...having been replaced by "social networking cards," now available at Staples for $4.99 for 50. It cracked me up to see in-store advertising for a tool meant to assist your family and friends in keeping track of the myriad places you're active online -- but it's a sign of the times, I guess.
[A] seminal paper from the New England Journal of Medicine in 1991 said that if a study was covered by The New York Times it was significantly more likely to be cited by other academic papers.
I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent on reputation here, inspired by the idea that sober-minded scientists are attaching status to what they read in the paper. (I'm curious though, about how they proved that the more cited papers weren't just more useful studies. But I digress...) Let me start by saying this: one of the many life lessons I should have learned at 20 that I'm finally coming around to at 30ish is that validation from external sources really does drive one's reputation, and that seeing someone's work or name referenced gives a certain reassurance that this here is a person that one can safely cite/quote/namedrop-in-conversation without exposing oneself to too much risk.
Now, it's no big surprise that a mention in the Gray Lady is going to give your credibility a boost. Having the New York Times calls you a "well-regarded Democratic strategist" goes a long way towards making you a well-regarded Democratic strategist. From that point forward, it's like the old saying about safe choices: nobody gets fired for buying IBM. If you've been mentioned in the New York Times, then more many intents and purposes, you're IBM in the minds of many.
Again, none of what I've said if particularly mind-blowing, but what I think might be surprising, if we stop to look at it, is how today this model for the creation of reputation extends so far beyond major publications like the Times, and how validation comes from all sorts of places and all sorts of ways online. I know that just for my own part, seeing a mention of someone -- on blogs I read, whether big or small; on Twitter streams of people I know or admire -- can serve as a tremendous validator of reputation and standing of that person in my own mind.
While I'm not sure it's fair to characterize it as a major failing, I know I'm guilty of taking this idea of validation too far. If a friend has mentioned or blogged about or Twittered with a particular person I don't know all that well, and I'm writing up something quickly for a blog post or essay, I'm very likely to rely upon that third-party validation of that person (and even that third-party description of that that person does, which often, I think it's fair to say, some's straight from the horse's own mouth.)
To take it one step further, if you're career-minded, that reputation gets crafted in this way might makes networking maybe even more important than it has been in the past. If my network has validated you, then me relying upon you to link to or mention or cite is a reduced-risk proposition. I'm probably not going to be humiliated by that decision. But if my network has never heard of you, then it requires more discipline on my part to vet you and come to my own, potentially risky, conclusion. As a fair-minded grown-up (and especially someone engaging in acts of journalism), I have a responsibility to make the effort. But there's no doubt that when time is tight it's easy to fall back on buying IBM.
I had some thoughts about Twitter's appeal yesterday that are entirely rough but that still might be worth sharing. The gist is this: what Twitter reminds me of is nothing so much as the constant stream of chatter that my high school friends and I kept up during the course of a day -- either in person, via note, over the telephone, or through word of mouth from friend to friend to friend. My high school friends (and by that I mean not only my close circle of six or some "best friends" but our extended network that included other close circles of friends) were extremely clever, bright, and funny, which conspired to make that period extraordinarily enjoyable. And through that constant contact, I felt alive, connected, loved, and tied in to something bigger than myself.
Now, back at that age of 17 or 18 it seemed to me that one of the sad things about getting older was that people of a certain age didn't seem to keep up those sorts of close associations. I looked to me that once you got married or otherwise partnered up you most likely lost that sort of free-wheeling friendships that made my life so rich. Become a thirty-something, and it was you, your spouse, a kid or two, and that one single friend that came over for dinner on occasion. I know there are probably troves of sociological research on how our social connections shift over different life stages, but, anecdotally, I'm not sure I was that far off.
Let me get to the point: it seems to me that some of the appeal of Twitter is that it can bring you back (or, if that wasn't your experience, introduce to you for a first time) to a time of constant chatter with a circle of friends and friends of friends in a way that's hugely fun, reaffirming, and relaxing. There's something kid like about gossiping and sharing and living life as a member of a social group or groups, rather than as a single atom bumping its way through the universe. In that way, Twitter reminds me a lot of high school: constant contact that makes me feel part of something bigger than myself and is a whole lot of fun too.
Todd Zeigler has some useful thoughts on the new TimesPeople feature that I talked about yesterday. I'll build on his thinking with one additonial note on the topic. What I like about TimesPeople is that it seems to embrace the perfectly reasonable idea that "social" is a how, not a what. We can engage in the news socially without having the need to take it to the level of full blown social networking. To take one example, Netflix isn't a social network by any stretch of the imagination but yet it has a great deal of social goodness mixed in. I might not form any more meaningful relationships with my Netflix friends, but who cares -- I sure get better movie recommendations than I would otherwise. That's the benefit of thinking of what we would otherwise do as something that might be made more communal in and of itself.
I'm having some fun trying out the New York Times' just-launched TimesPeople, an extremely light-weight social-networking app that rides above nytimes.com, storing the story recommendations, blog comments, and ratings for things like restaurants that I might make on the site, and showing me those of others I consent to having in my network to have in my network. TimesPeople isn't meant to be overly social -- the FAQs snarks "you won't have Times friends, and it won't get you Times dates" -- but it will replace the "Most Emailed" top ten list that generally only serves to make me depressed about what my fellow humans find most interesting.
Over on the excellent WorldChanging I have a short piece up on Carrotmob, a concept recently launched out in San Francisco where a group of green-minded buyers coordinate their shopping to incentivize a certain business into making concrete earth-friendly changes. The mob shopping concept is about you and your friends playing along with capitalism to move the market in a direction of your liking.
What ran on WorldChanging was a shortened version of my take on the topic, so I'm taking the liberty of running some of the omitted sections -- on the "carrots" that might make businesses participate in such a scheme -- below. It probably makes sense to read the post over there first and then hop on back here if you're still interested.
The natural question becomes whether the success of the Carrotmob targeted-consumption approach at K&D can be replicated and grown. The answer might lay in the answer to a different question: what's in it for business? What carrots might really make them to go green(er)?
Looking at the Carrotmob experiment from the spring, the most obvious answer is cash. When Brent says with a smirk in a video on carrotmob.org that "corporations will do anything for money," he means that in a good way. With their interests on the table, what remains is aligning them with those of the green-minded buyer. What's so important about Carrotmob is the coordination, because it reduces an inefficiency in other, uncoordinated socially-conscious shopping: "mobbing" lets a business know exactly why the gods of good fortune have smiled upon it.
A second, less obvious carrot came up in the Carrotmob planning process -- reputation, and in particular the growing power we all have to use the social Internet to shape the reputations of businesses we like. One of the downsides to the "stick" approach to collectively addressing (like, say, me prodding my social circle into boycotting Shell over its poor environmental record in Nigeria) is that going negative (a) takes sustained effort and (b) isn't that much fun. But buying a six pack of Brooklyn Lager on a Carrotmob-appointed day, and then blogging about how much I looove my energy-efficient corner bodega on a social site like Outside.in? That's easy. And fun. It's casual, occasional, proactive activism.
Using online social cred as a carrot took something of a backseat to cold hard cash as Carrotmob rushed to launch. That's something of a shame, because those combined carrots can be powerful. K&D Market's participation in Carrotmob was rewarded with a sharp jump in business, at least for a day, but visit K&D's page on the hyperlocal review hub Yelp and you quickly see the opportunity for more. (The page is easy to find -- Google "K&D Market" and it's the first result.) Among the nicest reviews about K&D is one calling the market "the museum of expired cereal. (Many reviews complain about poor service.) For some businesses, a boost in their online rep that going green might provide might be even more valuable than a few hours of targeted sales.
Having just finished watching the Steve Jobs keynote from WWDC on the new iPhone, I'm now packing a bag for the next month I'll be waiting outside the Apple store to buy one. I waited and waited and waited, but it's time. Sure, you'll hear people grumbling about how you can't activate it at the iTunes store anymore, it still only (officially) runs on the AT&T network, and the data plan is 10 bucks more than it is currently. Yeah, those things might suck. But they're more than offset by the fact that the things that this palm-held device can now do are, simply put, amazing.
What sold me isn't any one thing that the iPhone can now do. It's how beautifully it integrates so many different kinds of things -- things are are more than a sum of its parts. Those parts are indeed neat -- the GPS, the accelerometer, the camera, the SDK -- but it's the integration where the magic happens. The iPhone now supports:
enhanced GPS location awareness tied to social tools,
mobile blogging with built in photo editing,
full-featured gaming that reacts to tilting,
medical imaging linked to Wikipedia's entries on particular body parts,
and the list goes on.
It's not even computing anymore. It's integrated digital living. It's a two hundred dollar machine that carries significant potential to actually make the experience of living our day to day lives better. It's the future. Lemme at it. GPS, iPhone, social technologies
Whether Twitter someday takes its place in the stable of modern ways we interact with one another or eventually fades away like some old ruins, as far as I can tell it is a nearly completely novel model for communicating. "How exactly?" is a fine question. As I've begun collecting string on Twitter and spending an unhealthy amount of time Twittering and reading tweets myself, I've hit upon a few initial questions that are a starting point for thinking about how, at least, some small segment of the population is chatting today. Here are my top five four:
1) On Twitter, Who is the Audience? And Is It Different from the People You're Talking To?
This is the big one in my mind right now. A defining part of the Twitter experience is that you don't really know who your audience is. With blogging, for example, you might only have the vaguest sense of who's reading what you write, unless they chose to comment. But when it comes to Twitter, it's much more complicated than that. There are the people you follow and who follow you, the people who follow you and to whom you can publicly @ reply or privately direct message (and whose responses you can choose to see or not), the people reading the public timeline, and the people who might read your tweets through a badge on your blog. There are a handful of different kinds of audiences, some of which you're having a dialogue with and some of which are just watching you. Twitter fosters so many different kinds of interaction that even Evan Williams, one of the minds behind Twitter, is at pains to lay them out.
2) How Does Twitter Scale?
Even messages just 140 characters long can become an avalanche of information as your list of "followed" Twitters grows. Does Twitter need to grow beyond small networks of contacts to eventually support all the servers it runs on? In order for that to happen, there might need to be a way to sort your friends in different categories, groups, or tiers. If that happens, does it fundamentally change the Twitter model, for better or for worse?
3) What Sort of Relationships are We Building?
It's easy to joke about the shallowness of interpersonal relationships that are maintained by 140 character snippets, but I know more about some of my Twitter friends than I do with a lot of people I only know offline or who otherwise aren't on Twitter. I did a quick back of the envelope analysis of who I'm following. Of the 70 or so people, I categorized 25 under "Know a Lot," 20 under "Know a Little," and about 15 as "Fans Of." (The rest are organizations, publications, companies, etc.) What does it mean that I'm devoting equal levels of attention to people I consider friends as I am to people who don't know me from Eve?
4) What Kind of Information are We Sharing? And Who's Good at Sharing It?
One of the most interesting aspects to keep an eye on is how the way in which Twitterers fill that little text box is evolving. The original stated question that Twitter was supposed to answer was "What are you doing?" I find that the people I follow are using that question as only the loosest guiding principle, developing ideas about what's appropriate behavior as we go along and using those 140 characters to share ideas, pass along links, respond in real time to news events, and more. The open-ended questions I find particularly fascinating (but don't know how to begin to answer) is are there types of people better at sharing the info that Twitter is good at distributing?
Okay, so those are the five four most pressing questions I have about Twitter as a communications model. What are yours?
(Note: This post was edited after it came to my attention that I had only listed, in fact, four questions. One got dropped along the way. Oops.)
You know, one way of looking at MyDD
is to see it as a tremendous social experiment. Not only are we trying
to restructure the political process in the United States, we're relying
upon the wisdom of crowds to do it. Look
at my post last night about my upcoming trip to New Orleans. Within
a few hours, commenters collaborated to produce a stellar set of suggestions
on what to see and do while there. Two commenters formed a relationship,
one inviting the other to write on a Louisiana-focused blog. I've heard
from other commenters via email. I'll be working with and relying upon a few
people down in New Orleans who I met only because I put up that post.
In the best cases, in networks we progressives find both smarts and strength.
Last night at the New School here in New York City there was a panel on "Democratization
and the Networked Public Sphere" featuring three academics -- danah
boyd, Ethan Zuckerman, and Trebor
Scholz. I read boyd and Zuckerman fairly religiously, she on social media
and he on technology and the developing world. Some of what was said last night
might seem a bit far afield from our discussions of progressive politics. But
really, I don't think any of it was. At the very least, together it makes up the
context for our net neutrality fight.
Public and private spaces, said boyd, no longer exist as two distinct
poles or even as two ends on a spectrum. What is private today is constantly
in flux, and depends greatly on environment, context, and what the expectations
are for our behavior at any given moment. What makes the online different
than offline are four things, said boyd. First, persistence: what you
say online stays online, which is good for asynchronized communication,
like the discussions we have via posts and comments here, but leaves a
record for the ages. Second, searchibility: online life is searchable
in a way that offline isn't and searching allows us to connect different
aspects of identity from otherwise unconnected sources. Third is replicability:
content online can be copied and pasted from one context to another, though
the authenticity of that content may come into question. Fourth is the
invisible audience.
boyd said that the Internet has radically changed the way we interact with people
and makes the building of walls irrelevant, in a way. That said, she asked what
does it mean when what you write on your Live Journal site or Typepad blog can
be read by millions, but is more like read by six or eight people that you know?
It changes the way that we communicate. boyd argues that this isn't just a product
of the Internet, but of mass media. In the 1960s, black activist Stokely Carmichael
would make use of two voices -- one when appearing before a Southern black audience
and another before a white audience. When Carmichael had the chance to appear
on national radio, he had a choice to make and decided to communicate in the way
he would before a black audience. Ronald Reagan, said boyd, was skilled at negotiating
different audiences. How do we who engaged online deal with this idea of audience?
What many younger people do, said boyd, is to play ostrich -- "if I don't
see you, you don't exist."
And young people in this country who are quite restricted in their ability
to go out and engage in public life (for a number of reasons, from perceived
safety to lack of public transportation) lack a voice in the public sphere
-- particularly since they are age segregated and often only have personal
relationships with those in their same age bracket. Where they do have
a collective voice, like Facebook, they use it in great numbers -- witness
the 700,000 students who protested the introduction of Facebook feeds.
Trebor Scholz is concerned that the free labor invested in social networking
sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut amounts to "soft exploitation."
"Very few context providers," he said, "get rich off the
back of the very many." As things go mobile, Scholz said, with Facebook
Mobile and MySpace Mobile, and Twitter (more on Twitter below), and with
the enormous adoption of mobile technologies internationally, this exploitation
is amplified. And of course, of interest here is that MySpace was bought
for more than $300 million by Rupert Murdoch, who of course owns Fox News.
Scholz pointed to Larry
Lessig's questioning of "the ethics of Web 2.0" wherein
he detailed a distinction between "fake sharing sites" and "true
sharing sites." Fake sharing is when social media doesn't permit
content to truly be copied and shared beyond the bounds of the site --
for example, YouTube. Scholz said, amazingly, that his students tell him
that their parties now are really just opportunities to take photos to
post on Facebook. (We're learning to mediate life in real time! I find
myself in situations thinking "now how am going to blog this?")
Scholz suggested that social media participants truly take ownership of
their content and share in the monetary success it brings capitalists
who provide the context for that content.
As the founder of a "exploitative" context provider (Tripod.com),
Ethan Zuckerman took issue with Trebor's thinking. No one is forcing anyone
to contribute content to social sites, and the servers needed to run them
are enormously expensive to get and run, said Zuckerman. I'll add that
what's needed in this conversation here, I think, is some talk about literacy
and licensing. We port much of our online lives to free sites like Facebook
and YouTube and with good reason. But of course, they're not truly free.
We're simply paying for them with something other than money. That's fine
as long we enter into these relationships with out eyes open. Often the
important details are buried in the terms of service. If these are to
be healthy relationships that are good for everyone involved, we've got
to know what we're getting into. I'm hoping to explore this point more
soon.
Back to Zuckerman. Ethan runs a site called Global
Voices that promotes bloggers writing all over the world, particularly
where the government isn't too keen on that happening. He opens with the
1984 ad we're all familiar with here and suggests, a la Lessig, that this
mashup is the first real example of open culture and open politics coming
together. Next up was a remarkably
similar ad created by Tunisian blogger Astrubal
that replaces the talking head of Hillary Clinton with that of Tunisian
President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The Tunisian '1984' ad was created
in 2004 during Ben Ali's reelection campaign. Tunisia, Zuckerman said,
combines a high level of interest in connectivity with high levels of
censorships, which results in such political mashups as the Tunisian
Prison Map. (Mousing over each prison location produces information
on which political prisoners they're now housing. Wow.)
There's more. Activists in the very densly-populated country of Bahrain,
Zuckerman pointed out, circulated Google Satellite Maps that compared
the size of villages to plots of land reserved for royal palaces. They
were sent around as pdfs via email; the Bahraini government responded
by blocking access to Google Maps for a time. (Somewhat closer to home,
here in Brooklyn activists are
using Google Earth to raise questions about the building of a massive
new complex that includes an arena for the New Jersey Nets. No reported
cases of lost access Google Earth, yet.)
In Egypt we're seeing what Zuckerman called something like "the
only interesting and legitimate use of Twitter." If you don't know
Twitter, it's sort of a group-based
SMS system. So I sign up for Twitter, you sign up for Twitter, and when
we become friends, every time I submit a text message to the Twitter system
it shows up on your phone. It can be a overwhelming. (By way of example,
the latest SMS on the public feed is this: "Researching the new Pokemon
games. I'm getting pearl!") When I turned on Twitter down at SXSW
last month, my phone buzzed constantly. Not ideal if you get charged for
text messages over a certain number. But in Egypt, activists are using
Twitter to let their friends and families know when they get hauled into
jail.
(During audience questions near the end of the panel, danah boyd remarked
that there is an assumption in online interactivity now -- typified by
the Facebook news feed -- that the more information shared the better.
And it might be Twitter, danah said, that pushes to the point where we
really start to consider information overload. 24/7 news channels aren't
necessarily a good thing, she argued, and for one thing created a great
deal of space that needs to to be filled with more and more stuff.)
Using Twitter to let your friends know when you've been arrested is perhaps
a straightforward uses of social media for political purposes. But then
Zuckermen raises the case of what happened in the Philippines in 2004.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Election Commissioner were caught
in what was alleged to have been a compromising phone call in which the
politician asked the commissioner to rig the presidential elections. An
MP3 of the call was released and turned into a ringtone called "Hello
Garci." The ringtone became enormously popularly, and the Philipine
Center for Investigative Journalism now hosts 32
different remixes of it on their website.
Zuckerman compares a
map from Freedom House showing restrictions on the press with one
from the OpenNet Initiative showing restrictions on the Internet.
As it stands, the world is more kind to the Internet than it is to the
press but Zuckerman warns that the second one might start looking a lot
more like the first if trends continue. From where I stand, In both cases,
this is a case of "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Restricting the free press anywhere weakens it everywhere; that's why
we have organizations like Reporters Without
Borders. And we threaten all of our ability to communicate when we
begin to fracture the global network by creating a Chinese Internet or
a Cuban Internet or even a Verizon Internet.
That's that. I tried to be diligent in taking good notes on what each
panelist said. If I got any of their ideas wrong, I'm truly sorry. social technologies
Blue Jersey is asking garden staters to "Think Equal," in an ad campaign whipped together in a couple of weeks for a few thousand scraped-together bucks.
Outside.in is (1) the first clever use of a TLD that I've ever liked and (2) author Steven Berlin Johnson's latest project. It's a geo-located news aggregator, blog, and coffee shop rolled into one. Type in your zip code or neighborhood name and it constructs an online world of the things going on in your immediate space. One thing I particularly like is that, unlike with many social tools, content here isn't treated like it has an expiration date. For example, there may well be a great restaurant or music venue that stays great from one year to the next. You'll find that here. Sprinkled in there are still of course the timely bits -- gossip, police reports, event notices.
But the neatest part is a Google map application that allow you to pull back and back and back from your neighborhood to the larger environs. That's particulary useful in a place like New York City, where there's a lot of relevent information in my neighborhood but a whole lot more just outside of it.
It's Johnson's "long zoom" at work. If you haven't read his recent New York Times article, Johnson thinks that the long zoom is the defining way our era sees life. The idea is this. Renaissance art had a way of looking at things from a fixed perspective. The 80's is defined by the MTV quick-cut style. What makes us unique is that nowadays we "mov(e) conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics --- and back again."
Scola's got a new post feature story up on the Personal Democracy Forum concerning Facebook's decision today to open up the network to all comers. (After midnight, I refer to myself in the third person.) Here's a snippet:
What Facebook did today is to open up the system so that anyone with any old email address at all can join, create a profile, "poke" other users (an innocuous term today that the college kids I know don't seem to find funny), and the like. Identity is only proven on the basis of email address ownership -- meaning that all I have to do to join up is to enter in nancyscolarules@gmail.com and then respond back to an email sent to that address. This process, Facebook says, guarantees that profiles are created only by "a real person."
A real person, maybe, but of course not necessarily the real person that I'm going to represent myself to be on Facebook. There's little (as far as I can tell) to stop me from creating multiple profiles and picking from a Chinese menu of characteristics for each. That may sound simple, but it's a complete upending of the "one person, one profile" idea of identity that has carried Facebook this far.
Please read it, but they gist is that Scola thinks that the trouble with Facebook 2.0 points to how difficult it's going to be to manage how we do identity and social networks online. , social technologies
Posts tagged “social technologies” from shorter posts
The U.S. patent office's innovative Peer-to-Patent pilot project is going well, and so they're ramping it up:
The Patent and Trademark Office is extending the duration, increasing the maximum number of applications, and expanding the scope of applications eligible to participate in its peer review pilot program. The initiative, launched in June 2007, encourages the public to review volunteered published patent applications and submit technical references and comments on what they believe to be the best prior art for consideration. The expansion and extension took effect Wednesday.
[Y]ou, Internet person, are left with two options: Just pick a photo and go for it, or go the arty/ironic route. It's not as if you can stay hidden forever. Eventually someone will upload you to Flickr or tag you in a wedding pic wearing an unflattering, unchosen color. My own half-solution: I took a photo and ran it through something called the Face Transformer that created a manga version of myself. It's me, but it's not really me. That's kind of how it feels to be online.
"Get a new head shot" has been on my list of things to do for, oh, about two years now. The idea of having one iconic image of yourself seems so forced to me. I'm tempted to go to Glamor Shots and get a truly ridiculous photo done -- something where I'm all made up, the focus is entirely too soft, and I'm smiling lovingly at the camera.
June 16, 2008 Radar Launches; Sette Closes? Outside.In's hyper-hyper-hyper-local tool Radar launches today. (The idea is simple: think blogging meets maps.) And from it I've already learned that a good Italian place a few blocks from my apartment might be in danger of closing! geo-social web, Outside.in, social technologies
I seriously tempted to buy a Kindle, but I'm still too attached to the idea of books as discrete objects that can be stacked in the corner when I'm done with them. At least that way I know that when the revolution comes, Jeff Bezos be damned, I'll have something to read. Kindle, reading, social technologies
I'm a Brooklyn-based writer obsessed with technology, networks, social organizing, and the politics of food. This is my online home where I talk about those things and whatever else strikes my fancy. Learn More
