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.

I’ve recently installed a relatively new Wordpress plug-in from the good folk at Backtype.

This is what it does: it scans the web, including social networks like Twitter and other blogs, for mentions of your post and draws those mentions in as comments on the post. This is a good thing in many respects. It helps to give readers a sense of the whole debate, not just the point of view of people who manage to stop-by your site and leave a comment. It links to all its sources.

So why am I fretting?

In some ways, it feels like cheating. When people measure website engagement, the ratio of comments per post is a key indicator. Someone who gets 100 comments on every post is clearly more *cough* important than someone who gets 1 comment, when it comes to blogging and such.

My recent post on the #PRDebate event that we produced at NMK a couple of weeks ago ostensibly has 17 comments. Yet I know only a couple of those were from people who came to this site – the rest are collated from Twitter and other people’s blogs.

Have I stolen those comments in some way? In a way, I have. If other bloggers are competing to be the most popular, then they lose if they don’t use this plug-in. It seems like they’ve got less engagement than an entirely-equivalent-in-every-other-way blog that does use it. Which isn’t true and so that’s not really fair.

However, until people start complaining, I’m going to carry on. Conversations about blog posts are distributed nowadays – you’re more likely to get a reaction on Twitter than your own page; people reference your post on other people’s blogs. Blogs are less important as destinations as people dip into the flow rather than visit sites. Creating a resource, and multiple resources, to let people get the whole picture is a valuable thing. The engagement metric based on comments/posts is in some ways flawed since if people are discussing the post elsewhere, then that’s equally (more!) important than them discussing it on your own site.

Be delighted to hear others’ thoughts on this – comment below or via your own blog, twitter or anything else, it seems.

Twitter is about the real-time web; being in the flow. Once you’re following more than 100 people, it becomes an entirely different experience to instant messaging or Facebook. It feels like one of those adverts for the Information Superhighway in the 1990s: people and objects and destinations rush by. Sometimes you’ll stop and check in, by clicking on a mystery link, or catch up on a relationship by clicking on a username to see their last dozen updates. In the time you’ve spent doing that, though, a whole new page of updates has magically appeared.

The user experience changes radically depending on the client you use:

• The twitter web page doesn’t automatically poll its source and change. Yet every time you hit Refresh, it’s different. It’s always a reminder that the world keeps turning no-matter what’s happening in your own little portion. As much as it lets you see into the world of the people in your network, it’s a reminder of your anonymity. At the same time, the prominence of the edit box at the top of the page is an invitation to poke the world; to let people know.
• ‘Pro’ clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl change the proposition substantially. You won’t miss that @ message or the mentions of your brand or interests. For this reason, they’ve become favourites among egocentrics and those with marketing or PR interests in the network. In these client applications, the edit box has less prominence. It’s dipping your head into a rushing river, but also checking to see if any of your fishing nets have reeled in a catch; and resetting the bait with another update. These clients automatically update every few seconds, you see the real time web rush past; but the nets into search terms and messages mean that the feeling of control is not so lost.
• The mobile experience is different again. You’re less likely to participate in some respects, because data entry on a phone is trickier than from a keyboard. You’re less likely to click a link because you know that your device has a 50% chance of timing-out or failing to render the resulting page properly. The mobile experience is thus likely to be more about observation: checking in on your network – the ambient intimacy of it all.

Where am I going with this? A couple of places.

1. Leaving Las Twitteros

First, it turns out that, contrary to the propaganda, Twitter is an enormous, blue FAIL WHALE when it comes to retention, Mashable reported yesterday. Most people leave after a month, it seems:

…growth from February 2008 to February 2009 was reportedly 1382%, with the incline increasing yet further in recent months.

But like many social networks, it seems many people lose steam with the service. Stat tracking firm Nielsen reports today that a full 60% of users who sign up fail to return the following month. And in the 12 months “pre-Oprah”, retention rates were even lower: only 30% returned the next month.

There is more than one explanation for the massive drop-off in the last paragraph. The statistics given only track web page usage. It’s reasonable to suppose that a substantial number of users graduate from using the web page to using a different client, like Tweetdeck. In the discussion of the article, author Pete Cashmore links to another showing that only 30% of updates come via. the page – the rest using other clients.

I don’t think that this explanation explains the Nielsen figures entirely, though. I know a lot of very articulate and intelligent people to whom Twitter simply does not appeal. They gave it a go and didn’t see the point. That’s OK. Saying that this is because they haven’t given it enough time and effort, as I’ve heard before, is an odd argument. It’s a bit like saying I could come to love self-flagellation if I put my back into it, and my nether regions.

The recent celebrity endorsements of Twitter which have led to such rapid growth won’t help matters. Listening to the prattle from @stephenfry & co is a less engaging experience than being in touch with people you really know and sharing with them, I would suggest. If you use Twitter in order to keep up with certain celebrities, it must be very frustrating when they’re getting on with their jobs rather than providing updates. I’m not saying there are right and wrong ways to use Twitter – there aren’t – but there are ways that are likely to lead to more engagement than others.

The rushing passage of stuff is fine in a 30-second commercial, but hardly everyone’s cup-of-tea when they actually come to use the Internet. Point One is that Twitter is quite important but is not and will never be the next generation of the web, etc. etc.

2. Whispers in the Wind

The second matter I wanted to briefly explore was the viability of Twitter as a publishing or attention mechanism for media owners and institutions. Nearly every publisher does this (including NMK and its Lords and Masters at the University of Westminster). Maybe you hand-craft your tweets or automate them – it’s easy, using twitterfeed from your RSS, but err… it’s not very good, is it?

Your institution or organisation will not produce that many updates a day. That’s good in some ways – people will quickly unsubscribe from feeds that talk too much – especially if they have a corporate or robotic feel. At the same time, because you don’t update so often, your reach is tiny compared to almost any other medium. It’s a nudge, a poke, a pebble tossed into the river, a piece of flotsam that people might nudge into from time to time. It’s worth doing only because it’s easy. But because the social media marketing experts are using Tweetdeck or something, then they get an illusionary experience of the impact of their posts – their net full of retweets and @s at the end of the day looks full even for a tiny organisation like the one for which I work. At the same time, when I dip my head into the live stream, I see scarcely any interaction with tweets from ‘official’ media or institutional feeds. And there’s another problem that augments this…

If you open up a new channel of communication in the social media space, then there needs to be an ear on the other end listening and responding to the feedback. Social media, by definition, is not about broadcasting, but is two-way. You start a blog, you need a comments person. You send an email; you need a reply-address that works. Carefully writing your Blog T&Cs or Twitter bio or Email newsletter subscript can allow you to redirect responses somewhere else, but by entering into a communications arena that is entirely two-way with a one-way methodology, you’re asking for problems. (Skittles and The Telegraph’s brave – you may have other words – experiments with posting unmoderated twitter feeds illustrate this handsomely). Point Two is that Twitter is for people, not things.

You’ve probably already seen this, even though it was published just a week ago.

It’s had nearly two million views in the last week, over 6,000 comments on YouTube itself, and been plugged into 826 blog posts. Among its honours, it’s the #2 – Top Favourited (All Time) – Sport. If it weren’t for Susan Boyle, it would be top video global of the month. It’s almost perfect in its spreadability:

• expertly filmed and edited
• great soundtrack
• the guy totally rides a bicycle up a frickin’ tree! a tree!

There are two schools of stunt videos: ones that go horribly wrong and paens to skill. This definitely falls into the latter camp. If you read through the comments on YouTube, you’ll find the general tenor is:

I’m not going to hold myself back..
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THIS???
OMFG I HAVE NEVER SEEN THAT GOOD HANDLING OF BIKE EVER.
Dude you fuckin rock, hold it up!

Like the spate of parkour videos that appeared a couple of years ago, it’s not just about skill: it’s transgressive – this is not the sort of thing your mum would want you to do. The police would give you a good talking to, as well. Actually, I don’t want you to do it, either – the tree will win. It’s not robbery or beating people up, though. This is peaceful – but definitely not passive – resistance. It’s all about ignoring the boundaries society wants to put on you. Jumping over the fence rather than going round it.

It’s also a film about being solitary: generally there’s no-one around but Danny, and where there are people they don’t get close, or even appear to notice. When they do notice – as with the closing shot, where he jumps off the bridge – by the time they’ve reacted, he’s gone. Especially interesting since one of the commentators says that he’s fairly well-known around Edinburgh and “always draws a big crowd”.

I suspect these latter two points speak very directly to the people who are spreading the film. This is a rebellion articulated through actions, not words.

At the same time, it’s very Scottish – or British. There’s a tone of grace, understatement and humility. The setting is the nice part of Edinburgh, not the ‘hood. There aren’t the fast edits and flash effects you’re used to in a stunts video. You aren’t listening to aggressive hip-hop or grindcore; you’re listening to a slow ballad called The Funeral. The guy doesn’t even speak, let alone brag or give us some nonsense about dedication and spirituality. And the video starts with him falling off the fence – twice, rather than a parade of victories. At 4:10, notice as he goes back and closes the gate he’s just jumped over – that’s a British stuntman for you.

Like most interesting things, it’s a mass of contradictions.

Anyway, well-done to Danny MacAskill and Dave Sowerby and also to Inspired Bicycles who sponsored them.