Category Archives: Media ecology

Teenagers and social networking

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Latest survey report from Pew Research Center:
Among the key findings:

* 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.

* 66% of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all internet users. They limit access to their profiles.

* 48% of teens visit social networking websites daily or more often; 26% visit once a day, 22% visit several times a day.

* Older girls ages 15-17 are more likely to have used social networking sites and created online profiles; 70% of older girls have used an online social network compared with 54% of older boys, and 70% of older girls have created an online profile, while only 57% of older boys have done so.

Teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships

* 91% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to stay in touch with friends they see frequently, while 82% use the sites to stay in touch with friends they rarely see in person.

* 72% of all social networking teens use the sites to make plans with friends; 49% use the sites to make new friends.

* Older boys who use social networking sites (ages 15-17) are more likely than girls of the same age to say that they use social networking sites to make new friends (60% vs. 46%).

* Just 17% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to flirt.

* Older boys who use social networking sites are more than twice as likely as older girls to say they use the sites to flirt; 29% report this compared with just 13% of older girls.

Taste, trust and user-generated content

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Splendid rant by Simon Jenkins…

Whatever the borderline between amateur and professional, skill and artistry, some things are very difficult to do, and most people will admire and pay those who do them. Every creative talent comes with unseen baggage, directors, designers, stage-setters, publishers, editors and coaches. No art is without effort, and the effort is collective. If the electronic marketplace becomes devoid of copyright, producers will devise ways of protecting and “monetising” their appeal. Pulp fiction still seems to be thriving.

The internet has certainly torn up the media of communication pioneered by Gutenberg and Caxton, Marconi and Reith. The anarchist in me is attracted by the sovereignty of the mob. I like to see the market, the audience, hitting back occasionally – even if it does so from the Tower of Babel. Shakespeare had to contend with his groundlings and La Scala with its claque.

But rulebooks there will always be. The popular scientist EO Wilson explained the cultural genetics that guide our myriad responses to group stimuli. Embedded in our DNA, they govern everything from artistic sensibility to habit, style and forms of pleasure. In matters of taste, these genes demand frameworks of trust, whether the proclaimed intermediary be a priest or a fashion editor.

I trust certain writers, directors, composers, artists, even newspapers, to widen my horizons without revolting me. Between their transmitting and my receiving is a zone of faith. That is why, however worldwide the web, there will never be a “blog-standard” newspaper. I need to trust a news-gatherer to adhere to known standards of veracity and taste, or my own judgment will go haywire. Those with no one to trust are not to be trusted.

There is no substitute for a disciplined, rule-bound, edited news-gatherer any more than there is for a formal theatre, movie-maker or publisher. Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” will not find its apotheosis in the internet. The message transcends the medium and always will. The fact that a reader’s taste can sometimes be shocked shows the power of the trust on which it is normally based.

The backlash against user-generated content gathers pace.

MySpace and the sharecropping economy

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Interesting post by Nick Carr about the economic implications of user-generated content.

What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.

It strikes me that this dynamic, which I don’t think we’ve ever seen before, at least not on this scale, is the most interesting, and unsettling, economic phenomenon the Internet has produced.

Carr has written about this before. For example:

Web 2.0, by putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few.

Ed Felten disagrees with this analysis:

It’s a mistake, too, to think that MySpace provides nothing of real value to its users. I think of MySpace as a low-end Web hosting service. Most sites, including this blog, pay a hosting company to manage servers, store content, serve out pages, and so on. If all you want is to put up a few pages, full-on hosting service is overkill. What you want instead is a simple system optimized for ease of use, and that’s basically what MySpace provides. Because it provides less than a real hosting service, MySpace can offer a more attractive price point — zero — which has the additional advantage of lowering transaction costs.

The most interesting assumption Carr makes is that MySpace is capturing most of the value created by its users’ contributions. Isn’t it possible that MySpace’s profit is small, compared to the value that its users get from using the site?

Underlying all of this, perhaps, is a common but irrational discomfort with transactions where no cash changes hands. It’s the same discomfort we see in some weak critiques of open-source, which look at a free-market transaction involving copyright licenses and somehow see a telltale tinge of socialism, just because no cash changes hands in the transaction. MySpace makes a deal with its users. Based on the users’ behavior, they seem to like the deal.

The Saddam death video

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The Guardian asked me to comment on the video…

It was not an edifying experience, but the poor quality of the cameraphone video mitigated its ghastliness. It is shot from the stairs below the gallows platform. There’s a lot of jostling and shouting in Arabic. The various pre-execution procedures are shown – the black cloth being placed around Saddam’s neck, then the noose with its (to the uninitiated eye, anyway) ludicrously large knot. The rope has a lot of slack. More shouting. Saddam appears to smile, but given the quality of the video, it’s impossible to be sure. Then he is pushed forward. Nothing happens for a bit, except that the camerawork deteriorates further, sometimes focusing on the stairs. Whoever’s doing this is having trouble keeping their lens on the action.

Then there’s a loud crack, and Saddam disappears. Suddenly, one understands why the rope had so much slack. The shouting increases in volume and intensity. The camera focuses jerkily on the stairs for a time. The cameraman is obviously ascending them for a better view. Then there are a few surreal frames of the executed man’s face, now horizontal, which reminded one, bizarrely, of one of those art-movie sequences of a drowned man under water. Then fade to black.

I was the 811,625th person to view it, according to the YouTube statistics box…

Don’t email me!

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Wonderful rant by Joel Stein in the LA Times (free subscription required).

Here’s what my Internet-fearing editors have failed to understand: I don’t want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt to engage in a conversation with you. I have more than enough people to converse with. And I don’t listen to them either. That sound on the phone, Mom, is me typing.

Some newspapers even list the phone numbers of their reporters at the end of their articles. That’s a smart use of their employees’ time. Why not just save a step and have them set up a folding table at a senior citizen center with a sign asking for complaints?

Where does this end? Does Philip Roth have to put his e-mail at the end of his book? Does Tom Hanks have to hold up a sign with his e-mail at the end of his movie? Should your hotel housekeeper leave her e-mail on your sheets? Are you starting to see how creepy this is?

Not everything should be interactive. A piece of work that stands on its own, without explanation or defense, takes on its own power. If Martin Luther put his 95 Theses on the wall and then all the townsfolk sent him their comments, and he had to write back to all of them and clarify what he meant, some of the theses would have gotten all watered down and there never would have been a Diet of Worms. And then, for the rest of history, elementary school students learning about the Reformation would have nothing to make fun of. You can see how dangerous this all is.

I get that you have opinions you want to share. That’s great. You’re the Person of the Year. I just don’t have any interest in them. First of all, I did a tiny bit of research for my column, so I’m already familiar with your brilliant argument. Second, I’ve already written my column, so I can’t even steal your ideas and get paid for them.

There is no practical reason to send your rants to me…

Great stuff. Worth reading in full.

Social networking and chronic narcissism

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Nice rant by Philip Dawdy.

This whole Web 2.0, social networking, virtual community business is essentially a pornography of the self—a projected, fictionalized self that is then worshipped by the slightly less-perfect self. Human existence has been this way to a degree once we became the leisure society (am I dabbling in Veblen here? I think so.), but with the Web 2.0 we are so much more willing to spread our selves and our self-infatuations around. If you don’t believe me, cruise through MySpace—a house of mirrors if there ever was one—where we are all rock stars, hotties, vampires and gangstas with flava.

This state of affairs cannot be especially healthy for our souls, our psychology and, hell, our brains because none of it is real. But it sure is a successful approach to getting us to spend more time on the computer (oh, how I miss being able to write on a computer pre-Net, you have no idea). That’s not good either. Because the way the Net is now with all of its “communities” and communes of information there are simply too many stimuli. And, I’ve seen so many instances of such stimuli winding people up in ways that result in human wreckage.

The computer, some of you may recall, was supposed to free us. We were supposed to have so many automated tasks and so on that we’d be done with work by 3 p.m. and off to the social club. Things haven’t worked out this way at all. Not only do we do more work for more hours than we used to before the computer age, but even when we are not working per se, we have become slaves to our fictional selves on Web 2.0. I worry about people younger than me who have no idea what human communication and hanging out were like before the PCs and Macs turned into these hyper-communication tools. The Net has become our social club. In Seattle, any popular coffeehouse is filled with people who just sit at tables on their laptops and communicate with other fictional selves on the Net instead of doing the least bit of the communication and interaction—positive or negative—with people sitting five feet away. All those people, all that weird isolation. Zombies.

Dead trees: dead media?

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Thanks to Bill Thompson for this:

Smash Hits closed down this year. It was probably past saving but still sad. Is there room for a pop magazine to launch in 2007? Let’s do a little roleplay.

Publisher: Hey kids! Here’s a new magazine.
Kids: What’s a magazine?
Publisher: Well, it’s like a book…
Kids: Oh piss off.
Publisher: No wait! It’s in full colour, and you can read it on the bus on the way to school…
Kids: We read our text messages on the way to school.
Publisher: Okay – well we’ve mocked up a magazine to show you. Take a look at THIS!
Kids: Where are the videos?
Publisher: What?
Kids: Where’s the button to press play on the videos?
Publisher: Well, no, you see these are just photographs…
Kids: We’ve already downloaded all these photographs from the internet. How do we use this to talk to each other?
Publisher: Well, there’s a letters page…
Kids: How do we know when our friends are reading the same magazine?
Publisher: Well, you don’t…
Kids: Hang on, this still says that Ray might win X Factor…
Publisher: Well, you see we had to write this last week because it takes a long time to print onto paper…
Kids: But shouldn’t that have changed to say Leona by now?
Publisher: You can’t change it – it’s printed on paper!
Kids: So it doesn’t update?
Publisher: Well, no, but… Well anyway. How much would you pay for this magazine, do you think?
Kids: Pay? You have got to be ****ing joking.

Looking back, looking forward

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This morning’s Observer column…

This year was also the one in which old-media companies came out of denial about what they had hitherto regarded as an oxymoron, ‘user-generated content’ – text, audio, imagery and video created and published by mere amateurs. (Think of blogging, Flickr and YouTube.) Having awoken from their slumbers, the Time-Warners of the world reasoned thus: how can we exploit this garbage? After all, there’s a serious financial opportunity here.

If you’re an old-media outfit, creating ‘content’ is an expensive business: you have to hire producers, directors, studios, actors, writers and a host of other low-life types, pay them good money up front and wait until they produce the goods. Only then can you start to make money from it. But the explosion of user-generated content suggests that there are millions of schmucks out there who are willing to do all this for free! So the question for the old-media world was: ‘how do we cash in on this racket?’

Second life: cod statistics

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Clay Shirky has written a terrific piece on media naivete about the Second Life phenomenon. Sample:

The prize bit of PReporting so far, though, has to be Elizabeth Corcoran’s piece for Forbes called A Walk on the Virtual Side, where she claimed that Second Life had recently passed “a million unique customers.”

This is three lies in four words. There isn’t one million of anything human inhabiting Second Life. There is no one-to-one correlation between Residents and users. And whatever Residents does measure, it has nothing to do with paying customers. The number of paid accounts is in the tens of thousands, not the millions (and remember, if you’re playing along at home, there can be more than one account per person. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, how many logged into St. Ides?)

Despite the credulity of the Fourth Estate (Classic Edition), there are enough questions being asked in the weblogs covering Second Life that the usefulness is going to drain out of the ‘Resident™ doesn’t mean resident’ trick over the next few months. We’re going to see three things happen as a result.

The first thing that’s going to happen, or rather not happen, is that the regular press isn’t going go back over this story looking for real figures. As much as they’ve written about the virtual economy and the next net, the press hasn’t really covered Second Life as business story or tech story so much as a trend story. The sine qua non of trend stories is that a trend is fast-growing. The Residents figure was never really part of the story, it just provided permission to write about about how crazy it is that all the kids these days are getting avatars. By the time any given writer was pitching that story to their editors, any skepticism about the basic proposition had already been smothered…

I wonder if Linden Labs (proprietors of Second Life) regard me as a ‘resident’ of their virtual land. I signed up for an account a while back (mainly because serious people like Bill Thompson and Charlie Nesson seemed to think it was interesting). But after signing up I examined the kinds of avatars available and rather lost the will to second live (as it were). I have my hands full living my first life; to add a second seems like a step too far.

Shirky’s piece is good on Second Life, but even better on the deficiencies of journalism.