There’s a backlash coming. I don’t know exactly what form it’ll take but I’m starting to see signs. Just wanted to note it.
Updates from July, 2009
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Pete Ashton
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Pete Ashton
The image above is from a bit of research titled You Should Follow Me On Twitter by Dustin Curtis where he experimented with different was of phrasing the link on his site to his Twitter account. What’s interesting is the most successful phrase breaks accessibility guidelines yet seems to fit closely with how people both communicate and understand instructions.
I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of accessibility guidelines here. What I’m wondering about is the clash between an Internet full of structured, accessible and findable information and the conversational environment that produces that information.
Conversation is generally not structured and doesn’t make a lot of sense in logical terms. Our brains filter out the “ums” and garbled sentences and fill in the gaps. And beyond the style of conversation we have typos, illiterate text speak and so on. Should we discard this?
No answers yet, just a concern that while standards and accessibility are important for those who want to be found and heard, only monitoring that which fits those structures misses a whole swathe of conversation.
Or to put it another way, tools should fit the content rather than content being forced to fit the tools.
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Pete Ashton
JFDI is an acronym that’s been floating around lately. It stands for “Just Fucking Do It” and is, I think, a reaction to all the talking that’s been going on over the last year and a call to action. I like this attitude. It’s something I’d been doing for years, I think, and most of my successful online adventures (and the unsuccessful ones, of course) came from this.
JFDI is the opposite of “someone should…” or “why isn’t there…” The problem is that most people don’t feel able to do the things they’d like to see done on their own.
Social media stuff, by networking people in new and more complex ways, can theoretically solve this problem. I might not be able to do a thing but by putting part of the solution out there, be it a framework of ideas or the bit I can build, and letting others know about it the thing can be done.
The stumbling block mental. People don’t realise they can JFDI probably because culture has promoted the idea of needing an expert to do all things. It’s why There I Fixed It is seen as a weird, funny thing rather than the norm, which is should be, I think. I also blame consumer culture – don’t fix it, buy a new one. But then I would, wouldn’t I.
Anyway…
I think this is relevant to audience participation, or whatever you want to call it, by arts orgs. You can give people the tools and ideas and freedom and so on but if they haven’t got that motivation then they’re going to look to you for direction. And that sort of defeats the object. Maybe.
So, how do you get people to JFDI? Force a vacuum? Piss them off?
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Pete Ashton
Someone I couldn’t identify on the Get Ambition panel said performance was as far away from conversation as is possible.
A few months back someone on Twitter, I think it was @dubber, said Twitter was “performance conversation”.
I’ve been thinking about this concept for a while. I think I need to think about it some more.
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Pete Ashton
I follow a fair few arts organisations on Twitter at the moment and I’ve noticed a fair number of requests for stuff. Take this recent one from Come:Unity Arts:
Empty shops/houses needed for use as exhibition space in North West Birmingham: 24th – 26th July 2009
A few of these orgs have a healthy following but most of them have just started out. If I think I can help I’ll retweet, as I did here which resulted in this, and I know others will too but that’s not sustainable in the long term. This is an indication of a problem in need of a solution.
I wonder what that might be?
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Pete Ashton
I don’t think any of Dave Winer’s solutions to the Twitter problem are quite right but yes, there is a Twitter problem. As Dave puts it: “We are building a dangerously precarious centralized system that will, given everything we know about computer networks, at some point, fail.”
The thing is, I’m sort of looking forward to when Twitter fails. It’ll really shake things up and that’s always interesting.
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Pete Ashton
Some quick thoughts on how today’s Soho fire was broken and covered on Twitter.
Firstly this isn’t new. We’ve seen it before. But the mundane nature of it all is interesting – no-one’s saying “omg I’m reporting a fire on Twitter!” They’re just reporting the fire. So too is the scale. There’s not one iconic photo – there are hundreds.
Twitter is not the interesting thing here. This is mass adoption on an attitude and an approach which has been developed through play. People are taking the hashtag system the use for silly games and the “conversation as performance” format and applying it to something serious.
Filtering is an issue, as always, but it’s not that hard. It’s easy to pick out the three irrelevant photos from above. Similarly when the news was breaking and before there was a “proper” news piece it was possible to determine the location quite accurately by looking for patterns in the tweets.
There’s no “how” or “why” here, merely the statement that something happened. But that’s fine. Twitter is about statements that something happened (“what are you doing?”) and there are plenty of other social media tools and environments for answering those questions. Wikipedia, for example, or closer to home (ie, in the same office as me) Help Me Investigate. My point being criticising Twitter for only doing breaking news well is missing the point.
The BBC news coverage kicked in 45 minutes after Twitter which, to be honest, is not bad at all. There’s some good stuff in there with facts that come from building up networks of sources and the reputation to access them. But the photo doesn’t compare. Again, Twitter (along with Twitpic) does the breaking well. BBC are catching up though.
Video from the scene. That’s a new development. Expect to see more of that.
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Pete Ashton
Tom Ewing writes about serendipity using the pop charts as his framework and produces one of the best things I’ve read in a long while. Here are snippets which caught my attention, reproduced for no other reason. Think of it as highlighting for future thinkings.
For serendipity to happen you have to be able to give people what they don’t want– or don’t think they want– as well as what they do.
If you’re part of a crowd, all voting on one another’s suggestions, and your suggestions consistently don’t get anywhere, why stick around? In a world where the barriers to leaving a crowd are low, groups that stick together aren’t crowds, they’re communities, and communities tend to be terrific at recommendations but not so great at serendipity, because they’re geared to marginalize the conflict that it requires.
Contested public spaces are as likely to generate enmity as empathy but some of the point of participation is to stay aware of other strands of opinion, the other publics who use them. Contrast this to social networks, where the point of participation is to filter fellow participants into the worthwhile and the undesirable, creating a network of overlapping private spaces under the guise of a big public one.
How do we resolve the paradox of planning for serendipity?
The direction of progress online tends to be towards personalization and customization, whereas chasing serendipity requires a willingness to surrender control and drift through links and into new experiences.
the point of asking wasn’t to get at an answer but to enjoy the fireworks on the way
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Pete Ashton
Shameless ego-boosting I know but this is the sort of recommendation I strive for.
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Pete Ashton
Today the Birmingham Post published a rather silly article about social media. Interestingly while it was mainly about Facebook the title was John Lamb: Banalities of Twitter. Soon enough the Twitter-using folk of Birmingham picked up on this and piled into the comments making it the Post’s biggest story of the day according to the editor. That alone is interesting (is traffic to the Post’s site so low that a few hundred hits from the likes of us can tip the balance?) but it was the phenomena that really got me. And since it’s complex and nuanced I decided it would best be explained with a couple of captioned photos.
M’fellow traveler Chris Unitt used the first one in his riposte which was nice but they really were supposed to be read as a pair, so here they are.
Yes, they’re not that funny. Yes, I can do better. That’s why they’re on this blog rather than ASH-10 proper.
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Pete Ashton
I threw this out there yesterday:
Think I need to define serendipity. Keep using the term but what actually makes for a serendipitous environment?
Which promoted a whole load of thoughts from others. Here’s a dump of them.
tomewing: Oddly I just turned in a column on this for Pitchfork! I wd say broadly that you can’t have serendipity without risk.
Me: I’m thinking more fundamentally it’s about increasing connections and network complexity. Which does = risk.
tomewing: Yeah, agreed – in the piece I think I talked about it happening when communities (defined however you like) overlap.
MentalArtsBrum: A serendipitious environment ie: one that allows fortuitous happenings by accident, needs structure/formal processes plus an ethos that encourages new ideas, sponanteity & democracy, fosters meaningful connections and is responsive & non-judgemental.
theaardvark: A serendipitous environment needs to be chaotic. If something happens in non-chaos it’s not serendiptous but “well organised”.
ffolliet: Chance favours the prepared mind. Louis Pasteur
midge_uk: Surely a Serndip’ env’ is one with a ratio of chaos to opportunity 60/40, 70/30, 20/80, etc ??…
Me: I’m uncomfortable with chaos. Sounds too close to random which I’ve rejected. Might need better def of chaos too!
midge_uk: Then i suggest you read this or some books on Fractals http://tinyurl.com/mohtv6 (ie. Chaos needn’t be Chaotic)
Me: Indeed. But the common use of “chaos” is unstructured, unorganised, no rules, random, which is what I was rejecting as boring.
midge_uk: Lol, the pickles you get into when you try to redfine perfectly serviceable words :)
Ed_Hart: A serendipitous environment is anytime, anyplace, anywhere, as long as you are paying attention.
Me: Yeah, maybe I’m trying to hold water in a net here. Maybe it’s one of @stef’s accelerated serendipitous environments?
Jo_Ind: I don’t know what serendipity is. I get the feeling @peteashton etc are using the word differently from the way normally used.
stef: I agree Ed, but the keyword for me is _accelerated_
theaardvark: But serendipity is what arises from chance, random meetings. As soon as you restrict the random you lose the serendipitous.
MentalArtsBrum: Thinking about ‘serendipitous environment’ whilst hoovering. Surely if one plans for serendipity, it is no longer serendipity?
Me: That’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out. If it’s not serendipitous then what is it? (semi rhetorical question ;)
podnosh: Unh? Serendipity requires accident and randomness. Otherwise it is contrived or managed or controlled or…
LSpurdle: Serendipitous environment? Open, unblinkered, mobile/unanchored, flexible, fluid, welcoming? or a place where you take ideas and ideas take you!
Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and input.