This talk was given at Lovebytes on the 12 Feb 2010.  Thanks to Lisa for the invitation.

Tom Armitage gave a talk a few years ago about manners and etiquette which has stayed with me and which, with the recent meme around playfulness and Russell’s talk at Playful last year, got me thinking about how we ‘design’ engagement.  I want to argue that ‘social’ as it’s conceived by people designing a lot of web applications and services isn’t very helpful and I want to suggest through a series of half baked thoughts, that we think of it differently, in terms of friction.

This is a very broad question and somewhat meaningless, in that people think of the social in lots of different ways I’m sure.  But it’s a word that’s used a lot to describe what we do and what we design.  So it might be useful to have some common ground. From my work social is that which deals with generally accepted norms of behaviour, a coming together of behaviours; patterns.

And behaviours change.  You can go from a football loving student to…

… an ageing  biker dude and in the process see your behaviour and outlook change.  But it’s not just relationships and behavioural norms that ‘social’ encompasses.  Technology is central to our behaviour which is just as well because that’s what we design and play with, right?  I don’t mean technology as anything with a plug, but the codes, signs, materials, that enable effects and enable us to behave as we do.  Bruno Latour is probably the person I’ve found to be most influential on my own view of social, where the social is made up of more or less durable networks of things and these networks ebb and flow (much like the notion of desire in the work of Deleuze) and power and agency are effects of these networks, rather than networks being the effect of will or agency on the part of the individual. It’s a compelling argument, though not always a comfortable one with humanism still a dominant belief in the West.  My notion of friction draws on the notion of the relationships between things emanating out of Latour’s work..

Anyway, I digress (which I do a lot).

Back to social and what it means to be social online.  A lot of this is, I believe, down to accepting the ‘norms’ of behaviour we take for granted.  And those are bound up in manners and etiquette.  Increasingly web apps, services and sites understand that manners and etiquette matter and we’re building good manners into what we make.

The poster child for a lot of development in social manners has to be flickr.  It pioneered a friendly and more nuanced approach to how it dealt with its audience that we now see replicated in lots of web services. The “hello” in different languages is still polite and thoughtful…

So increasingly web apps are understanding the control, communications and context required to foster stronger ties with the audience and build trust.  In the talk I reference Google Buzz as one example of a service that had got this right (but I’d failed to see the privacy backlash occurring in the last 12hours before I talked), where the more granular control over ‘publicness’ of content was a welcome development over the blanket public / private profile that twitter offers.  But I like the thought that went into Buzz if not the execution, particularly the greater visibility afforded friends of friends (which should go hand in hand with the ability for you not to be seen as a friend of a friend, doh!).

However, I still think that Buzz represents a means through which to break out of the address book paradigm that most social web apps and phone companies end up perpetuating.

And this is important because research we’ve done shows that teenage peer groups are relatively impervious; there is little osmosis.  Online peer groups closely mirror offline networks and yet whilst our peer networks evolve the design of online social networks is relatively static.  Once a friend or contact, always a friend or contact, barring some cat fight or major faux pas.

We see a rather clumsy acceptance of our changing relationships in this Facebook notification, which is polite and pleasant, gently suggesting that I’ve not been very communicative with Louise and I should “catch up” but it doesn’t give me a ‘hook’ around which to start the conversation (such as her recent status update).  It might be more engaging to say…

You know, just being a bit more direct.  Now, this isn’t particularly polite and I’m not sure guilt is the best place to start in fostering a friendship, and it could well be that I’ve just been away for a while, or perhaps I communicate with Louise regularly in some other context, but the simple thought remains: relationships evolve and we’re not doing much to reflect that with what we build.

I’m thinking that we should perhaps build in a half-life to relationships, like we develop character ‘engines’ in games.  Because some relationships do decay don’t they?  Some ebb and flow.  Perhaps we should create a sort of transparency over their avatar around some basic algorithm for relationships, like frequency of contact, type of contact etc.

Anyway, I digress. So, with the exception of Teenage Boys we don’t mix well.  Many teenage boys over the age of sixteen (and er, some social ‘outliers’) are willing to risk the embarrassment and awkwardness of contacting and introducing themselves to strangers in the context of social networks for the potential reward it offers.  You know.  From research we’ve done we also see that playing platform games with strangers online also increases boys social confidence (and it is primarily boys that play online with strangers).

What was interesting about this research was how the boy’s forward-ness caused friction amongst girls in the peer group. They’d discuss and debate this boy – class, taste, values, looks, communication.  He’d be a “play thing”, virtually tossed around and tested.  The unintended consequence was that the girls talked a lot more; he was their ‘social object’, if only temporarily.

If you’re not a teenage boy then the only time you’re likely to extend your network and mix is on joining School, Uni, getting a new job, travelling or going clubbing.  These are the touchpoints for mixing and engaging with strangers, when we are receptive to new patterns, new behaviours, new ways of doing things. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that our social networks are now more stratified and impervious than ever (no, not necessarily the well educated geek community, I’m talking more generally).

So, what’s the value of mixing, of having more varied peer groups and communities? Well, there’s the possibility of better recommendations, greater serendipity, and of being more tolerant and understanding (and there must be other less worthy and more fun stuff too).

I’ve mentioned mixing between peer groups and communities being very limited but there’s far far more fluidity within peer groups.   Relationship status changes very frequently, especially amongst younger people (we grow more tolerant and more risk averse as we age). Amongst a study of instant messenger we found that girls especially have quite sophisticated category systems (taxonomies) for representing their relationships with others.  They change daily, as “cute boys” become “bleurgh” and “BF” (best friend) changes to “bitch”.  Whilst this seems extreme, it’s just a more explicit and amplified representation of the way our own relationships evolve and change.

But this fluidity isn’t represented in the way we manage relationships online.  There’s little negotiation.  These are “auto-friends” or “auto-contacts”.  Plugged in.  Always there.  The address book paradigm again.

Designing in friction and negotiation may not be something you’d want in spaces with high rules and norms. For example banks.  It’s not going to work well for traditional banks, or even market lending sites like Zopa. It’s just a bit wrong. Ecommerce sites may also be unsuitable… the product to checkout process flow is sacrosanct. But in creating new services for our internet enabled world of things, we’ve got an opportunity create better relationships and interactions and some of this thinking has about friction in the urban context has already been documented by Nico Nova, amongst others.

Where do we look for examples of friction, negotiation and playfulness that could act as stimulus for designing better services?

Folksy is an offshoot from Rattle (the company I work for). It’s a craft marketplace.  One of the unintended consequences of allowing lots of people to come together is that they choose what they want to do and in the last week they’ve been doing a swap, a like a secret santa, only around Valentines and mainly female to female.  I’m not sure there was any underlying reason other than surprise, serendipity, group reciprocity and being pleasant.   This type of thing builds trust in behaviours and communities. Surrendering control. Good Friction.

Taking this idea of surrendering control into more intimate zones, and rather than try and make recommendations, just use ‘fuzzy’ recommendations of others to state the obvious.  Wouldn’t this be so much more interesting than just seeing who was watching what?  You’d have some room for negotiation, for engaging.

I’m sure you’ve seen tweenbots. Alien-ness, getting lost and asking for help:  “Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal. [...] As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining its destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.”  Fab.

Clifford Nass from Stanford Uni has found that when things appear to behave in even slightly human ways, we assume they are human-like.  So, when we know something is a dog, we know it’s a dog.  When we see something that isn’t from a species we know about but it exhibits some human trait, moving for example, or has a rudimentary face, we’re polite.  We have manners!

Disorientating people and networks has all sorts of benefits, as any fan of JG Ballard will be aware, and it could take many forms, but exposing relationships to being reliant on others to complete a task is really interesting.  What would we be willing to do that for?

I want to suggest that humans actually just like dumb stuff more than clever stuff (the paperclip!) for lots of reasons but mainly because it gives us a point of negotiation, we can project, we can imagine.  The implication here is that the mechanism that drives engagement and friction can be dumb, like the cardboard ‘robot’.

Some relationships are really brief and seemingly inconsequential. But they’re actually really quite significant in providing a sense of the social, of the community and of norms of behaviour.  We come up against people and things every day. They offer points of friction. I know that the waitress in my local cafe knows my name.  I also know she’s unlikely to ever be my friend. That’s OK. Ephemeral relationships offer the chance to engage with people without any expectation of it having to progress.  What can we do with this?  Perhaps place specific contacts then become significant, bounded by near field technologies or other boundary defining tech?

The queue offers a similar offline example of friction.  Queueing is interesting because of the manners, the explicit sense of politeness that it signifies.  It’s also bloody annoying.  But it offers the chance to have conversations with other people and we can glean as much intimate information from a stranger in 15 mins as from a friend in 15 years.

Of the back of that, we build up a knowledge of others’ by seeing their patterns.  Of the people I know quite well (i.e. I communicate with fairly frequently) I know where they will be, at least city they’ll be in.  So my consumption of Dopplr is laregly about confirming what I already know. How could we introduce friction here?  How could we create negotiation and engagement from this?  For example, try and ascertain where your friends will be going next, see how existing patterns of behaviour are replicated going forward.

This is an experiment in engineering engagement. A team of artists created LED gender signs on the bathrooms of a bar and changed the signs over frequently.  It created socially awkward situations, a reason to talk, a reason to engage with someone.

It’s quite radical and only suitable for a context that is already quite playful (the bar), but nonetheless disorientating people could create some interesting forms of engagement.

And this is the “obligatory diagram” to create a scene of pseudo scientific endeavour… I feel like Charlie Brooker.

A lot of the examples I’ve just pointed to are not necessarily appropriate, they’re just cues, but you get the idea of how you can start to think about friction as the basis for ‘social’, about how you can start to question existing patterns of behaviour, and play with our manners and our etiquette.

]]> http://www.technogoggles.com/2010/02/we-are-friction/feed/ 2 http://www.technogoggles.com/2008/10/bibliometricity/ http://www.technogoggles.com/2008/10/bibliometricity/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:37:41 +0000 James http://www.technogoggles.com/?p=297 This post kinda came out of a presentation I gave at bathcamp and the previous post on The Cost of Knowledge.  That presentation was about how the domain of formal knowledge as presented by academic publications was needlessly costing us as taxpayers millions of pounds a year *and* yet still kept this ‘knowledge’ under copyright so you couldn’t access it without paying and so, it heeded the transfer of knowledge. 

As I was writing that talk it struck me that citations, the format for attribution in print, was fundamental to the structure of power that had emerged in higher education.  This post is about that.  It’s about how citations are technologies and the reason I think it’s interesting is that this presents a different lens on what we see as technologies which can help us do better Design Research.  The lens I want to describe is one espoused by Bruno Latour and others around Actor Network Theory.  They have an interesting take on technology which can be summed up in the following quote: “technology is society made durable” (Latour).   

Let’s begin with a story.  Derek is an academic, a lecturer in Geography at a “red brick” University.  He could rest on his laurels and take his salary.  But he wants to progress, get more money and become a senior lecturer.  One way to further his career is to do research.  To do research takes time and he either eeks out this time from his teaching schedule or he ‘pitches’ research proposals to one of a few research councils and grant bodies.  One project on “cities of data” is successful.  One of the requirements of the research is that it is made public.  The grant body does this.  However, the grant bodies publication has little kudos in the academic world and *it is not considered as a measure when being considered for promotion*, although the ability to get funding is.  So Derek needs to publish his work for peer review to be “measured” for quality by peers and if he’s successful it is published in one of a few journals.

Derek wants to pick a journal that will look ‘good’ on his record, something well known.  But another factor for consideration is how the journal is perceived in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).  The RAE is a process run by the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) that measures University department ‘quality’ based on their knowledge output. His choice of publication is based upon which will give him the best possible chance of receiving a high measure.  Popular publications measure more highly as higher supply supposedly pushes up the quality threshold.  Ony the very best is published.    

Derek references his peer group, people whom study the same or relevant subjects to his. In turn they reference him.  Those that break from the cycle of genre busting authors, those who create neologisms, signifiers to describe new concepts.  They get lots of citations.  They’re in the ‘head’ of the citation index and not in the Long Tail with it’s clusters of sub-discipline citation ‘niches’.

We can see from this simplified story how citations embed social practice, values and people. They are also the things around which these things cohere.  They are in short, technologies. They’re almost too innocuous to be seen to be ‘powerful’.  But they are: 

1. They’re the basis for academic standing – acknowledging an intellectual debt

2. They’re the basis upon which over £1bn in funding is distributed each year to academics and depertments in Universities to research stuff. Citations are the metric used for judging the rating by which funding is allocated.

3. Every year academics are hired on their ability to get cited. It’s a skill which in part creates ways of defining concepts (neologisms and new concepts being potentially more powerful ‘hooks’ for other people to reference).

And they have formats. It\s no wonder we’re educated in how to cite others’ work (see this list for a failry exhaustive description of different ways to format citations).  It’s a big deal. 

There is a committee looking at this apparently (thanks to someone at bathcamp for pointing this out with the ajoinder, “I know about all this stuff but find all the web2.0 stuff far more interesting”) called REF (Research Excellence Framework):

REF, which replaces peer-review judgments in science subjects with a
system of metrics, including a count of the number of times
researchers’ published work is cited by their peers..  (link)

The REF is basing its measure of how well researchers produce knowledge or add to the body of knowledge in circulation on “bibliometrics“.  It’s a whole new science of citations!

So what?  Looking at non-human things as cohering power can be helpful in Design Research.  Many researchers still look at people as the only active participants (popular in Humanist philosophy).  They have exclusive agency.  However, in describing how things happen and describing all the actors (human and non-human) involved in the process you can start to better understand where power resides.  In this instance not with the HEFCE or with the individual academics but with a textual format, the citation. This then could and should be a focus for thinking through the problem of Higher Education funding.

Update:
The Guardian has a good article of the effects of ‘bibliometricity’ which it argues is ‘narrowing’  study, making research more niche and resulting in academic research being gamed, becoming little more than a popularity contest:

Adding to the problem is the fact that methods to measure research
impact are becoming more numerical. For example, the number of times an
article is cited by others has become a proxy for quality. There is
even a formula that will reduce a researchers’ whole career to one
digit, called the H-index (http://bit.ly/H-index),
which been used for recruiting researchers for tenure in the US. “A lot
of people feel that their H-index is the most important thing on their
CV,” says Bentley.

This focus on numbers encourages both
researchers and journals to play games to raise their impact scores.
Some play harder than others. A journal called Behavioral and Brain
Sciences has come up with a nifty way of boosting its impact factor -
how often authors in it are cited. It now identifies a “target
article”, and then commissions a dozen comments to appear alongside it,
giving the article 12 citations directly on publication.

The game
playing in the UK’s research assessment exercise is another example,
says Bentley. “When considering what articles to submit for evaluation,
you may have this really good one in a low-ranking journal, and then
you have something in a high-ranking journal, and you always submit
that high-ranking article to the RAE even if you think that what you
wrote was much better in the other one.”

Worth a read.

And yet we’re still in a position where one of the main industries that create knowledge, Higher Education, are bound by arcane copyright laws.  I say arcane because there is no reason why they need be.  We have a situation where Bristol University – but one of the Universities I could get stats for but not atypical – spends £376000 on books in 2006/7 or £22 per student and £2 455 847 on serials or £142 per student.  Thats nearly £2.5 million pounds in one year on buying in the knowledge produced mainly by academics funded to do their work by the taxpayer through research bodies like the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 

There are approimately 171 Universities and Colleges of Higher Education in the UK.  They won’t all spend as much as Bristol.  But if the average spend was just half of that it would amount to £213 000 750. A lot of money for something where the cost of an open solution would be negligible and would actually be fit for purpose. 

But what really grates is that as a taxpayer and someone involved in research and who likes to knowl what people involved in similar research are doing there’s a big chunk of knowledge that I am excluded from unless I pay for it (again).  It’s copyrighted.  Danah Boyd has written about the frustration of being someone who is essentially doing Public Good and paid to share their knowledge of the world through the research work they’ve done, being tied down to a closed system.  Sure many academics can get around this by publishing drafts of their work or amended versions.  And some Universities are biting back by creating Open Access Repositories such as OpenDOAR (which now has over 1200 listings).  
 

Repair Shop by yboxochoc’s

According to the article Dyson has more-or-less singlehandedly kept the repair industry alive as it’s the only product that people bother to repair now [and i suspect Dualit too] because of their high replacement value, though computers and related peripherals don’t seem to obey the same economic principles probably because the diagnostics and repair work requires a laboratory environment!  But on the whole for white goods the disparity between labour costs and replacement costs has declined, whereas of course in the developing world [hate that term] you have cheaper labour re-making, recycling, breathing life into broken stuff; the disparity between product and labour costs is still wide enough for repair to be cost effective.  What struck me about this article though is how ironic it is that in an age where waste and environmental concerns are so critical and so mainstream, that we’re still chucking old stuff away; no business models have come around to cater for ‘repair’ and we’re still being seduced by ‘the upgrade’, new technology when more often than not existing stuff works just fine for the task at hand.  And nowhere is this more evident than in computing and computing peripherals inc. mobile telephony.  Nerds are responsible for perpetuating a waste culture that should now be an anachronism.  Marketers are of course talented in creating perceived needs and must-haves – witness the evangelical response to Apple’s iPhone.  So how could repair be re-invented?  How could it point the way to a culture of innovation and creativity?

• What happened to designing for a products death?  Life cycle management doesn’t seem to exist in consumables and white goods.  Disassembling goods should be something we could all do.  Make the organs of the product re-usable.
• Why not then have the repairman as the technical re-maker, a high end craftsman creating original pieces of industrial consumables to compete with the dualits and dysons. How great would that be? Personalised, unique maker-style stuff with its own story! 
• Or the repairshop as a retail end of a warranty service.  Generic labour-only ‘warranty’ and covering x branded goods could be the basis for a service.  You get stuff fixed, and advice on how to fix stuff in return for an annual fee and all you do is pick up the tab for the replacement parts and such a business could itself stimulate a business in making generic, copied parts.
• DIY fix-it sheds with trained mechanics and electricians to help you fix your stuff and in the process learn how to hack stuff anew.

Only in Shoreditch or Crouch End or Stoke Newington of course, but then most Springwise style Business 2.0 ideas seem to have this geographically bounded cohort as their target audience. 

Skimming Block, originally uploaded by superlocal.

I love the Far East.  I love the way they just get on and make stuff and then make more stuff to solve the problems of the initial stuff.  There’s no prevaricating, they just keep making instead of legislating, which is what we’re so good at in Europe.  Here we have a skimming block for RFID [which is embedded in credit cards over there and probably soon to be here].   
Makes me think of Matt Webb’s recent post on the excellent Pulse Laser blog about the rise of distributed manufacture in Japan and the use of interchangeable parts to make a complete product, rather than it being manufactured by one organisation.  This skimming block works the same way but for situations or experiences of the individual person -  in that rather than solving the problem for all in the ‘host’ technology [so working with all RFID chip users] you have interchangeable solutions for the range of technologies employed by the user.
In some scenario planning work I did whilst at the BBC one of the stories had the rise of technical ‘plumbers’ to solve problems you had with interoperability, or rebellious technology.  Workarounds necessary for the myriad of different socio-technical relations that emerged in the digital age.  That service and the sorts of products as this,above, seem increasingly plausible  cf. the discourse of the future which had all our ‘technology’ as pure, whole and inter-operable. But is the UK economy set up for that or are those products and services going to be imported or offshored?

I’ve been researching craft markets for a while now and the thing that I notice when I’m listening in on conversations is how fantastic people find the experience.  The experience.  Not really the products so much, good and full of stories as they are, and yet it’s nothing spectacular, there’s no entertainment or special effects. You’re just mingling, socialising with strangers and creativity and in that sense markets are an antidote to the very functional retail experience that shopping has largely become.  They’re also a source of cultural capital a means to find new produce, new things to talk about and recommend in much the same way that we rely on peers or experts or recommendation systems to help us manage choice and find new books or music or video. So markets seem support a similar function, here the market itself acts as an arbiter of choice and not just the individual and their peers who are browsing.

I’m sure markets will continue to thrive as food miles, local produce [and identity and provenance] become more of an issue, though I suspect they’ll remain distinctive in their cultural capital [this is after all  about 'creativity' and the best markets will be those that manage to foster the most creative telents] and will remain out of the mainstream, a bit part in the repertoire shopping behaviour of the swollen middle classes, but a more influential bit part.

Anyway, top notch cupcakes and fab tees by local artists

And whilst on the subject of Craft I need help to think of another term to describe handmade goods, because Craft signifies staid, old  fashioned and  well, a bit  cardigans and  Auntie’s woolly jumpers. The Japanese have Zakka, which I like.  Others?  I’ll find something at my next market visit to give away  to the best term, as decided by me

Other crafty links I’ve marked can be found via http://del.icio.us/mashedpotatoe/craft

Broadcast:

Here:

• The value is intrinsic to the media itself e.g. a TV programme and there’s a simple general revenue model for it to work [subscription or ads - based on viewing figures proxied by time of day etc.]
• The rights framework is built with that in mind, the rights holders paid for their bit of the media etc. and if the distributor cannot control supply through the medium e.g. decoder then the media must be controlled e.g. DRM
• The primary constraint here is limited supply.  The legal and political framework only allow for a small number of ‘broadcasters’ and to get involved in that is expensive and risky and consequently the barriers to entry are high.
• Any ‘sociality’ around the media is defined by either ‘locally’ produced feedback loops around say the [cliched] water cooler or, more abstractly, as a feedback loop through the media, in say TV guides or reviews.

Networked:

Here the:

• Media value is increasingly defined through the ‘sociality’ of the media itself, that is the ‘links’ that serve to define it in the ecosystem, rather than in the asset itself.
• Consequently value is distributed with the media [which is the case in the broadcast model only in the broadcast model that was pretty much everyone or everyone divided by x]
• The feedback loops are key in defining the value of the media and these loops are not constrained by space or place but play out through them – so you get feedback in the form of recommendation systems that are very public.
• Nor are these feedback loops constrained by time and the physical limitations in the broadcast model.  The loops are ‘immediate’ and are on the whole very ‘transferable’, contained within URLs or even in chat histories via AIM etc.   
• Neither are the feedback loops defined by formal hierarchy – informal [digg] mixes with formal, organised feedback [metacritic] as defined by the status of the reviewer.
• Advertising is the main means through which to generate revenue but this revenue may not fall to the media creator / owner as the media is copied, distributed and published elsewhere.
• Policing this environment is virtually impossible although community driven ‘social  policing’  through  individual reporting can be highly effective.

Of course trhese are two polarised ideals and the reality [at present, before IPTV] is we live with a mix – with some media being bigger than others, or at least more social or popular.  But what I’m getting at is that value is driven by the ‘ghost-like’ relations of links, by the ‘communicative morass’ rather than the media itself.  Blogs, AIM have their own place in that mix that can be defined by speed and fixity.  Blog and link aggregators are the nodes, akin to the FTSE, there to be gamed and played once measured.   AIM, txt, the more intricate, ‘local’ and immediate narrative that is often ephermeral, disappearing as quickly as it came but no less important for that.  Services like Twitter and Dodgeball only serve to facilitate and play on this communicative need.  And as more metadata, links, and  narratives come into existence so media must adapt to play out with them in the form of feedback loops.

However, many people I speak to who are involved in media production are still fixated on the media itself, which of course has to be brilliant but  is just part of the ‘design’ for creating successful genuinely ‘new media’ that pays.  The audience are now more integral than ever to the proposition and how it plays out.  Steven B Johnson sums this up in Emergence from 1991:

"The most significant thing for the web.. is not its capacity to stream high-quality video images or booming surround sound; indeed, it’s quite possible that the actual content of the convergence will arrive via some other transmission platform.  Instead, the web will contribute the metadata that enables these clusters to self-organize. it will be the central warehouse and marketplace for all our patterns of mediated behaviour, and instead of those patterns being restricted to the invisible gaze of Madison Avenue and TRW, consumers will be able to tap into that pool themselves to create communal maps of all the entertainment and data available online." [Steven Berlin Johnson 1991 Emergence p220].

All pretty basic stuff now but quiet prescient all the same and ahead of its time.  In talking through the implications of this nascent ecosystem to indies etc. they inevitably want to know how they can evolve to remain relevant to audiences that are increasingly getting recommendations and media itself [youtube, torrent files etc] from the web.  The basic question for such companies is: "how can we retain or maintain revenue from media when it’s massively distributed?". I’m not sure that anyone who owns IP in the digital age knows the answer to this.  But I’m not sure that there is an answer.  Media that is IP protected will struggle to be social in a networked
ecosystem.  And if it ain’t social then you’re going to have problems
getting it noticed and making money from it.  No, you have to move from a model whereby the media itself is intrinsically of value to a model where you use the social to develop new business models.  Easy stuf, for example:

• Translate. Get people to pay for transferring one media into another.  Just like printing has become a winner for static media e.g. moo for flickr and blurb for blogs, so ring-tones and paid for podcasts etc. have worked for exploiting traditional media.
• Relate. Start to create metadata around the media which can be used to drive discovery [e.g. delicious] and consequently ad revenue.  Then own that data.

Works within the existing framework, exploiting essentially dead media, like any artefact or product.  Packaged dead media in the form of formats like Wife Swap and Super Nanny are still the most lucrative [because they are 'transportable' and 'transferable' assets] but it is precisely their ‘dead’ nature that limits their potential in the networked digital world of the future. Going forward networked digital distribution allows is to give media life – to make it  inherently social by developing feedback loops or ‘ripples’ and therefore creating more opportunities to spin off into other [older] media [translation], or initiate subscription for extra functionality around a service and of course drive advertising into new areas.  To produce more social media, you need to get people [both end consumers and developers / producers] involved in creating or augmenting media in the first place and to play with the variety of things that influence the media such as links, metadata and narrative.

Enough waffle, I’m going to try and knock this into something meaningful soon.

Met up with Danny Dorling last night, Professor Danny Dorling to you, master of maps which actually kind of underplays the incredibly important role he has in defining social policy, especially in the UK.  Anyway, aside from some mutually supportive moan on why you just can’t win trying to be a new dad and all this modern man business is a cynical attempt by feminists to allow us to believe we’re empowering ourselves when [tailed off into drunken half-baked rubbish...] we discussed World Mapper, one of the most fantastic map resources on the web and a product of Danny and his team which they’re due to complete very soon.

Map of those living on less than $1 a day

And each of the maps has fantastic  notation:

The first Millennium Development Goal is to halve, between 1990 and
2015, the proportion of people who live on the equivalent of US$1 a
day, or less. In 2002, an estimated 17% of the world population lived
on this amount. They lived on less than or equal to what, to be
precise, US$1.08 would have bought in the United States in 1993.

In
over twenty territories more than a third of the population lives on
less than US$1 a day. All but two of these territories are in Africa.

The largest population living on US$1 a day is in Southern Asia, most of whom live in India.

It’s a fairly exhaustive attempt to map the key data that defines ‘us’ in the world and in the process get you to think!  [Maps are such a great stimulus for visually representing data.  It's probably no surprise that so many information architects / designers  are map freaks]. 

The main issue for World Mapper and the people behind it, is how to make better use of a resource which is probably, according to Danny, the last of it’s kind because, going forward there will be such an abundance and a variety of data that mapping it will be so much more difficult.

So how to make better use of it?  If you have an idea either Danny or myself would love to know.  There’s no API, though to be honest it’s difficult to know what this could allow anyway, the real value is in the imagery but there is a partial RSS feed.  The data itself is available to use in xls format [and someone could do a job in making this machine readable...] as are the images, released on an attribution, non-commercial share-alike license though the website is far more ambiguous about this [it isn't creative commons because that could inhibit some major media exercise with partners etc].  Thoughts on how this could be more useful…

Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before

The attention economy, originally uploaded by JamesB.

Too much noise. Secondary signs – the clock, ‘the orange jacket’ – become filters.  How simple would it be to create  a physical IA here that was navigable? What can offline learn from online?

And relatedly, how can you create a measure for the ‘negative externalities’ associated with excessive advertising to argue against urban spam?   There’s a weight of anecdotal evidence but all that does is act as a cue for clients to want yet more "hard hitting" work (sigh).  There’s market failure right there but you don’t see a way for media standards bodies to intervene for the greater good and part of me would object if they did – as you’d lose a lot of creativity in [guerilla / ambient] media planning.

Oily Bird, originally uploaded by olivander.

I’m struggling with the mantra of digital strategists like Seth Godin who argues that we need to make things as simple as possible for people:

We like things that are simple, not complex. Issues where we can take action without changing very much. If a marketer brings us a new idea, it’s either ignored or it’s a problem. A problem because we have to do something with the idea. Buy the new suit, trade in for the new car, install a new IT solution or change the way we feel about an issue.

The best problems, as far as a consumer is concerned, are those that can be solved quickly and easily, with few side effects.

In other words you keep things lubricated, you reduce the friction of the ‘social’, you make things easy and value the ease with which you can engender a relationship.  Compare this to the "ethics of inconvenience" put forward by Will Davies, who argues the need for an understanding of friction as social value…

I spoke at this conference earlier this year, discussing what digital technology offered the voluntary sector. One of the things I raised as an anxiety was an advert in the paper from that morning, in which Oxfam were claiming that ‘One click. That’s the difference between life and death for millions of people’ (part of their current I’m In campaign). On the one hand this is a fairly transparent and innocent attempt to ride the wave of the Make Poverty History campaign which ended last year, but on the other, it’s just a pack of lies. My medicine is a bit shakey, but I’m fairly convinced that One click is not the difference between life and death for even one person, let alone millions. The dilemma these charities face is how much to see the internet as a way of lowering barriers to entry, and how much to see it as a potential dilution of the issues at stake. And the problem is that barriers to entry tend to be constitutive of the value of action. The fact that it is a pain in the arse to write a letter, attend a meeting, dress up as batman and climb a monument, run for parliament or wage a decades long campaign for recognition, is why these actions are both admirable and effective.

I find both arguments persuasive.  My gripe is not just with the ethics of saving-the-world endeavour being promoted as easy and simplistic but the glut of things that stem from it being easy to join making the attention economy such an issue in the process.  Take Flickr.  Every day I’m offered the opportunity to join a new flickr group – I’ve already got more groups than I possibly know and rarely use any of them – and am told I’m a new contact for blah blah, who it transpires has 3457 contacts.  And of course it’s not just flickr, it’s the whole of social media where quantity equates with value. So much so that it undermines the social ‘media / ‘software’ it is predicated on.  In an online world the ease of being social undermines the value of relationships and consequently, over time, you put less effort in and you value the experience / contact / object less.  Consequently, diminishing, if not negative, returns set in [and probably lower than the Dunbar number of 150 which has been identified for a community to be cohesive as you and your contacts do not constitute a community in this sense, more a cohort or sub-set within the community].   

So if it is time we started appreciating quality rather than quality of relationships, friction rather than ease, how do we sell that into people?  How do we make ‘social media’ that values less rather than more? What does a strategy for ‘marketing friction’ to create lasting value between people and brands / issues look like? It’s clearly not what Oxfam are doing, so who is?