanca, somebody will say "here's talking at you kid" and perhaps there'll be nothing wrong with it...

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YouTube: videos are signs, watching is social

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Marshall McLuhan on YouTube

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

So, which medium is the content of YouTube?

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





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

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

• How important is simultaneity to meaning?


• How important is it to interaction?


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


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


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


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


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


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

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Folksonomic Value Proposition part 2 Revised

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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