We don’t look at our fishes

posted by Dave Allen, Leave a Comment

Fish: A Tap essay. This is a short but heartfelt manifesto about the difference between liking something on the internet and loving something on the internet.

I really wish I’d thought of this #. It is so wonderful in so many ways. A transformative media app that asks very little of us, that almost guarantees that one would use it many times (and that is its point, or Robin Sloan’s point..) Get the iPhone App here, now #. You will not be disappointed.

Social media marketing and its societal responsibility

posted by Dave Allen, Leave a Comment

Social media and the effect on society can be both positive and negative, but never neutral.

This one goes way beyond content strategy. On Saturday, danah boyd delivered an incredibly nuanced article # about how the Internet, and in particular, the Social Web, creates a huge opportunity to improve society. The problem that she points out very clearly, is that we as users have to be the ones that control the opportunity, and by doing so we will control the results, i.e. making them positive results.

The article # is long but definitely worth reading, and I’d say read it more than once, but to save you time here’s some bullet points and extracts:

One of my favourite maxims about the role of technology in society is called Kranzberg’s first law #. He argues that “technology is neither good nor bad – nor is it neutral”. It’s irresponsible to assume that the tools being built just wander out into the world with only positive effects.
what role does social media play in generating or spreading societal fear?
This question is grounded in three foundational claims:1. We live in a culture of fear

2. The attention economy provides fertile ground for the culture of fear

3. Social media is magnifying the attention economy
The term “the culture of fear” refers to the ways in which fear is employed by marketers, politicians, technology designers and the media to regulate the public and shape their worldviews.
Fear is used to justify the security theatre that we see in our airports.
In the 1970s, the scholar Herbert Simon argued that “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”His arguments give rise both to the notion of “information overload” but also to the “attention economy”. In the attention economy, people’s willingness to distribute their attention to various information stimuli create value for said stimuli. Indeed, the economic importance of advertisements is predicated on the notion that getting people to pay attention to something has value.
Now, along comes social media … Needless to say, social media brings with it massive quantities of information – unscripted, unedited, and uncurated. Going online is like swimming in an ocean of information. The very notion of being able to consume everything is laughable, even as many people are still struggling to come to terms with “information overload”. Some respond by avoiding environments where they’ll be exposed to too much information. Others try to develop complicated tactics to achieve balance. Still others are failing miserably to find a comfortable relationship with the information onslaught.The amount of information being produced overwhelmingly exceeds the amount of information any one person can possibly pay attention to. My favourite response to this is what computer scientist Michael Bernstein describes as going “Twitter zen”. This is the happy state people reach when they let go of control and just embrace the information firehose.
..and yet, somehow, people still think that they should read all blogposts in their feed readers or all tweets in their Twitter stream. In fact, there are tools designed to make us feel guilty when we’ve left things “unread”.No matter how we feel about the massive amounts of information, one thing’s clear: the amount of information is not going to decline any time soon. Given the increase of information and media, those who want people to consume their material are fighting an uphill battle to get their attention. Anyone who does social media marketing knows how hard it is to capture people’s attention in this new ecosystem.
The more stimuli there are competing for your consideration, the more that attention seekers must fight to incentivise you to look their way. More often than not, this results in psychological warfare as attention-seekers leverage any and all emotions to draw you in.
The internet makes visible things that we want to see, but it also makes visible things that we don’t want to see. It exposes us to people who are different. And this is the source of a great amount of fear.

Sociologist Manuel Castells # argues that we’ve seen a shift in how power operates. Power is no longer cleanly hierarchical. It’s now about power within networks. He argues that there are four different kinds of power in networks: networking power, network power, networked power, and network-making power.
Networking power is the power that comes from people’s inclusion or exclusion from a particular environment.
Network power is the power that stems from setting up the rules for inclusion or exclusion.
Networked power is the power that underpins those who can set the rules by imposing their will on others.
Network-making power is the type of power possessed by those who can connect people and flow information.This is the most critical form of power because all other types of power are built on top of this.

And boyd ends on this: “One thing’s clear: it’s high time we examined the values that are propagated through our tools. We all need to think critically about the information we create, consume and share. We all need to take responsibility for helping shape the world around us.”

Record Store Day 2012 and Fear of Music

posted by Dave Allen, Leave a Comment

Today is Record Store Day # where we head off out to buy music and support our local indie record stores. In one of those serendipitous moments, I came across an interview with Jonathan Lethem # in which he discusses his new book, Fear of Music by Talking Heads, which is part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of music writing #.

Books and music, two of my favorite things.

Do you have a favorite song on “Fear of Music”? From your description of “Heaven” – “If heaven’s impossible to know, ‘Heaven’s’ hard to recollect” – that seems to be your least favorite.

I received, in a very specific way, skepticism about “Heaven.” I have a friend, John Hilgart, who was a sounding board while I worked on this book. Hilgart said, quite passingly, “I always felt on Side 2, after ‘Air,’ there’s a three-song lull. I like ‘Heaven’ in principle, but to listen to it is kind of boring.” And then he felt, and I think this would be a much more common remark, that “Animals” and “Electric Guitar” are buried on Side 2 because they’re less inspired melodically or fully realized, and bear less relistening.

I had always held the whole album on this pedestal, where, in a way, it was all exactly as good as itself. I saw it as fractal, “This album is perfect, therefore everything on it is perfect.” Besides, I had always taken “Heaven” as a sacred object — everyone knows this is one of the masterpiece songs. But when Hilgart said that it was like – click! – “Heaven” is one of those things that I listen to and tell myself I’m loving it, but it’s actually boring. I started focusing on the idea of tedium, because the song’s self-referential; it wants to be boring.

In fact, I like “Heaven” a lot. The only song I’m uncomfortable with is “Electric Guitar.” The song is crippled by its disorganized quality, and it doesn’t seem as pure conceptually, because how do you put an electric guitar up there with air, heaven, animals, mind? It doesn’t belong on that stage. Also, it’s been played live barely ever. It’s a sitting duck if you need there to be a worst song on the album, though, really, I don’t know if “Fear of Music” needs to have one.

I do know that my favorites are the two side closers. I wouldn’t want to have to choose between “Drugs” and “Memories Can’t Wait.” Those became the most rewarding songs to write about; they just got richer and richer for me. I actually made myself like them even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Of course, “Life During Wartime” is pretty good too. [laughs]