Brian Frank » a2bb

Our Web and the Will to Believe

Brian — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:17:56 +0000

Late last night I had a serious lapse of faith in social media — as we all must from time to time.

We should have serious doubts questions about this stuff… Which is why I chuckle whenever I read editorials merely pointing out “there are hazards” and digitization “isn’t all good” — as if any sane person could completely overlook the risks.

But this time was different.

I was writing about Lawrence Lessig’s argument “Against Transparency” for The New Republic in October. He wrote that more data may be dangerous because it opens the door for a lot of dubious correlation=causation claims. He focused on campaign contributions, but the same principle applies to money received by doctors from pharma cos, etc:

The most we could say–though this is still a very significant thing to say–is that the contributions are corrupting the reputation of Congress, because they raise the question of whether the member acted to track good sense or campaign dollars. Where a member of Congress acts in a way inconsistent with his principles or his constituents, but consistent with a significant contribution, that act at least raises a question about the integrity of the decision. But beyond a question, the data says little else.

At this point in the article I thought Lessig was really on to something, but as I continued reading, I started germinating disagreement:

This is the problem of attention-span. To understand something–an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence– requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand many of these correlations, and their defamatory implications, is almost always less than the amount of time required. The result is a systemic misunderstanding–at least if the story is reported in a context, or in a manner, that does not neutralize such misunderstanding. The listing and correlating of data hardly qualifies as such a context. Understanding how and why some stories will be understood, or not understood, provides the key to grasping what is wrong with the tyranny of transparency.

Some of those points triggered associations with some notions I’ve been finding more and more use for.

“Attention-span” triggered an association with Tyler Cowen’s points in Create Your Own Economy about time horizons: while the web certainly does break up our attention into smaller spans from moment-to-moment, it also enlarges our span of broken-up attention, allowing us to incrementally pull everything back together by investing all of those tiny moments into long-term projects (or simply areas we know a lot about).

For example, we might have trouble focusing on a big book about climate change or macroeconomics or modern art, but it also enables us to keep working away at the topic, keeping our interest alive and our curiosity active as information is updated.

I’ve lost track of more books than I care to count, but while they sit on my shelf, unread (which is not entirely useless), I’m gradually finding and piecing together articles, reviews, commentary, counter-arguments, etc on the same subjects around the web. There are all kinds of options for organizing all of these diffuse particles and shaping them into a coherent project.

On this topic, for example, I aggregate all of my bookmarks, shared items, and tweets into FriendFeed here. A lot of those also get developed into blog posts (here) and from there I take it up another level of generalization, using Prezi as a mindmap to try composing the whole domain into a coherent, presentable narrative.

We’re trading one kind of competence for another: instead of grinding down through a stack of books — it’s about maintaining inertia and sense of direction on longer voyages of discovery.

And then there’s the social aspect… [insert platitude about engagement, relationships & community here].

That’s how science is supposed to work: somewhat meandering & driven by curiosity over a lifetime, with a lot of wrong turns along the way.

But at some point (in the past century — maybe between the WWII war effort and the space race) science fetishized (as it required) the ability to sit all day crunching massive quantitative problems.

Charles Darwin (for example) wasn’t an outstanding genius — smart enough, but no prodigy. What made him a great scientist was that he really wanted to know the origin of species and didn’t give up — for decades — until all of the connections fell into place. His process of gathering specimens wasn’t so different (on some level) from the process of gathering information from around the web, incrementally, as it appears.

Well… that’s an exaggeration. The point is many of science’s most influential discoveries were made by people who were notoriously unable to focus on one thing for very long — but were able to keep coming back when new evidence and insights appeared.

[That point is really open for discussion (soft way of saying it might be bullshit); a lot of the most important theories were formulated by brilliant minds at a very young age... I guess my point is that science has benefited from both lifelong resilience and white-hot brilliance -- so can the web.]

The spirit of persistence, continuity, openness, corroboration, and correction has priority over the more recent spirit of accomplishment, exclusive focus, and industrialized discipline.

The web is bringing that long-term spirit back. It’s teaching us to act despite doubt, and to learn — not just despite mistakes but because of them. Uncertainty and error are part of the process — they’ve always been, they just go covert sometimes and people start to think we can avoid them altogether.

Now uncertainty, error, ambiguity and change are back in a big way. As Jared Cohen from the US State Department told NPR, “The 21st century is a very bad time to be a control freak.”

So we need to cultivate values, mindsets, and conceptions to accommodate the uncertainty; we need institutions and conventions that can learn and adapt with emerging circumstances; we need to be able to change our minds and shift our focus as new information becomes available to us.

The ability to block out distractions and grind through that stack of books might even be a disadvantage. In a world where so much changes so fast there’s a very fine line between “ability to avoid distractions” vs “inability to see warning signs that the course you’re on is becoming irrelevant.”

So we need a balance.

Obviously.

But trying to “settle on” a balanced approach and steadfastly stick to that simply perpetuates the old mindset.

Don’t think we can sit down and figure out what the balance should be — but we shouldn’t let that discourage us either.

Finding the right balance is going to be an iterative & ongoing process — something that has to be worked-out over time and will probably never be settled.

This is exactly what we need to learn to get comfortable with.

As I’ve found in my own projects, once we become more accustomed to incrementally and pragmatically working towards a balance, the need to articulate a “solution” becomes redundant.

The practice is the solution.

Pragmatism is a skill we learn; like any other skill, once we’re good at it, it becomes enjoyable in itself. We shouldn’t fuss around too much trying to plan a way to direct or incentivize it (or even rationalize it), we simply have to encourage and enable the love of learning wherever we experience an opportunity.

The more we learn, the more we learn to love it; the more we love it, the more we want to learn — and the more we care about quality — the more prepared we’ll be for the uncertain future.

On one hand it’s wrong to assume we can trust ideological reasons to guide us; on the other hand, we can’t simply trust “the way things are” either.

Life’s an adventure.

We need to conceive democracy as an adventure too — an ongoing process of deliberation rather than as series of scheduled competitions framed by static rules, institutions, and procedures.

This is why I’m not as afraid of destroying our system of democracy as Lessig seems to be: I have a vision of what might replace it and I want to push further in that direction. I can’t see exactly what’s over the edge, but I at least see it isn’t anything that will kill us.

Maybe it will be a positive development if the slightest correlations are misinterpreted as corruption. My response was, “Good, if everyone’s afraid of being accused of corruption people will become less willing to even take that chance. People will find ways to run an election campaign that doesn’t rely on ever-increasing sums of money to finance the advertising arms race.”

And it just so happens that social media is creating opportunities to do that.

So maybe instead of attack ads and billboards — which politicians hypothetically won’t be able to afford because they’re afraid of accusations and scandals — we’ll start getting more genuine communication…

But then something terrifying occurred to me.

What if, instead of moving towards more open and deliberative types of campaigns, the advantages simply shift from those able to raise large sums of money to those who already have it?

Uh oh…

But we can’t afford to stand around speculating about what might or might not happen, we should be investing more in experiments and prototypes so we have some more empirical bases for answering these difficult questions and proposing solutions.

All changes have unintended consequences…

Let’s finally accept that and get on with the process in a more proactive way.

Stop saying “I have my doubts about social media” and “there’s a negative side to the web” because there’s a negative side to everything and we should have always been critical of our assumptions and tools — both new and old.

The most immediate example is the fact that I wouldn’t have read Lessig’s criticism without social media — and you wouldn’t have found what you’re reading right now (for what it’s worth).

Flawed as it may be, the web is becoming the best resource we have to learn and deliberate and pragmatically work through the process of overcoming our past (and future) mistakes.

Believe and it becomes true.

What choice do we have?

[Philosophical background starts here.]

Smarter Twitter Lists Make Smarter People

Brian — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:57:39 +0000

Selection is a natural; so is categorizing; so is ranking; so is list-making.

We owe a lot of great things to the human tendency to rank & classify. We wouldn’t have science (and therefore we wouldn’t have a whole bunch of other things)… Think of biology and chemistry.

Unfortunately, it also means discriminating. A list isn’t so much about what’s on it as what (or who) is not on it.

So, wary of that, Chris Brogan has expressed some dissent from Twitter’s new lists feature.

Admitting it’s one thing to make a list of things, the game changes when it becomes personal:

In talking with friends about it on Twitter, people immediately started DM-ing me, telling me that they felt left out or even LESS important because they weren’t on any lists. Lists are exclusionary by nature. They’re static. There’s a lot of reasons why they might not be all that pleasant for people.

The same thing concerned me too.

I haven’t made any lists yet because, like Brogan, I didn’t want to exclude anybody.

Sorry, let me rephrase that: yes, I did want to exclude people; no, I do not want those people to feel bad about being excluded — nor do I want them to hate me.

Ironically, Brogan did hurt someone’s feelings: Robert Scoble’s.

Scoble seems to be riding a wave of euphoria over Twitter lists so it didn’t take long for him to come dashing in to defend the honour of his betrothed:

I can’t STAND this attitude that everyone should be included in everything.

I should NOT be on a list of golfing greats. Heck, I’ve never even played the game, but let’s say I played. Are you KIDDING ME by saying I should be mentioned in the same breath as Tiger Woods?

At first it seems very over-the-top — not really getting Brogan’s point either.

Of course Scoble doesn’t care if he’s not on a list of golfing greats, but he might care if someone left him off a list of tech bloggers, or smart people, or people worth debating.

Then again he might not, because he knows he’s influential and list-worthy. He’d make most people’s lists and a few anomalous exclusions would come out in the wash.

But imagine someone who works hard but doesn’t have a huge profile, they’ve corresponded with Brogan a little — maybe they were on the same panel at a conference once too. This person would expect to be on one of Brogan’s lists. If not, feelings might be hurt and relationships damaged — and I suspect there are a lot of people potentially in this position.

Given the nature of Chris Brogan’s brand, it doesn’t take much imagination to understand he wouldn’t be keen to pick favourites (and, in effect, non-favourites) from the follower list he has already invested so much in.

But there’s some insight in Scoble’s argument. [And I should say, God bless these guys. I'm a huge fan of both.]

Lists shouldn’t be so subjective, they shouldn’t simply be about pleasing people or playing favourites (unless that’s you’re thing, and if that’s really you’re thing than roll with it). They should have some kind of objective merit attached to them — something by which the rest of us can evaluate how well you selected.

On the other hand, we don’t all have to make all-inclusive inventories of “social media experts,” or of every startup founder and VC on Twitter.

Good lists are objectively accountable but also demonstrate a degree of selectivity.

Jay Rosen is creating a good balance. He has a list of “best mindcasters I know” and he explained how he defines that. He also has a list of “young smart newsies” and before doing that he openly made a call for young journalists who might qualify.

So if he overlooks somebody then he’s got something to fall back on, and if someone really thinks they belong there are opportunities to earn it — though ultimately if Rosen doesn’t think you make the cut, that’s his call… and I think the web is better for having people willing to make those kinds of discriminations.

Smaller, more specific, and more exclusive lists tend to be more meaningful — at least on a human level.

Discernment is more communicative than sheer volume. It doesn’t just represent the people on (or off) the list, it’s more a representation of the person who created it.

Look for great storytellers.

Stories don’t work if the storyteller tries to include every detail; the listener/reader quickly gets lost. Great stories focus on a few key facts supplemented by a handful of complementary details.

And there’s a saying in music that the true masters don’t just know what to play, they know what not to play.

An untrained ear might be impressed by flurries of noise, but pure technical proficiency without selectivity is a characteristic of youth. Lots of people can wail, far fewer manage to develop a discerned and expressive style.

Nuanced and carefully constructed patterns might seem arbitrary to outsiders but they’re a kind of secret sign of expertise to fellow masters who have learned the craft and understand reasons for things.

Before trying to invent an expensive and sophisticated system for real-time search (looking a little further into the future), maybe we should consider the solution might simply be to skillfully select and cultivate our networks: learn to identify others who do the same.

The rest follows.

Maintain only the most rich and vital connections and they’ll deliver everything you need — and nothing more.

From Public Theatre to Public Theory

Brian — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:33:10 +0000

Few people would disagree that as more brands & memes vie for our attention, the simple act of communicating has become an accelerating arms race.

We shouldn’t necessarily complain.

Not more than a decade ago it would have been impossible for most of us to get any kind of public attention for our products or our ideas. Everyone pretty much had to pony up to the gatekeepers at big media companies.

Now we have more access via social media but the means of actually being effective have already become quite sophisticated — and evolving with every passing week.

Meanwhile, the age-old practice of yelling is still an option resorted to by some, as we saw Monday on Parliament Hill.

That’s the kind of reaction Canadian politics invites.

It’s all theatre. The protest was a perfectly natural extension of Question Period. The interruption was just one orchestrated stunt in an atmosphere that seems to consist entirely of orchestrated stunts (albeit more subtle ones, usually).

As Glen Pearson put it,

Things have become inverted. Very serious minded young hecklers in the House were tossed out, while the “professional” hecklers occupying the main seats maintain their honourable spots. We’re all in collusion … and delusion.

In Parliament’s defence (as well as the protesters’) at least there’s some substance to what they say and do. These political spectacles at least have some real bearing on important concerns. Which is more than I can say for the rest of the nightly news.

The increasing political spectacle should be seen in the context of our increasingly spectacle-driven culture.

Frank Rich noted (via Mediabistro) that cable news diverted coverage from a public policy discussion — Obama’s townhall meeting in New Orleans — to follow the balloon boy story. Rich also fairly condemned the news anchors for hyping the story (their job is really about selling the story — like carnival barkers — to remote-wielding viewers) and the audience is no less guilty for buying this garbage so willingly.

The distinctions (i.e. legalities) are merely technical — like the difference between the hecklers in the parliamentary gallery vs hecklers we hear of every day on the parliamentary floor.

Everyone’s on the same playing field now, chasing the same goal. Call it “fame” if you like; “attention” seems like a more accurate (and less attention-seeking) term.

Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.”…

None of this absolves Heene of blame for the damage he may have inflicted on the children he grotesquely used as a supporting cast in his schemes. But stupid he’s not. He knew how easy it would be to float “balloon boy” when the demarcation between truth and fiction has been obliterated. [Rich, NYTtimes.com]

Remember that word, “collusion”…

Meanwhile on Twitter — the flagship of citizen journalism and user-generated content — the balloon boy story was ubiquitous. I noticed someone tweet that at one point the entire list of trending words related bubble boy.

If a brand accomplished that we’d be celebrating…

So should we think of it as a massive media debacle or is it also a social media success story? How fine is that line? How different is the Heene family’s quest for attention from that of a major consumer brand?

How different is it from all the public disruption and attention consumed by, say, U2′s super-hyped Rose Bowl show? Here’s Bob Lefsetz on that:

The U2 tour opened across the pond, and has been slowly working its way west across America. Tonight it lands in Pasadena, California. And if you think the most important story in the Los Angeles Basin is the proposed football stadium, or gang warfare, or anything with substance, you’d be wrong. Because the entire mainstream media has been hoodwinked by Paul McGuinness and Live Nation. The biggest story in L.A. this weekend is the U2 concert.

Fewer than 100,000 of the nearly 13 million residents will attend, but the hype would have you believe that every resident is focused, that U2’s show is akin to last fall’s Presidential election.

And even more ridiculously,

… the story is not the music… The story is the STAGE!

Then you had to know this was coming –

It’s almost balloon-boy redux. Hell, like little Falcon said, THEY’RE DOING IT FOR THE SHOW!

And I’m afraid the more time and energy we spend on attention and persuasion the less we have for meaningful public dialog. We’re conditioning ourselves to be comfortable with a cacophony that makes genuine conversation difficult.

If you’ve read this far I’d wager you’re not entirely sold on that culture either. I’d also guess (if I may digress) you’re the kind of person who complains that music is too loud in many bars — too loud to really talk to anyone. Bar and club owners know that people tend to drink more when the music is loud.

Similarly, many readers will be well aware that when you’re designing a website or developing a social media strategy, there are certain practices and features that generate more unique visitors & pageviews — and, like turning the music up, these standard practices do not correlate with quality & substance, and are often antithetical.

For example, you won’t likely see blogging tips like this:

consider all sides of an argument and work out a balanced & objective position; the ideal is to articulate a position that nobody can disagree with
the world is complex, so sometimes our ideas will be too; don’t be afraid to write a series of 2000-word posts with lots of scholarly citations if necessary
you don’t have to be consistent: if you don’t have anything to write for a week (or a month) then maybe you can use the extra time to fix things around the house or enjoy the company of family and friends
also, sometimes you might need a week or even a month for big, fast-breaking events to sink in: take however long it takes to write something rational, informed, and original
make content and subscriptions visible but don’t actively promote yourself; this way your statistics will accurately reflect whether people naturally recognize value in your work

You get the idea.

That approach would likely be better for society as a whole, but it has proven to be miserably unsuccessful on a micro level.

But this medium is still young, the technology is still developing and previously unexplored practices are emerging with those.

Paradoxically, we can use the web to escalate the quantity of verbiage, but we can also use it to elevate the quality of dialog… via the capacity to build dynamic & robust networks — of information and of people we trust, across many diverse domains.

The hardcore Luddites and old-school press protectionists don’t recognize this opportunity though. They only see the bad.

So part of our responsibility is to show them…

It isn’t enough just to show them the good that has already been done. The web is still evolving and the best stuff hasn’t even happened yet. We have a responsibility to make it better — not just better than it is now, but a better medium for discourse and deliberation than any society has had before.

Just think, could this conversation have occurred at any other time in history?

If we don’t use our comparative advantage, it’s reasonable to assume we’ll lose it.

London, City of Opportunity: Journalism Edition

Brian — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:13:42 +0000

Part of a new series I’m starting to explore social, creative, and economic opportunities specific to London Ontario.

Recently I posted about the benefits of educating citizens to think like journalists. Since then I found a lot of great examples of a collaborative approach to journalism — not just between professionals and amateurs, but between organizations and (in a sense) collectively.

First, I loved this story of what happened after a small-town librarian in Colombia worked with a media professor to teach ten regular library users how to blog & podcast of what happened to a citizen journalism training initiative in Madagascar:

They were mostly writing about what donors would consider “non-serious” content. Occasionally they would post short videos about environmental and social challenges in Madagascar, but a lot of the content is what would be considered diary writing. Then something unexpected happened: on March 17 a coup deposed president Marc Ravalomanana. 15,000 protesters took to the streets, many countries froze their aid programs, and misinformation was frequently spreading on the airwaves of the radio stations that managed to continue broadcasting. Amid all the chaos, this group of Foko bloggers became the go-to sources of information for the international press. They were featured on CNN live, the BBC, New York Times, and Reuters.

Another interesting example is LePost.fr (subisidiary to Le Monde), as explained in this interview:

Each journalist is also in charge of a small group of active amateurs. He is their coach and teaches them the basics of the journalist job, tries to encourage them and even meets them in person. He understands that information is a conversation. He does not produce an article but more a process.

According to this, that 2 year-old French site has a readership of 2 million, built from a newsroom consisting of 1 editor and 8 specialized journalists who work with a community of 25,000 members (only about 1 or 2% provide the majority of content).

All of these links are via Jay Rosen.

What got me thinking about it (this time) was the coverage of Orchestra London’s opening night. By London’s standards it was “polyphonic,” with several different voices registering around the same time & topic. Apart from Free Press, Larry Cornies wrote about it on his own site; Stuart Thompson wrote about it for The Beat; Philip McLeod wrote about it on his own site, and I also watched Greg Fowler tweet from the last council meeting where it was discussed.

A lot of reporting, with some opinion, and zero conversation.

[Update: After sleeping on it I wonder if that criticism might have been counterproductive -- could have emphasized the positive aspect a little more.]

We need to connect more. As it is now, dialog either takes place a) in official settings, where isn’t really dialog at all, or b) in private, where it isn’t as accountable or potent as points being made online with links to each other, which anybody can find and follow-up on and try to improve.

[Added: We need to bring the dialog out into the open, make our views as accountable and articulate as the reporting is. We need to show leadership -- demonstrate that commentary on emerging policies is a process, not merely a series of products. And hopefully more people will participate when they see that example.]

Meanwhile, in other cities the mainstream news outlets are already starting to do collaborative journalism. Jay Rosen (again) points to a project in Madison, Wisconson:

When our jobs were secure, it was easier for us to bicker with each other. Now we are more inclined to see that we’re all in this together.

… The idea: Get individual Madison media to all do enterprise reporting on the same topic, to show what we are capable of as a community.

We could achieve collectively more than any of our outlets could individually. And we could demonstrate our ability to advance a common purpose, with each outlet doing what it does best.

They’re calling it All Together Now, or ATNMadison if you’re versed in the vernacular of social media tags. The story is here and the project’s home is here.

A major cooperative non-profit news organization also formed in Chicago (the purpose being to syndicate content to a Chicago edition of the New York Times). HuffPo has the commentary.

London seems to have a pretty good character and size to develop an open collaborative media community — or at least one with a lot of complementarity and mutual knowledge — something really original and noteworthy.

Stepping back to a more general view for a moment, Daniel Little outlines the benefits of cooperation:

If a number of the members of a group agree to contribute our efforts to a common project we may find that the total results are greater — for both common goods and private goods — than if we had each pursued these goods through individual efforts. Cooperation can lead to improvement in the overall production of a good for a given level of sacrifice of time and effort. This description uses the word “agree”; but Robert Axelrod (The Evolution of Cooperation) and David Lewis (Convention: A Philosophical Study) observe that many examples of cooperation depend on “convention” and tacit agreement rather than an explicit understanding among participants.

So cooperation can lead to better outcomes for a group and each individual in the group than would be achievable through entirely private efforts.

Making things more interesting, it’s no minor detail that UWO is home to one of the province’s two graduate journalism schools and a number of complementary programs at Fanshawe College.

On that point, following the release of the Downie-Schudson report on The Reconstruction of American Journalism [pdf] [abridged], Nieman Lab posted a breakdown into six main points which included the suggestion,

Universities already run teaching hospitals, why not news orgs?

Partnerships between news outlets and universities aren’t new, and they appear to be going through a metamorphosis of sorts, with investors, public/private organizations, and schools pooling resources for hybrid newsgathering. The report recommends bold and compelling steps beyond current efforts: the authors want to see full-fledged, year-round news operations run by faculty and students. Similar organizations already exist to some degree, but the picture painted by the report’s authors looks more like a teaching hospital than a college-based newsroom.

There must be something in all of this worth exchanging points on and trying to sustain… maybe a “meta” discussion like this is where we start.

Social Media Epistemology

Brian — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:31:38 +0000

With so many people claiming to be social media experts we just as often hear “there are no social media experts.”

There certainly are a lot of people who can generate a whole bunch of verbiage, but social media presents such an all-encompassing, massive and dynamic shift that the “social media expert” label makes about as much sense as “business expert” or “science expert” — useful only to those who are completely ignorant.

Then to say that nobody really understands everything about social media is like saying nobody really understands everything about society in general.

Of course nobody understands the whole…

If you want to get all epistemological about it [... sorry, I'm going to anyways], I’ll say that because we are a part of everything ourselves – and so is anything we do and say about it — the mere act of describing everything changes it and makes the description obsolete before anyone even has time to retweet it.

Even if you could eternally pause the web to investigate and analyze every single aspect, as soon as your first insight appears in people’s feeds after un-pausing, their behaviour will be affected by that new knowledge and the web will change yet again (e.g. someone might start developing a new app) and you won’t know everything anymore.

This isn’t just the reality of social media, it’s the reality of experience & expertise in any domain — the web just makes it more apparent.

So we’ll live with it.

The people selling themselves as “social media experts” are essentially tour guides. Right now that’s exactly who we need. We need hustlers — maybe even a few charlatans [I'm not exactly sure where I fit] — willing to approach even the most reluctant of the newest arrivals, herding everyone onto the bus to experience the area’s landmarks:

There’s Facebook on you’re right and of course Twitter is on your left. Look close and you’ll see Ashton, Ellen, MC Hammer… Oooh and there’s Flickr — beautiful isn’t it? Then we’ll drive by MySpace (we won’t be stopping)… And if we have time I’ll take you to Tumblr or Blogger and you can try posting something. Don’t be afraid, not everybody likes it but it’s something you have to try at least once while you’re in town…

The analogy stops there becuase there is no going back after this tour… And we still have to go a lot further.

This is the direction we’ll all be living and working from now on. Of course the landscape will surely change — along with the names that resound across it — but we won’t ever be going back.

Ultimately everyone will come this way and start to settle. Waves of immigrants will continue to integrate with the established locals (with varying degrees of tension), and we’ll each carve out our own little niches of expertise (likely extensions of what we’re already doing) and every one of those niches will be infused with some aspects social media.

We’re all responsible for figuring out how the infinite variety of social media practices work with whatever it is we do. Nobody else can put it all together for us in the end.

It’s funny that while nobody is a social media expert, in another way, we’re all becoming one.

Feed Frenzy: More Ways to Subscribe

Brian — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:54:53 +0000

I’m becoming more promiscuous as a content-producer. Several people have joked about how many blogs I have going. Then Bill suggested I should publish an all-in-one feed. I decided to set up a few more while I was at it.

Most are now listed on a new Subscribe page.

First I burned a new topic-specific feed. If you only want posts about London Ontario you can subscribe to this and that’s all you’ll get.

WordPress is already generating feeds for every individual category and tag, but now if you want all of my London-related posts sent to you by email you can set that up here.

Next I merged all of my posts from all of my blogs into one feed.

There’s also an even bigger feed that includes most of my comments (thanks to Backtype) — even comments from Google Reader, surprisingly. Those tend to be sort of buried, but Backtype finds them via FriendFeed.

Then I got a little more adventurous and spliced together a feed full of stuff I’m putting together on digital democracy. It delivers only relevant blog posts plus relevant stuff I bookmark in Delicious and share in GReader. It’s also set up to import any tweets tagged #a2bb.

I tried Yahoo Pipes but the Reader items came through looking like my own posts, unattributed to their actual producers. The Delicious bookmarks weren’t very well identified either. So I ran that stuff through FriendFeed, merging Delicious, GReader, and Twitter into one feed and then merging that with the blog stuff through Pipes.

Take a look.

Through FriendFeed sources are clearly identified by service and original URL (even from tweets with shortened URLs). As an added bonus people can potentially comment on and like stuff by going directly to the FriendFeed “group.”

There was some discussion over the weekend about FriendFeed’s decline. I still see a big future for it (or something very much like it) but not in the way it has mainly been used. I have some thoughts on that and where things are going, but I’ll do that in another post.

Memo to Professional Media: “Stop Resisting!”

Brian — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:05:35 +0000

At the London Free Press, Ian Gillespie warns of the hazards of the internet:

Watching that 90-second video [here], it’s hard — no, make that impossible — to see or know exactly what’s going on.

But that hasn’t stopped tens of thousands (by late yesterday afternoon, the video had been viewed more than 30,000 times on YouTube) of uninformed folks from making instant, inflammatory and out-of-context accusations, declarations and conclusions.

And that, my friends, is one of the dangers in our new age of viral videos, immediate journalism and lightning-fast analysis.

The problem isn’t the internet. After all, look at how well the mainstream news managed to inflate the Balloon Boy fiasco, far beyond our need to be (mis)informed.

The problem isn’t the internet, it’s how we use it — which means we can learn to use it better. We should focus on that.

Gillespie lists a number of questions that should be asked as we watch the video:

Where has he been in the minutes or hours before the video was shot? What has he done? What happens after the video ends?

[Exactly what I was thinking. As I watched the video yesterday morning I wondered what all those other bystanders knew and where that information was.]

That’s why professional news organizations need to educate more interested members of the general public. People need to be equipped with at least some of the skills and impulses journalists have — to think, to look around, to ask questions and bring more of the story’s background into view.

[Instead, we've been trained to consume the most sensational aspects of stories. Consider the first sentence of the UWO story: "A firestorm of controversy is raging..."]

I was glad to see that Ruby gathered more information before (and after) posting about the incident at LondonFuse.

Jeff Jarvis and others have been arguing for a while that professional news organizations need to train citizen journalists and facilitate them (us) in order to improve the quality of information coming out as stories break online.

Sharing information and devising conclusions is a spontaneous, natural human behaviour; you’re not going to stop it so we might as well try to channel it more effectively.

James Shelley discussed the issue here, calling it “a microcosm of what we witnessed at the Iranian protests this year: the lines between “witnesses” and “media” are now almost indecipherable.”

So I’m thinking… since we’re all in favour of ensuring the highest quality of information and dialogue, let’s talk & do more about working together — professionals and amateurs — to share best practices, and elevate the level of public knowledge and discourse in the city.

As a start, I love a lot of the “behind the scenes” content The Free Press is generating on their blogs. Dan Brown blogged about that yesterday. But a lot more can be done.

I’m just throwing ideas around… I’d be more than willing to participate in a pilot project of some sort — webinars, a series of meetups & discussions, a blogger-reporter exchange program… I don’t know.

[Update: Check out NPR's PublicMediaCamp as an example.]

Regardless, it’s time we see more positive initiative from the professionals (or at least better arguments and explanations to the contrary — not just flimsy analogies and flip remarks).

Leave the complaining to amateurs.

[And yet another update: Jay Rosen pointed back to an excellent older post he wrote about using "the press" rather than "media"; I'm quite inclined to agree. I'll adjust my vocabulary accordingly from now on (when appropriate, which won't be often: most of the time it is media I'm writing about, not the press). If I were to rewrite this post tomorrow, the title (at least) would reflect that.]

Best Of: Social Media in London

Brian — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:20:48 +0000

Brogan says it’s ok to do these so, ok, here’s the best of my posts about London Ontario so far. I noticed when I started putting them together they sort of make a case… but you’ll have to create your own adventure!

First, some background criticism on our mostly unconnected city:

Meanwhile we’ve got a great, burgeoning social media community:

Some positive suggestions pertaining to the city in general:

And some explanations why I think promoting social/digital media is the most effective way to make London a remarkable city:

I’m condensing all of these into one narrative, one argument that I’ll cover Nov 5 at the Central Library talk.

Our Greek World

Brian — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:46:18 +0000

I’ve been meaning to do one of these Open Yale Courses online for a while. I’d love to watch Robert Shiller’s course in financial markets (I think Shiller is great but I’m undecided how much I can really tolerate hearing about financial markets…) You can also view Paul Bloom’s introduction to psychology.

I haven’t looked at many of the courses on iTunes yet but there’s a ton of stuff there too, from all over the world.

Finally, the digital democracy thing gives me a sense of need. So I fired up Donald Kagan’s Introduction to Ancient Greek History as a refresher.

The first lecture is embedded below. I’ve been putting this off for a while but once I got past the first few minutes (past the, “oh no, a crusty old professor” reaction) I was amazed. This first lecture isn’t so much about Ancient Greece as it is about the whole history of political ideas throughout Western Civilization.

Required reading, I think — as the saying goes… but reading isn’t required.

[Update: These lectures are awesome! Seven hours later I've now watched 3 more episodes (I skipped two on the Dark Ages) -- er, I mean lectures -- and I'm totally absorbed. I wish I did this sooner... Fleshing out a lot of ideas for November too. And I regret the "crusty old professor" crack. Kagan is actually an engaging lecturer -- I even LOL'd a few times. I think my reaction was more like, "Whoa, this is longer than 4 minutes and the camera isn't moving around and there's no beat." And no Auto-Tune either.]

The New Digital World-View

Brian — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:04:56 +0000

[Here's a bit I've got so far prefacing That Project Provisionally Called a Book.]

Say Everything, Scott Rosenberg’s book about “how blogging began, where it’s going, and why it matters,” begins on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Along with first-hand witnesses in Manhattan, many other people across the US gravitated online to share their thoughts and feelings about the tragedy. Dave Winer — one of the first bloggers, not to mention one of the most influential – used his site to post information about his feared-missing father that morning; he explained, in a subsequent post:

We want to figure out what happened, what it means, and where we go from here. The world changed today. It’s still very fresh.

While that happened I felt the same urge: I wanted to make sense of it all; the best way to do that was to start writing. I wasn’t blogging but I felt the compulsive need — a feeling I eventually became very familiar with — to consume more information, more information, more information, more… and inject my own thoughts into those vital conversations.

If I was just a little bit geekier, or better-connected, or more self-assured, I might have started blogging at that very moment. Instead, I started a long process of personal deliberation, extensive research, and intensive reflection.

It took years but eventually the answers started to emerge — not by looking directly, but by turning around and wondering why we ask these questions in the first place.

It all boils down to this; science, religion — and anything touched by what we call “media” in the broadest sense – derives from our essential urge to “figure out what happened, what it means, and where we go.” We’re seldom conscious of it but it’s a constant process — or rather, we’re seldom conscious because it’s a constant process, which we can never fully get outside of to observe…

When I finally started blogging in 2007 I established an underlying argument that in order to address the world’s biggest problems we need to “invest in ideas” and develop better ways of thinking and deliberating.

As I got in the habit of blogging and communicating via digital media I developed a clearer appreciation of what it can do within the big picture of human history.

But to explain it we need a fresh understanding of human nature.

Part of the reason we’ve had so much difficulty making sense of the complex events of the past decade is that our ways of thinking — specifically, the metaphors, analogies, and images we resort to — have not caught up to the technologies and practices of our age.

We live in a world that consists of distributed, decentralized, and constantly-changing networks of real-time connections, but we still think in terms of simple one- and two-dimensional polarities, velocities, pressures, and collisions.

It’s like we’re trying to draw three-dimensions without knowing anything about linear perspective. It would be easy if someone could just show us the tricks — but nobody has quite figured those out yet.

Overcoming the old habits, learning new ones, is an incremental process. Think of it as replacing planks on a platform one-by-one rather than tearing the whole thing down. We still need something to base our thinking on, it’s impossible to simply clear everything away at once. Or you can think of this as either bootstrapping or disentanglement: we need to get the new ideas through the old; ratcheting ourselves up gradually, using the old habits as leverage for learning new ones.

Specifically, digital media needs to serve as a metaphor for appreciating the new ideas about human nature; at the same time, the updated understanding of human nature is required to fully appreciate a socially dynamic world connected by digital media… back-and-forth until both aspects become intuitive.

[Well that's a start, for now... Questions & feedback welcome. Further reading is here if you're interested. I'll also be working some of these ideas out in a live discussion Nov 5, which you're invited to.]

Uncovering London Ontario’s Economy

LDNbeta — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:06:34 +0000

This might seem like a joke or a bunch of rhetoric but it isn’t. Ok, maybe it’s somewhat extremely rhetorical — but no less serious: What exactly is supposed to come out of this economic summit on Thursday anyways?

On Saturday I read a passing mention of it in the subhead to some comments by Chris Bentley, Amit Chakma, Anne Marie DeCicco-Best, Ed Holder, Gerry Macartney, and Howard Rundle, but there weren’t any details other than the date.

Then there was nothing about it on the city’s website. Nothing via the promising-looking link to London’s Next Economy — a page that has apparently not been updated since September 2005. Nothing on their Twitter or Facebook either. And nothing about it on the London Economic Development Corporation’s site. Couldn’t find anything on their events or news listings. Nothing on their Twitter. Searching with Google and Bing didn’t turn up anything relevant at all. Nobody was discussing it, none of the stakeholders, none of the participants (whoever they might be) seemed to have made any mention of it online whatsoever.

Which made me wonder, is anyone actually taking the event seriously? Is it the general public’s need to be informed that isn’t being taken seriously? Is that because the general public doesn’t care to be informed? (Or did I just miss something obvious? — which I wouldn’t bet against.)

Thankfully I only had to wait three days for the next edition of the London Free Press and by Tuesday morning I was reading all about it. This is from Chip Martin’s article:

More than 200 leaders of London business, labour, education, finance, government and other agencies will brainstorm this Thursday in a bid to devise an economic action plan.

The movers and shakers in the local economy are being brought together by the London Economic Development Corp., at the request of city council, to plan how London can succeed in the future.

…

White said the focus was expanded to deal with all aspects of the city and its economy where concern exists about unemployment levels, the loss of manufacturing jobs, comparatively low population growth and the challenge of finding suitable employment to retain university and college graduates.

After the summit, White said the LEDC will take the recommendations it produces, consider them in light of the city’s strategic plan and recommend a course of action to city council likely next month.

Well put it that way and it sounds pretty important, but the relative silence makes me wonder whether everyone thinks this is just a waste of time.

It’s just the impression I get when I don’t see anyone demonstrating ownership, nor any of the participants taking it upon themselves to acknowledge the event. Nobody, not even the LEDC [screenshot] or the London Convention Centre [screenshot], have posted it on their calenders.

Digital media is still fairly new but we’re getting to a point at which, for many of us, this seems unfathomable.

Then again, why wouldn’t everybody think a summit is a waste of time? We’re talking about over 200 of London’s busiest people using a substantial part of a workday for this. And it’s not like many of them would have much difficulty finding an audience for their input if the right insight and urge happened to occur to them at the right moment.

Ideas can occur anytime, anywhere. The post-summit action shouldn’t be to merely recommend an economic plan, it should also (if not primarily) be to establish a framework for ongoing deliberation — preferably a more open and dynamic kind — to capture all of the ideas and insights that go undocumented and forgotten week-after-week.

I’m disinclined to oppose any kind of public forum — and I sincerely hope everything goes well on Thursday. My complaint is that these kinds of challenges and opportunities should never stop being discussed in public — i.e. online.

I’m a fan of the the “Beyond Crisis” special report the Free Press has been doing. I can’t seem to improve on their “six key areas” idea (as much as I’d like to ;-) … It deserves more coverage by bloggers etc in the city, including me. We should be building more discussion around it.

Btw, TechAlliance deserves credit for (very) recently getting a shiny new sociable site — the first institutional site I know of in London with an RSS feed… I just can’t wait to see more!

Have Any Favourite Posts?

Brian — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:03:35 +0000

I’m working on trying to select and organize some of my best posts into a book I’ll publish through Lulu.

If you have any you like — or stuck in your mind at least — or if you’ve been reading without ever commenting, now’s the time to say something.

The working title is “The World Turned Upside-Down,” referring to all of the symbolic (though not merely symbolic) events in the past year that represent a kind of 180º historical turn — a lot of things that directly contradict the assumptions held by past generations of leaders.

And it all just happened to be at a time in my life that I was:

relatively free from both professional and social commitments, so I could devote almost all of my free time to following these events
feeling very motivated to spend a lot of energy thinking and writing about them
knowledgeable enough about social media that I could pick up most of the tools and find most of the right voices without much trouble
still such a newbie that I had plenty of enthusiasm to keep me going

It was a lot of fun but it’s time to move on.

Making a book out of it is a way of condensing and encapsulating all of that experience into a few key insights and lessons for the next set of challenges and opportunities.

The notion I want to focus on has to do with social media and the power of citizens — i.e. a system that works more from the bottom-up than it used to, hence, “the world turned upside-down.”

That should give you an idea of where it’s going and what sort of posts I plan to use.

The first one is probably going to be the two-parter from August on future media models. That can be read as kind of a template or outline for the argument I want to support with the book; the rest of the content will fit around that somehow — either explicitly or as a kind of working demonstration, or to provide more contextual for the kind of world we have now.

Obviously I can’t use anything that contains a lot of material excerpted from other people’s articles and blogs. Most will probably come from my essay-type posts.

I’ll be very grateful for any input and I’ll acknowledge all responses. And of course you’ll also receive my undying appreciation and respect… can’t afford to buy you beer though — coffee, hmmmmaybe…

Another Look at LDNbeta

LDNbeta — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:36:05 +0000

No I haven’t forgot about the little endeavour I launched in May:

I started thinking we need someplace to just try stuff. If it works, then great: we can replicate it on our own sites or even develop something more permanent, public, and professional. If it doesn’t work, then that’s ok too: without actually losing anything, we can cross-off a few ideas from the list and move forward to the next few –a little wiser and more experienced than we were before.

This whole idea is like that. It might turn out to be a complete dud. If that’s the case, then fine: on to the next thing.

So what did it accomplish?

1. It didn’t have to accomplish anything

First of all, if nothing else, it simply scratched an itch: intrinsic motivation. I’d been blogging about London for a while and started feeling like I wasn’t backing up my words with any action. (It’s arguable whether LDNbeta resembles any kind of “action” yet, but anyways) I got the idea one weekend and I just had to do something about it — one of those creative-person urges.

2. Established a model to work with

Consistent with the notion of “rapid prototyping” (also knowing I had to capitalize on the motivation-surge at that moment), it only took about 24 hours from the initial moment of conception through buying the domain name, installing and setting up WordPress, writing that inaugural post, and hitting publish so I could start sharing not just a vague idea but a working demonstration.

3. Learned about the limits of social media

It was an effective way to get the idea across (I think) but it turned out to be not such an effective way to get other people involved, i.e. to generate real results.

I learned that although social media can be an efficient way to get noticed, make introductions, share information, and stay in-touch with people, it isn’t well suited for generating collaboration during the development stages of new projects and initiatives. That requires a lot more in-person (or at least verbal) networking and relationship-building.

Collaborators have to establish foundations of mutual understanding and trust; that means eye contact, handshakes, laughs, and maybe a beverage or three.

4. Developed more domain-relevant knowledge

It compelled me to do more reading, thinking, and writing. There were a lot of things I’d missed before — probably still are, but in the course of that process I earned a better grasp of what I don’t know, what I still need to learn, and where to go from here… I became more “oriented”: I found a number of similar initiatives I could defer to and point at for reference.

5. Signaled interest, ability, and intent

Conversely, I was raising a flag; other people took notice of what I was doing — people who were already on the same wavelength, thinking about (and possibly starting) similar or complementary projects [not just in London]; sending the right signals with one’s existing work can greatly expedite the process of establishing mutual understanding and trust.

If we can see that someone has already read and thought about (and tried) many of the same things, then first contact becomes easier, more natural (for me, at least) and more fruitful, and I’m very grateful to have made some new connections with people who share some of my passions and interests in the past few months.

6. Focused sense of direction, and humility

There’s more material, substance, and momentum to build with now. There’s a bit of a platform to build on, I received some feedback from others — or at least a better sense of what people are interested in — and perhaps most importantly, I’ve eliminated a lot of possibilities, formerly-unknowns, mistakes, and dead-ends from the long list I started with.

Finally, the most recent insight I had is that maybe my proposals haven’t so much prescribed what ought to be done, they seem to have merely described what’s going to happen anyways. Things have gone in the direction I’ve been pushing but I can’t see any evidence that my pushes had any causal efficacy. So part of me wonders if I’ve merely been an opinionated annoyance to the people who are actually getting things done…

Regardless, that possibility has motivated me to make some changes; if I’m going to make a meaningful contribution (and you can feel free to read it with the word “I” changed to “we”) I’m going to have to work harder on:

meeting and building relationships in-person
original research (both the journalistic and the academic kind)
deference to people and organizations that are ahead of me
focused and assertive criticism of what people and organizations need to correct or improve
professional presentation — such as limiting the use of the word “I”

Those are the intentions, at least — essentially the same things I need to improve on in general… and come to think of it, the foregoing list of accomplishments looks more or less like the core imperatives I keep coming back to — i.e. the whole reason I blog at all…

Well, so much for the “what I did this summer” story. Time to look outwards and ahead.

I have some high hopes for where this whole movement might lead. The rumbling on the horizon sounds deeper, the cadence more persistent — pretty hard to ignore now.

And now that everyone’s coming back from vacation or whatever, I’m looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish in the fall, winter, and beyond.

[Note: some minor changes were made Aug. 30.]

From the Agora to the Blogosphere, and Beyond

Brian — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:19:41 +0000

Yesterday I noticed a couple of announcements for London social media events in the fall:

a Twitter 101 TechAlliance Breakfast Club on October 14 starring @billdeys, @ericablonde, and @titusferguson
a social media [un]conference for the arts community promoted by @adamcaplan, @titusferguson, and @billdeys (from what I understand at this early stage — let me know if I should correct or add to that)

So I figure this would be as good a time as any to provide a few more details on what I’m doing Thurs, November 5 at the Central Library:

Come for a discussion about the ways in which digital media is changing the nature of public discourse and the structure of society. Will the transformation be as profound as the first dawn of democracy? How can we make the best use of these new platforms and tools?

It won’t be a how-to session (I’ll leave that to the people listed above — in fact I’ll likely be trying to hit them up for some pointers myself). It’ll mostly be about, well, exactly the kind of stuff I’m always blogging: “deep-thinking” (as Dan Brown puts it all the time), talking about new things that are happening and how they relate to the big picture.

“From the Agora” is a reference to this idea [not necessarily new in itself]. I’m trying to pound down the rough edges and form it into something more swallowable.

If you already know everything about social media, maybe you’ll learn something about Plato or Athenian politics or epistemology or something. The main thing I want to show is that it doesn’t have to be boring. I love that stuff just as much as social media.

I wish we had a better word than “blogosphere” but we don’t. I use it to refer to the whole newmediasphere or domain-of-digital-media — including Twitter and Facebook — but those more accurate (and less abused) terms don’t work in a title.

My main focus will be on “and Beyond.”

I have a handful of new-ish ideas that I want to bounce off of a crowd — to see what even newer ideas we might manage to create (maybe do some jamming before November too). I want to learn as much as I teach.

Most important, I want to conversation to continue to grow — which isn’t to say it needs my help.

It seems to be doing awesome without much from me, judging by the upcoming events, the buzz, and all of the Londoners coming to Twitter (both young and old but for a younger generation it looks like it’s becoming required for anyone with entrepreneurial and social-entrepreneurial intentions).

Still would be nice to build an identifiable hub…

Brian Frank » a2bb

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