twopointouch

via Richard Sambrook and David Brain, here’s a great presentation from the Lift conference, given by Genevieve Bell, who works as an anthropologist at Intel:

It’s about how we all lie online in terms of the way we present ourselves, or rather, that we’ve been lying about ourselves for an awful long time - how we feel, how we feel about our partners and jobs, our height, weight and age, for example - and this hasn’t changed just because technology has speeded up. According to psychologists, we tell between six and 200 lies a day in order to socialise (’I'm fine’), for play and fun, to hide misbehaviour, feel safer, feel private, feel better about the world for ourselves and to try to be more popular. There are lots of good (and bad) reasons to dissemble.

Lying is a bad thing for society, of course, as every major religion agrees. Though, on second thoughts, our culture does allow for things like white lies, keeping secrets and preserving our privacy, all of which are seen as good things by-and-large but which normally involve deception. Our actual practice means that deception is implicit to our social existence.

New information technologies that attempt to insist on personal transparency don’t really fit with our lying culture or our biological needs. There are conflicts between our cultural practises and our cultural ideals, and while we can work round those in meatspace, dealing with machines tends to expose those conflicts. (”Date of Birth?” on the registration screens of a service is a good example.)

Twitter, according to Bell, is about making an art out of confabulation. The construction of a lifestyle we present is both a biological necessity and a work of art in its entirety. On Twitter, you are allegedly telling the world ‘what are you doing right now?’. But I did a little search on Twitter for ‘having a wank’ (sorry, mum) and the lack of any direct matches would seem to support Bell’s contention.

I haven’t seen this subject addressed before and found the presentation fascinating. I am troubled by the idea that transparency is coming to be seen as a moral necessity. It’s like the web 2.0 equivalent of Daily Mail readers saying, “you wouldn’t object to CCTV if you had nothing to hide.” As individuals, hiding, privacy, confabulation, imagination and play are pretty important to mental health, I think. This is one reason why people are very concerned about who they let into their Facebook circle of friends. Facebook insists on people using their real names and thus makes it impossible to hide different circles and different personae from each other, the way you can offline. Facebook makes it impossible to lie, and that is arguably mentally damaging.

Whisking through my unread posts today, two items struck me as demanding a little follow-up. First of all, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison’s Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship. The nature of the paper is pretty obvious from its title, though that is not to imply that it is not well-written, intelligent and provoking. The authors don’t spell out their definition as a short list of unambiguous phrases, so I’ll take the liberty of doing that bit for them. Social network sites:

• enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks
• these networks often reflect offline networks in that they make explicit friend-of-friend links and other ‘latent ties’
• Friends on these systems are not necessarily friends in the offline sense, but are very likely to belong to the same offline social network somehow
• implement a (variably) visible profile system, which also displays a list of Friends within that system
• Friends can normally leave visible messages for each other - some actually evolved from messaging systems e.g. QQ and Cyworld
• Many social networks attract groups of quite similar people, at least initially.

So far, so good - not much that most people would find enormously controversial - and a useful list of defining characteristics to keep to hand the next time someone asks you, ‘So what are these social network sites, then?’

Then I read JP Rangaswami’s posts Some Friday Night Ruminations about Facebook et al. and  More Musings about what makes Facebook Different. The short answer to what makes it different, from the first of those posts is that:

I don’t quite know, but it is. Stuff like MySpace and Bebo are overtly narcissistic, it’s all about how you express yourself. Facebook, on the other hand, is about relationships and conversations.

So that kind of wrecks the neat list and the generalisations, because while I agree with them all, I can’t help but observe that he’s right.

In his later post, JP remarks Facebook seemed like ‘a site where communities coalesced and sometimes even collided’ - given its overwhelming take up among the UK and US population over the last twelve months, you find and re-find friendships with family, school-friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, lovers and rivals - its omnipresence and insistence on real names makes your Facebook identity a lot like your real-life identity. JP reckons this ought to be of value to enterprises because it allows work contact to deepen through the discovery of shared likes, random insights into a fellow’s personality which make you feel more intimate. This is a topic I wrote about in the Double Intimacy Score post at the end of September.

It seems to me that Facebook’s focus is on interaction, not representation. The home page, crucially, I think, is not your profile, but the lifestream of your network. The topmost item of everyone’s profile page is the stream of their latest actions and interactions on the network. That’s the big attraction, not creating the pimpingest profile page ever. That’s why you might go back several times a day - to see what’s going on in your neighbourhood. Once you’ve set your profile up, maybe automated streams from your blogs, flickr and twitters, etc., you’re not actually that likely to return to it very often at all. Once you’ve established contact with a Friend, you’re not even likely to visit their profile page very often, except the sub-sub-sections for new notes, imported items and photos, etc. The action’s in the actions. You add applications because they provide additional ways to interact with people. The action’s in returning that Poke, playing your turn at Scrabble, biting that chump. It’s the wall-to-wall page you look at, not the wall.

YASNS = Yet Another Social Network System

In my newsletter to NMK readers today, I referred to the Internet as a ’she’. Reading that back once it arrived in my inbox, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that. I think I’m happy about referring to websites as ’she’ - they are akin to vessels like ships and cars, and also domiciles - those things are very often referred to as feminine. But the Internet as a whole?

I’m wondering about this from a web 2.0 perspective. Web 2.0, with its insistence on ’social everything’ - seems to fit well with what people normally classify as feminine characteristics - connecting, embracing, collectivism, joining together.

The proposed next generation of web applications, on the other hand, the sort that will join up microformats and form the semantic web, seem to be delivering the Internet back into the hands of the engineers, and into the traditionally masculine traits of straight facts, logic and formulae. The thing that interests me is whether this is being driven by gender agendas in some way, at least in the way it is narrativised, if not in terms of the science.

Are any readers aware of any gender politics research being done in this domain? Or have I finally found my PhD thesis? [sidenote: also interested in anyone attempting to 'queer' the 'net and what that entails.]

PS: there is a broken link in the second paragraph of the newsletter. You could patch it together yourself, but to make things easier, the link is to this - a great analysis of the new rules of reputation in the era of Google, and why the Internet is really rather frightening.

I’m going to the Battle of Ideas conference later this month. I do recommend that (London-and-environs-based) readers take a look. Despite it being at the weekend, which might understandably dampen the ardour of any self-respecting new media flâneur, it’s looking like a veritable cavalcade of fresh ideas, innovation and debate across the disciplines. Not just technology and media, but art, education, health, science, everything… I am going on Saturday (gulp!) and Sunday (argghhh!) and that says a lot about how valuable I think it could be. It’s also really cheap when you look at the range and calibre of the speakers. Yay for the Institute of Ideas for putting it on.

One particular aspect that’s interesting to me [there is a work aspect to that in terms of how NMK may be participating, but that participation comes out of my own perception of what's interesting in New Media right now] is the debate on Saturday afternoon on privacy in this new world of Web 2.0 and the strange psychology that has developed around that.

On the one hand, we’re telling perfect strangers what we had for lunch and where we are on Twitter, give our name and address and phone numbers to Facebook, divulge our deepest personal secrets on blogs (but not this blog, dear reader, rest-assured), publish photos and videos of our social life. Transparency is held as an ideal. Self-surveillance, continual publishing and, above all, authenticity, are held as golden standards.

On the other hand, people are often appalled at the thought of Tesco’s (the biggest UK supermarket chain) analysing our shopping habits, Facebook personalising advertising for us, Google recording our searches and our ISPs and credit card companies selling our browsing and buying patterns to third parties. Within larger organisations, corporate IT departments are appalled by the risks we’re taking, but we hold our hands to our ears and say ‘lalala - open that firewall, you nazis’.

So are we being two-faced? Do we want our cake and to eat it too? It’s OK to hold up transparency as an ideal for businesses and corporations and to operate according to that ideal ourselves, but when those organisations take some very obvious steps in data-mining the information that’s available, then it’s suddenly a different story?

The plan, at the moment, is to unveil some new research on attitudes to privacy and to unpick the nature of these inconsistencies at the conference.

Without the benefit of any evidence whatsoever, though, here’s a couple of hopefully inflammatory thoughts:

• Transparency online is held as a gold standard of behaviour because it’s viewed as a return to past, lost, possibly illusory norms where people dealt with each other face-to-face and where a firm handshake was all you needed to create genuine trust and a reliable relationship. Our virtual existence craves some solidity where it is lacking.
• That the transparency lobby is thus a mechanism of nostalgia. They’re Golden Ageists. That’s fine, but it’s a narrative about commercial practices that potentially shifts the visibility of what is happening to the data you’re sharing. I’m putting on my post-modernist hat, and suggesting that narratives are the way we understand the world. But one of the counter-narratives might be equally valid, one about big business set to exploit consumers at every opportunity.
• Holding those two (and more) possible narratives in our heads at the same time is far from impossible. We live in a world of warring narratives, each of which interpolate us at some times.
• That the Cluetrain has already been railroaded by those bastards in big business who can see how to manipulate this state of affairs.

I personally like the idea and practice of being transparent online about my behaviour, the things I like and don’t like, and how I’m feeling. It’s liberating to not operate under a corporate persona, or maintain a series of separate online identities. If that allows advertisers to target me better (I like really expensive, funky, creative adverts for cheap stuff, btw) then that probably won’t do me much harm. Does it harm ‘people in general’ to be transparent? That’s a harder question and automatically makes me sound either incredibly patronising or self-deluded if I say ‘yes’.

But ‘yes’, I think it does. The companies that have the most money and thus the most advanced data-mining techniques might ultimately be the most successful. They’ll target us better, harder, faster, more creatively and more often. Because we’ve opened up. That’s bad news. Commercial success would be a meritocracy in an ideal world, I think: the best companies would be most successful. Transparency is often cited as a way of making that happen - the best companies will expose their internal workings and personality, and thus win support - but it is also a way of making it fail - the consumer population becomes infinitely ‘bucketable’, targetable, individually identifiable by the corporations with the best, most-expensive technology and resources.

I came across a great paper today called Vernacular Web 2, which is about two things in particular:

1. The golden age of the ‘Welcome to my web page’ sites: the ones with the starry backgrounds, midi music on autoplay and animated gifs. These expressions of folk art were reviled by designers and internet intelligentsia alike throughout the course of the late 90s. To the extent that they seem to only exist today in the form of clever pastiches.
    
2. That these pages find their contemporary analogue in [ugly] MySpace pages.

The author - Olia Liliana - charts the emergence of glitter graphics on MySpace pages. Glitter gifs are the epitome of the vernacular web. They link both to the Barbie world of a particular subset of teenage girls and to the bling culture of hip-hop music. Maybe bratz providing the link between the two. This joint heritage gives them an unusually large influence over a swathe of teenagers of different ages and sexes. The author notes that to a teenage girl today - those ‘digital natives’ - a glitter gif on their MySpace profile has no emotional distinction from the glitter stickers that they might put onto their school exercise books. It’s a great point and a really pertinent way to illustrate the way teenagers now differ from people like me who created their first web sites by hand back in the 90s (I still quite like my own internet skeleton closet, I’m pleased to say).

This is also about class and control. As danah boyd noted in July, there are class distinctions attached to which social network one chooses: the tidy, Ivy League, muted-blue of Facebook or the Bash Street Comprehensive multicolour of MySpace. That gap is also a difference - a really important difference - between expression in words alone and expression through sound, layout, pictures and jewellery, I think. Why do you think MySpace is so popular with creative artists? MySpace is visceral and multisensory; Facebook is guarded and controlled. (I know and I agree - this probably overstates the case - the nature of a social network probably has less to do with the software and more to do with the nature of your network and the way you play with each other). Nonetheless, you get the point when it comes to the design of each of these applications. Liliana suggests that users who adopt the provided templates on Web 2.0 sites like iGoogle are being put in their place, interpolated, if you like - that they are accepting their allotted role as amateurs; as users.

I wonder, though, if this latter distinction is valid. Facebookers as conformist yes-men; MySpacers as the rebel yell. While self-expression through the wilful disregard of ‘good taste’ is rebellious on one level, on another it is equally consumerised. Those webkinz and habbos and glitter stickers cost real money, are subject to real peer forces of control and subjugation and to corporate interventions. The number of genuinely original layouts for MySpace profiles is pretty limited, I think, and a lot of those have been created by professional designers. A lot of profiles have been bought from or advertise design shops. [Though maybe the geeks have an escape route - get some sort of kudos through their 133t skillz with CSS]. For the teens, I imagine there’s nothing new. The wrong colour of glitter on your MySpace, I guess, is equivalent to wearing the wrong trainers to school - the ones your mum got from the market. At the same time, Facebook apps are allowing users to disrupt the clean and calm veneer of the application - to much distress in some quarters. However, I think I can believe in the jist of the argument. Facebook is more conformist than MySpace. Bringing this to the mass adoption of Facebook and not MySpace by the tech-blogger world: I guess the implications are obvious - we’re people who prefer to express ourselves with words because we wore the wrong trainers to school so often that visceral self-expression seems painfully risky.

You may want to install this on your Facebook. Fight the power. Fight the power.

[Edited for idiocy and sense - it's ended up painfully note-y as a result. Enjoy the music, if not the pictures.]

From the Met Office 2007 weather summaries page for July:

Rainfall generally well above average, with England & Wales recording over double their average July rainfall, with some stations in the Worcestershire area recording over four times their average July rainfall. Sunshine well below average across the north-east of Scotland, but slightly above average across western areas of Scotland.

From today’s press release from the Internet Marketing Retail Group:

July saw a massive spike in online sales, up 80% on last year to a new all-time high. The IMRG Index burst above 4000 for the first time (4111), indicating that UK e-retail sales had exceeded ?4 billion in a month for the first time (?4.2bn). Sales for the month were ?1.86 billion higher than in July 2006.

When I was young, we always used to say that bad weather was ‘good for the farmers’. Clearly, that needs updating - nowadays, it’s good for the e-tailers.

Some topics never seem to get any good press. One of them is RFID. The word is almost synonymous with illegal mass surveillance. You may recall them being surreptitiously attached to your dustbins by local councils. Or perhaps used to monitor your movements on London Transport. Or even moves to track released offenders by satellite. I’ve no idea who does the PR for the technology, but I can’t imagine it’s a lot of fun.

Even the best efforts to make it sound like a good thing have a pretty creepy tone. Like the report I came across this morning, from Aberdeen Research, which sets out to show the marvellous business benefits that the technology might bring:

Aberdeen’s research shows that 38% of enterprises using RFID are doing so to improve the cost, safety, and reliability of managing work-in-process. (WIP) Best-in-Class organizations are leveraging RFID to both improve the the productivity of their workforces all the while simplifying the implementation and ongoing management costs of their networks. The findings are drawn from a survey of 220 organizations, a subset of the 1100 organizations participating in Aberdeen’s RFID research.

So how have you managed to improve productivity, boss? Oh, we’re spying on all of our employees using tiny embedded microchips…

I knew the Metro was owned by Associated Newspapers, but it now seems to have turned into a facsimile of the Daily Mail.

The hard porn lurking on teenage blog sites says their story today in the paper edition.

The vast majority of blogs on top social websites contain potentially offensive material, a study shows.

The pages on sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Google’s blogger.com are a hit among children but can hold porn or adult language.

The popularity of blogging has exploded in the past 12 months with the number doubling to 70million.

But some of the most popular sites are shamelessly devoted to sex such as ‘Belle de Jour, diary of a London call girl’ and ‘Girl with a one-track mind, diary of a sex fiend’.

Needless to say, it’s based on “research” (PDF file) by an outfit called Scansafe, who make errm web filtering software for business and for paranoid parents. If you look at the PDF, which the Metro clearly didn’t bother doing, you’ll find there’s absolutely no substantiation of these claims whatsoever. Who’da thunk it?

Charlene Li of Forrester Research has now released (blog post) her research paper into measuring the return-on-investment (ROI) of business blogging. I was promised a copy of the paper when I signed up for a webinar on the subject back in October, so hopefully I’ll be able to report in more depth soon without coughing up the $279 that Forrester is asking.

[Update: Yay - got my copy. May take a few days to digest.]

Li says that the report found six main benefits cited by those companies interviewed: “greater brand visibility in mainstream media on the Web, word of mouth, improved brand perception, instantaneous consumer feedback, increased sales efficiency and fewer “customer service-driven PR blowups.”

In relation to the GM Fastlane blog, researchers found that when all these factors were costed, the blog “generated $578,000 in value on an investment of $291,000″. Impressive figures. However, these benefits were measured against quite specific goals: “to share information about its products and to start a dialogue between GM leaders and customers” was a main one (or two). The report measures the cost of getting 100 people to comment on the blog, compared to the cost of getting equivalent customer insight through focus groups “at the cost of $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year”.

This kind of begs the question - or two questions. First, are those two things equivalent? I’m a big fan of company blogs, make no mistake, but I am not sure they are. Second, what about if you only spent $5000 a month on those focus groups? Does that mean that your blog actually made a loss? Yes, it would, if your stated aim is obtaining that feedback and nothing else.

A similar case might be brought against ‘word of mouth’ as a goal. If you take the ‘advertising equivalent’ approach - a common, if unpopular, metric of PR activities - then you may or may not be able to show a return. But are those things ‘equivalent’? Surely, you’ve achieved something very different by not using advertising to stimulate word of mouth.

Lots of questions, and I’m not an expert. I guess my feeling is that:

(a) While attempts to distil blogging ROI into an Excel sheet are undoubtedly a very good idea, and perhaps the only way some marketing execs will be able to get the plan past the grumpy FD, I think it’s a good idea to make your aims fairly broad. Measuring the power of a blog against the cost of focus groups (or advertising; or traditional PR; or more service reps; or a longer development cycle) is potentially putting the blogging champion into a corner if the aforementioned grumpy FD turns round with an alternative, less costly plan to deliver the same result.

(b) It’s pretty hard to measure the returns on something that’s actually very different to its alternatives by costing up those supposed equivalents. Having a business blog is not the same thing as doing some PR, some advertising and some focus groups. It can allow you to achieve some of the same aims, but it also has its own unique benefits that aren’t easily achieved in any other way. I’d say that achieving the impression that people are listening at your company is one of the main advantages of the blog format, for example. So is having a better Google position for your CEO’s name. So is the ability for customers to talk to that person in an intimate way. The equivalence model doesn’t really help measure ROI on these benefits.

Check Li’s blog post - linked above - for a good list of blogging ROI FAQs. Look forward to getting my hands on the paper.

Technorati: blogging, blogs, Forrester, ROI

An article on CNet.com suggests that children born since 1981 are doing more communicating than ever before - albeit through different channels than their predecessors. They’re also used to being in control of their media intake. There’s no evidence cited, and I cringe at the jargon, but I can see the point they’re making about children’s relationship with technology.

“What we’re talking about is a generation that has the ability to be in touch with each other immediately at earlier and earlier ages,” said Nancy Robinson, vice president and consumer strategist at Iconoculture, a Minneapolis company that tracks consumer trends for consumer giants like Nestle and Sony. “If you asked someone 10 years ago about the necessity of a cell phone for a 5-year-old, they would have laughed and walked away; now you can buy that at Target.”

Think of Generation We kids as a product of Generation Xers–a demographic born roughly between the years of 1961 and 1981 whose influence over pop culture peaked in the ’90s. Parents of Gen We are not only savvy about media and advertising, they’re also comfortable with technology. They’re taking those skills into parenting, encouraging their offspring to understand that with technology, the kids can be in control.

Technorati: communications, culture, youth