We’re wrong to think that today’s powerful social media tools are particularly groundbreaking – they are in fact a return to working methods that were popular centuries ago.
At least, that’s Charles Leadbeater’s argument in my Easter reading, the excellent book We-Think – Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production. I haven’t finished the book yet, but it’s already proved to be highly accessible and more dynamic/exciting than the slightly worthy Wikinomics.
Leadbeater’s point is that collaboration and sharing are as old as village life itself, and digital technology has forced concepts like ‘the commons’ to rise again through its leveling effect on all media. He reminds us that most of the great stories – from the Bible to the works of Shakespeare – were born from a history of shared storytelling, with bits added and changes made by whole range of voices.
It’s well worth bearing this in mind when worrying about the way traditional publishing/broadcasting is being decimated by the unstoppable march of progress. Huge profits for a few rights-holders can no longer be assured, but we’re not going to see the end of culture that some of the more blinkered commentators like to predict.
I imagine the rest of We-Think is going to be equally optimistic, and I can‘t help agreeing that all this is a natural progression from a rather brief period of human history where a few people controlled the storytelling tools for a while.
Seeing as Miami’s Winter Music Conference is now in full swing, we’ve been monitoring social media activity around the annual orgy of electronica. (Ok, so it’s a poor second to actually being out there. Poolside. In the sunshine. But it’s as close as we’re getting this time).
While there’s unquestionably more content than ever in terms of regular blogging, live streams (check out the new Awdio), pics and tweets going up ‘as it happens’, tracking this coverage down is a real hit and miss affair.
The experience highlights the shortcommings of Google when it comes to real-time and current events searching. Twitter search is better for catching links to live/fresh content, however the results are dominated by people saying ‘wishing I was at WMC’ as opposed to actual relevant media from out there.
Huge events like WMC really lend themselves to all kinds of digital media experimentation. When we reach a point where all the material can be easily found in one place everyone will benefit.
The Kyte player above is a project we worked on at Ministry of Sound during WMC 2008. I thought more people would be onto this kind of ‘live from my mobile’ footage this year, but phone livecasting is yet to capture the collective imagination (so far…) and they are all probably too busy enjoying their poolside strawberry daquiris right now anyway.
A birthday bash for a 1-year-old I attended at the weekend revealed a great example of how people are creating their own personalised communications systems using free web tools.
The parents had no fewer than 3 laptops set up, all running Skype video connections so relatives in various parts of the world could join in the singing of ‘happy birthday’ to the little boy.
The grandparents in Malaysia were propped up on the sofa while an uncle and aunt in Manchester were on the windowsill. The connections were clunky and eventually went down, but as an indicator of the changes such devices are already making to our daily lives I thought this was a great effort.
Knowing that the gathered toddlers will be looking back on the photos one day and laughing at the ‘prehistoric’ technology we employed is a reminder of the pace of change that continues to effect us all. My own 1-year-old had already spent the morning making faces at her 92-year-old great grandmother on Skype, who was of course the far more bemused of the two.
It looks like future generation’s ‘can’t work the video recorder’ moment is going to come earlier and earlier.
One look at the papers tells you that our favourite micro-blogging service has well and truly been picked up as the ‘trend du jour’ by the UK press.
From freesheets to broad ones, vast columns are currently stuffed full of Twitter related chatter. Be it lazy reporting on yesterday’s celebrity tweets, or repeated discussions of whether the platform ‘has become mainstream’ yet, it’s difficult to escape.
This obviously rubs some people up the wrong way. Witness the haters deriding Twestival on the Guardian PDA blog. And all that bile aimed at a charity event!
It actually really excites me when an emerging communications medium gets slagged off. Then you know it’s already challenging the status quo. Twitter is now so completely mainstream (how edgy can something that Phillip Schofield is using on This Morning really be?), but because the gulf between those who accept and use social media and those who don’t, or won’t, is so sharp, you can get the false feeling that using things like Twitter is still the preserve of a clued-up few.
It reminds me of when I owned a mobile phone back at college in 1995. I was hardly an early adopter, yet among my fellow students at the time, having it was considered totally bizarre. “But what on earth do you need it for?” was the regular question, along with sniggering about looking like a drug dealer or city slicker. And this was on a media and communications degree.
Sure the volume of bandwagon-jumping press stories and the cutesy twlingo is annoying. And as the experience of platforms from Friends Reunited to MySpace has shown, an explosion of up-take is no guarantee that your system is about to replace email just yet.
However it’s fairly safe to say that Twitter has proved that micro updates have a huge role to play in the future of how we communicate. (Way beyond having slightly weird ‘relationships’ with celebrities and being bombarded with impersonal PR messages, too.)
Fierce resistance is all part of the process these new tools undergo in becoming an essential part of our lives, but it will be quickly forgotten. After all, who thinks having a mobile phone is ridiculous today?
Brits have shown the world just how preoccupied with the weather we really are via the medium of Twitter. The dumping of a few inches of snow and the subsequent, inevitable shut down of Our Roman/Victorian era transportation network lead a lot of people to be stuck at home Twittering about the ‘arctic’ conditions.
The #uksnow tag was beating even #superbowl at certain stages on Monday, highlighting the huge leap in popularity of the micro blogging platform in the UK in the last few weeks.
Within hours of the first flake falling, a Google Map mashup was inviting people rate the snow in their postcode out of 10 with a simple Twitter text message.
Then once workers realised they weren’t possibly getting to the office, the avalanche began. #uksnow comments dominated the conversation – and to some extent still do right now. Photo service Twitpic featured a hell of a lot of snowmen and ‘picture postcard’ back garden scenes, and some genuinely useful travel information was also available too.
It was an exemplary show of the shared national joy/misery that a bit of snow causes us (that must have proved thoroughly unfathomable to people in other snow-prone climbs), but is the Twitter response just the latest social network fad? Certainly the hastily arranged flash event in Trafalgar Square @snowballfight smacked of trying too hard.
It seems unlikely that the Great British public will rush to post an image of their back garden every time it snows from now on. So to that extent we are witnessing the excitement at discovering a new toy. Yet the whole episode also reveals how people wish to use their media these days – to natter about the issues of the day in real time, and to have a nose around to see what other people are experiencing. The most basic human social instincts catered for in 140 character text messages and endlessly similar grainy photos.
It all hints towards the ways we’ll be communicating in the near future, even if it seems a bit silly now. The news networks, (who have really gone overboard with their coverage of the conditions), will take the hardest hit when people automatically turn to Twitter for all they need to know about shared events like this in real-time. It may only be text messaging, but the service has already proved it’s superiority as a medium, and we know this is only early days…
The inauguration of President Obama this week was groundbreaking for loads of very well documented reasons. The mainstream media have done a good job of highlighting the role that web technologies played in the historic election victory. Yet I thought some of the most exciting uses of social media were on display on inauguration day itself.
CNN’s hook up with Facebook looked like a good interactive idea, although when we checked out the ceremony at cnn.com the site could only stretch to congratulating us for having ‘made it’, but didn’t have enough capacity to actually show us the live stream. Thankfully the guys at Obama fave UStream had things completely under control for trouble-free laptop viewing of the historic fudging of the oath.
If ever there was a time for Twitter to go down it was this and although we did notice some sluggishness, it proved to be the most valuable resource for hearing the true ’voice of the people’, particularly via the excellent http://obama.twistori.com. Did 46% of Americans really vote for McCain? They’re being very quiet indeed.
Check out the Kyte player above for web tech evangelist Robert Scoble roaming around the amazing operation at Al Gore’s Current TV. Is this the future of live event journalism? It certainly looks like they may be onto something with those banks of people monitoring the vast public dialogue. That’s where the scoops come from today.
Will the UK - we’re told this week that Twitter penetration is surprisingly higher here than in the States - embrace such media innovation around our own election time?
