Category Archives: Media ecology

A Flickr of interest

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This morning’s Observer column.

At a Royal Society symposium on web science this week, Tim Berners-Lee let slip an interesting observation. Many people, said the web's inventor, no longer make a distinction between Facebook and the web. My guess is that these people are mainly teenagers – those whose experience of cyberspace is coloured by the fact that the first thing they encountered online was social networking. They started with Bebo and MySpace and then graduated to Facebook. And there they have stayed.

So, for them, Facebook is where it's at. That explains why they no longer use email, for example, except – grudgingly – to collect official communications from school or college. Most of their electronic communications are routed either via text messaging or Facebook updates. Almost all teenage party invitations now come via Facebook, which has also become the logbook of their lives. When it was announced a couple of weeks ago that Flickr, the photo-hosting site, had hosted its five billionth picture, someone pointed out smugly that Facebook already has over three times that number…

All predictions about the Net are wrong. (Except this one, of course)

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This morning’s Observer column.

If I’ve learned one thing from watching the internet over two decades, it’s this: prediction is futile. The reason is laughably simple: the network’s architecture and lack of central control effectively make it a global surprise-generation machine. And since its inception, it has enabled disruptive innovation at a blistering pace.

This doesn’t stop people making predictions, though. In fact, ever since the web went mainstream in 1993 there has been a constant stream of what computer scientist John Seely Brown calls “endism” – assertions that some new technology presages the termination of some revered practice, not to mention the end of civilisation as we know it. The prediction that online news means the death of newspapers, for example, is almost as old as the web. More recent examples include Wired’s announcement of the imminent death of the web at the hands of iPhone apps and Nicholas Carr’s assertion that ubiquitous networking heralds the end of contemplative reading.

The problem with endism is that it’s intrinsically simplistic…

The ‘Death-of-the-Web’ meme rides again

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This morning’s Observer column.

It’s possible, of course, that the Anderson-Wolff scare story was the product of an innocent mistake. But let us, for a moment, refuse them the benefit of the doubt. The core of their argument is that the popularity of apps as on iPhone and Android phones signals the death knell of the web. The marketplace has spoken, they write. When it comes to the applications that run on top of the net, people are starting to choose quality of service. We want TweetDeck to organise our Twitter feeds because it s more convenient than the Twitter web page. The Google Maps mobile app on our phone works better in the car than the Google Maps website on our laptop. And we’d rather lean back to read books with our Kindle or iPad app than lean forward to peer at our desktop browser.

That’s the message. Now, who is the messenger? Answer: Condé Nast, the publishing conglomerate that owns Wired — as well as the New Yorker, GQ and Vanity Fair. The web has posed a serious threat to their business model as it has to almost all print publishers because they have thus far failed to find a way to get people to pay serious money for online content.

The arrival of iPhone and, later, iPad apps was the first good news that magazine conglomerates had received in a decade. Why? Because, in contrast to the Wild West Web, apps are tightly controlled by Apple and consumers willingly pay for them. As a result, print publishers have fallen on the apps idea like ravening wolves…

Quote of the Day

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The 20th century was about sorting out supply. The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand. The Internet makes everything available, but mere availability is meaningless if the products remain unknown to potential buyers.

Gavin Potter, a competitor for the Netflix prize, quoted in a Wired Profile.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the original link.

Look before you leak

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This morning’s Observer column.

In the annals of the net, one of the sacred texts is John Gilmore’s aphorism that “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. Mr Gilmore is a celebrated engineer, entrepreneur and libertarian activist, who is regarded by the US Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency and men in suits everywhere as a pain in the ass. He was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, which meant that he made a lot of money early in life, and he has devoted the rest of his time to spending it on a variety of excellent causes. These include: creating the ‘alt’ (for alternative) hierarchy in the Usenet discussion fora; open-source software; drugs law reform; philanthropy; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which last week won a notable concession from the Library of Congress to legalise the “jailbreaking” of one’s iPhone – ie liberating it from Apple’s technical shackles).

The aphorism came up a lot last week following publication by the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel of extensive reports based on the stash of classified US military reports published on the WikiLeaks website. And of course in one sense this latest publishing coup does appear to confirm Gilmore’s original insight. But at the same time it grossly underestimates the amount of determination and technical ingenuity needed to make sure that the aphorism continues to hold good…

WikiLeaks and mainstream media

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Anne Applebaum has set up an engaging straw man in Slate Magazine.

I didn’t think it was possible, but Julian Assange has now done it: By releasing 92,000 documents full of Afghanistan intelligence onto the laptops of an unsuspecting public, the founder of Wikileaks has finally made an ironclad case for the mainstream media. If you were under the impression that we don’t need news organizations, editors, or reporters with more than 10 minutes’ experience anymore, then think again. The notion that the Internet can replace traditional news-gathering has just been revealed to be a myth.

To see what I mean, try reading this: “At 1850Z, TF 2-2 using PREDATOR (UAV) PID insurgents emplacing IEDs at 41R PR 9243 0202, 2.7km NW of FOB Hutal, Kandahar. TF 2-2 using PREDATOR engaged with 1x Hellfire missile resulting in 1x INS KIA and 1x INS WIA. ISAF tracking #12-374.”

Did you get that? I didn’t and would be the first to admit it. I do understand it somewhat better now, however, because the New York Times helpfully explains on its Web site that this excerpt, from one of the WikiLeaks documents, describes a Predator drone firing a missile at men suspected of planting roadside bombs.

Hmmm… I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think that professional reporting is useful and necessary. This was also obvious after the (redacted) ‘official’ version of the MPs’ expenses file was published. Suddenly, one realised how much journalistic slogging went into the Telegraph‘s publication of the details. The truth is that the Web and professional journalism have a symbiotic relationship and feed on one another. Without WikiLeaks, there would have been no Afghan War Log story. And without the interpretation of the raw data, we’d be less the wiser.

The UK Parliamentary expenses scandal also suggests another angle on the Wikileaks story, namely the question of whether the Big Bang release of a torrent of data is the best way to get the public’s attention. What the Daily Telegraph did was to drip-feed the public, day after day, with selected excerpts from their data trove. This kept the story in the headlines for weeks, and undoubtedly magnified the impact of the revelations. Slate writer Jack Shafer thinks that the Big Bang release of the Wikileaks data may have, paradoxically, weakened its impact:

The speed with which the press and the politicians have normalized the material as “nothing new” indicates that WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange may have miscalculated in his desire to get the biggest media bang. He’s been meditating aloud for some time on how to maximize publicity for his material, complaining that media organizations have routinely ignored WikiLeaks postings because nobody gets exclusives on the released material. None would do a document dive for a story if that meant competing with other news organizations.

Could Assange have milked the material to better effect? Shafer thinks that he could have.

To begin with, and I’m repeating myself here, there was too much material for the newspapers and magazines to swallow on such a short deadline. The publications felt that way, too. As Hendler reports, they asked for and got a week extension on the original Assange embargo date. Perhaps he should have given the three publications—which shared notes about the material but not copy— another month. Lesson learned: Too much is sometimes worse than not enough.

By inundating readers with Assange’s trove, the three news organization broke one of the sacred rules of journalism: If you have a big story—especially one based on a leak like this one—drip, drip, drip it out to your audience rather than showering them with it. The reader can absorb drips better than torrents. Leave the reader wanting more and then deliver the next day. Besides, a drip strategy requires the publication to determine what’s most important in the story. Without looking, can you remember what the most significant part of the Afghanistan story is? The surface-to-air missile report? The stuff about Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence? I’m still dazed by it all. By pouring out the material so quickly, the press caused a flash flood that has already cleared. Lesson learned: Drip irrigation works better than a monsoon.

In a comment on the Shafer piece, Tom Ricks thinks that it’s more complicated than that. He makes a useful comparison between the Wikileaks data and Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, which were essentially a compendium of Administration thinking about the Vietnam war:

“The reason Wikileaks’ [Assange] did a data dump the way he did, I suspect, is that there really is no there there. That is, he probably knew there was no way to drip this out. These report are similar to what you hear as an embedded reporter sitting around a tactical operations center in the middle of the night. They are the beginning of reporting, not the end. You hear something and say, Is it true? How could I determine that? If it is true, is is significant? Does it mean anything? The Pentagon Papers had all that. This stuff doesn’t.”

Advertising: our newest sunset industry?

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Some of my best friends work in advertising. Or used to. It was a great business once. It won’t be so great ten years from now, because it was an industry based on a media ecosystem that is rapidly eroding. Two interesting pieces on the Web today provide insights on this.

The first is a long blog post by Eric Clemons, who is Professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In it, he argues that the Internet shatters all forms of advertising. “The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed,” he writes. The nub of his argument is contained in four propositions:

* People don’t trust ads. There is a vast literature to support this. Is it all wrong?

* People don’t want ads. Again, there is a vast literature to support this. Think about your own behavior, you own channel surfing and fast forwarding and the timing of when you leave the TV to get a snack. Is it during the content or the commercials?

* People don’t need ads. There is a vast amount of trusted content on the net. Again, there is literature on this. But think about how you form your opinion of a product, from online ads or online reviews?

* There is no shortage of places to put ads. Competition among them will be brutal. Prices will be driven lower and lower, for everyone but Google.

The second piece is by Frédéric Filloux, who with Jean-Louis Gassée, writes Monday Note, one of the most thoughtful essay-blogs on the Web. In this week’s edition, he writes about a fascinating, detailed study of the 18-24 generation conducted by the French polling institute BVA. According to Frédéric’s summary, these people do not rely for information on a single group but on several, each with a different degree of trust.

The three concentric circles are : close friends and family as the core, a group of 20 to 30 pals whom they trust, and the “Facebook friends” of 200 or so, which acts as an echo chamber. Beyond these groups, behaviors such as elusiveness, temptation to trick and circumvent the social system will prevail.

How do they get the news? No wonder why the group is crucial to the Digital Native getting his information. First of all, the fastest is the best. Forget about long form journalism. Quick TV newscasts, free commuter newspapers, bursts of news bulletins on the radio are more than enough. The group will do the rest: it will organize the importance, the hierarchy of news elements, it will set the news cycle’s pace.

More chilling: the group’s belief in its power to decide what’s credible and what’s not. Truth – at least perceived truth – seems to emerge from an implicit group vote, in total disregard for actual facts. If the group believes it, chances are it is “true”. When something flares up, if it turns out to be a groundless rumor, it’s fine since it won’t last (which is little consolation for the victim of a baseless rumor); and the news cycle waves are so compressed that old-fashioned notions such as reliability or trustfulness become secondary. Anyway, because they are systematically manipulated, the Digital Natives don’t trust the media (when they themselves are not the manipulators).

Consequently, resources can only be group-related or collectively-driven. The perfect example is Wikipedia: because it is crowd-powered and carries an image of neutrality, it is embraced as trustworthy. In addition, Wikipedia is accessible, straightforward and well structured. As a result, many Digital Natives acknowledge turning to Wikipedia to check facts, or to get a good digest of the class there where given.

Note that advertising figures nowhere in this.

How is the Internet changing the way we think?

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This is a topic that is much on what might loosely be called my mind, because it plays a significant role in my upcoming book. So it’s not surprising that I was struck by George Dyson’s intriguing answer to the question:

In the North Pacific Ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.

The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results—maximum boat/minimum material—by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unnecessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.

I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don’t will be left paddling logs, not canoes.

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