Monday, January 4. 2010
The Networked Technology world in 2019
On Friday we looked at the 8 big trends in the networked technology space over the last 10 years (1999 - 2009). Today, as promised, we look at the trends over the next 10. In some ways its easier to think about 10 years rather than 2-3 years out as (i) you can see the big trends more easily and (ii) no one will remember this in 2019 unless we're very right 
.
A little digression, if I may. Bill Gates once said that things change more slowly in 2 years than people (and their business cases) want, but far faster in 10. My observation is that this is very true in consumer technology, less true in business technology, less again in the public sector, and public behaviour and structures change but slowly. We also have a model that says technology merely provides opportunity, its the economics, user behaviour and legal restrictions that drive uptake,
For example, VOIP was technically feasible in 2000, but it was only in 2003/4 that enough people had good enough bandwidth, and PCs were cheap enough, for it to "piggy back" on top of pre-paid for assets (your broadband connection, PC with microphone and speakers etc).
Anyway, enough of that - what what happens to the 8 trends we saw in the previous decade rolling forward? They were:
1. Bandwidth will carry on expanding
Given we have had a c 30x increase in the last 10 years, projecting that forward implies a mean of c 60 Mbps by 2019 in the UK. From about 20 Mbps per home upwards, you are talking multiple streams of HD video into a household so that allows the exciting prospect of everyone indoors watching their own HDTV channel, instead of TV channel as they do today. Plus ca change.
More to the point is that expanding bandwidth will drive richer applications, which we comment on below in points 2-4.
Critical to this will be whether the "frontbones" - the networks to the home - can take it. In countries where Government diktat has ruled rollout, this will happen. In those using "the market" it will (probably) happen - but later. The Digital Britain hoo-ha pretty much showed that the market will want to sell to the (urbanised, wealthy) 1/3rd of the population off its own bat, may then expand to the next 1/3rd but won't want to touch the last (poorer, rural, older) 1/3rd. Towards the mid 20-teens ("Twenteens"?) even the most market oriented of Governments will realise that to be competitive they need universal high bandwidth access and will force the issue.
2. Talking to each other will remain the Killer App
We don't know with certainty what New New Platforms will come after Twitter or Facebook, or what the successor of Web 2.0 - sorry, Web-squared - will be (though we have some ideas - see below). But what we do know is that it will revolve around P2P - person to person - communication. Always has, always will.
So, we will predict that whatever new platforms, technologies, etc etc emerge - and despite the resurrection of the standard old advertising and e-commerce use cases (see "you can find a great restaurant with your friends" below) - the killer application will remain enabling small world social networks of people to communicate.
This of course does not mean it will make the most money directly, as we saw in the 'Noughties that game went to being able to place low cost Ads against weak buying intention signals. But comms will still be the killer app driving people onto end to end platforms.
3. Our "Social Networks" evolve onto whatever the best platform of the moment is
An inevitable corollary of 2 above - given talking to each other is the killer application - the next need is to enable a "clearing system" to find people you want to talk to. The rate of change of Social Networks in the last 10 years - from email groupware to near real time video chatrooms - has been fairly predictable big picture (same function, different bandwidth), but - as always - it's hard to define at a detailed UI level just which design will succeed. The mayfly like existence of each new social network (2 year half life) means that (i) there is still massive innovation going on and (ii) the ones we have now will pass too.
The next 10 years will see more bandwidth, and more flexible social market-making. Twitter is the current design leader as it is asynchronous, asymmetric and ad-free (for now). Superimposing this on current platform trends we imagine more fixed/mobile convergence, more attempts to link metadata, more attempts to compromise privacy for searchability. Also, there will not be a "Paradigm Shift" - The users will migrate onto the "New" new platforms while maintaining use of the old (we still use email and SMS) - in fact we predict the ability to run "Unified Comms" systems will be increasingly critical.
In addition, as social networks get bigger and marketing zombies invade them, and signal to noise ratio falls, the ability to filter in the stream will be increasingly critical to its uptake - it is our view for example that Twitter clients will increasingly look like email clients (and vice versa - look at the new Mozilla Raindrop ) as the required functionality is proven over time. Another approach to filtering will be to increase the niche-ness of individual networks (this is what happens to the AltNet and GroupWare) - this story today about BeautifulPeople.com firing 5,000 userswho had got too fat over the holidays illustrates this quite well
4. All useful technology and applications commoditise over a 3-5 year cycle.....
Its worth looking at what is commoditising now to get a view of the main trends in the first half of the 20-teens. Low resolution video, fixed-mobile comms and devices, social media (or at least some aspects of it - group comms and basic profiling), the underlying protocols that Web 2.0 kicked off, text search, and even (near) real time services are busy commoditising. Its also easier to make simple payments now than ever before. The most powerful emerging services of the early decade will be built on combinations of these, as its going with the flow. We will be getting more interconnection of commoditising layers (ie the "walled gardens" will forever be climbing up the added value stack)
This is going to really hurt (ie bankrupt) some industries that have existed because parts of the value chain have not commoditised in the past. Those based on expensive physical delivery of data that can be delivered digitally will be under terrific pressure in the next 5 years, there will be major creative destruction there. Think newspapers now, and TV/Films etc as bandwidth increases. Ditto knowledge industries that have avoided global labour cost arbitrage owing to degrees of difficulty of moving the information to and from the markets. Say goodbye to Hollywood, say hello to Bollywood - and will Silicon Valley still have a hegemony in 2020?
The Cloud will be renamed at least twice in the next 10 years, it is coming, but at present the combination of relatively low system reliability, lack of decent SLA protection and too many competing platforms without sufficient plug and play and interoperability will keep it as a niche sport, and users in the 20-teens will mainly opt for hybrid models of Cloud + Own Equipment - though the niches will grow steadily. As with Electricity, the Cloud will have to be "tried and tested" at each layer before widespread adoption. Services on it - the ASP/SOA/SaaS/Whatever the next Acronym is layer - will continue to develop with bandwidth, penetration and sheer cycles of code-writing. Friction will be provided ny attempts to run wllaed gardens (it was ever thus)
Another part of the commoditisation story is the march of Moore's Law (or similar). By and large in this space you get twice the power at half the cost and size every 2 years. This won't change anytime in the next 10 years, and a 2**5 = 30x reduction is a useful tool to think about 2019 with - imagine iPhone and basic PC like functionality for $10, in devices the size of an iPod Nano for example! This is going to drive two other trends onwards:
5. .....but People are Still People. The more things change, the more they stay the same
The technology changes, we talk and interact with each other in new ways, but what we do remains the same. The human condition will remain to hatch, match and despatch, some will always want to seek power and money, and while running this never-ending circle of life we will still try and scrabble onto higher planes of Maslowian existence, and try and keep ourselves entertained in our downtimes. And being human we will still try and get something for nothing so the dreaded parasite that is advertising will, like death and taxes, remain with us for a while yet. So here are some things that this implies:
6. Hype (and dodgy economic theories) spring eternal in the human breast
In 1999 there were high priests of the New Tech Age then as now. Anyone churlish enough to be a "New Age Economics Denier" was castigated, lambasted and told they "didn't get it". By 2002 the sceptics had been proved largely right as the dotcom bubble deflated to complete limpness. But by 2004 the New "New Economics" of the Internet was on the rise again with Wikinomics (allowing me to calculate that New Economic memes have a c 2 year refraction time) and by 2009 in full swing with various flavours "Free" etc etc which. We predict most of this will be largely discredited by 2011 and a 2 - 3 year period of a Return to Rational Economics will ensue (it has already to an extent).
Companies built in this period have historically been strong, simple because they are built on solid fundamentals.
Ecclesiastes Law however states that, by c 2014 there will be a new inflationary bubble in something, and cometh the hour, cometh the man (or woman). A new generation of Tech Wonderfulness will thus be declared, that is of course quite unlike anything before, and it will of course herald in a New Economic Paradigm which (oddly enough) will promise to allow you to get richer with less effort, and that people who don't "get it" will of course be labelled as crusty old farts.
7. There is a Google or two in every Decade
In every decade a dominant New Media New Entrant emerges at a new layer that they make their own. In the past they have tended to be West Coast US companies (access to the worlds largest ubiquitous markets for risk capital and customers has pretty much guaranteed that). In the 80's it was Microsoft, in the 90's it was arguably AOL (and maybe Yahoo), in the Noughties it was Google.
Ten years later the last decades Cool Kids are nearly always still around, but now as large corporate entities rather than cool young companies. They are no longer the Innovators of the emerging "new" New Media and typically strategically buy innovation, and try and spoil it elsewhere. The ones for the 20-teens all exist already, the issue is spotting which has 10 year legs. In Social Networking I'm betting that Facebook is the New Yahoo, and something else will be the New Google. Maybe Twitter, maybe something in left field still.
Re Google in particular, we think that their search algorithms are going to be increasingly less useful over the decade - in a way a self inflicted goal, as by adding value to links means an entire parasitic SEO ecosystem has emerged. Given that Google funds itself entirely on its link economics, but subsidises many other ambitions, this is going to make its activities in other arenas harder over time. (I see John Battelle of all people, has come to similar conclusions)
In the next 10 years it will probably still be West Coast US companies that rule, but it will be less certain. China represents another huge, fairly homogenous market with its own barriers to entry, and Baidu seem to be able to hold off Google.
Others that are interesting are around the disruption of very big industries today - the growth of online video (Hulu), the disruption of Olde Print Media (Huffington Post, Techmeme) and the emerging Non-bank Banks (unless they get regulated sooner). Also the change to digital in the basic Telco layers implies the emergence of "Soft" Telcos (Telecoms companies that own no direct assets) - Skype is the first wave.
8. Planet Mobile will always overestimate benefits and underestimate time to get them
Planet Mobile runs on the perennial "You can use your mobile to select a great restaurant nearby for you and your friends" business case. It's been used to flog everything from m-commerce to location and augmented reality based services over the last 10 years. Three things have changed for the 20-teens though:
Well, that is the projection of the Noughties going forward, but there are a bunch of "Intersection" technologies (those at the intersection of some of these" and some newly emerging trends which will help reshape things too. In the spirit of keeping things Prime, here are 5 we see emerging
9. Privacy (and a related issue, Trust) will become a bigger and bigger factors.
We thought Privacy would hit the headlines after Beacon, but it didn't - however, right now the buzz about Privacy is higher than its ever been. We expect nuanced Privacy to become a major issue in the design of next generation Social Nets, Web Services and eCommerce systems. Online Trust will see huge leaps forward in quantification, simply because without it a lot of the transactions (social, financial, political, etc) that we take for granted in the real world won't happen online very easily above a very basic level. It will require solving a wide combination of Social Capital, Behavioural Psych/Economic and good old Ownership issues. Plus Privacy, of course.
For this reason, by the way, I am less bullish on Location Based services - they are a privacy timebomb waiting to happen, and you just know some overenthusiastic and under-ethiced entrepreneur is going to build the short-cut system that gets accused of facilitating robbery, rape and worse.
(I rather liked Greg Battle's post and his comment that "there will be a sea of people paying for a decade of crimes of youthful oversharing. Credit services will ingest social profiles/footprints as a behavioral overlay to your FICA score and a new industry of removing those indiscretions will be born."
10. How Green was my Valley again?
The sheer amount of money being thrown at Eco-Science todasy - whether you believe in it or not - will ensure that all the networking technologies we know and love will be thrown at trying to make us, our goods and chattels, and by extension the planet, Greener. Some innovations will be very valuable, some will be total Greenwash. Most will come and go and be superseded by newer, better stuff as its very early days for most ICT based Greentech.
If I were to make a guess, its that the Greenwave will be more prevalent in the next few years and recede towards the end of the decade. This is because I (personally) believe much of the current climate change/AGW hoo-ha will be seen to be over-egged and the massive rampups in funding its had over the last 10 years will recede. Bt 2015 the colour of Green will be more "classic"
Anything that makes more efficient use of existing energy assets (renewable or un) is probably a real win. There is also so much money and interested vested in the whole Carbon Trading arena that no doubt many maths PhDs' time will be spent adapting systems from the financial industries to game this one.
11. Enterprise 2.0 will be rebadged with a Three Letter Acronym by 2011.
No one implements big new systems in corporates without a TLA Besides, Enterprise 2.0 as it stands is too limited. It reminds me of Office Automation in the 1980's - a great set of new technologies that aren't yet quite hitting the really big economic levers of the business. By the time Enterprise 2.0 is attacking the big levers - sales effectiveness (CRM), business operations efficiency (TOC, JIT), Churn reduction and Customer Satisfaction (TQC, 6Sigma), reducing CAPEX bills (BPR) and massively improving information flow (MRP2, ERP, OODA) then it will need a new name.
This is not to say that Enterprise 2.0 is not relevant, just that its still a very early day story with immature technology. What comes after is (literally) a 64-billion dollar question.
The Enterprise 2.0 movement will stand or fall on its ability to do 3 major things
12. Government 2.0 will be a slow train coming
There are no doubt efficiencies to be gained by moving Governments services onto teh Web, however we believe it will be slower than many anticipate as:
13. The Internet of (Moving) Things
Aka Robots. The combination of Moore's, Metcalfe's and .... Law means a lot of ICT power can be put on a fairly sophisticated yet inexpensive moving frame today. The Internet of Things is not the endgame, some of these things will be quite smart, some will move, some will do other fairly complex, unpleasant tasks (like fighting foreign wars, cleaning houses and dealing with low price service needs).
Anyway, that concludes a heroic set of guesses. I should add of course that our methodology is to write scenarios, calculate critical paths, milestones and "points of no return", attempt to understand the game theory of the scenario - and revise it every so many cycles with new evidence - so we will have changed our minds in a years time
.A little digression, if I may. Bill Gates once said that things change more slowly in 2 years than people (and their business cases) want, but far faster in 10. My observation is that this is very true in consumer technology, less true in business technology, less again in the public sector, and public behaviour and structures change but slowly. We also have a model that says technology merely provides opportunity, its the economics, user behaviour and legal restrictions that drive uptake,
For example, VOIP was technically feasible in 2000, but it was only in 2003/4 that enough people had good enough bandwidth, and PCs were cheap enough, for it to "piggy back" on top of pre-paid for assets (your broadband connection, PC with microphone and speakers etc).
Anyway, enough of that - what what happens to the 8 trends we saw in the previous decade rolling forward? They were:
1. Bandwidth will carry on expanding
Given we have had a c 30x increase in the last 10 years, projecting that forward implies a mean of c 60 Mbps by 2019 in the UK. From about 20 Mbps per home upwards, you are talking multiple streams of HD video into a household so that allows the exciting prospect of everyone indoors watching their own HDTV channel, instead of TV channel as they do today. Plus ca change.
More to the point is that expanding bandwidth will drive richer applications, which we comment on below in points 2-4.
Critical to this will be whether the "frontbones" - the networks to the home - can take it. In countries where Government diktat has ruled rollout, this will happen. In those using "the market" it will (probably) happen - but later. The Digital Britain hoo-ha pretty much showed that the market will want to sell to the (urbanised, wealthy) 1/3rd of the population off its own bat, may then expand to the next 1/3rd but won't want to touch the last (poorer, rural, older) 1/3rd. Towards the mid 20-teens ("Twenteens"?) even the most market oriented of Governments will realise that to be competitive they need universal high bandwidth access and will force the issue.
2. Talking to each other will remain the Killer App
We don't know with certainty what New New Platforms will come after Twitter or Facebook, or what the successor of Web 2.0 - sorry, Web-squared - will be (though we have some ideas - see below). But what we do know is that it will revolve around P2P - person to person - communication. Always has, always will.
So, we will predict that whatever new platforms, technologies, etc etc emerge - and despite the resurrection of the standard old advertising and e-commerce use cases (see "you can find a great restaurant with your friends" below) - the killer application will remain enabling small world social networks of people to communicate.
This of course does not mean it will make the most money directly, as we saw in the 'Noughties that game went to being able to place low cost Ads against weak buying intention signals. But comms will still be the killer app driving people onto end to end platforms.
3. Our "Social Networks" evolve onto whatever the best platform of the moment is
An inevitable corollary of 2 above - given talking to each other is the killer application - the next need is to enable a "clearing system" to find people you want to talk to. The rate of change of Social Networks in the last 10 years - from email groupware to near real time video chatrooms - has been fairly predictable big picture (same function, different bandwidth), but - as always - it's hard to define at a detailed UI level just which design will succeed. The mayfly like existence of each new social network (2 year half life) means that (i) there is still massive innovation going on and (ii) the ones we have now will pass too.
The next 10 years will see more bandwidth, and more flexible social market-making. Twitter is the current design leader as it is asynchronous, asymmetric and ad-free (for now). Superimposing this on current platform trends we imagine more fixed/mobile convergence, more attempts to link metadata, more attempts to compromise privacy for searchability. Also, there will not be a "Paradigm Shift" - The users will migrate onto the "New" new platforms while maintaining use of the old (we still use email and SMS) - in fact we predict the ability to run "Unified Comms" systems will be increasingly critical.
In addition, as social networks get bigger and marketing zombies invade them, and signal to noise ratio falls, the ability to filter in the stream will be increasingly critical to its uptake - it is our view for example that Twitter clients will increasingly look like email clients (and vice versa - look at the new Mozilla Raindrop ) as the required functionality is proven over time. Another approach to filtering will be to increase the niche-ness of individual networks (this is what happens to the AltNet and GroupWare) - this story today about BeautifulPeople.com firing 5,000 userswho had got too fat over the holidays illustrates this quite well
4. All useful technology and applications commoditise over a 3-5 year cycle.....
Its worth looking at what is commoditising now to get a view of the main trends in the first half of the 20-teens. Low resolution video, fixed-mobile comms and devices, social media (or at least some aspects of it - group comms and basic profiling), the underlying protocols that Web 2.0 kicked off, text search, and even (near) real time services are busy commoditising. Its also easier to make simple payments now than ever before. The most powerful emerging services of the early decade will be built on combinations of these, as its going with the flow. We will be getting more interconnection of commoditising layers (ie the "walled gardens" will forever be climbing up the added value stack)
This is going to really hurt (ie bankrupt) some industries that have existed because parts of the value chain have not commoditised in the past. Those based on expensive physical delivery of data that can be delivered digitally will be under terrific pressure in the next 5 years, there will be major creative destruction there. Think newspapers now, and TV/Films etc as bandwidth increases. Ditto knowledge industries that have avoided global labour cost arbitrage owing to degrees of difficulty of moving the information to and from the markets. Say goodbye to Hollywood, say hello to Bollywood - and will Silicon Valley still have a hegemony in 2020?
The Cloud will be renamed at least twice in the next 10 years, it is coming, but at present the combination of relatively low system reliability, lack of decent SLA protection and too many competing platforms without sufficient plug and play and interoperability will keep it as a niche sport, and users in the 20-teens will mainly opt for hybrid models of Cloud + Own Equipment - though the niches will grow steadily. As with Electricity, the Cloud will have to be "tried and tested" at each layer before widespread adoption. Services on it - the ASP/SOA/SaaS/Whatever the next Acronym is layer - will continue to develop with bandwidth, penetration and sheer cycles of code-writing. Friction will be provided ny attempts to run wllaed gardens (it was ever thus)
Another part of the commoditisation story is the march of Moore's Law (or similar). By and large in this space you get twice the power at half the cost and size every 2 years. This won't change anytime in the next 10 years, and a 2**5 = 30x reduction is a useful tool to think about 2019 with - imagine iPhone and basic PC like functionality for $10, in devices the size of an iPod Nano for example! This is going to drive two other trends onwards:
- ubiquitous multimedia, at least in the OECD (this TED talk by Patti Maes is a sign of things to come)
- the Internet of Things - never mind a billion new mobile users, think a trillion new dumb devices. Say hello to Mrs Fridge!
5. .....but People are Still People. The more things change, the more they stay the same
The technology changes, we talk and interact with each other in new ways, but what we do remains the same. The human condition will remain to hatch, match and despatch, some will always want to seek power and money, and while running this never-ending circle of life we will still try and scrabble onto higher planes of Maslowian existence, and try and keep ourselves entertained in our downtimes. And being human we will still try and get something for nothing so the dreaded parasite that is advertising will, like death and taxes, remain with us for a while yet. So here are some things that this implies:
- We have a hypothesis (based on our reading of behavioural economics as it stands today) that genetic imperatives drive time value of attention, so people will pay real money for things that help them match and hatch. Anything that increases privileged access to mates, money, status, nest building etc will be seen as valuable. Entertainment media is by and large lowest value time (if you had better things to do with your time, you'd do it) so will continue to struggle to fight free models. Its a volume game with low prices.
- Advertising will move over to online media as attention shifts, but owing to the lower audience sizes and almost infinite inventory, the mean (and I mean "mean") rates will stay lower. Over the decade the best empirical metrics will emerge and establish a better economic basis, so by end 20-teens we expect Online Advertising to overtake "trad" advertising in revenue, if not in profitability (Yes, that means hitting c 50% of value by c 2017 or so). Some of this will be from growth, some will be from decline in the overall market as Advertising is just less relevant in a networked, interactive digital world.
6. Hype (and dodgy economic theories) spring eternal in the human breast
In 1999 there were high priests of the New Tech Age then as now. Anyone churlish enough to be a "New Age Economics Denier" was castigated, lambasted and told they "didn't get it". By 2002 the sceptics had been proved largely right as the dotcom bubble deflated to complete limpness. But by 2004 the New "New Economics" of the Internet was on the rise again with Wikinomics (allowing me to calculate that New Economic memes have a c 2 year refraction time) and by 2009 in full swing with various flavours "Free" etc etc which. We predict most of this will be largely discredited by 2011 and a 2 - 3 year period of a Return to Rational Economics will ensue (it has already to an extent).
Companies built in this period have historically been strong, simple because they are built on solid fundamentals.
Ecclesiastes Law however states that, by c 2014 there will be a new inflationary bubble in something, and cometh the hour, cometh the man (or woman). A new generation of Tech Wonderfulness will thus be declared, that is of course quite unlike anything before, and it will of course herald in a New Economic Paradigm which (oddly enough) will promise to allow you to get richer with less effort, and that people who don't "get it" will of course be labelled as crusty old farts.
7. There is a Google or two in every Decade
In every decade a dominant New Media New Entrant emerges at a new layer that they make their own. In the past they have tended to be West Coast US companies (access to the worlds largest ubiquitous markets for risk capital and customers has pretty much guaranteed that). In the 80's it was Microsoft, in the 90's it was arguably AOL (and maybe Yahoo), in the Noughties it was Google.
Ten years later the last decades Cool Kids are nearly always still around, but now as large corporate entities rather than cool young companies. They are no longer the Innovators of the emerging "new" New Media and typically strategically buy innovation, and try and spoil it elsewhere. The ones for the 20-teens all exist already, the issue is spotting which has 10 year legs. In Social Networking I'm betting that Facebook is the New Yahoo, and something else will be the New Google. Maybe Twitter, maybe something in left field still.
Re Google in particular, we think that their search algorithms are going to be increasingly less useful over the decade - in a way a self inflicted goal, as by adding value to links means an entire parasitic SEO ecosystem has emerged. Given that Google funds itself entirely on its link economics, but subsidises many other ambitions, this is going to make its activities in other arenas harder over time. (I see John Battelle of all people, has come to similar conclusions)
In the next 10 years it will probably still be West Coast US companies that rule, but it will be less certain. China represents another huge, fairly homogenous market with its own barriers to entry, and Baidu seem to be able to hold off Google.
Others that are interesting are around the disruption of very big industries today - the growth of online video (Hulu), the disruption of Olde Print Media (Huffington Post, Techmeme) and the emerging Non-bank Banks (unless they get regulated sooner). Also the change to digital in the basic Telco layers implies the emergence of "Soft" Telcos (Telecoms companies that own no direct assets) - Skype is the first wave.
8. Planet Mobile will always overestimate benefits and underestimate time to get them
Planet Mobile runs on the perennial "You can use your mobile to select a great restaurant nearby for you and your friends" business case. It's been used to flog everything from m-commerce to location and augmented reality based services over the last 10 years. Three things have changed for the 20-teens though:
- The rogue entrant that re-sets the game for the next round has emerged (Apple and the iPhone). (Rogue Entrants use the technology available to build the "obvious gaping hole" system that the incumbents for various commercial reasons refuse to build). Going back in history, Apple always enters a poorly structured game with a well defined complete - and closed - solution, capturing about 15 - 20% of the more profitable market while the rest is then duked over by the guiants, and the lower economics usually means 1 dominant player emerges (Microsoft). Google Android is the early pretender for the Microsoft role in this industry, but its still early days and the shoe (and penny) still have to drop for the incumbentsSo, does this mean that Planet Mobile is now about to enter its (much heralded) decade of hegemony? Yes, it will be a lot better than in the Noughties, but... the rule of thumb of dividing all Planet Mobile projected benefits by 2 and multiply time to get them by 2 is probably as useful now as 10 years ago. apply.
- Pricing and network mean that the other billion or so of mobile users will come online this decade (Mobile penetration in Africa is now similar to the UK in 2000), but they do not have the economic value. Their entrance, however, will transform the market for follow on services (and quite a number of other Olde Industries in these locations)
- Smartphones do more stuff - which means that (i) a bunch of things PCs and other single purpose devices did will be taken on board, and thus (ii) a whole raft of new fixed/mobile applications will emerge. But "Mobile" will stop meaning "Phone" and mean anything from Handy via Tablet through Netbook to Laptop and whatever else comes along that can connect to the mobile nets (Mobile TV sets anyone?)
Well, that is the projection of the Noughties going forward, but there are a bunch of "Intersection" technologies (those at the intersection of some of these" and some newly emerging trends which will help reshape things too. In the spirit of keeping things Prime, here are 5 we see emerging
9. Privacy (and a related issue, Trust) will become a bigger and bigger factors.
We thought Privacy would hit the headlines after Beacon, but it didn't - however, right now the buzz about Privacy is higher than its ever been. We expect nuanced Privacy to become a major issue in the design of next generation Social Nets, Web Services and eCommerce systems. Online Trust will see huge leaps forward in quantification, simply because without it a lot of the transactions (social, financial, political, etc) that we take for granted in the real world won't happen online very easily above a very basic level. It will require solving a wide combination of Social Capital, Behavioural Psych/Economic and good old Ownership issues. Plus Privacy, of course.
For this reason, by the way, I am less bullish on Location Based services - they are a privacy timebomb waiting to happen, and you just know some overenthusiastic and under-ethiced entrepreneur is going to build the short-cut system that gets accused of facilitating robbery, rape and worse.
(I rather liked Greg Battle's post and his comment that "there will be a sea of people paying for a decade of crimes of youthful oversharing. Credit services will ingest social profiles/footprints as a behavioral overlay to your FICA score and a new industry of removing those indiscretions will be born."
10. How Green was my Valley again?
The sheer amount of money being thrown at Eco-Science todasy - whether you believe in it or not - will ensure that all the networking technologies we know and love will be thrown at trying to make us, our goods and chattels, and by extension the planet, Greener. Some innovations will be very valuable, some will be total Greenwash. Most will come and go and be superseded by newer, better stuff as its very early days for most ICT based Greentech.
If I were to make a guess, its that the Greenwave will be more prevalent in the next few years and recede towards the end of the decade. This is because I (personally) believe much of the current climate change/AGW hoo-ha will be seen to be over-egged and the massive rampups in funding its had over the last 10 years will recede. Bt 2015 the colour of Green will be more "classic"
Anything that makes more efficient use of existing energy assets (renewable or un) is probably a real win. There is also so much money and interested vested in the whole Carbon Trading arena that no doubt many maths PhDs' time will be spent adapting systems from the financial industries to game this one.
11. Enterprise 2.0 will be rebadged with a Three Letter Acronym by 2011.
No one implements big new systems in corporates without a TLA
Besides, Enterprise 2.0 as it stands is too limited. It reminds me of Office Automation in the 1980's - a great set of new technologies that aren't yet quite hitting the really big economic levers of the business. By the time Enterprise 2.0 is attacking the big levers - sales effectiveness (CRM), business operations efficiency (TOC, JIT), Churn reduction and Customer Satisfaction (TQC, 6Sigma), reducing CAPEX bills (BPR) and massively improving information flow (MRP2, ERP, OODA) then it will need a new name. This is not to say that Enterprise 2.0 is not relevant, just that its still a very early day story with immature technology. What comes after is (literally) a 64-billion dollar question.
The Enterprise 2.0 movement will stand or fall on its ability to do 3 major things
- gain new customers/users/donors/whatever,
- keep them
- service tham at lower costs than current and "Good Enough" new systems will.
12. Government 2.0 will be a slow train coming
There are no doubt efficiencies to be gained by moving Governments services onto teh Web, however we believe it will be slower than many anticipate as:
(i) Those with power hate giving power away.
(ii) Governments, by and large, do not have stellar records in adopting new IT systems early, nor in rollling them out fast and successfully. Potential cost savings will be counterbalanced by the costs of purchase and implementation in cash-strapped public services. There will no doubt be Digital Inclusion lobbies arguing for 100% access to new services - a worthy aim, but it will serve to further slow things down. But full inclusion is expensive - however, so long as there is not Digital Inclusion, you can't take the savings. This is the Catch 22.0
(iii) Privacy is a major headache with public data, and current 2.0 systems are far from secure
(iii) Also, current networked systems are too simplistic to deal with the 5% of unpleasant people who will lie, cheat and scam. We can easily design Government 2.0 systems for the 95% of (usually) honest citizens (95% of the 2/3rds of the population who will have Broadband access) , but to do so will be to accept higher risk, and probably more collateral damage from the bad guys. And given how risk averse and lawsuit-keen We The People are en Mobbe, it will be hard for governments to do this. Even if they wanted to, which they don't
13. The Internet of (Moving) Things
Aka Robots. The combination of Moore's, Metcalfe's and .... Law means a lot of ICT power can be put on a fairly sophisticated yet inexpensive moving frame today. The Internet of Things is not the endgame, some of these things will be quite smart, some will move, some will do other fairly complex, unpleasant tasks (like fighting foreign wars, cleaning houses and dealing with low price service needs).
Anyway, that concludes a heroic set of guesses. I should add of course that our methodology is to write scenarios, calculate critical paths, milestones and "points of no return", attempt to understand the game theory of the scenario - and revise it every so many cycles with new evidence - so we will have changed our minds in a years time
Thursday, December 31. 2009
8 Lessons from a Decade - Networking Technologies 1999 - 2009
I have been catching up on the BBC Electric Dreams series over the holidays, and was taken by the summary of the 80's as "technology with lots of promise that was very hard to actually make work" and the 90's as technology that "did what it said on the tin, but didn't integrate with anything else".
So what about the Noughties? Looking back over 10 years of networking technology evolution is useful to put things into perspective. As it is fashionable to make lists I have done so, but have eschewed the usual 10 Points. I have (unilaterally) decided that lists are only valid if they use a number on the Fibonacci Sequence, so here are the 8 Largest Trends from the Noughties:
In summary then - the Noughties were the era that Metcalfe's Law took hold, and the network economics thereof drove a higher level of integration and "plug and play" evolution. But what the technology was used for, and the tracks it evolved along, were big picture largely predictable as the tracks are pre-laid and people's needs stay the same.
So what does that imply for 2010 - 2020? Tune in tomorrow to find out
So what about the Noughties? Looking back over 10 years of networking technology evolution is useful to put things into perspective. As it is fashionable to make lists I have done so, but have eschewed the usual 10 Points. I have (unilaterally) decided that lists are only valid if they use a number on the Fibonacci Sequence, so here are the 8 Largest Trends from the Noughties:
1. Bandwidth will carry on expanding
We started in 1999 with 56 kbps modems, a whopping 128 if you bought ISDN (I know I did). In 1999 you get a fairly standard 2-3 Mbps on most UK xDSL nets, about half that on mobile ones. A few people are accessing some contended piece of 50 Mbps. OECD countries with state intervention in the market (eg France and Scandinavia) are further ahead and the mean bandwidth is higher. In Korea (major state intervention) you get 100 Mbps.
(Given we have had a c 30x increase in 10 years, projecting that forward implies a mean of c 60 Mbps by 2019, and that will give a lead in to my Future Projections post tomorrow)
2. Talking to each other remains the Killer App
Despite all the prognostications of great e-commerce in the late 90's on fixed and mobile services, the killer app every time you looked at a new platform was enabling people to talk to each other. Email groupware and SMS were the examples in 1999. In 2009, Twitter (essentially an asynch chat-group platform) showed the same for social networks to the extent that all others had to adapt their models to map to it.
3. Our "Social Networks" evolve onto whatever the best platform of the moment is
An inevitable progression of 2 - talking to each other - the next need is a "market" to find people you want to talk to. Today we call this Social media. In 1999 email groupware and chatrooms were where the action was, today with better bandwidth and Web 2.0 enabled tools we have Social Networks which rely on more bandwidth and newer comms technoilogies (aka Twitter et al)
4. All useful technology and applications commoditise over a 3-5 year cycle.....
In 1999 getting an internet connection and a LAN was non trivial, setting up wifi was for geek hobbyists and Pringles fans only, and although VoIP was technically possible it required you to buy and bodge a whole lot of stuff (yes Paduans, we had VoIP in 1999 but you had to buy $200 of additional gear to to get the Transmission/Reception on your computer). The reason Skype took off in 2004 was because of good cheap bandwidth and laptops having mikes and speakers and the conversion software, not because the guys were tech geniuses per se. There is a time for everything....
5. .....but People are Still People
The technology changes, we talk and interact with each other in new ways, but what we do remains the same. The human condition is to hatch, match and despatch and between this never-ending circle of life we try and scrabble onto higher planes of Maslowian existence, and try and keep ourselves entertained in our downtimes. From 1999 to 2009 there have been continual attempts to improve access to music, movies, material tat and potential mates. What is absolutely predictable is that any service that facilitates these basic needs better will succeed. What is also absolutely predictable is usually the large corporates that have all the assets to win will not take the initiatives (think mobile operators and music for example). What is harder to predict is which new one will succeed in the Darwinian moshpit
6. Hype (and dodgy economic theories) spring eternal in the human breast
In 1999 there were tablets, ever faster PCs, new mobiles, "must have" games, software programs and other consumer geegaws being hyped to the gills by rich Tech Giants. Scroll forward to Techmeme on any day in 2009 and you will see the same, mainly by the same people (with Google being the one new entrant - see point 6). In 1999 the "new economics" of the Internet was all the rage and was busy fuelling the dotcom boom. There were high priests of the New Tech Age then as now. Anyone churlish enough to be a "New Age Economics Denier" was castigated, lambasted and told they "didn't get it". By 2002 the sceptics had been proved largely right as the dotcom bubble deflated to complete limpness. But by 2004 the New "New Economics" of the Internet was on the rise again with Wikinomics (allowing me to calculate that New Economic memes have a c 2 year refraction time) and by 2009 in full swing with "Free" etc etc.
This time the overall economy popped early so we have the fascinating view of the theories being overtaken by the contra-reality even as they come out. The corollary of course is that every time a New Economic Theory contradicts Old Economics, it will eventually be proven wrong, but many peopel wil lose an d make money in the next turn of the screwed.
This is not to say that the basics of networks economics are wrong - they are not - but much of what is sold around them are pure snake oil, and a good test is the oldest "if it sounds too good to be true, its is". Caveat Emptor applies in 2009 as much as it did in 1999.
7. There is a Google or two in every Decade
In every decade a dominant New Media New Entrant emerges. They tend to be West Coast US companies. In the 80's it was Microsoft, in the 90's it was arguably AOL (and maybe Yahoo), in the Noughties it was Google. Ten years later they are still around as large corporate entities but are no longer the Innovators of the emerging "new" New Media. They are always up and running already, the issue is spotting which has legs. Facebook and Twitter are two to watch though I suspect they are early run - ins, others that interest me are Hulu, the Huffington Post and the Non-bank Banks (I will comment on this more tomorrow).
8. Planet Mobile will always overestimate benefits and underestimate time to get them
In 1999 the "You can use your mobile so you can select a great restaurant nearby for you and your friends" business case was in full cry. It was used to sell everything from m-commerce to location based services. Fast forward 10 years and nothing much has changed, except for one thing - the rogue entrant that re-sets the game for the next round has emerged (Apple and the iPhone). The Rogue uses the technology available to build the "obvious gaping hole" system that the incumbents for various commercial reasons refuse to build. Going back in history, Apple always enters a poorly structured game with a well defined complete - and closed - solution, capturing about 15 - 20% of the more profitable market while the rest is then duked over, and the lower economics usually means 1 dominant player emerges (Microsoft).
Does this mean that Planet Mobile is now about to enter its (much heralded) decade of hegemony? Tune in tomorrow, but as a short answer the operating rules of the last 10 years - divide benefits by 2 and multiply time to get them by 2 - still apply.
In summary then - the Noughties were the era that Metcalfe's Law took hold, and the network economics thereof drove a higher level of integration and "plug and play" evolution. But what the technology was used for, and the tracks it evolved along, were big picture largely predictable as the tracks are pre-laid and people's needs stay the same.
So what does that imply for 2010 - 2020? Tune in tomorrow to find out
Tuesday, December 29. 2009
Reading rise due to Internet low bandwidth
Monday, December 14. 2009
A Free Press vs a "Free" Press
Wednesday, November 18. 2009
Streams of Content, Limited Attention - and Twitterwalls
danah boyd (no, its not a typo, apparently she spells her name all in lower case) delivered a paper yesterday at the NY Web 2.0 Expo which, it would seem, did not go down too well with some of the audience, which is a pity as it was quite interesting in a number of ways. I wasn't there, but parsing the Twittersteam it seems like she read it, too fast, and some people got frustrated and vented on the Twitterwall behind her, then her supporters jumped in and...well, I'm not a fan of Twitterwalls while people are speaking (see The Great Twitterwall Hijack bit here) for just this reason, and it shows total disrespect of the speaker. But then, I also think reading badly from notes is a bit disrespectful of a paying audience (and besides, a Social Media Expert should know what to expect - those who live by the twt..... ). I think danah appreciated this, as she later apologised, so kudos to her.
Anyway, the paper itself was really quite intriguing, as it is one of the first I have seen from the coterie of webpeople whom I normally consider the Evangelistii of the Social Media scene about some of its real challenges, and its worth reading carefully therefore. Given y'all are far too busy/lazy/stoned for that , we've done our normal service of expurgating, expostulating and explaining it for you. The paper starts with:
"Flow" is the new Metaphor de Jour of the Web-Set. Of course, many people have written about being "in the zone", "in flow", "letting the force be with you" etc over the last 20 years or so, and it picks up Dave Winer's concept of the "River of News" - but picking the guru with the longest and most unpronounceable name is clearly de rigeur . The problem with this concept of being "In the Flow" is in the last line - "This state is delicate, plagued by information overload and weighed down by frustrating tools". Put it another way - there is too much stuff today for you to have a hope of being in The Flow without drowning, unless there is a vigorous and ruthless filtering process and a hefty use of easy to see metadata.
I have a slightly different take on this. The Internet Is Different, but the way the medium is really restructuring the media is not around YOU, its around THEM. Voting YOU as person of the year masked An Inconvenient Truth - ie that in fact the real game is shifting from a set of Broadcasting Aggregators to a set of New Media Aggregators (Facebook, Google, Apple etc) who are all busy trying to build their own monopolistic walled gardens across the entire value chain from content creation through to proprietary user device. At least in the Olde Worlde if I bought a TV set it showed everyone's channels, and it still does on the PC whereas with a Kindle or iPhone I only get what the aggregator chooses to provide me with (AOL 2.0 anyone?). YOUR contribution is not yours either - the T&C of these sites abrogate it to themselves, which is why they can then sell themselves for squillions while YOU get nothing, even though the biggest value component in the sale is YOUR user data and potential attention to Advertising. Privacy is now a fungible good......
Now its gets very interesting, because at this point the paper changes tone significantly - the stuff above is pretty much straight from the Kool Aid 2.0 spigot, but danah's next section on 4 Challenges that need to be solved for this to work are perceptive and practical - and admit to there being problems! Which makes me wonder if the above stuff is just the liturgical form one uses before getting into the real sermon:
Absolutely, and I think it reflects the real organisation of the new media structures as owned by a new breed of aggregator, as I described above. Danah is politely vague here, but in blunt terms it means that the long tail is there for being jerked, and the jerks are more likely to follow a Celebrity on Twitter who knows f*ck-all about X, but take their opinion on X over someone more qualified. She again alludes to this when she notes:
Social Media as the new Opiate of the Masses! Its hard to think about any supplier driven "balance" working giving the new super-aggregators are all commercial entities, and are far less regulated than the TV, Radio or even print media ever were. If I were to bet on this, I'd say that the pressure to regulate Digital Media - much as media before it - will be a growth industry in the next 10 years or so. We are already seeing very worrying trends - and emerging counter resistance - around privacy and security.
Her next point is about the risky nature of everyone getting this day their own Daily Me:
As danah points out, the Technology does not inherently disintegrate social divisions. In fact, more often then not, in reinforces them. We have always been able to pick our narratives,(eg you read a left or right leaning newspaper depending on your wont) but the ability to micro-configure is Internet Age. The only people up to now who have had this capability have been recluses and very powerful people with toadies surrounding them. Neither model suggests a happy outcome. "Daily Me" advocated talk of a "Serendipity Switch" - I think an "Uncomfortable News" switch may be more in order. She believes that only a small percentage of people are inclined to seek out opinions and ideas from cultures other than their own, and that these people are and should be highly valued in society. I think she is right on the former and wrong on the latter. The last thing people comfortable with their own opinions value is some outsider telling them they're wrong. Shooting messengers is a time honoured human blood sport
This is actually quite extraordinary stuff - when one of the Evangelisti starts to talk about the totally non-meritocratic structure of social media, about the lack of balance in the interests of broker, creator and user, that a a totally self selected experience is bad and that all power corrupts, whether its from People we Hate or People We Love. its (almost) a Pauline conversion (or at least a Neo Keensian one
). What does amuse me about the Olde Guard of the 2.0 Webset is that they just...can't....bring....them...selves....to.....talk....about....what...You-Know-Hoogle et al are up to because these were held up in the original Old Testament 2.0 as Prophets of the revolution, even when its becoming increasingly clear that Net Neutrality is less of an issue than Aggregator Neutrality. Countless small time consultants is not the issue here, its a chimera for the real Information Brokers - the walled citadels over the flow of information that the New Media Aggregators are trying to build.
In her section "Making it Work" I think there are two insightful bits - Firstly:
And Secondly:
Or we charge entrance fees......
All in all a very useful discussion, even the more so as it marks - in my opinion anyway - a more "official" recognition of The Dark Side of Social Media than has previously been the case. That it was combined with a live demonstration of the downsides on the Twitterwall just puts the bow on the show......
If you liked this post, don't forget to vote for Broadstuff for the British BIMAs 2009 Best Blog Award . If you hated it, vote anyway.....
Anyway, the paper itself was really quite intriguing, as it is one of the first I have seen from the coterie of webpeople whom I normally consider the Evangelistii of the Social Media scene about some of its real challenges, and its worth reading carefully therefore. Given y'all are far too busy/lazy/stoned for that
, we've done our normal service of expurgating, expostulating and explaining it for you. The paper starts with:LIVING IN STREAMS
In his seminal pop-book, Csikszentmihalyi argued that people are happiest when they can reach a state of "flow." He talks about performers and athletes who are in the height of their profession, the experience they feel as time passes by and everything just clicks. People reach a state where attention appears focused and, simultaneously, not in need of focus at the same time. The world is aligned and it just feels right.
.......
Those who are most enamored with services like Twitter talk passionately about feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in-tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate. This state is delicate, plagued by information overload and weighed down by frustrating tools.
"Flow" is the new Metaphor de Jour of the Web-Set. Of course, many people have written about being "in the zone", "in flow", "letting the force be with you" etc over the last 20 years or so, and it picks up Dave Winer's concept of the "River of News" - but picking the guru with the longest and most unpronounceable name is clearly de rigeur
. The problem with this concept of being "In the Flow" is in the last line - "This state is delicate, plagued by information overload and weighed down by frustrating tools". Put it another way - there is too much stuff today for you to have a hope of being in The Flow without drowning, unless there is a vigorous and ruthless filtering process and a hefty use of easy to see metadata. FROM BROADCAST TO NETWORKED
For the last few centuries, we have been living in an era of broadcast media, but we have been switching to an era of networked media. This fundamentally alters the structure by which information flows.
''''''
Internet technologies are fundamentally dismantling and reworking the structures of distribution. Distribution is a process by which content creators find channels through which they can disseminate their creation. In effect, they're pushing out the content. Sure, people have to be there to receive it, but the idea is that there are limited channels for distribution and thus getting access to this limited resource is hard. That is no longer the case.
As networked technologies proliferate around the world, we can assume that there is a channel of distribution available to everyone and between everyone. In theory, anyone could get content to anyone else. With the barriers to distribution collapsing, what matters is not the act of distribution, but the act of consumption. Thus, the power is no longer in the hands of those who control the channels of distribution, but those who control the limited resource of attention. This is precisely why YOU were the Person of the Year. Your attention is precious and valuable. It's no longer about push; it's about pull. And the law of two feet is now culturally pervasive.
I have a slightly different take on this. The Internet Is Different, but the way the medium is really restructuring the media is not around YOU, its around THEM. Voting YOU as person of the year masked An Inconvenient Truth - ie that in fact the real game is shifting from a set of Broadcasting Aggregators to a set of New Media Aggregators (Facebook, Google, Apple etc) who are all busy trying to build their own monopolistic walled gardens across the entire value chain from content creation through to proprietary user device. At least in the Olde Worlde if I bought a TV set it showed everyone's channels, and it still does on the PC whereas with a Kindle or iPhone I only get what the aggregator chooses to provide me with (AOL 2.0 anyone?). YOUR contribution is not yours either - the T&C of these sites abrogate it to themselves, which is why they can then sell themselves for squillions while YOU get nothing, even though the biggest value component in the sale is YOUR user data and potential attention to Advertising. Privacy is now a fungible good......
Now its gets very interesting, because at this point the paper changes tone significantly - the stuff above is pretty much straight from the Kool Aid 2.0 spigot, but danah's next section on 4 Challenges that need to be solved for this to work are perceptive and practical - and admit to there being problems! Which makes me wonder if the above stuff is just the liturgical form one uses before getting into the real sermon:
FOUR CORE ISSUES
1) Democratization. Switching from a model of distribution to a model of attention is disruptive, but it is not inherently democratizing. This is a mistake we often make when talking about this shift. We may be democratizing certain types of access, but we're not democratizing attention. Just because we're moving towards a state where anyone has the ability to get information into the stream does not mean that attention will be divided equally. Opening up access to the structures of distribution is not democratizing when distribution is no longer the organizing function.
Some in the room might immediately think, "Ah, but it's a meritocracy. People will give their attention to what is best!" This too is mistaken logic. What people give their attention to depends on a whole set of factors that have nothing to do with what's best. At the most simplistic level, consider the role of language. People will pay attention to content that is in their language, even if they can get access to content in any language. This means Chinese language content will soon get more attention than English content, let alone Dutch content or Hebrew content.
Absolutely, and I think it reflects the real organisation of the new media structures as owned by a new breed of aggregator, as I described above. Danah is politely vague here, but in blunt terms it means that the long tail is there for being jerked, and the jerks are more likely to follow a Celebrity on Twitter who knows f*ck-all about X, but take their opinion on X over someone more qualified. She again alludes to this when she notes:
2) Stimulation. People consume content that stimulates their mind and senses. That which angers, excites, energizes, entertains, or otherwise creates an emotional response. This is not always the "best" or most informative content, but that which triggers a reaction.
This isn't inherently a good thing. Consider the food equivalent. Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they're rare in nature. Thus, when they come around, we should grab them. In the same way, we're biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we're not careful, we're going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We'll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.
..........
Of course, there's money here and people will try to manipulate this dynamic for their own purposes. There are folks who put out highly stimulating content or spread gossip to get attention. And often they succeed, creating a pretty unhealthy cycle. So we have to start asking ourselves what balance looks like and how we can move towards an environment where there are incentives for consuming healthy content that benefit individuals and society as a whole. Or, at the very least, how not to feed the trolls.
Social Media as the new Opiate of the Masses! Its hard to think about any supplier driven "balance" working giving the new super-aggregators are all commercial entities, and are far less regulated than the TV, Radio or even print media ever were. If I were to bet on this, I'd say that the pressure to regulate Digital Media - much as media before it - will be a growth industry in the next 10 years or so. We are already seeing very worrying trends - and emerging counter resistance - around privacy and security.
Her next point is about the risky nature of everyone getting this day their own Daily Me:
3) Homophily. In a networked world, people connect to people like themselves. What flows across the network flows through edges of similarity. The ability to connect to others like us allows us to flow information across space and time in impressively new ways, but there's also a downside.
Prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, and power are all baked into our networks. In a world of networked media, it's easy to not get access to views from people who think from a different perspective. Information can and does flow in ways that create and reinforce social divides. Democratic philosophy depends on shared informational structures, but the combination of self-segmentation and networked information flow means that we lose the common rhetorical ground through which we can converse.
Throughout my studies of social media, I have been astonished by the people who think that XYZ site is for people like them. I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men. I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that.
As danah points out, the Technology does not inherently disintegrate social divisions. In fact, more often then not, in reinforces them. We have always been able to pick our narratives,(eg you read a left or right leaning newspaper depending on your wont) but the ability to micro-configure is Internet Age. The only people up to now who have had this capability have been recluses and very powerful people with toadies surrounding them. Neither model suggests a happy outcome. "Daily Me" advocated talk of a "Serendipity Switch" - I think an "Uncomfortable News" switch may be more in order. She believes that only a small percentage of people are inclined to seek out opinions and ideas from cultures other than their own, and that these people are and should be highly valued in society. I think she is right on the former and wrong on the latter. The last thing people comfortable with their own opinions value is some outsider telling them they're wrong. Shooting messengers is a time honoured human blood sport
4) Power. When we think about centralized sources of information distribution, it's easy to understand that power is at stake. But networked structures of consumption are also configured by power and we cannot forget that or assume that access alone is power. Power is about being able to command attention, influence others' attention, and otherwise traffic in information. We give power to people when we give them our attention and people gain power when they bridge between different worlds and determine what information can and will flow across the network.
.........
In a broadcast model, those who control the distribution channels often profit more than the creators. Think: Clear Channel, record labels, TV producers, etc. Unfortunately, there's an assumption that if we get rid of limitations to distribution, the power will revert to the creators. This is not what's happening. Distribution today is making people aware that they can come and get something, but those who get access to people's attention are still a small, privileged few.
Instead, what we're seeing a new type of information broker emerge. These folks get credit for their structural position. While the monetary benefits are indirect, countless consulting gigs have arisen for folks based on their power as information brokers. The old controllers of information are losing their stature (and not happy about it). What's emerging is not inherently the power of the creators, but the power of the modern day information brokers.
This is actually quite extraordinary stuff - when one of the Evangelisti starts to talk about the totally non-meritocratic structure of social media, about the lack of balance in the interests of broker, creator and user, that a a totally self selected experience is bad and that all power corrupts, whether its from People we Hate or People We Love. its (almost) a Pauline conversion (or at least a Neo Keensian one
). What does amuse me about the Olde Guard of the 2.0 Webset is that they just...can't....bring....them...selves....to.....talk....about....what...You-Know-Hoogle et al are up to because these were held up in the original Old Testament 2.0 as Prophets of the revolution, even when its becoming increasingly clear that Net Neutrality is less of an issue than Aggregator Neutrality. Countless small time consultants is not the issue here, its a chimera for the real Information Brokers - the walled citadels over the flow of information that the New Media Aggregators are trying to build. In her section "Making it Work" I think there are two insightful bits - Firstly:
We need technological innovations. For example, tools that allow people to more easily contextualize relevant content regardless of where they are and what they are doing and tools that allow people to slice and dice content so as to not reach information overload. This is not simply about aggregating or curating content to create personalized destination sites. Frankly, I don't think this will work. Instead, the tools that consumers need are those that allow them to get into flow, that allow them to live inside information structures wherever they are, whatever they're doing. The tools that allow them to easily grab what they need and stay peripherally aware without feeling overwhelmed.
And Secondly:
.....we need to rethink our business plans. I doubt this cultural shift will be paid for by better advertising models. Advertising is based on capturing attention, typically by interrupting the broadcast message or by being inserted into the content itself. Trying to reach information flow is not about being interrupted. Advertising does work when it's part of the flow itself. Ads are great when they provide a desirable answer to a search query or when they appear at the moment of purchase. But when the information being shared is social in nature, advertising is fundamentally a disruption.
Figuring out how to monetize sociality is a problem. And not one new to the Internet. Think about how we monetize sociality in physical spaces. Typically, it involves second-order consumption of calories. Venues provide a space for social interaction to occur and we are expected to consume to pay rent. Restaurants, bars, cafes… they all survive on this model. But we have yet to find the digital equivalent of alcohol.
Or we charge entrance fees......
All in all a very useful discussion, even the more so as it marks - in my opinion anyway - a more "official" recognition of The Dark Side of Social Media than has previously been the case. That it was combined with a live demonstration of the downsides on the Twitterwall just puts the bow on the show......
If you liked this post, don't forget to vote for Broadstuff for the British BIMAs 2009 Best Blog Award . If you hated it, vote anyway.....
Sunday, November 8. 2009
Fake Steve, Real Media, Unreal business models
Friday, October 30. 2009
Stuff White People Don't Like #2 - Real Geeks (#CabinetForum Redux)
There is a post on the marvellously satirical blog Stuff White People Like, on White (White in the sense of US slang for the Lefty Liberal Intelligentsia) people's view of people who Know About Technology
Now, I was reminded of this over the last few days because I was listening to the debates on the C&binet Forum Conference sessions over the Internet whilst working. This was an invite only session, and it became increasingly clear to me over the 2 days I was listening in, that this discussion about the future of digital media was being essentially run by White people, talking to White people, for the benefit White people. I doubt there was the merest smattering of a Tech Major present. (OK, I exaggerate - but just look at the forum's blogroll - nary a techie blogger in the whole roll, its MSM tech journos all except for TechCrunch - who, of course, were not actually invited to the event, being, well, Tech Crunchies )
One can argue that this is fine, after all heaven forbid the critical Affairs of State be decided by people who are not White! (I mean, if we had a Real democracy we'd be doing weird things like not invading random Mid-Asian countries, for example - imagine that!) The big problem with technology is that, by and large, mainstream Meedja, Journos and Politicians - the "White" people mainly invited to these sorts of bashes - actually don't by and large know how all this stuff actually works (Sorry good people, but being on Twitter and/or Facebook and even having an instapundit blog on Wordpress doesn't quite qualify). This means that when the Dark People who run theEvil Corporations appear and talk smoothly about how the Digital Landscape works, then the White people get totally bamboozled and either lap it up (if its a "Good" Evil Corporation - Google Neutrality anyone?) or tend to run around jousting at various largely irrelevant windmills, muddying the Ether nets.
Its the (smoothly) bland leading the blind. (By the way, JP Rangaswami has written a great fiskpost on Dark Lord Mandelson's nefarious scheme over here......)
Which is why, of course, the UK is in the Digital Shi....Situation it is in. 'Nuff said........
I had written the above last night and was going to spike it under the "This Would Seem Like Sour Grapes Because You Weren't Invited* " heading (that, and this article probably is as close to a perfect 10 on the Paul Carr Scale of How to Lose Friends and Piss People Off that I've ever come) , but then I read about an Unconference that was held at the above Cabinet Forum by some of the attendees, and was run for roughly the same reasons that I raised as issues above. It is written up here on the Pervasive Media Blog. Here is a synopsis of the conclusions.
May I emphasize "There is a need for more computer scientists coming into the creative industries in order to create innovative products" and "We need a new generation of producers with more diverse skills and an overview of the industry"
They are right of course, but lets just go down another level on the implications:
Once upon a time, the White people of the Media-Political complex were called the "Chattering Classes" and had Dinner Parties in Islington, but now some are paddling in the shallower waters of technology and thus label themselves as Geeks, or even "Digerati". This is of course inaccurate, the correct term is Chatterati, obviously. Digerati by and large know how this stuff actually works, and work in - or even run real businesses in - the space. Unfortunately, many Digerati are inarticulate, wear unfashionable glasses and look like the IT Crowd, so they are best left Unseen and Unheard. (This of course is what Quangos are for - Quangos allow White people to draw large salaries for performing the unpleasant job of managing Real Geeks, so that other White People don't have to see them at conferences like this...... )
So, next C&binet Forum, I would like to see some of the people there who do actually know how this sh*t all works rebutting some of the claims made. Some positive discrimination for people who actually did some Maths in their university degrees, for example, would be helpful. People with unfashionable glasses and haircuts. Maybe even people who studied IT. (OK, OK, thats probably going too far.....)
Oh, and as for the the Blogroll....c'mon guys, you need to read a bit wider than that. You could even read this 'ere Broadstuff blog, after all, we've been shortlisted for the BIMAS so we must be some cop......
*The tongue is , I hope, firmly in the cheek - and what cheek - They did, after all, streamcast the sessions and put it all up on Twitter for comment. I'm thus now awaiting the Grapes of Wrath
(Update - In the interests of journalistic balance, there is a far more sanguine post by Anthony Mayfield, on TechCrunch EU oddly enough . Anthony imho doesn't go far enough on the Tech lack - this post, on the other hand, goes too far )
(Update 2 - To explain a bit of my frustration here - we do a lot of work in this space, and I will shortly post up some research we have done on the pace of innovation over the last 100 years or so that I presented at the "Internet: Next 40 Years" session last night. In essence, the changes that are coming to the media have been predictable - and have been predicted - for at least 15 years to my certain knowledge and have happened more than once before over the last 100 years, and are not quick - its a 20 - 30 year repetitive cycle, from novel technology driving economic shift to screams for industry protection to social takeup to regulatory shift to it all happening again. (see here for some of our previous analysis on the situation). It just makes me very frustrated that, because the answers aren't "under the Creative Media lampost" as it were, they are deemed not to exist, or at least don't get airtime.)
(Update 3 - a friend pointed me to this 2006 post from Tom Coates saying much the same as I said above. I love the analogy of the Old Order wailing for assistance because it can't run away from the snail)
(Update 4 - in response to some comments below, and several emails and DM's from people. I was not so much shooting at the people in the room or Arts majors per se, as I wrote in the Comments:
I feel extremely strongly about this (as the above post shows, methinks) - we are a small niche strategy consultancy in this space, we study the UK vis a vis other countries, we study this technology age vs previous ones and do future projections - and the things that stare out at you when you do are:
So it is frustrating to see the (smoothly) bland leading the blind in 2009. There is no need, and little excuse for it. That the "Stuff White people like" blog is written in the USA proves they have the same ideological issues, but the fact they also have held the technology lead since the 1950's shows they are able to overcome it too.
When white people go away to college, they tend to study what are knowns as the Arts. This includes actual Art, English, History, Classics, and Philosophy. These can of course be broken down further into Film, Womyn’s Studies (yes the spelling is correct), Communications, Gender Studies, and so forth. It is important to note that a high percentage of white people also get degrees in Political Science, which is pretty much like arts, and only seems to have the word “science” in it to make white people feel better about themselves.
........
But what about the white people who study Science, Engineering or Business? Unless they become doctors, they essentially lose white person status (and can only be regained by working at a non-profit).
Now, I was reminded of this over the last few days because I was listening to the debates on the C&binet Forum Conference sessions over the Internet whilst working. This was an invite only session, and it became increasingly clear to me over the 2 days I was listening in, that this discussion about the future of digital media was being essentially run by White people, talking to White people, for the benefit White people. I doubt there was the merest smattering of a Tech Major present. (OK, I exaggerate - but just look at the forum's blogroll - nary a techie blogger in the whole roll, its MSM tech journos all except for TechCrunch - who, of course, were not actually invited to the event, being, well, Tech Crunchies
)One can argue that this is fine, after all heaven forbid the critical Affairs of State be decided by people who are not White! (I mean, if we had a Real democracy we'd be doing weird things like not invading random Mid-Asian countries, for example - imagine that!) The big problem with technology is that, by and large, mainstream Meedja, Journos and Politicians - the "White" people mainly invited to these sorts of bashes - actually don't by and large know how all this stuff actually works (Sorry good people, but being on Twitter and/or Facebook and even having an instapundit blog on Wordpress doesn't quite qualify). This means that when the Dark People who run theEvil Corporations appear and talk smoothly about how the Digital Landscape works, then the White people get totally bamboozled and either lap it up (if its a "Good" Evil Corporation - Google Neutrality anyone?) or tend to run around jousting at various largely irrelevant windmills, muddying the Ether nets.
Its the (smoothly) bland leading the blind. (By the way, JP Rangaswami has written a great fiskpost on Dark Lord Mandelson's nefarious scheme over here......)
Which is why, of course, the UK is in the Digital Shi....Situation it is in. 'Nuff said........
I had written the above last night and was going to spike it under the "This Would Seem Like Sour Grapes Because You Weren't Invited* " heading (that, and this article probably is as close to a perfect 10 on the Paul Carr Scale of How to Lose Friends and Piss People Off that I've ever come) , but then I read about an Unconference that was held at the above Cabinet Forum by some of the attendees, and was run for roughly the same reasons that I raised as issues above. It is written up here on the Pervasive Media Blog. Here is a synopsis of the conclusions.
University is broken. Education is way behind industry. Our education system needs to change - places like RCA, ITP, University of South California are brilliant at fostering creative entrepreneurialism by getting artists, writers, programmers etc to work together on one project. We need to teach teamwork and interdisciplinary, entrepreneurial skills through an embedded cross-cutting logic.
There is a need for more computer scientists coming into the creative industries in order to create innovative products, but this often causes a disjunct in language and understanding.
We need a new generation of producers with more diverse skills and an overview of the industry - 'super-producers'
We need to support the brokers, the people who bring together the creatives with businesses, brands, finance etc. At present there is no core support for this kind of role, though there is general acknowledgment it has financial, cultural and social impact. We need to invest time in our own businesses to make connections.
Collaboration isn't just about money its about making things happen and learning from each other.
May I emphasize "There is a need for more computer scientists coming into the creative industries in order to create innovative products" and "We need a new generation of producers with more diverse skills and an overview of the industry"
They are right of course, but lets just go down another level on the implications:
- Firstly, it is fascinating that in 2009 the "Creative Industries" by and large still do not, it would appear, automatically include Digital Media at their heart - you cannot apparently, you see, be Creative if you are not White and are a Geek.
- Secondly, there is technology all over and under the Creative Industries already - its just that, because the Real Geeks are not White, the IT is Crowded in basements, Morlock-like and kept from sight (and under-utilised).
Once upon a time, the White people of the Media-Political complex were called the "Chattering Classes" and had Dinner Parties in Islington, but now some are paddling in the shallower waters of technology and thus label themselves as Geeks, or even "Digerati". This is of course inaccurate, the correct term is Chatterati, obviously. Digerati by and large know how this stuff actually works, and work in - or even run real businesses in - the space. Unfortunately, many Digerati are inarticulate, wear unfashionable glasses and look like the IT Crowd, so they are best left Unseen and Unheard. (This of course is what Quangos are for - Quangos allow White people to draw large salaries for performing the unpleasant job of managing Real Geeks, so that other White People don't have to see them at conferences like this...... )
So, next C&binet Forum, I would like to see some of the people there who do actually know how this sh*t all works rebutting some of the claims made. Some positive discrimination for people who actually did some Maths in their university degrees, for example, would be helpful. People with unfashionable glasses and haircuts. Maybe even people who studied IT. (OK, OK, thats probably going too far.....)
Oh, and as for the the Blogroll....c'mon guys, you need to read a bit wider than that. You could even read this 'ere Broadstuff blog, after all, we've been shortlisted for the BIMAS so we must be some cop......
*The tongue is , I hope, firmly in the cheek - and what cheek - They did, after all, streamcast the sessions and put it all up on Twitter for comment. I'm thus now awaiting the Grapes of Wrath
(Update - In the interests of journalistic balance, there is a far more sanguine post by Anthony Mayfield, on TechCrunch EU oddly enough . Anthony imho doesn't go far enough on the Tech lack - this post, on the other hand, goes too far
)(Update 2 - To explain a bit of my frustration here - we do a lot of work in this space, and I will shortly post up some research we have done on the pace of innovation over the last 100 years or so that I presented at the "Internet: Next 40 Years" session last night. In essence, the changes that are coming to the media have been predictable - and have been predicted - for at least 15 years to my certain knowledge and have happened more than once before over the last 100 years, and are not quick - its a 20 - 30 year repetitive cycle, from novel technology driving economic shift to screams for industry protection to social takeup to regulatory shift to it all happening again. (see here for some of our previous analysis on the situation). It just makes me very frustrated that, because the answers aren't "under the Creative Media lampost" as it were, they are deemed not to exist, or at least don't get airtime.)
(Update 3 - a friend pointed me to this 2006 post from Tom Coates saying much the same as I said above. I love the analogy of the Old Order wailing for assistance because it can't run away from the snail)
(Update 4 - in response to some comments below, and several emails and DM's from people. I was not so much shooting at the people in the room or Arts majors per se, as I wrote in the Comments:
"I was more aiming at the weird - and unique to UK thing I think - of the wide separation of Arts and Tech in the culture, so the governing class (the media-political and to an extent financial set) by and large have a very small amount of tech in their "DNA". And in a world that is increasingly driven by its technology, this to my mind opens 2 major risks:
(i) Misunderstanding - of how the technology works, which leaves the policymakers - and media overall - very vulnerable to misconceptions, bamboozlement and snake oil salesmen.
(ii) Missed opportunities - not understanding what is going on , and even worse being misled by the vested interests, leads to a lot of wasted time, resource and effort.
I feel extremely strongly about this (as the above post shows, methinks) - we are a small niche strategy consultancy in this space, we study the UK vis a vis other countries, we study this technology age vs previous ones and do future projections - and the things that stare out at you when you do are:
(i) This era of change is not unique - for those that can be bothered to do so, there are plenty of lessons from previous technology waves that can be instructive. And the Old Order always reaches for the protectionist lever.
(ii) Britain as a country is losing out competitively by a failure to optimise its takeup of these industries. It has actually done well despite the best efforts of its vested interests and many policy decisions, a testament to the creativity of its arts and technology establishments, but things are accelerating and there needs to be a co-ordinated approach if it is to carry on batting at its weight, never mind above it
So it is frustrating to see the (smoothly) bland leading the blind in 2009. There is no need, and little excuse for it. That the "Stuff White people like" blog is written in the USA proves they have the same ideological issues, but the fact they also have held the technology lead since the 1950's shows they are able to overcome it too.
Wednesday, October 21. 2009
The Mobile shall inherit the Earth, says Meeker
Friday, October 16. 2009
Jan Moir, the Web, Free Speech and the Wisdom of Mobs
No sooner has Twitter excelled itself in pushing Democracy 2.0 to new heights with the Trafigura Injunction Scandal, than it plumbs new depths with the Jan Moir weblynch. Now Jan Moir is one of those real "test cases" for Free Speech. She has completed the "how to be hated" triple crown of slagging off a just-dead, gay, boy-band member in the Daily Mail of all papers.
The original article is here, and the gist of it is that the author (said Jan Moir) believes that the death of Stephen Gately, gay boyband pop star was perhaps not as accidental and natural as it is being portrayed. There is no evidence in the piece, just innuendo about a menage a trois that potentially went wrong. So far, so what - normal hack fare, I hear you say....
And, as you know, fans of social media and the Web are all progressive, forward thinking individuals and take this in their stride. And they would, at a heartbeat, say they would support Free Speech to the death of their last iPhone battery.
So here comes the rub - Ms Moir chose to couch her over-the-top allegations with over-the-top undertones of homophobia which, while playing to the Daily Mail gallery, also of course has all the good people incensed, and the homophobia-phobes frothing at the mouth, and the #rentacause lot grasping for links, and everyone is calling her many very rude names as well as suggesting her instant removal from the paper, twitter, this life, the universe etc.
And the problem is, supporting free speech is defined, roughly, as ""I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". (Voltaire, btw*)
Of course, her right to Free Speech doesn't mean that you have to agree - or even listen - and you have the right to rebut and even disagree, vehemently as in the Grauniad - or even better, get snarky and sarcastically clever like the excellent Daily Quail piece.
And there has been a terrific response, and the correct one in my view, as Twitternauts have flooded the various complaint boards - Stephen Fry has weighed in with how and where she goes against IPCC guidelines, and many people have given guidance as to where to object. and how (it breaches sections 1, 5 and 12 of its code of practice.)
But I'm afraid not all have kept to this standard, in fact the Wisdom of the Crowd has turned into the Baying of the Lynch Mob at times. And in my view some of the hatemail makes those people no better than Jan Moir. And there are a lot more of them. And they are on the side of popular opinion so its far harder to take a shot at them.
So, what worries me more than some hack with a homo-cooked chip on her shoulder is this very real evidence of this darker side of Social Media - the speed at which mobthink can break out online is quite worrying. Or am I the only one (not in the Jan Moir fan club, that is) who is more worried about this aspect than what she actually wrote?
For the record, my view is that (i) I totally disagree with her logic, (ii) I reserve the right to say her article is full of sh*t, but that (iii) I totally agree with defending her right to say it and (iv) I wish I'd written the Daily Quail piece (You will, Oscar....).
Update - 24 hours later and its running and running, there are polls, campaign groups on Facebook etc all dedicated to getting Jan Moir fired or otherwise shutting her up. There has been a brilliant set of comments on the blog, and there were also a few good comments about this post such as these two by @TLockyer on Twitter, viz:
Absolutely agree with the former, free speech must equally defend the rights of those who wish to complain/criticise/condemn her. The latter is an interesting point, since, as many people have pointed out, her schtick - and that of the Daily Mail overall - follows a certain flavour that some will find offensive, so in my mind there is a "well, what did you expect" argument too.
What I do totally agree with is the idea that extreme commentators should face up to the consequences of the collateral damage they cause, and social media has been excellent for that - she can be in absolutely no doubt about how cross so many people are. I also thought the idea of having a go at the advertisers on the site was a very good one. Also, if after all the protests, her employer feels that she is too hot a potato and chooses not to provide a platform, that too is fine, others are justified in denying access to their platforms.
Predictably, Ms Moir issued an apology-that-was-not-an-apology - all very mainstream media, and accused the online-o-sphere of a concerted campaign against her. I think this is typical Olde Media misunderstanding, on 2 fronts:
I'm going to use a quote from one of the comments below, from Patrick Hadfield:
So trying to shut her up is just wrong, wrong, wrong. If you genuinely support Free Speech it means you have the right to argue with her but not to try to get her shut up, and personally I abhor the crude ad-hominems! Just because I disagree with you does not make you a "sh*tfaced c*ntb*tch" to quote one erudite commentator.
In fact, If I were a tad cynical (as if ) I may not have have been surprised that some of the other mainstream media (and Twitterers) have seemingly been less interested in defending the Freedom of Speech mast that they nailed their Trafigura colours to a few days ago, and are in fact seemingly taking out Mob-Injunctions to silence someone else's right to free speech! Possibly (surely not) in the interests of traffic and short term popularity?.
A Volte-farce? - Perish that thought, Voltaire would be turning in his (very old) grave
*for you, @shefaly
The original article is here, and the gist of it is that the author (said Jan Moir) believes that the death of Stephen Gately, gay boyband pop star was perhaps not as accidental and natural as it is being portrayed. There is no evidence in the piece, just innuendo about a menage a trois that potentially went wrong. So far, so what - normal hack fare, I hear you say....
And, as you know, fans of social media and the Web are all progressive, forward thinking individuals and take this in their stride. And they would, at a heartbeat, say they would support Free Speech to the death of their last iPhone battery.
So here comes the rub - Ms Moir chose to couch her over-the-top allegations with over-the-top undertones of homophobia which, while playing to the Daily Mail gallery, also of course has all the good people incensed, and the homophobia-phobes frothing at the mouth, and the #rentacause lot grasping for links, and everyone is calling her many very rude names as well as suggesting her instant removal from the paper, twitter, this life, the universe etc.
And the problem is, supporting free speech is defined, roughly, as ""I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". (Voltaire, btw*)
Of course, her right to Free Speech doesn't mean that you have to agree - or even listen - and you have the right to rebut and even disagree, vehemently as in the Grauniad - or even better, get snarky and sarcastically clever like the excellent Daily Quail piece.
And there has been a terrific response, and the correct one in my view, as Twitternauts have flooded the various complaint boards - Stephen Fry has weighed in with how and where she goes against IPCC guidelines, and many people have given guidance as to where to object. and how (it breaches sections 1, 5 and 12 of its code of practice.)
But I'm afraid not all have kept to this standard, in fact the Wisdom of the Crowd has turned into the Baying of the Lynch Mob at times. And in my view some of the hatemail makes those people no better than Jan Moir. And there are a lot more of them. And they are on the side of popular opinion so its far harder to take a shot at them.
So, what worries me more than some hack with a homo-cooked chip on her shoulder is this very real evidence of this darker side of Social Media - the speed at which mobthink can break out online is quite worrying. Or am I the only one (not in the Jan Moir fan club, that is) who is more worried about this aspect than what she actually wrote?
For the record, my view is that (i) I totally disagree with her logic, (ii) I reserve the right to say her article is full of sh*t, but that (iii) I totally agree with defending her right to say it and (iv) I wish I'd written the Daily Quail piece (You will, Oscar....).
Update - 24 hours later and its running and running, there are polls, campaign groups on Facebook etc all dedicated to getting Jan Moir fired or otherwise shutting her up. There has been a brilliant set of comments on the blog, and there were also a few good comments about this post such as these two by @TLockyer on Twitter, viz:
- Trouble with extreme free-speech argument is that if it defends Jan Moir, it must also defend those (NOT all) being nasty to her. (@shefaly made a similar point - "The critics have as much right to criticise as Moir has to her homophobia.")
- And those paid to write for commercial or ad-supported mass media can rightly be held to higher standards on sensitive stories
Absolutely agree with the former, free speech must equally defend the rights of those who wish to complain/criticise/condemn her. The latter is an interesting point, since, as many people have pointed out, her schtick - and that of the Daily Mail overall - follows a certain flavour that some will find offensive, so in my mind there is a "well, what did you expect" argument too.
What I do totally agree with is the idea that extreme commentators should face up to the consequences of the collateral damage they cause, and social media has been excellent for that - she can be in absolutely no doubt about how cross so many people are. I also thought the idea of having a go at the advertisers on the site was a very good one. Also, if after all the protests, her employer feels that she is too hot a potato and chooses not to provide a platform, that too is fine, others are justified in denying access to their platforms.
Predictably, Ms Moir issued an apology-that-was-not-an-apology - all very mainstream media, and accused the online-o-sphere of a concerted campaign against her. I think this is typical Olde Media misunderstanding, on 2 fronts:
- the "sharp riposte and flounce off" gambit only works in the Old Media, where access to reply was very expensive and newspapers controlled dissent via a small "letters to..." page and burying apologies in the smalls - but now a columnist who tries this will be hung out to dry by his or her own petard on multiple blogs across the planet. The New Media is a conversation, people listen, respond - and then expect a conversation.
- there was no "concerted action" initially, its more like a dispersed organism reacting. People tell their groups of friends about things, if those people feel strongly enough they pass it on, and so forth. It is also true that a series of concerted activities came about later (the Facebook campaign etc) but this would not have happened via a small cadre of "instigators" - it only happened because enough people felt strongly enough about the issue. I hope Ms Moir and the Daily Mail can grasp the difference between trying to move the masses (Old Skool Media) and a mass movement (New Media). What does happen in New Media is it moves very fast, so people don't reflect enough on their reactions to things that may incense them initially (hence my worry re WebMobRule and Free Speech)
I'm going to use a quote from one of the comments below, from Patrick Hadfield:
I also think we need to allow people we disagree with a voice: I hate what the BNP have to say, and I don't want to hear it, but I think they should be let on Question Time so that their ideas can be shown up for the distortions and lies they really are.
Evan Harris MP made a telling comment at February's Convention of Modern Liberty: the real test of human rights is on those we might feel don’t deserve them – criminals, prisoners, terrorists… It was a good – and powerful – point: human rights are universal, and that means everyone, however distasteful we might find their deeds or beliefs.
Free speech is one of those rights.
So trying to shut her up is just wrong, wrong, wrong. If you genuinely support Free Speech it means you have the right to argue with her but not to try to get her shut up, and personally I abhor the crude ad-hominems! Just because I disagree with you does not make you a "sh*tfaced c*ntb*tch" to quote one erudite commentator.
In fact, If I were a tad cynical (as if
) I may not have have been surprised that some of the other mainstream media (and Twitterers) have seemingly been less interested in defending the Freedom of Speech mast that they nailed their Trafigura colours to a few days ago, and are in fact seemingly taking out Mob-Injunctions to silence someone else's right to free speech! Possibly (surely not) in the interests of traffic and short term popularity?. A Volte-farce? - Perish that thought, Voltaire would be turning in his (very old) grave
*for you, @shefaly
The Freeconomics of Wired
Quicksearch
More Broad Stuff
For More Information about Broadsight:
Contact us
Broadsight website
Articles
To sign up for Broadstuff on other services:
Broadstuff - the Twitter edition
Broadstuff - the Jaiku edition
Broadstuff - the FriendFeed edition
Subscribe to Broadstuff via email
Books we are reading:
Contact us
Broadsight website
Articles
To sign up for Broadstuff on other services:
Broadstuff - the Twitter edition
Broadstuff - the Jaiku edition
Broadstuff - the FriendFeed edition
Subscribe to Broadstuff via email
Books we are reading:
Syndicate Broadstuff
Poll of the Week
Will Augmented reality just be a flash in the pan?
Archives
Archives
Alan Patrick (@freecloud) 's Twitter Feed
Popular Entries
- Should the BBC make its content freely available to UK VJ's? (4294967293)
- The (Sc)rape of the Created Commons (21)
- Stuff White People Don't Like #2 - Real Geeks (#CabinetForum Redux) (16)
- An initial review of Cuil (15)
- Jan Moir, the Web, Free Speech and the Wisdom of Mobs (13)
- On the increasing uselessness of Google..... (13)
- Is the Twitter #fixreplies incident a scaling issue? (12)
- 10 ways to lose friends and alienate yourself on Twitter..... (12)
- Freetards and the FreeTardis (11)
- Broadsight Summary of the Online Advertising Industry (10)
Categories
- About Us
- B2B / VRM / CRM 2.0
- Blogging & Blogs
- Bubblewatch
- Business Models
- Data and Analytics
- Digital Media Web 2.0
- Dis - Aggregation
- DRM / IP
- eBooks / eReaders
- Enterprise 2.0
- Gaming / Virtual Worlds
- Hackers and Startups
- Identity / Profiles / Trust
- Laptops, Netbooks & Handsets
- Microblogging / Unified Messaging
- Mobile TV
- Mobile Web 2.0 & Multimedia
- MyPCTV
- New Search
- Odds and Sods
- Online Advertising
- Open Source
- Robotics
- Social Networks
- Strategy
- Triple / Quad Play
- Venture Capital / Angel Funding
- Web Services / Cloud Computing
- Web TV / IPTV / Online Video
