The Ed Techie

The morality of scale

<broadcast tower http://www.flickr.com/photos/7715592@N03/2177026879/>

When I was an undergraduate a friend and I had one of those (no doubt drink fuelled) discussions that we felt were very important. It was based around the idea of what would it be like if everyone lived to be 1000 years old? We decided that it would be unlikely that anyone would stay with the same partner for that length of time. Not because you didn't love them, but because in order to stay sane you would need to change yourself. Otherwise you'd just go mad being the same person all the time - the 670 year old you is likely to be different from the 130 year old you. We also felt that morality would change under such a dramatic shift - could you really live to 1000 years old and not be in trouble at some point? So having a criminal record might not be unusual anymore ("yeah, I had a brief fraudster phase in my 570s").

While we may not be living to 1000 yet, I think we're seeing a similar need to shift morality when it comes to networking. The twitter mob is now operating on a daily basis, as a number of recent examples have shown. The Justine Sacco story attracted much attention - being sacked while in flight for posting a racist joke. To be clear, what she posted was offensive and stupid, but as this Forbes piece argues, "at no point in history has it been so easy to destroy your entire life so quickly in so few words". And while sympathy with Sacco may be in short supply, the twitter mob is not very discerning: this teenage girl received lots of abuse after posting a joke which most people failed to appreciate.

While Sacco and other twitter morality outrages are based on offensive tweets, they are often no more offensive than the type of conversation one overhears in the pub. And yet someone won't have their life ruined for saying such things in a pub, but if a broadcaster said such things we would rightly be outraged by them. And this seems to be the difference, we are applying broadcast morality to personal communication.

Of course, you can say 'treat everything you say online as broadcast', and that's a pretty good model. But to bring us back to my 1000 year lifestyle change in morality, just as we would have to get used to people having a criminal record, so we might need to get used to someone having been the subject of a twitter mob. As pervasive technology gets used more extensively, those pub conversations may be broadcast without the speaker's knowledge. Most of us (in my world) are liberal, and don't go around saying offensive things either in pubs or on twitter, but can any of us say that over the course of our lives, something you've said couldn't be taken out of context, and be the subject of a twitter storm? 

I'd like to think that we're going through an evolutionary phase and this massive connectivity is something we'll grow accustomed to, and adjust our social norms. But as the tragic gun crime stories from the US remind us, we're not always that great at adjusting society to meet the new possibilities of technology. In the mean time, avoid being part of a twitter mob, no matter how justified it is - it's bad for your soul.

Twitter is your IT support

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/7172953614/>

This post isn't intended as a criticism of anyone, rather an observation on a trend I've noticed from several others also. 

I'm running my block of the Masters course H817 as a MOOC. It'll start this March, and one of the things I wanted is a DS106 style blog aggregator. That is, I want the contributors to register their blog, and for posts they tag appropriately to repost automatically in the course blog.

Now, the sensible way to do this seems to be to install WordPress and use the FeedWordPress plug-in. For reasons I won't go in to, I haven't been able to get this done at the Open University, despite trying since last July. I've spoken to people at others unis and it isn't isolated to the OU, it seems to be this low-level, experimental type of IT support is increasingly difficult to find.

Do you know who I think the culprit is? The VLE. As universities installed VLEs they became experts at developing enterprise level solutions. This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution. In short, we know how to spend £500,000 but not how to spend £500.

With time pushing on, I got some local support in IET (thanks Will), and investigated the best options. It became clear that hosting externally would be the easiest option. I asked on Twitter who the best hosting solutions were and got a great set of responses. Alan Cann suggested siteground and sent me a friend's introduction offer, so I signed up with them. In 10 minutes I'd followed their WordPress installation, installed WP, found the FeedWordPress plug-in and installed that too. The blog is here: h817open.net

My next problem was to get registration to work. I looked at what DS106 have done, and in response to a request on Twitter, Alan Levine pointed me to this solution from Martha Burtis. That was a bit beyond my coding skills. So I created a simple Google Form and embedded it in my blog. I then asked Martin Hawksey if he knew how to take a Google form output and turn it into an OPML file as FeedWordPress allows you to create a list of syndicated sites from an OPML file. He pointed me to this service, which does just that.

He and Tony also suggested some solutions which will help with autodiscovery (ie finding the feed for the blog if someone just enters their main URL). Martin lists some options here. I haven't quite cracked this yet, so it needs people to enter their feed url, which isn't ideal, so I'll keep working on this.

So, I think I have a working solution. If you have time, could you try it for me by registering your blog here and then posting something which has the tag #h817open. Only posts with this tag should appear. You can just do a test post, but perhaps more interestingly you could respond to the idea of whether "openness has won" or not with a post "Openness has (hasn't) won because..."

This took me about an afternoon. The problem is that it's quite a flaky solution, the OPML service could disappear, I don't really know if it will work for all blogs, and there's no support. So it could go down and I've got no backup. More worryingly I am at the edge of my expertise here, so I can't really do much more. So a university supported proper grown-up solution would be preferable. On the other hand, one of the things I frequently say is that the best thing we can teach our students is how to be good members of a network. And this is a clear demonstration of why I believe that. I think this tension between the innovative possibilities of new technology and the understandably cautious nature of institutional IT services will mean that we'll all need to do more of this DIY tech set-up and experimentation. And the only way to do that is to have a good network who can help.

One last plea - I joked with Alan that I needed DS106 out of a box. I think I'm serious though - it would be great to have a step by step, idiots guide to installing and setting up a DS106-like environment. The rest of us don't have Alan and Jim's tech skills, so getting to the starting line is difficult. I know they'll say you should invent your own way, but they done so much great work that I don't think they realise just how much expertise they have. A simple installation that let the rest of us get started, would mean we could all go off in different directions then. So any of the DS106 crowd up for it? And I do mean a simple guide, it has to be Weller-proof.

 

Categorisation angst, the monoamorous and Google+

Yes, we're all playing with Google+, and I suspect blogging reactions to it, but this is not one of those posts (quick verdict: it's immediately better than Buzz/Wave, and Circles combined with Hangout could be very useful for research teams, institutions). No, what this post is about is the categorisation dilemmas that tools such as Google+ generate, and our relationship with technology.

In terms of categorisation my first dilemma was whether work colleagues count as 'friends'. I chatted to George Siemens about this and he concluded he didn't have friends, just colleagues (or colleagues who are also friends). I'm in a similar position, or at least my online self is. I do have some friends (some of whom are not imaginary), but they tend not to be the sort of people who'll be in Google+. And there are plenty of people I work with who I would also count as friends (such as George). And then there are people who I've never even met who I think of as friends (Jim Groom and Alan Levine for example). But friends is a very laden term, so do I want to recreate the Facebook definition, or reclaim it for 'special' people? Dunno.

And on this subject of this I am unsure which approach to take to adding people into Google+. When I started in Facebook I befriended anyone, but after a while I stripped this back to people I knew reasonably well. In Twitter I have a more open approach, although once I was following about 1000 people I stopped following back automatically. So do I want the wide or narrow network in Google+. Dunno yet.

Lastly, looking at Google+ brought to mind a post I did a few years ago, in which I argued that we are largely irrational in our choice of software, but often dress this up in terms of rational decision making around features. We have an emotional connection to software and tend to be loyal to one type. We are essentially monoamorous for categories of software, you're either a Facebook or Twitter person, a Blackboard or Moodle advocate, Flickr or Picassa freak, etc (you may have accounts in both, but you're loyalty will be with one or the other). As I argued then, it's like the team you support (in football or whatever) - the whole point of the attachment is to have only one (although it is acceptable to have more than one loyalty at different levels eg local team, main team, national team).

If you are launching a new software service then this monoamorous behaviour is significant - either the service needs to be better enough to lure people away or it has to be distinctive enough to constitute a different category. You can't rely on people wanting more than one service that does the same thing.

Which brings me back to Google+, sooner or later those of us who use these things intensively will have to go with one or the other. There will be cross-streaming so you can feed one from the other, but our attention and loyalty will be with one or the other. And in these kinds of businesses, it's attention that counts. 

Which leaves me with the big question - which one will win my affections? Definitely dunno.

The year of the backlash

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/frippy/1419020309/ by Frippy>

This is hardly a marvel of prophecy, but bear with me...

The signs are that this year will be one marked by something of a backlash against social media/ web 2.0/ any internet stuff. I don't mean from the traditional media, who've always been suspicious, but from people who know what they're talking about and have been advocates. In other words, increasingly 'us lot' will be declaring that this stuff is peripheral, uncool, over- rated, etc.

I think this will often been focused on a particular technology, and Twitter will be the main candidate this year. I've already seen several people I know abandon it. But increasingly it reflects a disappointment that technology hasn't delivered on its promises, and that as it becomes incorporated into everyday life it begins to look like all the stuff it was meant to replace. Hey, e-mail was revolutionary once. This cycle of attitudes towards technology is neatly captured in the Gartner Hype cycle, which, while not founded in deep research, captures instinctively what many of us feel about technology.

The other thing to bear in mind is that as technology matures, so does the criticism that goes along with it. This moves from the tabloid 'it's evil' attitude to a more reasoned approach. I disagree with a lot of what Lanier says in You Are Not A Gadget (that's another post), but I agree when he says technology criticism should not be left to Luddites (and neither should technology engagement be left to the evangelists). So part of what we will see growing this year is smart people bringing their intellectual capacity to bear on their experience with technology.

I would caution though that many of us who are prone to technology enthusiasm are also guilty of excessive criticism (I include myself in this). Maybe it's a personality thing for early adopters. My point is we should be wary of going to extremes. To return to my earlier example, the fact that Twitter won't be the tool that brings down totalitarian regimes, or that you found yourself using it too much, or that it is often trivial does not mean it is therefore useless. I think we should avoid these kind of binary distinctions: it's a revolutionary force or it's pointless. I know that, for instance, my use of Twitter has changed from a compulsion to tweet at all times, to a much more regulated, measured use. I'll go days without using it, but on other days will dip in continuously and find it entertaining, useful, engaging. And that's the same for all of it - we tend to over-indulge and then find their real value as they settle into our daily lives.

I think a healthy caution has crept into our reaction to technology now: Buzz, Ping, Wave, Quora - all of these have been met with an appropriate questioning attitude and not a blind acceptance of the next big thing. But we should also not become adverse to what can be done using tools with a little imagination - ds106 radio is a recent example of this. The technology isn't particularly complex (well, it would be beyond me, but for someone like Grant it's probably not too complex), but when you make it easy enough and get the right mix of people together, magic happens.

So I'm starting the backlash against the backlash early - YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter - these things are amazing. They're just not as amazing as we first thought, or rather, we're just beginning to find the ways in which they will be amazing.

A conspiracy of sentiment

Yesterday Paul Chambers lost his appeal against his fine and conviction for posting a joke on twitter which was prosecuted under the anti-terrorist legislation.

The case was so obviously ridiculous that everyone thought common-sense would prevail, but eschewing humour and reality, Judge Jacqueline Davies deemed the tweet "menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed."

Any ordinary person would have seen it as a joke. I had previously thought this was simply a case of the law getting itself in a mess, escalating something and then being unable to climb down. Added to that a healthy dose of people not understanding twitter. 

Now though I'm convinced it's more than that. I don't believe in conspiracy theories, I know all those involved haven't got together at some late night meeting and decided to make a random citizen's life a misery. But when something so nonsensical progresses through multiple stages and possibilities to put an end to it, then you have to look for some explanation. I think although there is no outright conspiracy, what we do have is a conspiracy of sentiment. All those involved at various stages: politicians, the police, CPS, judges, media are all acting from the same unspoken emotional base. This can be summarised as: they hate you.

They hate that you undermine their carefully crafted messages and turn them into jokes. They hate that you are forming new methods of entertainment that they don't understand. They hate that you can organise yourselves without them knowing about it. They hate that power has been democratised. They hate that you get at content for free. They hate it, hate it, hate it. So when the opportunity arises to stamp on one of you snivelling social media types, they grasp it with both hands.

And that's why the Twitter Joke Trial is important - because it reveals the mindset of those in power, and because it will be the first of many attempts by them to control or at least seek revenge on what they don't understand and loathe.

Twitter as interdisciplinary tool & culture

I have been writing a chapter on interdisciplinarity for my book on digital scholarship, and thought I would share this section which explores the idea that social networks (Twitter in this case) can be viewed as interdisciplinary tools. One of the ideas I am particularly interested in is that a barrier to interdisciplinary work has been the existence of different cultures in various disciplines. It may be that tools such as Twitter and blogs have a culture of their own, which can to some degree, compensate for these other differences. Put simply, do bloggers in different disciplines have more in common than non-bloggers and bloggers in the same discipline?

In this post I want to look at both the culture of twitter and how this combined with its features can aid interdisciplinarity.

Three key features of twitter demonstrate how an open approach has allowed community norms to emerge. The first is the convention of putting an @ sign in front of a person’s twitter id to send them a reply (eg @mweller). This was a user convention first of all, so it would designate that a particular tweet was for the attention of a particular user. As Twitter developed it became a standard convention, and then incorporated into the software, so now users can see all replies to them listed separately. The @ reply rule grew out of the email naming convention, but has almost become synonymous with twitter now.

The second convention was the use of hashtags to define a particular comment which could be grouped together. The use of the # was proposed by Chris Messina in a tweet: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”. Hashtags can be seen as metadata, describing the content of a tweet. They became relevant as the use of search on Twitter grew. People could search on a hashtag and thus gather all of the tweets on a particular topic. This was seized on by conferences, so all the delegates at a conference would agree to use a hashtag, and later conference organisers began specifying an official hashtag. Search was originally performed by a third party service, (using the open API), but in July 2008, Twitter bought Summize, the most popular Twitter search tool. Hashtags could now be incorporated into the standard Twitter practice, and ‘trending’ became a relevant term as topics grew on twitter, often denoted by a hashtag. Apparently the Twitter team initially rejected hashtags as ‘too nerdy’, but their simple, and unregulated, creation has allowed them to flourish.

Hashtags can now be used as the means to define a community, particularly around an event, course or topic. The open data approach of Twitter means that these can in turn, be analysed to reveal connections between members, subjects of discussion, locations, and prominent members. As well as a useful means of categorising tweets, hashtags are now so ingrained in practice that they form a part of humour on Twitter, with people often creating ‘mock’ hashtags (although there are no official hashtags) as an ironic counterpoint.

The third norm to emerge is that of the retweet. This is the practice of passing on someone’s tweet. Originally this was achieved by copying and pasting the tweet and adding RT and the user’s id at the start. Boyd, Golder and Lotan identify the following motivations for retweeting:

• To amplify or spread tweets to new audiences
• To entertain or inform a specific audience, or as an act of curation
• To comment on someone’s tweet by retweeting and adding new content, often to begin a conversation
• To make one’s presence as a listener visible
• To publicly agree with someone
• To validate others’ thoughts
• As an act of friendship, loyalty, or homage by drawing attention, sometimes via a retweet request
• To recognize or refer to less popular people or less visible content
• For self-gain, either to gain followers or reciprocity from more visible participants
• To save tweets for future personal access

As with the other community behaviours, the retweet became enshrined in code, when in late 2009 Twitter implemented a retweet function on their site. This allowed users to easily retweet a message by simply clicking a button, without the need for copy and paste, but some of the subtlety as to how it appears in timelines was lost (it is shown coming from the originator and not the retweeter).

What these three examples demonstrate is that the community has evolved over time, suggesting, experimenting and then adopting norms of behaviour – the ‘stickiness’ we saw earlier with blog culture. Once it has become established, and proven to add value, Twitter have then moved to implement it in code to make it easier and also to further spread its use. They have not imposed the practice from the start, and sought to define how users will interact, which has often been the case with software development, instead they have allowed the community itself to develop its own norms.

If I analyse my own twitter network (using TwitterAnalyzer.com) then it reveals that the geographic spread of my followers is mainly across the following countries:

• UK
• US
• Australia
• Germany
• Canada
• France
• China

By analysing the biography details people provide the top professions amongst my followers are:

• Consultant
• Technologist
• PhD student
• Lecturer
• Manager
• Teacher
• Librarian
• Author

Amongst these I can identify a number of communities and networks, some of which will intersect. These include:

• Bloggers – many of the people I follow are those I already had an online connection with via blogs, and twitter was an extension of this.
• The Open University – I have acted as an advocate for Twitter in the Open University, and see it as a means of informal knowledge sharing within an organisation
• Cardiff - there is an active twitter community, which often meets face to face.
• >UK Higher Education – As well as bloggers and Open University people there is a large contingent of peers in other universities, funding bodies, libraries, etc
• Journalists and media – a number of journalists and media consultants use twitter regularly
• Tottenham Hotspur – I support Spurs and a number of the people I follow for this reason, but also there is a wider group for whom football is an interest (who are also members of the other networks)

There are a number of sub-groups in this also, for example Canadian bloggers form a coherent network of their own, and many individuals will occupy more than one category. One can view these many different groups and sub-groups as networks that will become more or less active, and distinct, according to external events. For example, during the general election in the

Huberman, Romero and Wu have investigated interactions on Twitter and find that despite many followers the number of people a user interacts with (ie sends replies to) is relatively small. This reflects findings in Facebook and is interpreted as the existence of Dunbar’s number (1998) in social networks. Dunbar’s number suggests that people find it cognitively difficult to maintain meaningful relationships beyond a certain number of friends, usually given as 150, with a smaller core group around 20-30.  While this may well be true for the more stable relationships, the use of tools such as hashtags and retweets allows for a finer grading of online acquaintance. I can read, or retweet, someone else’s posts without ever interacting with them, and they may reciprocate, without engaging in direct conversation, yet these people form part of a valuable network.

As an interdisciplinary tool my twitter network has a number of advantages, and associated issues:

• Geographical diversity – while it is inevitably centred around the UK and North America, it is a global community which brings different perspectives. It is limited by language though, and the immediacy does not allow for translation so there is a danger of English language views dominating.
• Professional diversity – within the different networks a number of professions and experience can be found, which will inevitably bring a degree of interdisciplinarity. One of the benefits of Twitter has been to improve intra-departmental communication within an institution. However, while the table above shows a reasonable range of occupations, it is still largely centred around higher education. There are, for example, very few (or no) priests, builders, make-up artists or senior retail managers in my network (which is not to say they are not present on Twitter). For interdisciplinarity this may not be an issue.
• Size – at the time of writing I follow around 1,100 people and have approximately 2,800 followers. That represents a considerable network and pool of expertise which will share a wide range of knowledge and will also respond to requests for advice on topics outside of my own domain.
• Immediacy – one of the changes Twitter required in my behaviour was a shift from exhaustive reading to regular sampling. As a blog reader I tried to keep up with most posts from those I subscribed to, with subsequent guilt when the unread count on my blog reader mounted. As my Twitter network expanded this behaviour was not possible and so a shift was required, where I ‘dip into’ Twitter, sometimes more intensively and other times I am completely absent. This is the concept of the stream, it is not meant to be consumed in its entirety, but sampled on occasion. Twitterers are responding in real-time and thus it is ideal for capturing diverse reactions and interpretations before they are filtered into disciplines. There is a consequent danger though that this relentless churning of information means useful research will be missed via this route.
• Interdisciplinary bridges – the ease of sharing provides a means to bridge disciplines, in particular the retweet can be viewed as a tool for bridging audiences and disciplines as a twitterer in one domain can rebroadcast to their network, which will have the types of sub-groupings shown above.
• An inherent set of cultural norms – the three features we saw above, as well as other practices indicate that, as with blogs, Twitter has its own set of cultural norms, which provide the required ‘stickiness’ for communities to develop. These may be sufficient to overcome the differences in cultural norms across disciplines, and provide a common framework.
• Professional and personal mix – twitter occupies an intersection between professional and personal, formal and informal, resource and conversation. In many previous tools we have sought to separate out these elements, for instance when we create forums for students in VLEs it is a common practice to have a separate ‘Chat’ or social forum so that this doesn’t interfere with the academic discussion. However, this blend in one place in Twitter both provides motivation to partake (we don’t separate out our thoughts or lives so neatly) and also provides hooks into other areas of interdisciplinarity.

The list above shows a number of benefits in developing a networked approach to interdisciplinarity which may address the issues which have plagued it for many years. Indeed if we had intentionally set out to create a tool for promoting interdisciplinary discourse, then the resultant service may have not looked dissimilar to Twitter.

Understanding the attention economy

My iPad (which decided to stop connecting for a couple of weeks, but has now returned from its sabbatical) has made me appreciate anew the importance of good design and using media to grab people's attention. This was brought home first by the Flipboard app, which takes your Twitter & facebook feeds along with other feeds to convert social media into your own glossy magazine.

 

The result is that it provides me with another 'in' to the stream. This isn't the only way I interact with these sources but it's a pleasant interface and pulls me into looking at links and articles I might otherwise miss.

Bloglines is a similar app (which I found via John Connell), here I add in my favourite blogs to create a nice bookshelf. Again it probably isn't the best way to handle hundreds of feeds, but it provides a nice window on some of them, meaning again I might read things I would otherwise skip.

 

What both of these apps demonstrate is that by adding a nice layer of UI, the way you interact with these sources can be subtly altered. For a start it seems to elevate them somewhat - these are now nice articles to be read with a coffee and a bagel.

But more significantly it highlights the importance of grabbing people's attention. This usually means by adding in some media - a post with a nice image is more likely to make me open it from bloglines (Jim Groom's Bavatuesdays wins here). Or it could be an intriguing title. There are also variables such as posting at an optimal time (weekends are rarely useful, and afternoons in the UK will get some American traffic too).

These may seem like trivial, superficial aspects for academics to be concerned with, and certainly trying too hard to get attention has the opposite effect. But in an information saturated context we can't assume good quality will always be found. As we send our little thoughts into the digital world we need to at least give them every chance to survive. I wonder if understanding the online attention economy will be a digital literacy?

The New Bereavements

In a Twitter chat with Josie Fraser yesterday, she said that the URL shortening service u.nu has closed down and joked that she wasn't sure of the correct etiquette for the passing of such a thing:

u.nu url shortening service discontinued after constant spammer abuse http://u.nu/unu-discontinued so long, & thanks fr all the links.less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneJosie Fraser
josiefraser

I have been pondering for a while that we face a new set of bereavements. We are probably going to face these more, so for example, how do you react when your favourite service disappears? Imagine, say, Slideshare disappeared tomorrow. How would I feel? Anger that I have lost data, annoyance that old links won't work, upset that the good people there are out of jobs, saddened that such a thing didn't survive?

Another example I've encountered over the past year is when someone suddenly quits Twitter (or stops blogging or whatever). As these are people I am unlikely to ever meet face to face they are effectively lost gone. In real life we might mourn the passing of a friendship, so how do we react online? Should one shrug, or hold a candlelit vigil?

I expect we'll face more of these new forms of small-scale loss. There will be online therapists no doubt to help us cope.

PS - if there isn't one already, then someone should start a band called The New Bereavements.

The network ate my newspaper

(So what do you think of David Cameron then Gordon?)

So the UK televised Leaders Debates have now finished. I have to say, it's been a blast. Not because they were good television (after the first one and the surprise Clegg factor they quickly reverted to saying the same things), but because of the back-channel on twitter. In 2008 I suggested that the Eurovision song contest was the perfect TV twitter event because

"It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire to share. And you know that it is a communal event, so others will be watching too."

The same might be said of the leaders debates. Having the back channel has been endlessly amusing and inventive with twitpics, hashtags, videos and jokes being shared in real time. It has also been very informative as people have challenged the views represented and sought out facts and shared these.

Over at the BBC Rory Cellan-Jones suggests that

"So far, it's been a much better election for the mainstream media - or the "MSM" as they're described by an often contemptuous blogosphere - than you might have expected. The bloggers hoped they would boss this campaign, breaking stories, setting the mood, and leaving the flat-footed old media types trailing in its wake."

The alternative is also true - ask yourself this, could you really function as a political journalist (or academic) and not have followed this election on twitter? I'm with John Naughton who argues that:

"One of the more comical aspects of the current UK election is the way ‘old’ media (newspapers and broadcast TV) gloated about how they had ‘transformed’ the election from the venerable two-party slugfest into a supposedly more open contest. There’s a note of triumphalism here: “see”, the dinosaurs are braying, “for all this talk of an ‘online election’, the impact of the Net, social networking, twitter etc. it’s really going to be decided by older, tried-and-trusted media”. There may be a lot of cyberchatter on Twitter and Facebook, the political editors jeer, but it’s not showing up on the doorstep."

I think the effects of social networking are quite subtle. I'm not naive, I know that the majority of UK voters aren't on twitter, but this is still fairly new. How will that look at the next election? The thing about social networks is that they are difficult to manipulate. Like John Gilmore's quote about the internet, something similar can be said:

"Social networks dissipate direct pressure and push back"

This means it is much more difficult to manipulate people in a network the way the broadcast media can be manipulated. It requires more energy and when you apply that pressure the network pushes back (usually with sarcastic humour and parody, which is the politicians worst enemy).

So while old media may be congratulating themselves, they have missed the point. This is the election that marked the beginning of the end of their power, they just haven't noticed it. I am reminded of a quote from the (not particularly good) film Deep Impact, in which the President, as played by Morgan Freeman, says to the plucky reporter:

"it might seem that we have each other over the same barrel, but it just seems that way."

Social media in society roundup

I'd like to do this regularly, but probably won't, a review of stories and how social media has related to them. I think it would be interesting to chart the impact social media is having on actual society (not just the techie or ed techie one). Here are a few stories over the past month that caught my attention:

Rentokil news release - in March several newspapers ran a story about there being '2,000 bugs in every train carriage'. It was based on "Research by pest controllers Rentokil". Science journalist Ben Goldacre smelt (ahem) a rat and followed it up. Ben chased them up through twitter, email and phone but couldn't get access to the email which had been sent to journalists by Rentokil's PR company. But eventually the truth emerged:

"After a bit of prodding, their PR company Brands2Life explained how these bugs were counted. No buses were studied, and no trains were studied either. ... contrary to what was said earlier, wherever it came from, these numbers did not come from measurements and counts, they are actually based on a “theoretical model”.

...Rentokil’s model for the number of bugs on trains and buses made some interesting assumptions, and you will have your own view on whether they make for a reasonable approximation to the real world.

They assumed, for example, that the railway carriage or bus was left alone, by itself, in isolation. They assumed this isolated carriage was helpfully furnished with a plentiful food supply. They assumed that the ratio of male and female bugs was perfectly optimal for breeding.

They assumed – surprisingly for anyone involved in modelling populations, surprisingly for anyone, really – that the population of bugs would be left entirely unchecked, with no external factors to control the mortality rate. They assumed that the siding or garage was controlled at a constant temperature all day and night, with no extremes, they assumed there were no trampling commuters, no cruel vaccum cleaners, no anything. In fact they assumed there was no cleaning, ever, and no passengers, ever. This was their model of insect populations on commuter vehicles.

“On the above basis” Rentokil’s PR explained to me: “it is possible that the stated numbers of cockroaches and bed bugs/fleas could live on a train carriage or bus.”"

Anyone who has read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science will be familiar (if depressed) with this kind of PR story being taken up wholesale and unquestioningly by the press. What is interesting here is that listening to Ben on Radio 4 later that week he commented how the use of blogs and twitter allowed him the space to really track these stories down. In a newspaper column it would seem pedantic and picky, and there would be a word limit, but in the social media space he received information and encouragement from his twitter network. This means that, although they'll still try it, PR companies now have a space where they will be held to account, whereas previously no-one would get to hear about their exaggerations, assumptions or lies because of a complicit agreement in the mainstream press. The make it up and don't give a damn party is over.

Nestle - this was the subject of one of those twitter storms that brew up quickly (and I have to say, even when I agree with them, they have the whiff of a pitchfork wielding mob about them). Nestle have a Facebook page, which had been ticking along nicely for a couple of years, with people discussing how they eat their Kit-Kats. Then Greenpeace encouraged people to adapt Nestle logos, to support their anti-Nestle campaign, on the use of palm oil. Cnet covers the story here. People started doing this on the Facebook page and the Nestle representative came in heavy handed demanding they remove the copyright infringing logos, etc. Then it got going on twitter and became a trending topic, generating lots of bad publicity for Nestle.

What this demonstrates is that people will use an organisation's Facebook page as a means of demonstration and protest. The best defence against this is to be a 'nice' company, but even then some people may have differences of opinion. The difficulty then is knowing how to handle them. It's not clear who the Nestle representative was, but it could have been some untrained employee who was just given the page as part of their duty and responded brusquely. Such a response is worse than no response and for organisations the Nestle furore should be one of those case studies on handling new media.

Leader's debate - on 15th April in the UK we had our first televised leaders debate as part of the general election. It is widely acknowledged that the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg came out best in this. From a personal perspective it was the perfect twitter event TV. It wasn't particularly interesting, but the backchannel around twitter brought it to life. While the broadcast analysts were still pondering the big messages #Iagreewithnick was a trending topic, showing that the network had determined the main outcome (which the conventional broadcasters agreed upon over the ensuing few days). A tweet which got retweeted many times summed it up pithily: "What we learnt tonight: Clegg is a damn fine speaker, Cameron met a black man once and Brown agrees with Nick". In line with the first story here, it was also in online media that we saw many of the claims and anecdotes investigated over the coming few days (if you're interested, my colleague Simon Buckingham-Shum did an excellent analysis of the debate using Compendium, which was better than most of the expert analysis we saw).

What was interesting here was the way that humour was used to puncture the claims and careful gestures of the leaders in a way that serious analysis failed to do. For instance, David Cameron came equipped with a range of anecdotes aimed at demonstrating him to be a man of the people. Fridge-magnet then created a Cameron anecdote generator which got passed around on twitter.

Seeing the threat now posed by Nick Clegg, many of the right-wing newspapers turned their focus on him. The most hysterical was a piece from the Daily Mail which claimed Clegg was some form of Nazi supporter. Within a couple of hours the hashtag #nickcleggsfault was trending on twitter as people punctured the pomposity of such articles by blaming any event, from IE6, to Justin Bieber.

So while this won't be the social media election in the way the Obama one was, because the parties themselves aren't using it as effectively, it will be an election in which social media begins to challenge the dominance of traditional media as the means through which we experience it.