A bit of holiday reading - John Brockman on the demise of the old literary intellectual and their replacement with...well, that's an interesting question and I'm not sure he has it right. I first read his book "The Third Culture" (in which he argued that there needs to be an intellectual culture that blends new thinking encompassing both science and liberal arts) some 15 years ago. In his view the traditional 20th Century "Intellectual" is intellectually redundant:
"Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time."
He is talking about the (often proud) ignorance of science and technology (and I wouldn't limit it to Americans either - in fact in his Third Culture he had a good go at European intellectual tradition as well). Observing the chattering class British disdain of science (still largely prevalent today), I was somewhat sceptical that a 3rd Cuture would come tofruition anytime soon. And waching the rise of pseudo-scientific hokum movements from creationism to ..... since then has made me even less convinced.
So who does he believe the New Intellectuals are? Well, if his own books are anything to go by, he has assempled all the "writers of books" that have a scientific bent (rather than scientists per se). Well, being a publisher, he would, wouldn't he?
Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy these sorts of writers hugely (Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Jaron Lanier et al), but I do wonder if this is a bit akin to looking for lost keys under existing lamplights? Does being an Old Skool publisher lead to missing the point as much as an Olde Intellectuals does?
The one thing that has interested me is the last 5 years and the rise of the Blogosphere, where there has been a massive rise in people who, because they are not constrained by conventional limits, do cross these intelectual lines quite unconsciously and happily. The difficulty with the Blogosphere of course is that it is huge, chaotic mass and (as it gets easier and easier to use) increasingly polluted with pure cr*p so it is hard to find the good stuff at first.
But what has happened - big picture - is a rise of a very large volume of people putting new ideas together in new ways, so you ar awash with new thoughts. Let me give you an example - this week for the first time I heard of (and read a bit of the works of) Vaclav Smil (who also writes on the development of technology and energy over the last 100 years or so). Now here is the interesting thing (to me, anyway) - there was very little he has written that I didn't already know about by reading the blogs I do read in this space, and yet I had never heard of him - yet Bill Gates apparently hangs on his words.
The point I am making is that new ideas are now arising and disseminating in multiple channels, and the Blogosphere - distilled - is its own intellectual - as well as its own Hello! and Pseud's Corner and sheer Crap-o-Sphere (500 million people on Facebook and nothing on.....)
The problem going forward, in the arising tide of sheer noise that is the New Social Media, is finding them. The Web will need its John Brockman style publishers as much a Olde Media did.
Ooops - she's at it again! Every so often Danah Boyd does an analysis that brings un-PC differences to light in Social networks. This time its race (last time it was class...see here).
And, one suspects, this time (just as the last time) - she has exaggerrated it a tad for publicity (surely not because - you would no doubt be surprised to hear - there is a book to flog?) - GigaOM:
The book chapter is entitled “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook,” and is part of a book called Digital Race Anthology, which is being published later this year by Routledge Press. In it, Boyd describes how during her research in 2007, one teenaged interview subject named Kat said that she didn’t like MySpace any more because it was what she called “ghetto”:
It’s not really racist, but I guess you could say that. I’m not really into racism, but I think that MySpace is now more like ghetto or whatever.
Boyd says that this kind of comment in a number of interviews drove home the point that “Facebook went beyond simple consumer choice; it reflected a reproduction of social categories that exist in schools throughout the United States. Because race, ethnicity and socio-economic status shape social categories, the choice between MySpace and Facebook became racialized.” Later on, Boyd uses the metaphor referred to in her chapter’s title when she says that one way to understand the shift that teenagers appeared to make in 2007 from using MySpace to using Facebook is to see it “through the lens of white flight” — that is, the departure of white and middle-class residents from inner-city neighborhoods.
Digital White Flight, Ghettoisation, incipient racism, class and income inequality - marvellous stuff. Its a pity battered women and asylum seekers can't be shoehorned in too (wait for the 2nd Edition - Ed)
As GigaOm imples, (and this would be our hypothesis too), MySpace is a last-generation SocNet, and it was overtaken by a nerwer and better executed design, and also had a "last generation" user base - music fans etc - rather than Chatterati.
Facebook has also arguably done a far better job of monetizing and expanding its social network and its features, while MySpace has not had much success, despite repeated attempts to monetize its user base through the use of widgets and other features. Could it not be that one network prospered because it was just better, easier to use, offered better features and was better managed? And that the other has declined because it is ugly, the user interface is terrible, and all you can do is listen to small snippets of largely irritating music? Does it necessarily have to be driven by some kind of “white flight” from an online ghetto?
It was also bought by a large corporate just as the Next Generation hit the scene, so the ability to innovate was removed at a critical time.
Overall I like her stuff on privacy, but I think her stuff on web demographics is skewed because it looks too narrowly - I think two of the comments on the GigaOm page explained the bigger picture well - this one:
Can PhD’s (or microsoft employees) really be this dumb? Have they ever heard of something called the ‘network effect’? Or how about studying the reasons behind why Microsoft’s OS became even more dominant in PCs than Facebook is now in social media.
Or, acknowledge that Fox utterly mismanaged MySpace. Or…and maybe she was too busy to learn this, but there are ZERO BARRIERS to join Facebook.
This is embarrassing in its complete dumbness. (Not you, Matthew, but Doctor Boyd.)
Ignore the ad hominems, but the points about causes other than race or class are well made - and also this:
Facebook started as a university only social network, which yes may mean demographically more white people but I don’t think race is really a factor.
MySpace offered more customisation, music on member pages – but all in all a more chaotic experience. And it looked to school kids that as you went to university you grew up and onto Facebook. Kids always want to be more like adults, so when Facebook opened up – those that previously had to wait until they were 18 to join, could now do so at 15 or 16, and then younger.
Facebook was also the independent alternative to MySpace which has been owned by Murdoch’s Fox Interactive for quite a while. The individualism is what made MySpace different to Facebook – but that “individualism” was under massive corporate control. This meant removing copyrighted music from people’s profiles and more policing in general.
Even without the ability to share copyrighted music on MySpace profiles, it remained the place for musicians and bands to have their homepages. But since then MySpace has regressed as a music platform. They started having ads with audio (very annoying when you want to listen to the music by the band whose MySpace page you’re on) and more intrusive ads in general. It remained very difficult until quite recently to make a MySpace page look good with the customisation tools they offered. They didn’t offer good user tracking to bands. They didn’t introduce a DRM-free music store and allow the bands to sell their music quickly and easily. Basically they completely dropped the ball.
The fall of MySpace has little to do with race, and even little to do with Facebook except that they had a critical mass of users so were waiting in the wings to pick up the slack. MySpace just threw it all away and I would be surprised if it still existed in 5 years at all.
Incidentally, I read this week that Twitter has a more valuable/professional/dynamic/upmarket demographic than Facebook now....and (shock) its more MALE!
We eagerly await the cries that Twitter is a White Male bastion....
Have been tres busy this week, hence no posts - but the non-admission of a design error on the iPhone 4 by Apple this week has been very amusing, on a number of fronts:
Form f*cked Function
The Beautiful Device got in the way of efficient Antenna design, essentially allowing Antenna attenuation to be added to by a 100 - 220 lb soft bag of salt water. Not good (If, as may even be the case, it was because they had no wireless engineers, then this is even scarier.
Pride Goeth before a #FAIL
What us nore intereting is that they must - MUST (surely) - have seen this result in testing before launch, so it is interesting to speculate why the launched regardless - after all the evental sticking plaster (that would work too...) was hardly rocket science or costly, and yet the impact of such an error is surely huge compared to whatever benefits were gained by launching at the time
How to win friends and influence people the Apple Way
The attempt to recover essentialy by blaming the users for the way they held it, or for whining, or for being hundred pound saltbags was an..."interesting" strategy. It plays well to the fanbois, but outside of that sanctum less well methinks.
Thats 3 strikes in rapid succession - what does this say about what is going on within Apple, one wonders?
Anyway, policy in Broadstuff Towers is to be a laggardly Early Adopter - always wait 6 months while The Market (aka the suckers who buy early) irons out the bugs (and beside, the price usually drops too).
The poor form of "Wisdom of Crowds" Prediction markets and Performace Statistics
We have been reflecting on the poor performance of "Wisdom of Crowds" prediction markets and on historical Statistics to predict future occurrences, as shown in the chart above (see the original article here)
News reached Broadstuff Towers yesterday that a new, and better, prediction method has been found - an octopus:
The creature, known as Paul, has correctly chosen all of his German homeland's results so far. This time hie is predicting Spain vs Holland
With food in both boxes to attract Paul, it is then a matter of waiting until he opens one of them to determine his predicted winner. The eight-legged mystic has a perfect record at this tournament - and is said to have had an 80% success rate during Euro 2008.
Here he is on YouTube
I recall a test done many years ago - the Monkey Market Fund - where stocks were picked based on where monkeys were looking, and it outperformed the stock market average. Maybe ancient soothsayers had it right after all - who needs algorithms when you have entrails.
This being South Africa's World Cup, I am surprised that there have been no stories of the local sangomas divining the Footballl results.....
....a significant majority of technology experts and stakeholders participating in the fourth Future of the Internet survey say it improves social relations and will continue to do so through 2020.
Some 85% agreed with the statement:
"In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the internet has mostly been a positive force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future."
Some 14% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:
"In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the internet has mostly been a negative force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future."
Most of people who participated in the survey were effusive in their praise of the social connectivity already being leveraged globally online. They said humans' use of the internet's capabilities for communication -- for creating, cultivating, and continuing social relationships -- is undeniable. Many enthusiastically cited their personal experiences as examples, and several noted that they had met their spouse through internet-born interaction.
The underlying drivers are seen to be the lowering of the "friction" of communicating - cost, geographical barriers and time required to keep in contact with people.
The drawbacks perceived were....
Among the negatives noted by both groups of respondents: time spent online robs time from important face-to-face relationships; the internet fosters mostly shallow relationships; the act of leveraging the internet to engage in social connection exposes private information; the internet allows people to silo themselves, limiting their exposure to new ideas; and the internet is being used to engender intolerance.
So what's not to like?
One of the issues with all this is that the survey was done of "experts" and "stakeholders". Pew says that:
The surveys are conducted through online questionnaires to which a selected group of experts and the highly engaged Internet public have been invited to respond. The surveys present potential-future scenarios to which respondents react with their expectations based on current knowledge and attitudes
And if you read that detailed survey methodology (I do this sort of stuff for a living, these things interest me) and the list of famous Soc Med fans questioned, the worry is that the recipients are not neutrals. "By design, this survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting effort. That process does not yield a random, representative sample" says Pew. I'll say - read the respondents opinions over here.
Which begs the question of the whole point - never mind the veracity of - the study. It is clearly not useful as research, so what is the aim here? I have no objections to a "Delphi" technique (questioning experts to get their views), but ths isn't one, as the questions are pre-structured to derive a result, and the approach is not made very clear in the press release.
The worry I have with this sort of "research" is that tech journalists and bloggers will pick up on the press release without looking at how it was done, and if enough of them do that you get a distorted view of the market. Perish the thought that this may, in fact, be the aim (I see that GigaOm wasn't taken in....)
Been catching up this afternoon with what Eric Schmidt said at Actvate 2010 yesterday, its been reported in the Torygraph, Grauniad and El Reg (I am ignoring the twitterstream from now on - here's why). If you are interested in what will happen in the next 2 - 3 years then its worth catching up n as there are Googlefingers in so many pies, and the guy is no fool - maybe Evil, but no fool.
Schmidt said there were 3 big trends - the growth of mobile internet connectivity, the growth of cloud computing, and networking. To me those are two big trends - mobile and cloud - the other is an underlying architecture. I also think he is trying a 3 pot shuffle - to me, the three things that look like the 3 Big Trends in the Googleverse are Mobile, Cloud - and slipping past the Privacy/Trust issue in datamining. So, in reverse order:
Trusssst in Meeee
(From the Torygraph)
Schmidt says this enables them to deliver better-targeted ads - more lucrative for Google, more relevant and less annoying for you. However, it raises privacy issues, something for which Google has been criticised.
"I think the criticism is fine. I think criticism informs us, it makes us better. It doesn't bother me at all,” Schmidt says. However, he acknowledges the problem but says it’s a broader issue. "Those concerns are real - I'm not trying to move away from them. The fact of the matter is that if you're online all the time, computers are generating a lot of information about you. This is not a Google decision, this is a societal decision. In Britain, you all allow yourselves to be photographed on every street corner. Where are the riots?”
Google, Schmidt says, is kept in check by its customers and by the competition: “All of our testing indicates that the vast majority of people are perfectly happy with our policy. And this message is the message that nobody wants to hear so let me say it again: the reality is we make decisions based on what the average user tells us and we do check. And the reason that you should trust us is that if we were to violate that trust people would move immediately to someone else. We're very non-sticky so we have a very high interest in maintaining the trust of those users."
In other words trust the Wisdom Of The Crowds to know what is good for them. In that way you can fool most of the dumb b*star....er, People most of the time...... Sadly for Google, that does not apear to be the ay it is working - too many people who can't be fooled are taking too close an interest.
Mobile Internet
(From the Grauniad)
"Mobile is the hottest area of computer technology," Schmidt said. "The smartest developers now are writing apps for mobile before they write for Windows or Apple Mac desktop operating systems. Part of that is because these devices are hugely personal to us when we use them."
Asked what he thought of the future of newspapers, Schmidt said: "What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? I think it's delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also colour, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with. At the moment we have readers, but it's not intelligent enough; newspapers often tell me what I already know. We'll have advertising products that are much more media-centric. The most important thing is that it will be more personalised."
They will beat Apple by suing the Microsoft Gambit
"We don't have a plan to beat Apple, that's not how we operate," Schmidt says. "We're trying to do something different than Apple and the good news is that Apple is making that very easy."
"The difference between the Apple model and the Google model is easy to understand - they're completely different. The Google model is completely open. You can basically take the software - it's free - you can modify whatever you want, you can add any kind of app, you can build any kind of business model on top of it and you can add any kind of hardware. The Apple model is the inverse."
Except that when Microsoft played Apple they had all the App developers, and a good hardware distribution network - two things Google/Android is struggling with - as El Reg notes:
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has convinced himself that the company killed its sold-direct-to-netizen Nexus One phone after less than six months because it was "so successful."
"The idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did," Schmidt told The Telegraph, demonstrating just how far removed from reality his mind has become.
Microsoft never did direct sales. A lesson for Google there methinks. It is possible for them to win the "Microsoft" position in the mobile smart device market, but to do so - if Microsoft's lesson is anything to go buy - you have to have a large scale 3rd party distribution system (IBM, anyone?) and the lions share of the developers on your platform.
The Cloud
(From the ToryGraph)
This is about more than just selling people a new product, it’s about shaping a social change. Within three-to-five years, Schmidt says, we’ll be consuming almost all of our information online. We’ll do it, he adds, “on devices that are live not static. The characteristics of these devices are that they know who you are, they know where you are, they can play video and they carry memory."
To get a sense of the likely rate of change of the next three-to-five years, think back over the same period. Google has bought YouTube, launched Google Docs, taken leaps forward in mapping and expanded into mobile operating systems with Android and desktop operating systems with Chrome OS.
The Cloud is upon us! And yet, and yet...... every 10 years or so some company pops up with the (rather self serving) nostrum that The Cloud will rule. And all the Kings horses and all the Kings men spend PR money like water, but it dies down again as reality intrudes. Mr Schmidts says that:
"The internet is the most disruptive technology in history, even more than something like electricity, because it replaces scarcity with abundance, so that any business built on scarcity is completely upturned as it arrives there," Schmidt said. "You have to plan your corporate strategy around what the internet does."
Leaving aside whether or not the Internet is " the most disruptive technology in history", a lot of people think IP will be like electricity and other commodities, but consider the differences:
- There are no similar "economies of scale" for production infrastructure to justify massive centralised plants vs local production. This is seen in the (reluctant) admission by Cloudists that its benefit is not cost saving.
- The variabiity required in the end product is far higher (for now anyway), so the benefits of end product commoditisation are not as high and the complexity costs of its mass delivery are worse.
- Those who win from mass centralisation (Cloucd Co's) are not those who own the Transport infrastructure - objectives are not aligned. Witness the 'Net Neutrality bunfight.
- "There is no Plan B" if a Cloud based infrastructure goes down, at least in the forseeable future. Nobody with any form of risk will thus put all their eggs in its basket.
- There is not as much fungibility in the supply chain. Apple locks you in one way, Facebook another, etc etc. Imagine if your dishwasher would only work off one companies' electricity and your TV off anothers.
In other words, The Cloud ain't going to take over anytime soon. But then, Google knows that, which is why its not putting a lot of its resources into it - the main Googlegame is to try and wreck Microsoft's economics by giving it away for free. Which is, of course, why Microsoft has gone into Search with Bing.....
What was interesting to me was the massive degradation in the User Generated Twitterstream. Last year, and early this year, you could tune in to such Twitterstreams and get a fairly decent "user generated media" view of what was going on. The "User Generated" Activate Twitterstream yesterday was....well, "unhelpful" would put it mildly.
Key issues I spotted were that retweeting of content was far more focussed than before, but not in a good way - the main focus was on:
(i) Uncritical mass retweeting of "soundbite sayings" - "Kool aid" homilies etc
(ii) Similar mass retweeting of very dubious statistics, again totally uncritically.
(iii) In fact my impression overall is that the Twitterstream was becoming an "empty vessels making the most noise" mode of communication. The Retweeting seemed more about marking cyberterritory by pissing on the digital lamp-posts than actually communicating anything.
The disparity between the Twitterstream and the Grauniad "Journalist Generated" Liveblog and Twitterstream became more and more marked as the day wore on, leading me to ormulate two hypotheses for "User Generated Media" going forward:
(i) The "Citizen Reporter" on the twitterstream, who was a pretty reliable eyewitness 2007-9. is increasingly being drowned out by flacks, fanbois and noisy numpties. "Proper" mainstream media journalism again is becoming a far more trusted source. The age of "You Media" is over.
(ii) I eventually stopped watching the Twitterstream, setting up a temporary stream from a group of people whose views I trust that were there. In other words, the Twitter Signal to Noise ratio is gettng to the point where filtering the folksonomy by trusted source will be essential.
The obvious lesson for presenters from yesterday is that using mental bubblegum soundbites that send the twitternumpties into RT frenzy is a far more effective way of getting your message across than any reasoned argument. That was ever thus, true - but the only danger with this, I would argue from my reasoning above, is that over time it degrades to lowest common denominators sans moderation - a tragedy of the commoners, as it were. It will work like online advertising - you do it to get to the most influential people, but they are the first to avoid it - so you wind up banging your gong to the digital peasantry.
And on the way, the countless retweeting empty vessels toll the death bell for Citizen Journalism on Social Media platforms.
No what surprises me a lot about this post is that I wrote it! I'm no friend of the MSM, and a fan of the whole "2.0" thingy in general, but what this showed me is that, left to its own unfiltered devices, "User Generated" content is a lot like a the h3nry Sewer of Life - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. And like that sewer, if what is being put in is a lot of crap.....
As an aside, it may also mean that the Good Stuff in future will be found behind Times style paywalls and what you get for free is increasingly Ad-peddled and raddled sh*t (as the Economist implies today - but the article is, newly, behind a paywall.....).
