On the way to dConstruct: a social constructionist thought for the day

September 3, 2010

A desire to put some theoretical acro props under my vague unease with the determinist narrative of so much of our technology discourse has led me to the writing of the French anthropologist Bruno Latour. His work on the social construction of science, an ethnography of the R&D lab, has a special resonance for me, a humanities graduate who finds himself colleague to a legion of French engineers.

I’m stumbling intermittently through Catherine Porter’s translation of Latour’s 1991 work “We have never been modern“, as a prelude to David Edgerton’s “The Shock of the Old“. At times it feels a bit like eating up the broccoli before allowing myself desert, but the rich, buttery morsels like the following make it all worthwhile.

The story so far.

Latour argues that modernity, from Civil War England onwards, managed its contradictions by placing boundaries between naure and society. Thomas Hobbes, writer of the Leviathan, was taken up as a founder of political philosophy while Robert Boyle, he of the air pumps, was channelled as a natural philosopher and pioneer of scientific method. In truth both men speculated on both politics and science, but this inconsistency was whitewashed by their modern successors seeking only the pure narrative of one or the other.

And so we are today in a world still riven by CP Snow’s two cultures, where right-wing bloggers can grab acres of media coverage against climate scientists by finding just the tiniest trace of political “contamination” on the lab’s email servers.

But I wonder if the disconnection and reconnection of nature and society is also a useful way to understand some of the ideas I’m expecting to hear today at dConstruct, a conference at the cutting edge of technology and media convergence.

The 19 years since Latour published “Nous n’avons jamais été moderne” roughly spans my working life so far. I’ve witnessed the amazing things that can happen when you expose the humanities-soaked world of newspapers, books and TV to the attentions of software engineers and computer scientists. The results have been delightful and depressing, often both at the same time. Who knew back then that floaty copywriters would have to cohabit – for better or for worse – with the number-crunchers of search engine optimisation?

This fusing of the worlds of media and technology is only just beginning, and the next step is evident in the hand-held touch-sensitive, context-aware marvel of creation that is the latest smartphone.

Hitherto we have seen the the world of human-created information, the texts of the ancients and the tussles of our own times, through the pure window of the newspaper, the book, the TV, the PC screen. But the smartphone is a game-changer, like Robert Boyle’s air pump. With its bundle of sensors, of location, of proximity, and in the future no doubt heat, light, pressure and humidity it becomes a mini-lab through which we measure our world as we interact with it.

All manner of things could be possible once these facts of nature start to mix with the artifacts of society. My Foursquare checkins form a pattern of places created by me, joined with those of my friends to co-create something bigger and more valuable. My view of reality through the camera of the phone can be augmented with information. We will all be the scientists, as well as the political commentators, of our own lives. This is the role of naturalism in my “Mobile Gothic” meander.

To recycle Latour on Robert Boyle’s account of his air pump experiments:

“Here in Boyle’s text we witness the intervention of a new actor recognised by the new [modern] Constitution: inert bodies, incapable of will and bias but capable of showing, signing, writing and scribbling on laboratory instuments before trustworthy witnesses. These nonhumans, lacking souls but endowed with meaning, are even more reliable than ordinary mortals, to whom will is attributed but who lack the capacity to indicate phenomena in a reliable way. According to the Constitution, in case of doubt, humans are better off appealing to nonhumans. Endowed with their new semiotic powers, the latter contribute to a new form of text, the experimental science article, a hybrid of the age-old style of biblical exegesis – which has previously been applied only to the Scriptures and classical texts – and the new instrument that produces new inscriptions. From this point on, witnesses will pursue their discussions in its enclosed space, discussions about the meaningful behavious or nonhumans. The old hermeneutics will persist, but it will add to its parchments the shaky signature of scientific instruments.”

I don’t yet know where I stand in this picture. Am I the experimenter, his audience, or the chick in the jar?

An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768

A desire to put some theoretical acroprops under my vague unease with the determinist narrative of so much of our technologydiscourse has led me to the work of the French anthropologist Bruno Latour. His work on the social construction of science, anethnography of the R&D lab, has a special resonance for me, a humanities graduate who finds himself colleague to a legion of

French engineers.

I’m stumbling intermittently through Catherine Porter’s translation of Latour’s 1991 work “We have never been modern”, as a

prelude to David Edgerton’s “The Shock of the Old”. At times it feels a bit like eating up the broccoli before allowing myself

desert, but the rich, buttery morsels like the following make it all worthwhile.

The story so far.

Latour argues that modernity, from Civil War England onwards, managed its contradictions by placing boundaries between

naure and society. Thomas Hobbes, writer of the Leviathan, was taken up as a founder of political philosophy while Robert

Boyle, he of the chicks in air pumps, was channelled as a natural philosopher and pioneer of scientific method. In truth both

men speculated on both politics and science, but this inconsintency was whitewashed by their modern successors seeking only

the pure narrative of one or the other.

And so we are today in a world still riven by CP Snow’s two cultures, where right-wing bloggers can grab acres of media

coverage against climate scientists by finding just the tiniest trace of political “contamination” on the lab’s email servers.

But I wonder if the disconnection and reconnection of nature and society is also a useful way to understand some of the ideas

I’m expecting to hear today at dConstruct, a conference at the cutting edge of technology and media convergence.

The 19 years since Latour published “Nous n’avons jamais été moderne” roughly spans a working life in which I’ve witnessed

the amazing things that can happen when you expose the humanities-soaked world of newspapers, books and TV to the

attentions of software engineers and computer scientists. The results have been delightful and depressing, often both at the

same time. Who knew back then that floaty copywriters would have to cohabit – for better or for worse – with the

number-crunchers of search engine optimisation?

This fusing of the worlds of technology and media is only just beginning, and the next step is evident in the hand-held

touch-sensitive, context-aware marvel of creation that is the latest smartphone.

Hitherto we have seen the the world of human-created information, the texts of the ancients and the tussles of our own times,

through the pure window of the newspaper, the book, the TV, the PC screen. But the smartphone is a game-changer, like

Robert Boyle’s air pump. With its bundle of sensors, of location, of proximity, and in the future no doubt heat, light, pressure

and humidity it becomes a mini-lab through which we measure our world as we interact with it.

All manner of things could be possible once these facts of nature start to mix with the artifacts of society. My Foursquare

checkins form a pattern of places created by me, joined with those of my friends to co-create something bigger and more

valuable. My view of reality through the camera of the phone can be augmented with information. We will all be the scientists,

as well as the poticial commentators, of our own lives. This is the role of naturalism in my “Mobile Gothic” meander.

To recycle Latour on Robert Boyle’s account of his air pump experiments:
“Here in Boyle text we witness the intervention of a new actor recognised by the new [modern] Constitution: inert bodies,

incapable of will and bias but capable of showing, signing, writing and scribbling on laboratory instuments before trustworthy

witnesses. These nonhumans, lacking souls but endowed with meaning, are even more reliable than ordinary mortals, to whom

will is attrributed but who lack the capacity to indicate phenomena in a reliable way. According to the Constitution, in case of

doubt, humans are better off appealing to nonhumans. Endowed with their new semiotic powers, the latter contribute to a new

form of text, the experimental science article, a hybrid of the age-old style of biblical exegesis – which has previously been

applied only to the Scriptures and classical texts – and the new instrument that produces new inscriptions. From this point on,

witnesses will pursue their discussions in its enclosed space, discussions about the meaningful behavious or nonhumans. The

old hermeneutics will persist, but it will add to its parchments the shaky signature of scientific instruments.”

I don’t yet know where I stand in this picture. Am I the man in the white coat or the chick in the belljar?

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You’re in the future now, Konvergenz Boy

July 22, 2010

To my middle, most media-savvy son, the record player is the stuff of legend. Could a needle bouncing through wiggly grooves on a disc of black plastic truly recreate music as faithfully as the bits and bytes that play the part today?

On a rainy July Saturday afternoon I stagger from the loft with my old turntable and a box of vinyl dating back to the mid-1980s. For my first trick I play music the boys already know, the stuff we have as MP3s. Somehow transparency of operation makes the old technology seem more miraculous than the new.

Then we dig a little deeper into my teenage listening habits, into the stuff so embarrassing or forgettable that it never made the cut when formats flipped to CD and then over to digital. That’s where I find this forgotten future.

A follow-up to Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s “Love Missile F1-11,” “21st Century Boy” is all space hotels and acid rain. It features the news from 13th July 2011. Back in 1986 it hit number 20 in the UK singles chart, apparently. I have no memory of how it came to be in my attic.

But look closely at 21st Century Boy (Modelled, I guess, by Tony James et al.?) He is:

  • Compu-Boy
  • Phone-Boy
  • Video-Boy
  • Disc-Boy
  • TV-Boy
  • (and, um, Rocket Baby. Best not go there.)

He is clutching all the technologies that we now see clamped together in the disruptive embrace of communications, information, entertainment and education convergence.

He is old enough to be my 21st century boy’s granddad. He is Device Man, and he wasn’t far wrong.

And that’s just Side 1. Side 2 is “Buy EMI“.

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When too much perspective can be a bad thing

June 29, 2010

An article by my former colleague and TEDx Leeds speaker Norman Lewis reminds me of an ingenious device imagined by Douglas Adams in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Yes, I know you all like a good Douglas Adams quote.

First, though, listen to Norman, writing about ‘Millennials’ and Enterprise2.0 on his Futures Diagnosis blog:

The Millennial issue in the workplace has become symptomatic of the uncertainty of the ‘information age’ which exaggerates the novelty of the present at the expense of the past. This generational shift is regarded as unprecedented and a unique feature of our times. The workplace (and indeed, the world) is now divided into two periods: the past where everything remained the same with little change and the current moment with its constant change where change and disruption are incessant.

This rhetoric of unprecedented change is precisely that, rhetoric. What about the generational shift that occurred in the 1960s? The rise of the teenager in the post-War period was indeed unprecedented and had a huge impact on Western society. But did this result in the end of the enterprise as we know it? No, the exact opposite. It helped to forge the enterprise as we know it.

This is spot on. As I’ve argued before, what has changed in the last decade is the enterprise’s level awareness of stuff that has previously gone on behind its back.

Throughout the so-called “mass media” era, managers were encouraged to delude themselves that they had the attention of their employees and customers, who were in reality talking amongst themselves all along.

The web puts an end to the delusion. It acts like Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex:

… allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected.

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”

Why is the web like this? Because of the convergence of communications, entertainment and commerce into a single seamless mass.

Once upon a time, television appeared to be an uncontested safe harbour for entertainment and commerce, the corporate-networked desktop PC a clearly bounded productivity tool. Sociability and communication happened out of sight and out of mind.

Now those things are collapsing in on each other. When commercial messages have to compete with pictures of your kids, cute kittens and plans for nights out, there is no contest. When employees openly use the same tools to converse with their peers as to conduct business it becomes clear at once that bonds of friendship are stronger than those of salaried fealty. When even the biggest brand is reduced to a fraction of one percent of searches on the web, it becomes just another microscopic dot on a microscopic dot.

These truths are not new, but the tools to discover them are.

Executives stepping out of the Vortex for the first time are understandably mind-blown. Realising quite how insignificant their businesses and products are in the lives of their consumers, they become easy prey to social media’s snake-oil salesforce, who promise to swell the ranks of their Twitter followers and guarantee instant Google gratification.

Maybe they’d do better to remember that they were young once, and that, as Adams wrote: “In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

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Fact-checking the information exa-ggeration

June 8, 2010

Numbers: they can be beguiling things, especially when they tell a story we really want to hear.

The bigger the numbers the better, ideally so mind-bogglingly big that they totally overwhelm our critical faculties.

Best of all, take a series of numbers getting ever bigger: a dynamic that makes us feel as if something significant is happening before our eyes.

All of the above feature in this example from Google’s recent annual shareholders meeting:

[Chief executive officer Eric] Schmidt estimates… There are 800 exabytes of information in the world people can access on the Internet, he says, explaining that an exabyte is about 1 billion gigabytes. “Between the dawn of civilization and 2003, there were exactly five exabytes created,” he says. “We now create that every two days.”

You’ll find the precise quote about 24 seconds into this video from Google’s Investor Relations channel.

The statistic prompted this reverie from the inestimable JP Rangaswami on his blog, Confused of Calcutta:

So, while I knew that the amount of information being produced was accelerating, and that too at an increasing rate, I didn’t really have an appreciation of the scale. Now I do, and I’m grateful to Eric Schmidt for that.

Now I’m sure there are many things for which we should be grateful to Eric Schmidt, but perpetuating this five exabyte claim is not one of them. I’ve tracked down the source and it’s not very convincing. This from Language Log, back in 2003:

The canard that “Five exabytes… is equivalent to all words ever spoken by humans since the dawn of time” was repeated in this 11/12/2003 NYT article by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It’s amazing how people pass this stuff around without checking it or thinking it through: Eskimo snow words all over again, though on a much smaller scale (so far).

For leaving aside the practical question of when we date “the dawn of civilisation,” what value judgements are implied in converting the ”information” of a pre-digital world into bits and bytes?

How, for instance, do you evaluate a medieval manuscript? Its transcription into ASCII or Unicode may be a fraction of one laughing baby video but I’m not sure the comparison is very meaningful.

And what of all the other artefacts created by our ancestors? The warp and weft of their handmade clothes made unique pixellated patterns, while our machine-produced chainstore garments would be easily de-duped prior to archiving.

It’s really exciting to live in the 21st Century but breathtakingly arrogant to portray our predecessors as information poor. It feeds a narrative of technological determinism and “information overload” while blinding us to a much more enticing prospect: that people have been creating stuff since, erm, the dawn of civilisation.

As I suggested in a previous post, if we want to profit from the massive potential of new media, we’d do well to start with a little more humility and respect for the way people communicated and interacted quite happily for thousands of years without the help of mobile phones and computers.

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A funny thing happened to my copy of a limited-edition newspaper

April 12, 2010

This is not just any newspaper.

It is a signed, numbered (23/100), limited-edition copy of “Immanent in the Manifold City“, crafted by James Bridle with the generous assistance of Newspaper Club, Graphics category winner in the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year Awards.

I left it on the sofa while I went out to work.

When I came home I discovered that someone had used it like, well, any newspaper. For scribbling on.

Now I understand why tabloid sub-editors abhor white space.

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As It Is To-Day

March 15, 2010

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And so I’m loving the safari around the world’s largest city and capital of the British Empire, afforded by Chris Heathcote’s inventive Newspaper Club debut As It Is To-Day.

Chris has been feeding Newspaper Club’s editing software Arthr on a diet of old London press cuttings from the 18th Century to the 20th. The result is a delightful gallimaufry (my all time top new word of the week): here the city is described at the height of its pre-eminence in 1851, there is a reflection on the sad fate of Cleopatra’s Needle by the 1920s.

My own favourite dish gives a taste of the hazards of the 1790s “On Walking London Streets,” a 14-point list of instructions for avoiding pick-pockets, horse-drawn traffic and falling slops. I love the idea that the characters of my 1794 stories were moving through a million-person city for the first time. Was this their missing manual?

Also, an umbrella was considered “a machine”. So too, in the right hands, is a newspaper. You can buy it here.

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1794 Redux

February 1, 2010

Late last year I made a small prototype based on my Ignite London talk, 1794, by printing the 20 slides as Moo cards, with associated pages on this blog.

Now there’s a new version, using cards, stickers and an A3 sheet for you to play with the story. It’s backed up with a new set of web pages at 1794story.wordpress.com.

It’s an unashamedly personal, partial and unfinished history, an experiment in stripping the book down to its barest essentials then adding some of the flexibility and remixability of the web. I’ve written more of the “why” of the project in the about page.

Also, I’m looking for a few people to play with the story. “Beta test” would be an overstatement, but I am interested in honest feedback. There is no right way to read this story, only what you do with it. Let me know if you’re interested.

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The renaissance of the prospectus, a prospectus

December 7, 2009

Be it known that at some point in the near future I plan to bloviate on the concept of the prospectus and its coming revival in new and unexpected transmedia formats. Consider this a prospectus. I’m so meta.

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On newsprint: the potency of cheap paper

October 1, 2009

This post was going to be all about newspapers, but the more I thought about it the more I realised that before writing about the news I have to explain the paper, specifically the cheap, low quality paper we call newsprint.

It’s a fascinating story which, I think, explains why short-run, nichepaper projects such as Newspaper Club are so deliciously disruptive.

After all there have always been easier formats for getting messages out to people. For decades there was the mimeograph, then the photocopier, and desktop publishing, books, leaflets, A4 newsletters and “vanity-published” books. Rarely did the newspaper form get a look-in on anything other than, well, news.

To understand why that is, we should consider the trade-offs. This involves a graph, with no numbers, but stay with me, please.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Ten years on, can we stop worrying now?

August 27, 2009

Ten years ago this month the Sunday Times published an article by Douglas Adams called “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”. You can read it here.

Some starting observations:

  1. It’s a tragedy that Adams died, aged 49, in 2001, depriving us of more great literature in the vein of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, of genuinely innovative new media projects such as H2G2, and of the witty, insightful commentary we find in the Sunday Times column.
  2. Adams’ insights have stood the test of time.  Everything he wrote at the end of the Nineties stands true as we near the start of the Tens.
  3. We still haven’t stopped worrying.

Adams from 1999:

… there’s the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists (yes, Humphrys Snr., I’m looking at you) pronounce internet addresses. It goes ‘wwwDOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH… today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will probably know what it means.

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on…

2009: John Humphrys is still huffing and puffing [Update 3/9/09 - further proof provided!], and…

you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

The moral panic continues, now transferred to social networking and camera phones.

And Douglas Adams hit the nail of the head in his taking to task of the term “interactive”:

the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

The same fallacy persists, now transferred from the term “interactive” to “social“.

Ten years ago, Douglas Adams identifed a few problems.

  • “Only a minute proportion of the world’s population is so far connected” – this one’s well on the way to being fixed, as much by the spread of internet-capable mobile devices as by desktop or laptop PCs.
  • It was still “technology,” defined as “‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs.” – has the internet in 2009 reached the same level of  everyday acceptance as chairs? Almost, I think, though the legs still fall off with disappointing regularity.

The biggest problem, wrote Adams, is that “we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it”. Invoking Steve Pinker’s The Language Instinct (read this too, if you haven’t already), he argued that it would take the next generation of children born into the world of the web to become really fluent. And for me that’s been the most amazing part. Reflecting the other day on Tom Armitage’s augmented reality post to the Schulze and Webb blog, I realised that I see that development in my own children’s engagement with technology.

  • At birth a child may assume that anything is possible: a handheld projector holds no special amazement for my three-year-old.
  • Through childhood we are trained, with toys among other things, to limit our expectations about how objects should behave. My six-year-old, who has been trained by the Wii, waves other remote controls about in a vain attempt to use gestures.
  • My nine-year-old, more worldliwise, mocks him for it.

We arrive in the world Internet-enabled and AR-ready, it’s just that present-day technology beats it out of us. I work for the day when this is no longer the case.

Last words to Douglas Adams, as true today as in 1999:

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

Update 3/9/09: Debate about Twitter on the Today programme, and Kevin Anderson takes up the theme.

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Print’s not dead, it’s just evolving

October 17, 2008

“Is Print Dead?” was the provocative title for David Parkin’s Leeds Media Breakfast Briefing the other day. If the answer had been yes, I guess we’d all have had to wolf down our croissants and get back to work. Thankfully as a newspaper business editor turned online start-up entrepreneur, David treated us to a more sophisticated  perspective, and a more leisurely breakfast.

David and I trained together on the Newspaper Journalism course at the University of Central Lancashire. It was the 1990s, but only just. Al Gore was still busy inventing the Internet, and only halfway through term two did Professor Peter Cole obtain some Amstrad word processors so we could ditch our manual typewriters.

On qualifying, I quickly succumbed to the lure of noo mejah, but David stuck with ink and paper for a decade longer, rising to become business editor of the Yorkshire Post. He quit less than a year ago to launch The Business Desk for Yorkshire and has already set up a second office covering the North West from Manchester.

David and his team are clearly making an impression among their target audience of regional business leaders. They’re successfully translating all the basics of good journalism from paper to screen, and relishing the same aspects of online that I love too:

  • freedom from press deadline tyranny – a big frustration as a newspaper journalist, says David, was “inability to get the news to our customers quickly,” especially as “evening” papers now hit the streets by mid-morning
  • the intimacy with a niche audience – for the Business Desk this means high quality readership for advertisers and high quality comments, like when Ken Morrison retired and senior regional business-people added their own tributes on the site
  • … and the instant return-path of online comments and web stats – “as a newspaper journalist I hoped and guessed who had read a story. Online you can see who’s doing what minute-by-minute and react.”

David still sees a role for newspapers as vessels for more reflective writing, and even as mementoes of major events like 9-11, though this seems at odds with the gutting of editorial budgets on smaller titles forced to go free to survive in the new landscape. Many media brands born in another age still seem to obsess about whether online is there to support print or vice versa. Which is the bubblegum and which is the baseball card? Do their readers really care either way?

And I’m not sure that David really engaged with the challenge from a number of breakfast briefing questioners, including me, that print retains a sensual superiority over electronic media. Need a flexible, sub-milimetre-thin, 1200 dpi interface? One that costs pence not pounds? You look in the R&D lab, I’ll be in the chip shop.

As I’ve said here before, I’m convinced that newspapers have gained a lot already from new media and they could be on the brink of another breakthrough – driven this time by print on demand, personalisation and seamless return-paths, such as mobile barcodes. My bet is that they’ll also learn from bloggers to be less lecuturing, and more local. For a deliciously disruptive vision of how to do it, take a look at the hand-drawn, limited-edition and all-round gorgeous Manual Newspaper project.

But here’s the biggest contradition of all in the Business Desk’s story. Denied coverage of his launch by the erstwhile colleagues with whom he now competes, David deployed some smart guerilla marketing tactics to introduce the new service to the commuters of Leeds and Manchester. His chosen media: printed coffee cups, printed beer mats, printed napkins, printed posters.

Is print dead? No, but it’s certainly evolving…

Newsprint bird

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Here Comes Everybody bigger (and smaller) than ever before

October 7, 2008

Back in May I blogged about Clay Shirky‘s book “Here Comes Everybody”. I was torn: I wanted to believe that social media could indeed make the world a better place, yet my inner history graduate protested that people are people, and have communicated and interacted for good and ill since time immemorial.

In “Television may be the gin of the information age, but that doesn’t mean the web is pure water” I questioned Clay’s contention that the web unlocks a cognitive surplus previously wasted on one-way television viewing.

In “Erm, excuse me, but I think Everybody was here all along” I challenged the title of Clay’s book: surely it was the media that was late to everybody’s party, rather than the other way round.

So when David Cushman on Faster Future gave his readers the chance to ask questions for a video interview of Clay I put in my twopenceworth (as with everything here, in a personal capacity that does not necessarily represent the opinions, strategies or positions of my employer):

I’d like to know why Clay chose the title “Here Comes Everybody”? I rather thought that everybody was here all along, in that communicating and self-organising have been characteristics of human society for thousands of years. Is technology really changing people’s behaviour, or simply making existing behaviour more visible in the online space?

Thanks to David for asking my question, and to Clay for answering it so eloquently. Here’s the video…

(and David’s accompanying blog post)

Do I buy the answer? I’m not sure, though I’m pleased to see Clay’s focus on people, not technology as the driving factor. ”I’m not a technical determinist…. it’s the novelty of scale, ” he says.

Make sure to watch right to the end for another gem. I love the idea that things can now happen globally on a much smaller scale than ever before, as well as at large scale in the mighty networked crowd.

Other episodes of David Cushman’s Clay Shirky interview here, here, here and here.

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Even on paper, the immediacy is the message

August 22, 2008

Adam Greenfield posts on Speedbird about British Airways’ current ad campaign to rehabilitate Heathrow Terminal 5. The ads run across print, radio and digital, and confront low expectations of T5 based on its highly-publicised teething troubles. They break new ground in their use of near real-time statistics, such as the number of yesterday’s flights arriving and departing on time.

Adam quotes one example of the copy from the Telegraph in print:

“YESTERDAY AT T5 AVERAGE TIME THROUGH SECURITY WAS 4.7 MINS. This picture was taken at 9:44am yesterday and shows Amanda Gemmill on her way to Beijing to watch her boyfriend compete in the Men’s Eight Rowing Final. 4.7 minutes was the average time the 842 customers we asked told us it took them to pass through Security yesterday, between 6am and 2pm. We had to stop at 2pm so we could make this ad.”

… and he suggests this presages the future…

All that really remains is for embedded sensors to replace the clipboard-bearing interns importuning tourists, and for the flimsy pulp the Telegraph is printed on to give way to some kind of networked display surface, and BA’s copywriters can substitute an elegant little Mad Lib for their coyness: “It took [number] customers an average time of [time] to pass through Terminal 5 security during the last hour.”

Not so fast, Adam! Even if those sensors and networked display surface were available, would they really be more compelling that the lower-tech methods used by Bartle Bogle Hegarty to promote BA’s T5 experience?

First, the ads attract attention precisely because they disruptively collide real-time information with the solid old media of newspaper and radio. We expect to see fresh data on computer screens and networked devices. It’s seeing the same dynamism appear on the printed page that makes it feel like Harry Potter.

Logically, there was never a reason why daily papers couldn’t carry daily-updated advertising copy. After all they managed to print up-to-date news for the best part of 200 years before the advent of the internet. I suspect the real bottleneck was the cumulative and often unchallenged preciousness of of clients, creatives, planners, buyers, sales and production people. Faced with online’s shortened lead times and increased accountability, traditional media are simply having to raise their game in order to survive. And they’re learning fast.

Second, I rather like BA’s method for gathering the information, “clipboard-bearing interns” and all. I’m not convinced that automated sensors would be more persuasive than the reported experiences of 842 customers. Machines may be more accurate, but the crowd could still be more credible. In advertising at least, reality counts for nothing unless it is reflected in perception.

The lesson from BA’s latest campaign? The promise of 21st century technology challenges us to innovate, but some of the best solutions can still be satisfyingly steam age.

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Posted by mattedgar

The unsung office hero

June 25, 2008

Working for a company in a rapidly changing industry, it’s easy to overlook the contributions of the team members who deliver the goods day-in day-out. It’s important that these unsung heroes are recognised, and their milestones marked.

So when my coworkers spotted that the office coffee machine was approaching its 100,000th drink they decided it was worth a party. The good folks at Flavia obliged with supplies of chocolate to go with the centemillennial celebrations.

As the number on the LCD crept up, about 20 of us crowded into the narrow corridor where the coffee machine lives, ready to cheer its achievement.

Some people were hoping for some kind of crazy embedded software Easter egg, but the machine modestly just did its thing, exactly as it had for the other 99,999 drinks. The honoured recipient of the beige plastic cupful of “Smooth Roast” reported that it tasted “lovely”.

Here’s the machine quietly communicating the moment…

100,000 drinks

In their fascinating work, The Media Equation, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass demonstrate how people instinctively relate to machines as if they were human, even if they have no outwardly human attributes. Their work focuses on individual interactions with computers and how we treat them with politeness and respect, not wanting to hurt their feelings.

The Flavia party takes this a step further. Not only is the coffee machine treated as sentient each time it dispenses a drink, but over the years (five, maybe?) it has become part of the team. It has certainly out-done many human employees in length of service.

Interestingly it was the count of “Total Drinks” that increased our emotional connection with the coffee machine. The counter feature was doubtless included as an aid to maintenance and service rather than for public consumption, yet it made us think differently about the machine’s role in the epic narrative of our corporate life. If we can get through that many hot beverages together, then we too must be heroes of a sort.

When its time finally comes to be “upgraded” or whatever indignity awaits, I hope we will treat the coffee machine with the deference accorded by Icelandic civil servants to their IBM 1401, as recorded here.

Oh, and the chocolate was lovely too.

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Posted by mattedgar

Old / new media mash-up – first impressions

June 14, 2008

Here’s the proof (geddit?) that the worlds of inky fingers and fat thumbs can coexist.

Last week I purchased a 1.5 inch type-high zinc block of the QR code for this blog, http://matt.me63.com. I wanted to see what happens when the beautifully tactile letterpress of my boyhood meets the amazing multimedia mobiles that I work with now. The answer, it seems, is they get on just fine.

That this works is a tribute to the staying power of Daler-Rowney’s Water Soluble Block Printing Colour, which survived 10 years in the loft to produce a perfect print first time, and to the amazing resiliance of the 2d barcode format and my Nokia N82′s 5 megapixel camera, which coped with all but the blurriest of my impressions.

And just listen to the sound of the roller transferring ink to the block – gorgeous :)

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Posted by mattedgar

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