twopointouch

(Or, for those enjoying the puns, Nashional Guard.)

Every social media destination has some sort of scoring mechanism:

• Twitter followers
• Linked-In contacts
• Facebook friends
• Blog subscribers/comments

Those are the four I personally use most consistently, though I dip in and out of all the others to see what’s happening. They all have an equivalent.

What’s the result of those scores? Bigger is better always seems to be the suggested case: something that’s very deliberately designed into the UI is your score. Other people’s scores are almost always a click away.

For the owners of those products, it’s absolutely the case that bigger scores are great. The more people you’re connected with, the more time you’ll spend on the site, the more likely you’ll eventually click an advert or buy into the premium features, and the more trouble it is to move. For me, moving from Linked-In to a rival business network like E-cademy or Xing or Ryze would be a major pain.

The quality of the product doesn’t really matter, either, when the score’s at stake. Why do we use Twitter? It’s flakey and restrictive. Jaiku was way better than Twitter; there are up-and-coming competitors like identi.ca that offer way better features. Not to mention already dead competitors like Plurk. But my people are on Twitter and that’s why I put up with it. I have X followers there and X/5 on its closest competitor.

The ludic (playful or game-like) element of social sites provide a massive incentive to stay and play. I was delighted to beat my high-score on Twitter yesterday. That’s pretty childish, in most people’s estimation. No, actually it is childish: I should be ashamed of myself. And so it’s something that sounds gauche when we admit to it. By-and-large, we don’t, unless we have no embarrassment reflex.

But let’s talk about it.

I want to beat you at Twitter, Facebook and the rest. If your score is higher than mine, then I am jealous. If it is lower, then I scorn you. Why? Ummm dunno. Because it’s there. Frankly, because it’s designed like a game and in the same way I want to win our chess game that we might have one day, I want to win our Linked-In/etc. game.

This is the secret dashboard on Linked-In/Twitter/&c:

So what would happen if I stopped playing? My rank on the killboard would decline rapidly.

What does stopping playing mean on these sites? Not visiting; not accepting any friend requests that simply boost the friend count; not joining in on discussions where I know – or suspect – there’s no real challenge to established points of view.

Would I have fewer friends? – possibly. Would the things I said and did be less right? No. [My job role as a publisher clearly means that reach is a KPI. That kind of taints what I might do as a real human being. ]

The other consequence of the ludic nature of social sites is the effect of that on people’s behaviour, as I’ve talked about over the last couple of posts. If it looks like a game, and playing it like a game offers some rewards, then of course people will do that. If the game is approval, and it is in many cases, then that will lead to approved behaviour. Scoring systems on social media destinations are nearly always linked to approval in some way. The other part of the game is competition – you have to have a better comment than the other guy. That’s really great in some ways, because it makes people reach for ideas. Really terrible in other ways, because destroying the opposition becomes the focus. Thus the phenomenon of the Angry Internet Man – a great phrase possibly coined but definitely popularised by the awesome gaming site RockPaperShotgun.

This is a little way off from the Foucault post, in some ways, but it leads to the same conclusion. Social media may well be a force for good, creativity, innovation. But at the same time it is also exerting control and perverting behaviours.

PS. I think last.fm and similar taste-based networks have different dynamics, but that’s one for another day.

The Foucault post yesterday seemed to go down well, so I thought I’d chance my arm and respond to a couple of criticisms in a new post rather than the comment thread. Sorry, purists.

My erstwhile-friend Roger from Content & Motion launched the first counter-offensive. His main point is about the decentralisation of power in the online world. There’s no central control tower any more in the online Panopticon.

O RLY? UK Government agencies want/have your email, your movements and your picture already. We have entered an age when central government in the UK has access to almost everything you do. So no, power and discipline is not decentralised. It is more centralised than at any point in history.

OK: that’s a little bit of a feint from me, I know. I do know what he means. He means we choose – a lot of the time – about what authorities and news sources we read. We each can vote for the stories/pictures/video etc. that bubble up on twitter, digg and delicious. If I want to get my news from the Doom-monger Daily and nowhere else, then I can.

But then… but then all of those choices are recorded; they are creating more information about me – they are fleshing out the picture of who I am and what I do and what I like. And what marketing tactics might work with me. And how much of a threat I might be, were I remotely threatening. Remember, that all knowledge, experience and information is also power given away. I went along to the always-splendid MeasurementCamp meeting this morning – and as I imagined, this is grist to the mill for the social networks (Facebook, Bebo are delighted to share demographic information). It’s the only part of their business model that makes sense:

What’s that? You want an ageing commie sympathiser who smells? Yeah, we’ve got a coupla hundred of them – check out this delaney guy – hahaha!

Yep: there’s no longer a central control tower. There are hundreds and thousands of them. You’re covered by twenty cameras every time you move online. They each exert their portion of control and they do, I believe, have a central ideology – what’s become to be called the groupthink and circle-jerk of the Internet. More on that below.

[As an aside, I remember a guy from Microsoft asking me a couple of years ago whether selling ads against user-volunteered information in their profile was ethical. He was genuinely concerned. I said go-for-it – there has to be a value exchange for there to be a business.]

Catherine (location unknown, sadly) makes a great point (she made three great points, actually, but I am only doing one tonight):

You may have no racists on your Twitter feed, but how is this different from the people you choose to associate with in real life? This isn’t socialmediaworld, this is the world most people create for themselves in real life. You may not like this process (and there is an argument to be made against it), but it’s certainly not down to social media.

You know what, she’s right. Social media has extended my political world to a far greater extent than it has constrained it.

The second-half of the post regarding transgression is severely unfinished – it was nearly 2am. I’d love to see some analysis on internet Groupthink. I know I see it on a daily basis. But the extent to which minority views and change are thus made impossible? That would be the theoretical outcome of Foucault and Social Media  and that’s why it’s there, but I don’t have any data whatsoever. mea culpa.

[NB: I’ll certainly back the original post up, insofar as I able, but be aware that I wrote it as an exercise in response to an invitation. It’s not a manifesto. It’s mucking around with ideas to create something potentially useful and thought-provoking. That’s not a cop-out; it’s the way it is].

Some of my early hopes for social media, that it represented, like Kevin Kelly reckons, some kind of renaissance for socialism in the western world, are starting to run dry.

There’s a splendid series of articles over at O’Reilly Media concerning the dark side of social media by Joshua-Michéle Ross. The first of these, The Digital Panopticon, was drawn to my attention by Antony Mayfield today.

[This post is terribly unpolished – my books are in boxes for a couple of weeks, so only internet research here – and also, I am a critical theory dilettante at the best of times].

The Panopticon, as you probably know, was a scarily-perfect model of perpetual surveillance in a prison, first mooted by Jeremy Bentham, one of the great philosophers of The Enlightenment. Prisoners in such an institution may be observed at any time and they’re unable to tell whether or not they’re being watched. Thus, they’re kept in continual paranoia. Many prisons, including current-day institutions like London’s Pentonville and Pelicon Bay in California, are believed to be inspired by the Panopticon model.

Josh suggests, and I am bound to agree somewhat, that social media technologies have a strong panoptical element:

In the age of social networks we find ourselves coming under a vast grid of surveillance – of permanent visibility. The routine self-reporting of what we are doing, reading, thinking via status updates makes our every action and location visible to the crowd. This visibility has a normative effect on behavior (in other words we conform our behavior and/or our speech about that behavior when we know we are being observed).

Josh’s point is that we somehow accept social media networks as empowering, democratic and all about spreading fresh ideas. The reverse may be the case: any given information about ourselves donates some portion of control to another party.

Let’s take this across to one model of critical theory. Post-structuralist modernist (I get my posts mixed up) philosopher Michel Foucault back in the 70s picked up and ran with the idea of the Panopticon, especially in his best-known work Discipline and Punish. His idea was that Bentham’s model wasn’t just an idea for a prison; but for a society.

He argued that prisons are a really new idea. Back in the past, we simply thrashed/burned/drowned/stabbed transgressors. That all changed in the C18th with the Enlightenment . The idea of law-enforcement was ‘enlightened’ with the  understanding that resources [people] didn’t need to be wasted and that better social control is exercised through freely-given compliance, rather than co-option.

People could be turned into machines, a consequence of political thinking in the emergence of industrial society and the rush to efficiency and cost-allocation. Once properly mechanised, they could be ‘trusted’ – the scare quotes, because the trusted prisoner is no longer human. A big part of that process is surveillance: once people know that they are always (potentially) watched, they’re a bit more compliant to the rules, and a bit more like machines.

The genius of the current model is that we are self-surveillant, of course. We willingly offer our identity, friends, thoughts and so-forth, to the all-seeing eyes of anyone who can be bothered to set up an appropriate search alert. We’re consequently a bit less likely to say or do things that fall outside the accepted models of political and corporate behaviour.

Foucault saw this coming in what was happening back in the C18th. Foucault observed that over the period of that century, the exercise of power changed from explicitly keeping people down to encouraging people to express themselves (and then governing that), rather than repressing expression as in the earlier model. Foucault’s ideas of power produced knowledge, produced information, produced pleasure – in the right directions. Creating knowledge, creating information is a form of surrender in this model.

It produced (arguably) blog-conversations, for example. They are a discourse, in his terminology – conversations that follow an agreed etiquette, language and code – creating implicitly agreed audience-identities and scope. If you cannot submit to that discourse, you cannot be a part of it. I can’t explore that fully right now, but blog conversation as discourse is a rich course of enquiry, I promise.

One small part of this to pick out: Foucault remarked on the way people could now be disciplined by:

tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical

How perfect a description is that of the unfollow, unfriend, forum-ban, IP-ban?

For dozens of contemporary examples, check out this issue of Surveillance and Society, though it is very academic.

And where is transgression in social media?

It is simply not allowed to exist in many cases. No, wacky viral videos and satire along the lines of the Daily Show do no not count – the former often serve Capitalism, the remainder and all of the latter are our current carnivalesque release-valve on norms that really couldn’t care less about political change. Porn doesn’t count either, because it’s so fully and perfectly Capitalist in the first place.

Blogs you don’t like: don’t subscribe/unsubscribe – you get the Daily Me; Facebook people get unfriended if they say the wrong thing; unsavoury Twitter followers are not followed or blocked. Bland self-approval of the group takes over. There are no racists on my spectrum right now. As far as I am concerned, they don’t exist. But that’s not the real story, clearly. Racists are poised to take Stoke in the next by-election. They don’t appear on my spectrum because I have deliberately blinded myself to their existence on a day-to-day basis. Diversity of opinion is purely opt-in (with strong incentives to opt-out) in socialmediaworld.

In socialmediaworld, there’s consequently no-one who wants to topple our social democracy. Almost everything that I see, and almost anything I am likely to see, is already ranked (Google) and focused (Twitter) through the twin lenses of liberal democracy. Minority views are excluded by the machine – only the recommended and personalised is allowed through. The stuff that dulls and comforts the political imagination. Foucault talked about a ‘new economics of power’ with regard to the French media of the 70s – he would have so relished and reviled our current political abstinence and lack of ideas.

Transgression has almost ceased to exist. Almost. Look to the unchampioned uninnovative for that: IRC, usenet, forums, web-sites.

Terribly unpopular post on ‘innovation and politics’ to follow…

We love our infograms, don’t we, the digerati, the twittering classes? These information graphics, or data visualisations. I don’t think there’s another field of the social sciences quite so keen on complicated graphs that half-explain themselves and suggest transparency and half are a subtle appeal to the imagination.

Because these images are machine-generated, there’s a temptation to believe that they are transparent. That they are mirrors of hard-and-fast facts. They are not. No image is unmediated nor undesigned. Someone decided to style the information in this way, with this scope and format, these colours and these dimensions. And there’s an agenda in that, whether overt or unrealised: this is how we visualise this stuff and how we want you to visualise it, too. They fulfil an ideological function.

For this post about data-visualisations, I’m going to focus on the visualisation part of the term ("You can picture it like this"), rather than the data part.

Why are these the images that are selected and why do they look the way they do?

The Connected Web

These types of images are especially popular. I think that when you sign the application for the International League of Social Media Consultants, you must pledge to include them in every slide deck.

This is what the web looks like, we’re told. The visualisation holds a nod to the Powers of Ten and the Mandelbrot Set, a web of terrifying complexity that will reveal infinitely more layers of complexity the closer you zoom in. This web is far bigger than you know, or can possibly know. They may remind you, too, of the molecular diagrams of complex carbohydrates that you never quite understood properly at school.

It looks like this because today’s web is about interconnectedness, not just in the sense of wires under the streets, but the connections of tribes of influence and ultimately of every individual on the web – each of which is subtly different (unless, of course, they are not). The colours are interesting, too. Note the preponderance of blue (unvisited links) and red (alert!) in these pictures.

Why do Web 2.0 presentations nearly always start with this image? Because they need to disabuse you of the notion that the web looks like this:

You don’t need a £1000-a-day consultant for a web with one input box and two buttons, one of which is almost never used. No; understanding the web requires science beyond your ken and difficult Maths.

The Tag Cloud

I’m actually a big fan of tag-clouds – as I’ve mentioned before. I think they encourage exploration, individual journeys and also give an instantly understood visual fingerprint to a site.

So two thumbs-up for ones like this:

The ones that I’m less keen on sometimes look a bit like this:

Or, even worse, like this:

The video shows CNN creating – and then seriously discussing – a ‘word cloud’ in its terminology, made from President Obama’s press conference on March 24. Not a brilliant starting point. Tag clouds do not provide a lot of analysis for documents. They flag up the main topics. They do nothing to establish sentiment or tone. If Obama’s speech had consisted entirely of questions, rather than statements, the tag cloud would look exactly the same.

By the way, UK’s Daily Telegraph immediately copied the idea, to our shame, in order to ‘analyse’ the Chancellor’s budget speech last month:

The Friend Wheel

The Friend Wheel became one of the enduring visual images to try to explain Facebook and the Social Graph – the network’s term for the interconnectedness of your friends in a social network – and why advertising on it will work (click for big).

What the hell does this show? Well, that my friends on Facebook sit in three broad groups: the green ones are the social media whores – they all know each other as well as me. I’ll probably see them at a London networking event once a month. The blue ones seem to know each other, but not the greens. They are perhaps specialists or old work colleagues. The pinks are less likely to know the greens and blues – maybe family and friends who came a little later to the network?

What you realise after a while, is that everybody’s friend wheel looks exactly the same. That’s what Facebook is like. People who don’t do the whole social media thing probably won’t have as much of a green crowd, but for them, school friends or people within a large corporation might take their place.

Again, it seems like over-complication and scientification of some common sense about what Facebook is like. This, more familiar, view of your friends doesn’t look like you need a specialist firm advising you:

But, oh!, the colours and so many lines!

Last Words

I am not remotely as cynical as this might imply. I remain an enormous fan of data visualisations, despite all of this, and advise a visit to Visual Complexity on a weekly basis to get your fix. But do be alert: don’t forget that this is an art as much as a science.