matt.me63.com - Matt Edgar

Two recent news stories continue my theme that social media doesn’t so much change people’s behaviour, as expose pre-existing behaviours for all to see, often with unexpected consequences.

Exhibit 1: ‘Dumbest criminal’ records crimes

A Leeds man has been dubbed the city’s “dumbest criminal” by a councillor for posting videos of anti-social behaviour on the YouTube website.

Andrew Kellett, 23, from Stanks Drive, Swarcliffe, published 80 videos and was given an interim anti-social behaviour order (Asbo) by Leeds magistrates.

Kellett has been previously convicted of various offences but the Asbo stops him from boasting of his activities.

BBC News, 21 May 2008

This one’s fairly straightforward: people have been speeding, racing, dodging taxi fares and stealing petrol since the advent of the automobile. But even as some wring their hands over the spread of CCTV and enforcement cameras, others now bravely disintermediate the authorities altogether. Why wait for your crimes to be exposed when you can post them on the internet yourself?

Our legal system’s response? Stop, you’re making it too easy! Shooting fish in a barrel is one thing, but fish who voluntarily jump into the barrel and bob up to the surface with targets tattooed on their bellies - where’s the fun in that? So he gets an ASBO to stop him putting any more of his crimes on Youtube.

Exhibit 2: Students ‘had hints’ before exam

An exam board is investigating suggestions that some teachers gave students hints about what questions would be in an A-level biology exam.

Discussions in an online student forum ahead of OCR’s A2 biology practical identified key areas for revision.

OCR said it would watch the results to see if anyone had gained an advantage.

BBC News, 28 May 2008

Now, I reckon teachers with an inside track on the practical exam have always discretely “advised” pupils what to revise. Not to do so when you’ve shepherded a bunch of teenagers through the course material for the best part of two years would be almost inhuman, even without the pressure to perform in league tables. Exam boards must have long realised this conflict of interest.

It takes a bunch of students chatting in an online forum to force them to admit the situation and “monitor” results. The Facebook generation may be adept at negotiating the social intricacies of poking, but it seems some of them have totally failed to grasp the point of a nod and wink. And it only takes a few to spoil it for everyone.

People being people, much as they’ve always been: loving, creating, cheating and scheming in the same proportions as they always did. The new variable is visibility, and that changes everything.

It’s taken me a while (and 83 more pages of Here Comes Everybody) to understand my unease with the “technology changes everything” discourse around social media, and now to reach an alternative hypothesis. In my last post I questioned whether the advent of the internet in the place of television could, as Clay Shirky suggests, awaken some kind of latent creativity and collaboration. Could the web really turn the tables on the mass media, humble big corporations and bring about revolutions?

Here Comes Everybody contains a number of such vignettes to back up the case for the technology-led societal shift: the phenomenal accumulation of quality volunteer-contributed content in Wikipedia, British students’ Facebook revolt against changes to their HSBC bank charges, Belarus “flash mob” protests, and so on. Nothing like these things could happen, the story goes, without new tools built on top of mobile phones and the internet.

Except that they could, and did. Because for every story of 21st Century people getting together to achieve something amazing using new technology, there’s a story from history of people who did much the same without the benefit of the world wide web. One of these even gets into Shirky’s book: the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and all that it stood for. But to that we might add any number of 20th Century educational movements such as the Workers’ Education Association, student boycotts of Barclays and Nestle in the 1980s, the demonstrations of May 1968 (the same year, by the way, that a contract was awarded to build something called the Arpanet).

These big things, of course, are just the tip of the iceberg. To these we must add countless more localised acts of collaboration and creativity: the village antiques society of which my grandmother was treasurer, the baby-sitting circle where my mum and dad traded nights out with other parents using curtain-rings as currency, countless fanzines photocopied and posted. Sure, it was a little harder to shift ideas around the world, but from what I can recall we mostly managed OK. After all, making and sharing stuff are two of the most defining characteristics of being human.

So how come it still feels like the internet is changing everything? I have a suggestion.

When Clay Shirky talks in his blog post about a massive television-related bender spanning the whole second half of the 20th Century, he’s half right. But it wasn’t the mass of the population that was rendered senseless by the broadcast media - no they kept on creating and collaborating much as people always have. Rather, the intoxication induced by television was mainly in the minds of big business and mass media. Broadcasters and brands became so drunk with the power of pushing content one-way into people’s living rooms that they forgot that their “audience” might be busy doing other things.

It was a wise executive who admitted “I know half my advertising doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half” because the mythical housewife never was waiting patiently for the television to tell her which brand of soap powder to buy. She was too busy chatting to her next-door neighbour while they scrubbed their doorsteps, or making bunting to string along the street on carnival day. But business, the media and government didn’t get that. It was their tragedy that there was no return path. Information flowed in only one direction - away from them - leaving them to revel in their own self-importance.

It’s my contention that the amount of collaboration and creativity in the world is not changing greatly as a result of new communications technologies. There may be a little incremental creation, but mostly it’s substitutional of other activities that have gone on in some shape or other for thousands of years. What has changed is that new technologies make those old activities more visible. All those conversations used to happen in drafty village halls, through the post and over the phone. Now they are on the web for all to search and to see. It’s no longer possible for the mass media and big businesses, or even governments, to imagine that they have it all their own way, because the curtain has been drawn back to reveal just how irrelevant some of them have become.

It’s not so much a case of “Here Comes Everybody”, as of “Everybody Was Here All Along”. People aren’t late to this party, technology and business are. Only by understanding that can traditional organisations have a chance of being welcomed into the conversation. If they come at this change from a technology point of view - thinking that they’re going to instantly enable incremental communications for an amazed and grateful populace - then they’ll likely fail to make the grade. But if they understand that it’s mainly substitutional then they’ll see why their customers set the bar so high.

People have been communicating and interacting for thousands of years without the help of mobile phones and computers. They have developed sophisticated ways of doing so. Social niceties and nuances make their collaborations highly efficient. If you or your business want to be a part of that you’d better first watch and learn. See how natural are the conversations, and how easily people negotiate complex issues of coordination and collaboration. Then try to design tools and talk in a language that matches that quality. Or to put it another way, Here Comes Technology, Late As Usual (but if you sit quietly at the back for a bit Everybody might let you join in).

The new media revolutionary in me so much wants to believe Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” hypothesis, that the web heralds a new era of mass participation, collaboration and creativity. With our mobile phones and broadband connections we remade society, so that my five-year-old son cannot conceive of a world without the web (”Daddy, if people didn’t have computers, how did they buy things from the Internet,” he once asked.) We are the generation that Changed Everything. How cool is that?

But then my inner history graduate rebels. I’m innately suspicious of anyone who says human behaviour has changed fundamentally. The joy of history is in its humanity, in all the stories that show how our ancestors were ordinary people who laughed, loved, tricked and schemed just like we do today. If Baby Boomers claim they invented sex, just refer them to Roman pottery and the satirical cartoons of the 18th Century.

And so I believe in our bright human future: that so long as people survive, they will behave much like their stone age forebears. The context may be different, but people are people across time and space. And that’s a Good Thing.

So I’m deeply conflicted when, on the blog accompanying his book, Shirky launches a puritanical attack on television as a sink that dissipates our thoughts, and compares it to the socially sedative role of gin in our early industrial revolution cities. The theory goes that:

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society

Television, the dominant mass media of the second half of the 20th Century is our modern-day equivalent of gin. But despair not, for Shirky has us all roused from our stupor by the Internet in all its chaotic glory, millions of Wikipedia edits, captioned cat photos and all.

The fact that Internet users watch less TV has been a commonplace for some time, so Shirky builds on this to show that if everyone watches just a little less TV and participates a little more online, whole new sources of value will be unlocked from our newly productive endeavours. We The Web Users can be morally superior to the Telly Addicts of the past: they consumed, we create.

It’s a great analogy, but I’m suspicious of the conclusion. Why? Because TV watching is not the only thing being edged out to make way for all those hours online. Not only do we watch less TV, we also sleep less and spend less time interacting with our families.

I started to list some things I do less as a result of having the internet:

• watch tv
• talk about tv
• buy magazines
• phone people up
• write letters
• go to the shops
• go to the library
• queue to pay bills
• look out of the window on trains
• sleep

Now a couple of these things - watching TV, buying magazines - do seem like gin, the one-way attention sink activities, (though as fundamentally social beings, it’s never long before two or more people assembled before a television set are debating and discussing the content, hurling abuse at the screen or fighting over the remote control).

But what about the others?

I now communicate less by phone and letter, and more by email or text. Where’s the cost in that? Well I reckon it’s in the nuances, the tone of voice, the side-tracked conversations, the pictures scribbled in the margins, that just don’t happen so much online. So I’ve substituted some inconvenient but rich communications media for handier, cheaper, but less subtle ones.

I shop online for stuff so I don’t have to go to the shops, and I Google for information so I don’t have to go to the library. So there goes a whole load of opportunities for collaboration - chance meetings with friends, taking my cue subconsciously from what other shoppers are looking at, and so on.

Then there’s the contemplation time. I used to stand in queues, look out of the window, ignore the TV and let my mind wander. Greater efficiency in transactions and communications is squeezing out those times, and I wonder if the quality of my communications is suffering just as their quantity increases. And that’s before the sleep deprivation kicks in, tiredness and drunkenness sharing many symptoms.

So maybe TV was the gin of the information age, but the internet has a way to go before it’s the clean drinking water that will unleash our productivity. Exchanges on online social networks are so far a pale shadow of the sophisticated interactions that happen when people get together in the real world. And whatever the medium, tomorrow’s people are highly likely to remain much like the people we know today: at once creative and lazy, generous and greedy. If attention is a finite resource, so surely is virtue.

The irony that I’m saying this on a blog is not lost on me. And no, I’m not about to retreat to my log cabin with a manual typewriter, but I do believe there are a few things we need to work on. To do that, we need to understand the good and bad stuff we’re leaving behind, as much as the huge potential of the new technology we embrace.

Disclosure: I write this post having made it up to page 99 of Here Comes Everybody. It’s a great, thought-provoking book and I fully expect to revise my opinion by the time I reach the end. Please consider this a review in perpetual beta :)

Greetings from 2008! I’m really pleased you’ve picked the Early 21st Century Social History module this term. You’re going to love it.

But before you dive into the wealth of primary evidence we’ve left on the net, there’s something we need you to understand. We know it doesn’t look good, but we weren’t really shallow time-wasters. You see, the billions of pages of social networking archives through which you’re crawling don’t really tell the whole story. Before you condemn us as the idle generation who played Scrabulous while the icecaps melted, we’d like to put those texts into context.

Context #1. We were young. Your course notes may include some stats showing that lots of people in their 30s, 40s and beyond were signed up to the social networks. This is true, but the most active users remained in the under 25 bracket. They were finding their way in the world, and trying on new personalities. They lived for the moment and some learned the dangers the hard way.

Context #2. Even when we weren’t young, we were inexperienced. We’d only just taken the controls, like learning to drive a car. (OK, bad example. I guess you’ve seen one in a museum.) Looking back, our efforts will seem clumsy, lacking the nuances and vocabulary of other more-established communications media. With time we’ll get these things right, but you future historians probably look at our online efforts like we look at 1950s TV.

Context #3. Even when we were experienced, we weren’t serious. Surely this was the first (though by no means the last) medium to start with the trivial and scale up to the serious. It took decades for electronic communication to move, as Andrew Odlyzko notes “from Samuel Morse’s solemn ‘What hath God wrought?’ to Alexander Graham Bell’s utilitarian ‘Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,’ to the banal ‘How was your lunch?’ that is so common today.” Now we’ve moved from pull to push: we upload photos of our lunch without even being asked. For many of us posting stuff online is more a time-killer than a communications tool.

So while you’re flicking through our old Myspace pages and Facebook groups, please believe us when we say: The rest of the time, we were really busy doing mature, skilled, serious things. It’s just that we didn’t document that stuff. You’ll have to take it on trust.

Thus somebody - and nobody quite seems to know whom - said of Johannes Gutenberg. But even with the belated arrival of the “w” to make up the Latin alphabet to 26, this once mighty army now seems barely enough to log into Bebo.

There are forces at work.

1. Web-based services demand that users have globally unique ids. You know the score - you enter your favoured username on the Web Too Point Oh site du jour only to find that some random namesake got there first.
2. … but people’s names are not globally unique. I guess I could change my name by deed poll to mattedgar63 but society seems unsympathetic to such innovation.
3. Fortunately many of the new breed of global web services support Unicode as standard. To force the majority of the World’s population to use only Latin characters would be bad for business, as well as deeply un-PC.
4. Kids like codes. No sooner could my son write than he was finding ways to write messages in secret. Language can be used as a tool to obfuscate as well as communicate.
5. Kids (in UK at least) are increasingly exposed to cultures with non-Latin character sets. The Iron Curtain has gone and with it the cosy certainty of Gutenberg’s lead soldiers…

And before you know it, it’s come to this. And this. And this…

25 soldiers? Make that 95,221.

Please excuse this shameless plug for my brother’s new venture, Social Minds. Back in 1997, Edmund went to work in Japan for a year. He stayed, got married, and has gained a wealth of experience in distance learning and educational technologies. Now he’s taking that experience into virtual worlds, including Second Life.

As his shiny new website says:

• Social Minds provides educational opportunities using cutting-edge distance-learning tools.
• We offer classes based in a 3-D Virtual World, currently centered on Second Life.
• We are focussed on combining the motivational energy of conventional classes with the power and reach of distance learning.
• We are actively involved with the Sloodle Project, and host a free trial Sloodle site.

There’s also an engagingly-written blog (”Vote for me! I’ve got an office! With tables and chairs!”) and the offer of a limited number of free places on the experimental Second-Life-based introductory Japanese course.

It’s refreshing to see how virtual worlds could start to enhance existing real-world activities, such as education. Obviously I’m biased, but I reckon Edmund has the rare combination of skills and experience to make this a reality.

Out shopping on an Autumn Saturday afternoon, a spectacular rainbow appeared over Islington. And on every street corner there was someone taking a picture with their cameraphone. A perfect example of how convergent technologies create brand new behaviours, as well as enhancing existing ones.

Most of those people taking pictures probably didn’t explicitly choose a cameraphone - the mobile photography revolution was virtually pure technology push by handset manufacturers and network operators. But once armed by default with a reasonable quality, zero-cost-per-click camera they’ve created new usages that never featured in the all-too-predicatable MMS launch campaigns (it was all Beckham and babies from what I remember, never happy slapping or lunch).

Chris Heathcote sums up the digital photo effect as “more people taking more pictures, more people looking at pictures, and more conversations started from photos” - and it’s not just more, more, more, it’s different, different, different.

Flickr etiquette is a tricky thing. For starters I have to pigeonhole the tangled web of people-with-whom-I-share-photos into “family”, “friends” and that wonderful catch-all “contacts” (maybe we should all be using a Cold War-style dead letter box in Regent’s Park?)

But that’s nothing to the almost daily dilemma of how to share each photo I upload.

• If I make this or that picture public am I giving away just a little to much of my family’s privacy?
• Maybe someone, someday might find a use for that snap of Leonardo Da Vinci’s printing press?
• Just how many photos of my kids can my work colleagues stand to see?

I think it has to do with the intimacy gradient:

Conflict: Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence which corresponds to their degrees of privateness, the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, family, will always be a little awkward.
Resolution: Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.

Now for “building,” read “photo sharing service”.

But I’ve noticed one thing when skimming through my photostream: I’m far more likely to mark a picture public if I take it with my cameraphone than if I take it with my digital camera.

The regular camera is used in intimate situations - in the living room when Pascal smiles, or when Ludo falls asleep standing up. It only leaves the house in its faux leather case for special occasions - family parties, days out, when we value good pictures of never-to-be-repeated moments.

The cameraphone is the Bic Biro of image capture devices. Always in my pocket, with me everywhere I go in my everyday life. It’s helping me to take pictures I’d never have taken before - stupid pictures, random pictures, might-come-in-handy-one-day pictures. These are the pictures I’m happy to mark public on Flickr without a moment’s thought.