Many people still read home-delivered print (more than you might think). Print readership isn’t directly measurable, but there are plenty of research tools that all report a decline in frequency — and along with it, engagement with civic life.

This bugs me. I’m not doubting that engagement with “civic life” drops when you remove the source of information about it. I’m just wondering what it gets replaced with. I feel more engaged with civic life in my city than I ever did when I actively bought print media. I’d like to think I’m not unusual in that regard.

So why are they interesting? Two things:

1) Accessibility. All these tools are either absurdly cheap or free (with restrictions or hidden time costs). This is the Printing Press or Photocopier argument. 

2) Mass adoption. As Lord Shirky says, bigger or more us radically different. When you move from 1000 to 1000000 people doing a thing the nature of that thing changes. 

So it’s all about access. That’s all that’s new really.

I keep returning to I Can Has Cheezbuger for some reason, not so much for the system they use but for the notion of letting stuff bubble up through activity. Or maybe Flickr Interestingness is the thing. Popular isn’t the thing here. I don’t care if lots of people have looked at a thing but I do care if a few people found it really compelling. How do you measure that?

And, ultimately, how can this be connected to a specific geographic place?

Probably best to think of them as part of a process, the creation of a pool of raw data to be used in some way.

Actually, here’s a nice example. I dumped all 1200 of my TTV photos from Supersonic in a movie because I haven’t had time to select and process the 100 or so that will stand alone. Someone has taken section with Jarboe, slowed it right down and soundtracked it with some of her music.

Nice bit of remix culture going on there.

I’d advocate new blogs open up comments as wide as possible and apply restrictions as they become necessary. As a new site you need all the help you can get in building an audience. Think about a new shop opening on the high street. Firstly they’ll have their doors wide open )not just unlocked – wide open) so absolutely anyone can walk in. Then they’ll have a member of staff whose job it is to greet customers and help them find what they need – this is the equivalent of you asking for comments and joining in the discussion. And then, finally, they actually have what you need or offer to order it for you – the listening part.

Now, once the shop is established with a reliable customer base they can afford to change their strategy. Maybe they move the popular stuff to the back of the store so people have to walk past other products to get to it and increase opportunistic sales (this is why the milk is at the back of the supermarket). Maybe they move the greeter onto the tills to speed up sales. Maybe they de-emphaise their loss-leading special orders service and push the high-margin best sellers.

The point is they’re only able to do this once enough customers think it’s worth their while to shop there. If you want to force people to register to comment in order to build up a database of users to exploit you’re going to have to make it worth their while. The Guardian can do this because they’re the Guardian. Are you? Probably not.

The same, by the way, goes for CAPTCHAs – the fuzzy word-recognition thing implemented to prevent spam programs. It also prevents people with every so slightly fuzzy eyesight or the mildest of dyslexia (I have great trouble with these) let alone those with serious impairment. Spam-filtering software for blogs is fairly advanced now, especially on Wordpress, so you don’t really need to worry about it when you start out. It’s only when you hit higher Google rankings that you come on the spammers radar. For the first few months you’ll be fine.

Same applies to trolls. Unless you are blogging about contentious subjects or are bringing antagonism in from offline you’re unlikely to have to moderate comments to begin with, at least not across the whole site. The odd post of two might need attention but most of them aren’t going to be that active.

So open it all up. Welcome everyone. Greet them and talk with them and make them happy. Build a large pool of readers who actively want to contribute something. Then decide with them how you’re going to manage the conversation. But that’s another subject alltogether.

I don’t think I’ve ever been a Digital Utopian. I might have come across as one and I’m sure I’ve said things that are a bit utopian but I’d hope it’s always been about the potential of this stuff.

Let’s use anti-depressants as a metaphor because it amuses me to do so. Society is kinda sick and needs fixing. (This is not news. Society has probably been sick since 10 or so people decided to come together. I mean, have you not read Asterix?)

The modern Anti-D’s, the SSRIs not you parents’ Valium, don’t pretend to make you happy. They give you the opportunity to make yourself happy by acting as a crutch. If you’re in the dark pit of despair they’ll switch the light on and provide a ladder, but you need to climb up the ladder.

And that’s what social media (or whatever you want to call it) provides. It’s the potential to connect people in new ways, to share information in new ways and to learn about the world and each other in new ways. But you have to work with these tools and develop these opportunities.

Google etc have all the answers but not always on the front page. You need to learn how to use Google.

Crowdsourced popularity rankings (Digg, Twitter trends, etc) suck because of the crowd, not because of the system.

And so on.

This is going to take a while to sort out. People have been crushed by monolithic media control systems for generations. I reckon we’re looking at 50 years before we can shake that off. And even then this new networked utopia will only be as good as the people in it.

Am I a nihilist utopian? Maybe.

Further aside, I wonder if the social media backlash ties into the Kübler-Ross “five stages of grief” model: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. We’ve been through Denial and I think we’re into Anger. Better get the SSRIs out for the next part…

For now I’m making lists of the main blogs in this area. So far I’ve got:

http://www.createdinbirmingham.com/

http://morecanalsthanvenice.wordpress.com/

http://cultofcreativity.com/

http://www.creativeboom.co.uk/

I’m sure there are more. Links in the comments please!

What worked for HBO won’t work for news

I love The Wire. It’s the best TV series ever. I’ve paid for it twice, once on HBO and once on DVD. So I not only believe in paying for content I love, I practice it. Redundantly!

[Redundant practice is an interesting concept. Buying a CD because you want to reward the band even though you already downloaded the mp3s is a redundant act.]

I just don’t think the reporter model is working. All it does is inflate the self-importance of these people, turn them into gatekeepers, and often bullies. People who behave like the power brokers they’re supposedly covering.

[I've been thinking for a long time journalism is too tied up in power. The Murdoch factor trickles down to the front line. Just as we need to remind politicians they are servants to the people who elect them, so we also need to imbue that sense of public service into journalism, at least if it wants to be supported as an essential service.]

I also think there’s a need for aggregation, but it’s a practice people like Simon often mock. In fact reporters base their work on generous people who contribute their knowledge for free — sources.

Seeing the social web as your rolodex on steroids with ESP is a no brainer.

Certainly good enough is good enough and I’m a strong believer in the democratic power of lo-fi, but…

I’ve been trying to move away from the term social media since the spring but it’s very hard to explain what it is I do without it. It’s a bit of a millstone.

I think the social media industry will start fading away in the next year or so as the snake-oil salesmen get revealed (some of them might not realise they’re selling snake oil – I occasionally wonder about myself) and those who really know and understand this stuff stop talking and start doing, taking the theory and blurring it in with the rest of societal activity.

There’s nothing fundamentally special about social media. It’s just people talking and sharing. What makes it special is that it’s new.

What’s really weird is how something intrinsically connected to 30 years of Usenet, 10 years of blogging, 5 years of Web 2.0, etc can still be considered new, but there you go.

(see also, kinda: The Bruno Brookes syndrome)

The use of atomic weapons was widely blamed on a primate named Albert Einstein. Even Einstein himself had agreed with this opinion. He was a pacifist and had suffered abominable pangs of conscience over what had been done with his scientific discoveries….

Actually the discovery of atomic energy was the result of the work of every scientist, craftsman, engineer, technician, philosopher, and gadgeteer who had ever lived on Terra. The use of atomic energy as a weapon was the result of all the political decisions ever made, from the time the vertebrates first started competing for territory.

Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited.

They also gave themselves, and one another, more blame than was deserved when things went badly. This gave them all jumbo-sized guilt complexes.

It is usually that way on primitive planets, before quantum causality is understood.

Robert Anton Wilson, Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy, p7

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.