apophenia :: web2.0

September 25, 2008

Understanding Socio-Technical Phenomena in a Web2.0 Era

Earlier this week, I had the honor of giving a talk at the opening of the Microsoft Research New England Lab. I have uploaded a crib of that talk, entitled "Understanding Socio-Technical Phenomena in a Web2.0 Era" for anyone who is interested in what I had to say. The abstract is here:

Web2.0 signals an iteration in Internet culture, shaped by changes in technology, entrepreneurism, and social practices. Beneath the buzzwords that flutter around Web2.0, people are experiencing a radical reworking of social media. Networked public spaces that once catered to communities of interest are now being leveraged by people of all ages to connect with people they already know. Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook enable people to map out their social networks in order to create public spaces for interaction. People can use social media to vocalize their thoughts, although having a blog or video feed doesn't guarantee having an audience. Tagging platforms allow people to find, organize and share content in entirely new ways. Mass collaborative projects like Wikipedia allow people to collectively create valuable cultural artifacts. These are but a few examples of Web2.0.

Getting to the core of technologically-mediated phenomena requires understanding the interplay between everyday practices, social structures, culture, and technology. In this talk, I will map out some of what's currently taking place, offer a framework for understanding these phenomena, and discuss strategies for researching emergent practices.

Videos of my talk along with the other talks at the event can be found here. For those interested in computer science education (or CS in general), I strongly recommend the one by Erik Demaine (where he makes a compelling case for how computer science is everywhere). For those into design, definitely check out the talk by Bill Buxton (where he refutes the notion that everyone is a designer). Both of these talks had me giggling and smiling for hours.

Category: web2.0

Tags: talk msr

   

Posted by zephoria at 6:46 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

August 15, 2008

I want my Olympics 2.0-style

Last night, I went to bed watching girls' gymnastics. I found myself very irritated. There were 24 girls in the finals, but NBC focused only on those that they thought would medal. The result is that there was tremendous downtime that the announcers filled with speculation, gossip, and historical reminiscing. I was quite irritated because what I wanted was to see more gymnastics. Anyone who is at the Olympics has to be fascinating to watch - why only focus on those who are likely to medal?

Come to think of it, everything about how NBC has covered the Olympics has been abysmal. Last weekend, I was with a hardcore copyright conservative who kept arguing that people watching the opening ceremonies online were cheating NBC out of money. I countered that what these people were doing was indicating what the market wanted. Many were happy to watch the Chinese CCTV version live instead of waiting until what NBC declared to be "primetime." Personally, I was quite annoyed with NBC starting around 5.30AM when we woke up to watch the opening ceremonies only to learn that they weren't covering it live. So, logically, we went to NBC's homepage to see if they were streaming it live. No. That's where I think that NBC fucked up royally. I don't know why they decided that the Today Show was more important than the opening ceremony, but they did. Still, there was no reason to not stream it live on their website. I would've happily sat through dozens of commercials to see it live. Instead, I TiVoed it and watched it sans commercials. Big win on NBC's part, right?

What NBC has tried to do is configure its viewers. They've told everyone how they should watch the Olympics and are peeved when people have a different idea of how they want to watch this symbol of nationalism. Normally, the people have no choice. Yet, because of the Internet, there's a lot of push for alternatives. Of course, personally, I'm just angry and annoyed. I can think of so many ways that NBC could've handled this better. What I want is Olympics 2.0.

I want an Olympics where the "best" is broadcast on TV, like now. But I also want an interactive version. Take gymnastics. I want to know on each apparatus who is up live. And I want to be able to switch between different cameras and choose my own view through the stadium so that I can watch whichever competitor I want. I want to be able to watch live, all day, on ALL sports (even judo and the other weird ones where Americans are not so present). I want interactive live and I want to be able to pull down and follow any individual Olympian or team through their events at a later point. I want the Olympics to be treated as a bunch of spliceable objects that I can remix live for my own viewing pleasure. And I want to be able to see it ALL. Is that that hard to ask for? Hell, I'd be willing to pay for such interactive watching options. And I'd certainly be willing to watch ads to see things LIVE. But boy does it annoy me to watch a "live" NBC broadcast that is already well reported on in the NYTimes.

So can I please have Olympics 2.0? And dear International Olympic Committee, please don't sell exclusive rights to the next Olympics to an organization who is doing more to curtail and configure access than to engage the market the way that they want to be engaged. And NBC, would you stop being so antiquated and leverage new media for what it's good for?

Category: web2.0

Tags: olympics media

   

Posted by zephoria at 6:13 PM | Comments (34) | TrackBack (0)

August 1, 2008

knol: content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation

Isaac Newton famously stated, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." This metaphor is commonly used to highlight the way that knowledge is not a single-author process. We build on what others do, explicitly and implicitly. While folks generally understand this, our culture focuses on the contributions of individuals. In the world of publishing, there is often a single author on the cover and little is known about the large and small contributions of a whole team of folks - the editors, the grad students, the reviewers, etc. (I especially love books "by" politicians where the ghost writer is never acknowledged.) More problematically, when people are measured by what they can attribute to themselves as individuals, there is pressure to either avoid collaborating with others or to steal credit. Neither of these are healthy.

I'm a big fan of collaboration and collective knowledge production and public good projects. This is one of the reasons that I love Wikipedia. Not only are Wikipedia entries the product of collective contributions, but both the small and large contributions are visible to all. Of course, contributing to Wikipedia needs to be an act of love because there are no traditional structures that reward such contributions. Wikipedia has its faults, but it is fundamentally the collaborative creation of a public good.

Google's Knol takes an entirely opposite approach to knowledge production. Knol's entire structure is built around single authors, control and individualism. There aren't even mechanisms for multiple authors and the tools available for collaboration are extremely limited. "Collaboration" still assumes a primary author. Linking between knols doesn't appear common and so there's no network of information. They key is authorship.

Since Knol launched in beta, folks have been comparing it to Wikipedia (although some argue against this comparison). Structurally, they're different. They value different things and different content emerges because of this. But fundamentally, they're both about making certain bodies of knowledge publicly accessible. They just see two different ways to get there - collaborative anarchy vs. controlled individualism. Because Knol came after Wikipedia, it appears to be a response to the criticisms that Wikipedia is too open to anonymous non-experts. The implication is that Wikipedia is the dribble of the unwashed masses. These same folks praise the control-centric Knol. Yet, I think Doc is right. A knol is quickly becoming a "unit of spam" instead of a unit of knowledge. Y'see - a system that is driven by individualism quickly becomes a tool for self-promoters. (And men...)

We're quite a few months into the Knol experiment. What I find particularly fascinating is that most of the knols that they promote on their front page are health-related, primarily by people who claim to have health-related expertise (doctors, nurses, professors) who appear to be copying/pasting from other places. Why health? What's motivating these people to contribute? (And why are they too lazy to fix the formatting when they copy/paste from elsewhere?)

Frankly, from my POV, Knol looks like an abysmal failure. There's no life to the content. Already articles are being forgotten and left to rot, along with a lot of other web content. There's no common format or standards and there's a lot more crap than gems. The incentives are all wrong and what content is emerging is limited. The expert-centric elitism is intimidating to knowledgeable folks without letters after their names and there is little reason for those of us with letters to contribute. While I don't believe in the wisdom of a crowd of idiots, I do believe that collective creations tend to result in much better content than that which is created by an individual hermit. (Case in point: my *$#! dissertation vs. any article I've co-authored.)

What makes me most annoyed about Knol though is that it feels a bit icky. Wikipedia is a non-profit focused on creating a public good. Google is a for-profit entity with a lot of power in controlling where on the web people go. Knol content is produced by volunteers who contribute content for free so that Google can make money directly from ads and indirectly from search traffic. In return for ?

When are we going to learn that the Internet is really good at collective action? When are we going to learn that getting people to develop and maintain bodies of knowledge on the Internet is an art? When the incentives are all wrong (e.g., Yahoo! Answers), the result is pure crap. When are we going to learn that experts alone never produce the best content? Hell, even a high school kid can improve most articles with some simple editing.

I don't think that Wikipedia is the end-all, be-all, but I do think that they've learned a lot over the years. And I think that we need to take what they've learned seriously and improve on it. I do think that Wikipedia could benefit from the contributions of experts and I would love to see folks think about how such contributions could be incentivized and rewarded. That said, I don't think that experts are enough. I think that they are only one part of the puzzle. I also think that Wikipedia is limited by its own scope. I'm glad that there are other projects under the Wikimedia Foundation, but I think that there need to be more and they need to be managed in context. For example, it's pretty clear that we need a WikiHealth. Of course, I think that this area needs to be addressed cautiously.

There are huge costs to having inaccurate information available when it comes to health. It's one thing to get the wrong diagnosis for your computer problem and accidentally destroy your machine. It's an entirely different reality to get the wrong diagnosis for your health problems and brick your body. You can say that people shouldn't take advice from the Internet, but be realistic. Our insurance/health system is so broken that most people can't afford to go to the doctors... and besides, doctors are amazingly good at being wrong. So what's the right structure for collective knowledge production around health? And no, Google, the answer is not people who self-report as doctors writing "definitive" entries about topics.

So, if I were to evaluate Knol, I'd give it a D. Maybe a C for effort, but points off for being so arrogant. Your thoughts?

Category: web2.0

Tags: knol wikipedia knowledge publicgood information

   

Posted by zephoria at 10:39 PM | Comments (36) | TrackBack (0)

June 17, 2008

markers of status: different, and yet the same

(I was asked to respond to some of Clay Shirky's posts on Talking Points Memo Cafe. I figured that this would be a good excuse to blog since I've been a bad bad bad bad blogger lately. What follows is my first blog response.)

Original Post on TPMCafe: markers of status: different, and yet the same

Speculating on social status in an age of networked participation, Clay Shirky accurately points out the ways in which metrics for status have become diversified. It is possible to gain satisfaction from achieving high status in World of Warcraft, even if popularity there is quite niche. In our ethnographic study of new media and youth culture, the Digital Youth group at Berkeley and USC also found that many youth involved in interest-driven digital practices rejected traditional status markers in preference for those that could be achieved in subcultures. Becky Herr and Mimi Ito examined different aspects of fan communities; Patricia Lange and Sonja Baumer looked at vid practices; Matteo Bittanti observed gaming culture. In all of their studies, they found diverse ways in which people marked and negotiated status, confirming Clay's suspicion that networked participation can alter the markers of status.

Now, here's the caveat... Just because status markers can be rearranged does not mean that they universally are. While we found tremendous examples of alternative status structures, the vast majority of youth that we studied used networked technologies to reinforce more traditional markers of status and hierarchy. While there are certainly youth who engage in a variety of geeky practices, the vast majority of youth use tools like MySpace, Facebook, instant messaging, and mobile phones to socialize with peers from school, church, and activities. The social hierarchies that exist in everyday life are replicated and reinforced online. While social categories do play a significant role in teen life, neatly defined cliques are not that normative. Still, gossip and boundary marking are part of everyday teen status struggles, online and off. In his book "Geeks, Freaks and Cool Kids," Murray Milner Jr. suggests that teens' particular obsession with status is because "they have so little real economic or political power" (2004:4). He argues that hanging out, dating, and mobilizing tokens of popular culture all play a central role in the development and maintenance of peer status. Just as these activities take place in school, they also take place in networked environments.

For most teens, the status that matters is that which is conferred in everyday life. Everyday friendship and dating matter more to them than the connections that they make online. This isn't that surprising because, for as much time as teens spend online, they spend very little engaging with strangers and far more connected to people that they know. Finding interesting music videos or gross-out content online may heighten status amongst peers if this content is valued, but becoming popular with strangers online does not transfer to popularity offline. This was best explained by Dominic, a 16-year old from Seattle: "I don't really think popularity would transfer from online to offline because you've got a bunch of random people you don't know it's not going to make a difference in real life, you know? It's not like they're going to come visit you or hang out with you. You're not like a celebrity or something."

Some of us have become celebrities online, or at least micro-celebrities. Both Clay and I have benefited tremendously by our presence online. We have achieved status through our knowledge of these spaces. Yet, we are by no means normal (in any sense of the word). I think that we'll continue to see fantastic examples of individuals achieving status through their networked participation, but I don't think that this will ever become mainstream. We will continue to see people achieving celebrity through online (e.g., Tila Tequila, Star Wars boy, Perez Hilton, etc.), but just as celebrity is rare offline, it will be rare online too. For those who invest massive amounts of time in particular subgenres of networked culture, we will also see tremendous achievements of status. And this will be tremendously rewarding, especially for those marginalized and ostracized people who never did and never will fit into more normative culture. But this is the marker of any good subculture. And we will continue to see new subcultures with new markers of subcultural capital. Still, my belief is that, for most people, status will continue to be about getting validated by peers in everyday life. I think that some of the ways that validation can occur is through mediated interactions, but I don't think we'll see fully mediated status. Of course, time will tell...

Category: web2.0

Tags: status hierarchy youth culture socialmedia

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:14 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

February 22, 2008

no conferences for me... no sxsw, no etech... wah.

No one seems to believe that I'm not going to SXSW or Etech or CHI or any other tech conference this spring. I was hoping to be far enough along in my dissertation to stop by each for a day or so, but it's not going to happen. Trust me, I really really really wanna. But I'm really really really not going to any tech conferences this spring. That said, you should. Everyone else that I know is going and it's giving me an achy breaky heart to think about all of the fun that I will miss while I continue to fester in my PJs writing my dissertation. Please, do go, listen to amazing talks, play werewolf, and ask the goddesses of late night partying to support me in finishing my dissertation so that I can join you in the fall.

(I will still be attending the iSchool conference because my committee will be there.)

Category: web2.0

Tags: conferences events

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:30 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

February 16, 2008

Who clicks on ads? (Revisited with data)

Two months ago, I ruffled some feathers with a post called Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean? Lacking any good public research, I pointed to a blog post by an AOL Global Advertising Strategy guy talking about research they did on AOL ad clickers. The report was by no means generalizable to all ad clickers, but it made a significant point: ad clickers are not representative of the population at large. Still, there were folks that were annoyed that I wasn't pointing to public data, especially when I continued on to make my own hypotheses about who these heavy clickers are.

This week, in a study called "Natural Born Clickers," Starcom USA, Tacoda, and comScore found that "the 6% of the online population accounting for most of the click-throughs skews toward male Internet users ages 25 to 44 with household income under $40,000." [see news brief; anyone have the full report?] "The study also found that their heavy clicking did not reflect high spending levels offline. They were also more likely to visit auction, gambling and career sites. The findings suggest that high click-through rates don't necessarily boost branding campaigns." In other words, "the click is dead."

This study finds that the age and gender of heavy clickers differs from what the AOL report found. (This probably says more about AOL users than anything else.) Yet, their findings also support (but do not confirm) a portion of my initial hypothesis that heavy clickers are:

• More representative of lower income households than the average user.
• Less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).
• More likely to live outside of the major metro regions.
• More likely to be using SNSs to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).

Folks tend not to like to hear that heavy clickers skew towards lower income levels, but I still believe this to be true. (For the record, 2006 median U.S. household income was $48,201.) Also, I should note that the population who uses SNSs to meet new people most likely skew male and 25-44, although not exclusively.

Hitwise also came out with new data this week: Yahoo search draws a younger audience, but Google users are more likely to spend more online. What I find particularly intriguing about their report is this graph:

Now, I don't know what all of these labels mean, but terms like "Affluent Suburbia" and "Upscale America" lead me to believe that the Hitwise bubbles are saying that people who spend lots of money offline are also the most likely to spend more than $500 offline.

Now, if you put these two reports together, you get a funny image of what's going on. Wealthier users are more likely to spend money online, but they are less likely to click on ads. Poorer users are more likely to click on ads, but not likely to spend money online except in a few verticals. Wouldn't this then mean that Google is more likely to get the eyeballs of those likely to spend money, but statistically less likely to make money off of their clicks? This would seem to conflict with the TechCrunch post that suggests that the Hitwise data proves why Yahoo is in deep doo-doo. Given that both Yahoo and Google search generate revenue through click-throughs and not impressions, wouldn't these two reports conflict with TechCrunch's assessment?

Category: web2.0

Tags: market business advertising

   

Posted by zephoria at 4:05 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

February 13, 2008

Discover Magazine video of moi

Last fall, I did an interview for Discover Magazine about my research. I still think that I look strange in video, but I figured others might appreciate it.

Category: web2.0

Tags: research

   

Posted by zephoria at 2:33 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

February 4, 2008

just because we can, doesn't mean we should

Learning to moderate desires and balance consequences is a sign of maturity. I could eat only chocolate for all of my meals, but it doesn't mean that I should. If I choose to do so anyhow, I might be forced to face consequences that I will not like. "Just because I can doesn't mean I should" is a decision dilemma and it doesn't just apply to personal decisions. On a nation-state level, think about the cold war. Just because we could nuke Russia doesn't mean that we should've. But, just like with most selfish children, our nation-state thought that it would be infinitely fun to sit on the edge of that decision regardless of the external stress that it caused. We managed to grow up and grow out of that stage (although I would argue that our current leadership regressed us back to infancy).

I am worried about the tech industry rhetoric around exposing user data and connections. This is another case of a decision dilemma concerning capability and responsibility. I said this ages ago wrt Facebook's News Feed, but it is once again relevant with Google's Social Graph API announcement. In both cases, the sentiment is that this is already public data and the service is only making access easier and more efficient for the end user. I totally get where Mark and Brad are coming at with this. I deeply respect both of them, but I also think that they live in a land of privilege where the consequences that they face when being exposed are relatively minor. In other words, they can eat meals of only chocolate because they aren't diabetic.

Tim O'Reilly argues that social graph visibility is akin to pain reflex. Like many in the tech industry, he argues that we have a moral responsibility to eliminate "security by obscurity" so that people aren't shocked when they are suddenly exposed. He thinks that forcing people to be exposed is a step in the right direction. He draws a parallel to illness, suggesting that people will develop antibodies to handle the consequences. I respectfully disagree. Or rather, I think that this is a valid argument to make from the POV of the extremely healthy (a.k.a. privileged). As someone who is not so "healthy," I'm not jumping up and down at the idea of being in the camp who dies because the healthy think that infecting society with viruses to see who survives is a good idea. I'm also not so stoked to prepare for a situation where a huge chunk of society are chronically ill because of these experiments. What really bothers me is that the geeks get to make the decisions without any perspective from those who will be marginalized in the process.

Being socially exposed is AOK when you hold a lot of privilege, when people cannot hold meaningful power over you, or when you can route around such efforts. Such is the life of most of the tech geeks living in Silicon Valley. But I spend all of my time with teenagers, one of the most vulnerable populations because of their lack of agency (let alone rights). Teens are notorious for self-exposure, but they want to do so in a controlled fashion. Self-exposure is critical for the coming of age process - it's how we get a sense of who we are, how others perceive us, and how we fit into the world. We exposure during that time period in order to understand where the edges are. But we don't expose to be put at true risk. Forced exposure puts this population at a much greater risk, if only because their content is always taken out of context. Failure to expose them is not a matter of security through obscurity... it's about only being visible in context.

As social beings, we are constantly exposing ourselves to the public eye. We go to restaurants, get on public transport, wander around shopping centers, etc. One of the costs of fame is that celebrities can no longer participate in this way. The odd thing about forced exposure is that it creates a scenario where everyone is a potential celebrity, forced into approaching every public interaction with the imagined costs of all future interpretations of that ephemeral situation. This is not just a matter of illegal acts, but even minor embarrassing ones. Both have psychological costs. Celebrities become hermits to cope (and when they break... well, we've all seen Britney). Do we really want the entire society to become hermits to cope with exposure? Hell, we're doing that with our anti-terrorist rhetoric and I think it's fucking up an entire generation.

Of course, teens are only one of the populations that such exposure will effect. Think about whistle blowers, women or queer folk in repressive societies, journalists, etc. The privileged often argue that society will be changed if all of those oppressed are suddenly visible. Personally, I don't think that risking people's lives is a good way to test this philosophy. There's a lot to be said for being "below the radar" when you're a marginalized person wanting to make change. Activists in repressive regimes always network below the radar before trying to go public en masse. I'm not looking forward to a world where their networking activities are exposed before they reach critical mass. Social technologies are super good for activists, but not if activists are going to constantly be exposed and have to figure out how to route around the innovators as well as the governments they are seeking to challenge.

Ad-hoc exposure is not the same as a vaccine. Sure, a vaccine is a type of exposure, but a very systematically controlled one. No one in their right mind would decide to expose all of society to a virus just to see who would survive. Why do we think that's OK when it comes to untested social vaccines?

Just because people can profile, stereotype, and label people doesn't mean that they should. Just because people can surveil those around them doesn't mean that they should. Just because parents can stalk their children doesn't mean that they should. So why on earth do we believe that just because technology can expose people means that it should?

On a side note, I can't help but think about the laws around racial discrimination and hiring. The law basically says that just because you can profile people (since race is mostly written on the body) doesn't mean you should. I can't help but wonder if we need a legal intervention in other areas now that technology is taking us down a dangerous 'can' direction.

Category: web2.0

Tags: socialgraph privacy

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:07 AM | Comments (34) | TrackBack (0)

December 29, 2007

Pew on teen social media practices (with interesting bits on class)

While I was off struggling with Leopard and pants, Pew put out another great report: Teens and Social Media. This report fleshes out what I noticed earlier - teens are much more protective of the content they post online than adults are. Yet, this report is sooo much more than that. Here are some of the new findings to whet your appetite:

• Digital images - stills and videos - have a big role in teen life. Posting them often starts a virtual conversation. Most teens receive some feedback on the content they post online.
• Email continues to lose its luster among teens as texting, instant messaging, and social networking sites facilitate more frequent contact with friends.
• More older girls than boys create and contribute to websites.
• Girls have fueled the growth of the teen blogosphere.
• Teens from lower-income and single-parent households are more likely to blog.
• Teens who are most active online, including bloggers, are also highly active offline.
• Most teens restrict access to their posted photos - at least some of the time. Girls are more restrictive photo posters.
• Content creators are not devoting their lives exclusively to virtual participation. They are just as likely as other teens to engage in most offline activities and more likely to have jobs.
• African American teens are more likely to look for college information online.
• Girls are more likely than boys to look up health, dieting, or fitness information on the Web.
• The number of teens who report instant message use has dropped since 2004.
• Visiting a chatroom has declined significantly in popularity since 2000.
• Fewer teens are buying products online.
• Wealthy teens are more likely to engage in multimedia Web activities.

Note: The bits on social network sites in the report are using data collected in late 2005/early 2006. Much of those findings were reported in an earlier Pew Report. I strongly believe that SNS use is up since then and that 55% is extremely low.

The whole report is extremely interesting (and I strongly encourage you to read it), but I want to take a moment to talk about the two statements that I bolded in the list above. What Pew's data shows is that online participation correlates with offline participation. They are not able to show causality (and they do not try to claim that they can), but such a correlation still contradicts the ever-present myth that online activities cause a decline in offline activities. Of course, don't misread this correlation in the opposite direction either. In other words, you cannot say that if you get a group of teens involved online, they will also get involved offline. Meshing these findings with my own qualitative observations, I have a sneaking suspicion that what Pew's data is pointing to is that the hyper-motivated and/or overly scheduled teens from middle/upper class communities are extremely engaged offline and use online technologies to socialize with their friends in the interstitial times and that this cohort's content creation is primarily to support friendships rather than create for creation sake. This also makes sense because teens who have more free time tend to have less restrictions and tend to prefer offline encounters with friends to online ones.

I wasn't surprised by most of their findings, but one of them did make me raise my eyebrows: Teens from lower-income are more likely to blog. Because of how Pew collects data, it cannot answer the question "why?" when it finds such correlations, but I figured that my qualitative data might provide some insight and so I went back through my data. When asked about blogging, most of my MySpace-dominant users would immediately talk about the blogs that they kept on MySpace while my Facebook-dominant teens would talk about how Xanga was "so middle school" and that "everyone stopped" because "it just felt really weird writing about my day to people that I didn't even care about." And then it clicked. As I pointed out last summer and Eszter saw in her survey, the MySpace/Facebook split is correlated with socio-economic status. Because MySpace supports blogging and Facebook does not and because many of the teens who were once on Xanga are now using one of the SNSs, it makes sense that teens from lower-income households are more likely to blog now. They are blogging on MySpace. Now, that outta be interesting when these kids hit college where blogging is used as an educational tool.

Category: web2.0

Tags: youth teen socialmedia blogging

   

Posted by zephoria at 4:40 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)

December 3, 2007

"Information Access in a Networked World"

Last month, I participated on a panel at Pearson Publishing along with three others from MacArthur's digital learning initiatives. I gave a talk there about the future of information access and I wanted to make the crib available for all who might find it of interest:

"Information Access in a Networked World"

In the talk, I outline three mechanisms of information access: push, pull, and osmosis. I then talk about how teens are engaging with information through these different processes, touching on educational learning, politics, Wikipedia, and social currency. I have a feeling folks might find it interesting, especially the educator and policy maker and parent types. Oh, and of course the information access people. (Oh, and embedded in there is a sneak preview of one of my upcoming projects re: Wikipedia.)

Category: web2.0

Tags: information learning networks wikipedia

   

Posted by zephoria at 8:23 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

October 9, 2007

my role in a marketer's dream

This morning, I spoke on a panel at the Retail Industry Leaders Association. The day before, a guy from Unilever gave a presentation on what happens when users take up your content and spread it all across the web. He was invited to be on the panel at the last moment because of a cancellation and because his presentation was so well received wrt Web 2.0. Right before we go on, I'm informed that the guy from Unilever was talking about the Dove Evolution campaign that was spread all over YouTube.

This is the moment where I went white.

Y'see... I played a role in that. I saw the Dove Evolution ad and wanted it to be spread around, especially to the anti-violence against women folks that I was connected to through V-Day and the teens who I was talking with. I was pissed off that it wasn't on YouTube or in any embeddable format (at the time it wasn't findable, but since, it appears as though people did post it before me). I knew it needed to be embeddable to be spreadable. So, with the help of some tech-savvy friends, I scraped the Flash video from the Unilever site and uploaded it to YouTube. And then I posted it to MySpace. And then I posted it to other video sharing sites. And then I sent it to a bunch of friends. And then I blogged about it. I knew it was interesting and spreadable and wanted it to reach certain audiences. So I scraped and uploaded and blogged. And I gave copies of the scraped version to others to upload in case someone tried to take it down.

I wasn't the sole contributor to its proliferation on the web. Other versions had more views and bigger blogs posted links to various versions. Every few months, I would get a letter from someone asking if they could use the video for this that or the other. Lately, people had been writing to me as though I was the producer of that commercial and I always responded that I was not. Collectively, this ad was viewed as important and because of this, various folks got involved in spreading it. Myself included. Beyond that, I didn't think about it.

It seems as though this "phenomenon" was a big deal to Unilever, an event that made them realize the power of Web2.0 and spreadable content. While I had been worrying about C&Ds as a result of reposting it, they were struck speechless by the spread and were all in favor of it. In other words, they were doing exactly what a company should be doing when something they put out there becomes a user phenomenon. And, somehow, I was doing exactly what a good "fan" should do, even though I had never thought of it that way. I tend not to analyze my own habits, but sure enough, I was helping fulfill a marketer's dream. Only it never dawned on me cuz I was busy observing others' activities. Oh, the irony.

Category: web2.0

Tags: marketing dove commercial youtube

   

Posted by zephoria at 2:44 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

August 13, 2007

For the record: I do not go to UCLA.... or to CalTech

In trying to layout arguments for educators about why Wikipedia is exceedingly important, I often have to hold my breathe when it comes to the policies and dynamics that really get my goat. I try to avoid my own Wikipedia entry because it makes me want to pull my hair out. It's been made very clear to me that I'm not allowed to be an expert on myself, but oh do I get annoyed when people use that as my bio (my bio is here). My favorite line from my discussion page:

Personally, I'm inclined to take anything from Boyd's website with a grain of salt, as Boyd's area of research is social networking, and for all we know this is some grand experiment on how the rules can be pushed.

Throughout the discussion, there's ongoing references to the ways in which mass media are credible and authoritative. In the last month, I've been cited in the press as being a student at both UCLA and CalTech. I'd like to state for the record that, while I respect both of those institutions, I've never been associated with either (although I've attended parties at both). I've also been referenced as an anthropologist, a sociologist, and a professor. My apologies to academics who get annoyed at me about these labels - I know that I am none of the above, but I don't know how to stop them from perpetuating. I've also been cited as working for companies I used to work at. I am not working at any company right now. (I also did not recently release a full report on a study of class dynamics in America.)

I'm trying really hard to figure out ways in which we can get youth to think critically about the construction and production of information. I believe that Wikipedia is a great source for working through and thinking about these issues, but I'm extremely worried about the ways in which Wikipedians fetishize mass media as ideal sources. Hell, I'm worried about the ways in which my own industry sees mass media as proof that the sky is falling. Media is often very useful for citations, but to assume that it is always right seems to be extremely dangerous, especially for a community that's fighting an image issue concerning the ease with which things can be edited and published. I also think it's dangerous for Wikipedia to perpetuate inaccuracies in mass media just cuz mass media said so.

To those Wikipedians out there who happen to read my blog - is there any conversation amongst Wikipedians about how to deal with mass media coverage? Is there any conversation about how mass media coverage is often biased or inaccurate? Why is mass media coverage so valued? (And why on earth am I notable because I'm profiled in mass media instead of because of why mass media was covering me?)

Category: web2.0

Tags: wikipedia

   

Posted by zephoria at 3:23 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack (0)

June 27, 2007

knowledge access as a public good

Over at the Britannica Blog, Michael Gorman (the former president of the American Library Association) wrote a series of posts concerning web2.0. In short, he's against it and thinks everything to do with web2.0 and Wikipedia is bad bad bad. A handful of us were given access to the posts before they were posted and asked to craft responses. The respondents are scholars and thinkers and writers of all stripes (including my dear friend and fellow M2M blogger Clay Shirky). Because I addressed all of his arguments at once, my piece was held to be released in the final week of the public discussion. And that time is now. So enjoy!

• Michael Gorman's commentary
• My response

Continue reading "knowledge access as a public good"

Category: web2.0

Tags: gorman britannica wikipedia

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:15 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

May 30, 2007

"Film and the Audience of Tomorrow"

As promised, i've uploaded the crib from my talk at Cannes for your enjoyment (and critique). It's about film, DRM, remix, MySpace, youth, fandom, film consumption, and other good things.

"Film and the Audience of Tomorrow"

Enjoy!

Category: web2.0

Tags: film DRM remix myspace fandom youth

   

Posted by zephoria at 4:01 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

May 2, 2007

maps + tech companies

XKCD has the best map today:

I couldn't help but think of an old post that i wrote about search engines as evil nation states of the 20th century, resulting in this silly image:

This had particular resonance today when a friend IMed me to say that Digg is like the UAE: it looks clean and modern on the surface, but it's no doubt corrupt as ever on the inside.

(For those who are unaware, Digg's users revolted yesterday over Digg's decision to block posts concerning the HD-DVD key. A bigger question has emerged over what else Digg quietly suppresses.)

Category: web2.0

   

Posted by zephoria at 1:52 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

April 3, 2007

Incantations for Muggles

I love Etech. This year, i had the great opportunity to keynote Etech (albeit at an ungodly hour). The talk i wrote was entirely new and intended for the tech designer/developer audience (warning: the academics will hate it). The talk is called:

"Incantations for Muggles:
The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life"

It's about how technologists need to pay attention to the magic that everyday people create using the Web2.0 technologies that we in the tech world think are magical. It's quite a fun talk and i figured that some might enjoy reading it so i just uploaded my crib notes. It is unlikely that i said exactly what i wrote, but the written form should provide a good sense of the points i was trying to make in the talk.

I should give infinite amounts of appreciation to Raph Koster who took unbelievable notes during my presentation, letting me adjust my crib to be more in tune with what i actually said. THANK YOU! I was half tempted to not bother blogging my crib notes given the fantastic-ness of his notes, but i figure that there still might be some out there who would prefer the crib. Enjoy!

(PS: If you remember me saying something that i didn't put in the crib, let me know and i'll add it... i'm stunned at how many of you took notes during the talk.)

Category: web2.0

Tags: etech crib muggles magic

   

Posted by zephoria at 7:29 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

March 16, 2007

web 1-2-3

I'm often asked what "Web 3.0" will be about. Lately, i have found myself talking about two critical stages of web sociality in order to explain where we're going. I realized that i never succinctly described this here so i thought i should.

In early networked publics, there were two primary organizing principles for group sociability: interests and activities. People came together on rec.motorcylcles because they shared an interest in motorcycles. People also came together in work groups to discuss activities. Usenet, mailing lists, chatrooms, etc. were organized around these principles.

By and large, these were strangers meeting. Early net adopters were often engaging with people like them who were not geographically proximate. Then the boom hit and everyone got online, often to email with their friends (and consume). With everyone online, the organizing principles of sociality shifted.

As blogging began to take hold, people started arranging themselves around pre-existing friend groups. In this way, the organizing principle was about ego-centric networks. People's "communities" began being defined by their friends. This model is quite different than group-driven structures where there are defined network boundaries. Ego-centric system are a (mostly) continuous graph. There are certainly clusters, but rarely bounded groups. This is precisely how we get the notion of "6 degrees of separation." While blogging (and to a lesser degree homepages) were key to this shift, it was really social network sites that took the ball to the endzone. They made the networks visible, allowing people to put themselves at the center of their world. We finally have a world wide WEB of people, not just documents.

When i think about what's next, i don't think it's going more virtual, more removed from everyday life. Actually, i think it's even more connected to everyday life. We moved from ideas to people. What's next? Place.

I believe that geographic-dependent context will be the next key shift. GPS, mesh networks, articulated presence, etc. People want to go mobile and they want to use technology to help them engage in the mobile world. Unfortunately, i think we have huge structural barriers in front of us. It's not that we *can't* do this on a technological level, it's that there are old-skool institutions that want to get in the way. And they want to do it by plugging the market and shaping the law to their advantage. Primarily, i'm talking about carriers. And the handset makers who help keep the carriers alive. Let me explain.

The internet was not *made* for social communities. It was not *made* for social network sites. This grew because some creative folks decided to build on the open platform that was made available. Until recently, network neutrality was never a debate in the internet world because it was assumed. Given a connection (and time and literacy), anyone could contribute. Gotta love libertarian idealism.

Unfortunately, the same is not true for the mobile network. There's never been neutrality and it's the last thing that the carriers want. They want to control every byte and every application that can be put on the handsets that they adopt (and control through locking). In short, they want to control *everything*. It's near impossible to develop networked social applications for mobiles. If it works on one carrier, it's bound to be ignored by others. Even worse, the carriers have a disincentive to allow you to spread bytes over the network. (I can't imagine how much those with all-you-can-eat plans detest Twittr.) Culturally, this is the step that's next. Too bad i think that inane corporate bullshit is going to get in the way.

Of course, while i think that people want to move in this direction, i also think that privacy confusion has only just begun.

Category: web2.0

Tags: web3.0 netneutrality mobile place presence privacy

   

Posted by zephoria at 8:48 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

January 31, 2007

SXSW, ICWSM, and Etech

March is rearing up to be insane and i want to invite you to come along for the ride. At SXSW-Interactive, i will be on a panel about youth on Saturday and doing an on-stage interview with my dear friend and mentor Henry Jenkins on Monday. I am an invited speaker at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media and i will be presenting there before rushing off to Etech where i will be doing a keynote on Wednesday currently called "Incantations for Muggles." These are some pretty huge talks and i'm both terrified and ecstatic. They're going to force me to sit down and write some new material. Tehehe.

Note: registration deadlines are quickly upon us. Feb 9 is the final discount deadline for SXSW and early registration for Etech ends Feb 5. These events are most fun when friends are present so come join me! (Oh, and for those who wish to howl, Jane will be running werewolf at Etech.)

Category: web2.0

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:38 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

January 3, 2007

some thoughts on 2007 (advertising, bullying, and mobile)

I love the idea of "social network fatigue." I can see the Prozac ad now:

Are you tired of your friends? Does reciprocity get you down? Do you dream of blockmodels? Are you afraid of the big bad structural holes? Don't worry... we can help!

OK... i admit, that was far more for my own entertainment than for yours. But seriously, the concept of "social network fatigue" boggles my mind. I realize that the prediction is really "Users will tire of large-scale, portal-style social network sites like MySpace and Facebook in 2007" but the framing of it as "social network fatigue" reveals the inherent problem in this prediction. Users aren't going to tire of their friends but they will tire of problematic social spaces that make hanging out with friends difficult.

Now, i'm not one to enjoy spouting predictions (notice discomfort in recent press interview) but i have to say that i agree with 80% of Fred Stutzman's predictions. Social network sites as we know it are not the end-all-be-all. They will fade and other services will recognize the value in adding social features to their site. Social network structures will become as ubiquitous as search or profiles. They will be a given, either explicitly ("are you my friend?") or implicitly (your phone contact list). That said, i think there are going to be some blood baths next year and i'm not looking forward to them.

For me, the question is: "are teenagers tiring of the highly-visible social network sites?" and the answer is both yes and no. The level of emotional enthusiasm i hear has dramatically faded over the last six months. It's taken for granted that it's the way to reach people, but folks have seen the pros and cons and are no longer slurping it up without thinking. The perceived presence of people who hold power over teens (parents, teachers, etc.) and those who want to prey on them (marketers, pedophiles, etc.) has done unbelievable damage in general teen perception. I'm astounded by how many teens i'm running into who are "scared" to go on MySpace because they've been told horror stories by everyone. It doesn't matter that the stories they repeat back to me are inaccurate - it's clear that mainstream news coverage had a huge role in shaping social network sites in 2006. I want to scream every time a teen tells me the story of the two alexes or about how Dateline "proved" that predators are going to stalk them. (Instead, i listen patiently and politely.)

More significantly, MySpace has turned into a massive zit full of marketing puss. Most teens don't mind advertising but when things look more like spam than advertising, you're in deep shit. Every PR organization and marketing arm is leeching onto MySpace like a blood thirsty vampire. Problem is that vampires kill their prey. Teens who wanna hang with friends are mostly protecting themselves by privatizing their profile (more cuz of the marketing predators than the sexual ones) but this quickly loses the luster, particularly when it's fundamentally hard to do what you want to communicate with your friends. (Simple things like friend management and better messaging tools would go a long way.) I'm very worried about how, unregulated, spamming and over-advertising will kill even the coolest social hangouts. I keep wondering what the regulation solution will have to be. (Is it law or code cuz it ain't gonna be market or social norms?)

I believe that teenagers are the reason that mobile will happen sooner than we think. I don't believe that the first explosion will be US-based. I am very hopeful about Blyk because i think that they stand a very decent chance of getting cluster effects working. (Note: the anti-corporate voice in me screams in horror at the idea of a free mobile service built on ads but there's no one i trust more in mobile than Marko Ahtisaari. I have much respect for the whole team and i think that a free phone will be extremely popular so long as they get a few things right.) I think that mobile social network-driven systems will look very different than web-based ones but the fundamentals of "friends" and "messages" and some form of presence-conveying "profile" will be core to the system.

What worries me most is that my gut says that 2007 will involve far too many hyper-visible examples of bad-teen-behavior. You think Nicole and Paris' fight is public? Wait until every teen in America videotapes their cat-scratching, hair-pulling, nut-kicking, all-out brawls and uploads them to YouTube. Those who hold power over teens are primed to obsessively stalk their behaviors and i don't think it's gonna be pretty. Forget dirty laundry, we're talking a full inversion of the house. (Personally, i can't wait until kids start videotaping their parents' fights or otherwise disrupting the power dynamics - that's going to make things super messy. ::shudder::)

I think 2007 is going to be spent working through issues of public life and privacy mixed together complicated power dynamics between generations and between producers and consumers. We're going to see legal battles, big corporate power plays (a.k.a. "bullying"), and media panic coverage meant to distract us from Iraq. We're going to see a disgusting increase in consumer advertising that will aim to saturate everything possible. (This is what you get for getting "old media" and "old business" online finally.) Personally, when i turn up the futurism dial, i wanna hide under a rock in 2007. Of course, it shall be interesting and i won't be able to resist peeking.

Category: web2.0

Tags: mobile sns myspace bullying advertising

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:01 AM | Comments (38) | TrackBack (0)

January 1, 2007

ephemeral profiles (cuz losing passwords is common amongst teens)

Sara created a MySpace using an email address that she made specifically for that purpose. After vacation, she couldn't remember her MySpace password (or her email password). She created a new MySpace page using a new throwaway email address. When i asked her if she was irritated that she had to do this after investing time in the previous profile, she said, "nah.. I had too many Friends that I didn't know anyways."

This snippet from my fieldnotes depicts an attitude that i keep hearing from teens that completely contradicts adult norms. Many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts in most places. Forgot your IM password? Sign up again. Forgot your email address? Create a new one. Forgot your login? Time for a change.

While adult bloggers talk about building an identity through extended blogging, i keep finding teens who got locked out of Xanga and responded by making another Xanga (or a Blogger or a LiveJournal). They have expressions scattered across numerous services with numerous handles. Some teens chew through IM handles like candy; their nicks are things like "o-so-funny" rather than the first name, last name standard that seems to pervade professional worlds. It's not seen as something to build an extensive identity around, but something to use to talk to friends in the moment.

Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They're going to a new site, they want to start over.

While this feeling of ephemerality is not universal amongst teens, it's far more prevalent than you'd ever see in adult culture and it has some significant implications for design:

• Focusing on "lock-in" will fail with these teens - they don't care if they lose track of something they put hours into building.
• Teens are not looking for universal anything; that's far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm.
• Paying for an account can help truly engaged teens remember their accounts (i haven't found any teen who permanently lost their MMO login) but it can also be a strong deterrent for those accustomed to starting over.
• The numbers that people cite concerning accounts created are astoundingly inaccurate and are worthless for talking about usage or unique participants. (added tx to a comment by Rich)

I should note that i don't think that the answer is "help teens remember passwords." I actually think that this tendency to shed is advantageous in the way that we shed clothes every year because the "old me" is no longer relevant. Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting.

Of course, i do expect everything to change with the mobile. While i don't expect teens to care about number portability (like their parents), losing a phone is a far more expensive proposition than losing a login (although it seems to be just as common amongst teens). I expect there to be a lot less turnover when accounts are tied to a phone. It'll be interesting to see if strong identity is loved or hated.

Clarification: This post is not intended to negate or devalue my previous work on how people use different nicks to represent different facets of their identity. This latter practice is common to people of all ages and has great value for impression management. How you represent yourself on LinkedIn is very different from how you represent yourself on Friendster and you don't want these collapsed. This post is meant simply to highlight another aspect of shifting handles amongst teens that is not common amongst adults; it is not intended to say that this is the only reason for new handles. (While losing passwords is common amongst adults as well, starting over happily isn't.)

Category: web2.0

Tags: youth teens passwords

   

Posted by zephoria at 10:07 PM | Comments (32) | TrackBack (0)

December 15, 2006

on being virtual

Lately, i've become very irritated by the immersive virtual questions i've been getting. In particular, "will Web3.0 be all about immersive virtual worlds?" Clay's post on Second Life reminded me of how irritated i am by this. I have to admit that i get really annoyed when techno-futurists fetishize Stephenson-esque visions of virtuality. Why is it that every 5 years or so we re-instate this fantasy as the utopian end-all be-all of technology? (Remember VRML? That was fun.)

Maybe i'm wrong, maybe i'll look back twenty years ago and be embarrassed by my lack of foresight. But honestly, i don't think we're going virtual.

There is no doubt that immersive games are on the rise and i don't think that trend is going to stop. I think that WoW is a strong indicator of one kind of play that will become part of the cultural landscape. But there's a huge difference between enjoying WoW and wanting to live virtually. There ARE people who want to go virtual and i wouldn't be surprised if there are many opportunities for sustainable virtual environments. People who feel socially ostracized in meatspace are good candidates for wanting to go virtual. But again, that's not everyone.

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it's not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don't. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don't call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

That's the big joke about the social media explosion. 1980s and 1990s researchers argued that the Internet would make race, class, gender, etc. extinct. There was a huge assumption that geography and language would no longer matter, that social organization would be based on some higher function. Guess what? When the masses adopted social media, they replicated the same social structures present in the offline world. Hell, take a look at how people from India are organizing themselves by caste on Orkut. Nothing gets erased because it's all connected to the offline bodies that are heavily regulated on a daily basis.

While social network sites and mobile phones are technology to adults, they are just part of the social infrastructure for teens. Remember what Alan Kay said? "Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born." These technologies haven't been adopted as an alternative to meatspace; they've been adopted to complement it.

Virtual systems will be part of our lives, but i don't think immersion is where it's at. Most people are deeply invested in the physicality of life; this is not going away.

Category: web2.0

Tags: virtuality mmogs immersion

   

Posted by zephoria at 8:07 PM | Comments (44) | TrackBack (0)

December 14, 2006

paris and Le Web 3

First off, Paris rox! I was not expecting to love it as much as i did. I mean, i *hate* cold weather and it's always a bit disconcerting to be in a city where it's impossible to understand 99% of what's going on. What surprised me is that my 2 years of high school French meant that i could follow basic things. Knowing simple words like "gauche" and "droit" were unbelievably useful (given how frequently i get lost). Plus, i could make enough sense of the menu to find duck (mmm... duck). Of course, my pronunciation of said words is ATROCIOUS. Anyhow, i could totally live in Paris (with some French lessons)... that was surprising to me.

Now, onto the controversial Le Web 3 conference... For those who don't follow tech gossip, it seems as though many people were outraged at how the conference was handled (and it seems to have provoked amazing amounts of juicy web drama of the teenage boy type). The dominant complaint concerned the fact that three politicians showed up, took the stage, and gave stump speeches. Others were upset because the tech talks were pretty generic.

Personally, i found the whole political thing utterly entertaining. I came to France expecting generic talks. We're talking a tech conference of 1000 people. Since most of these people haven't heard any of the presenters before, most of the presenters went with one of their solid talks instead of something more risque; plus, a lot of the program was panels and Loic reached out to us based on what we're known for. So, while i was stoked to see some of my favorite people speak, i didn't really expect to learn a lot from the talks themselves. (That said, i LOVED the talks by Marko Ahtisaari and David Weinberger; both gave me lots of ideas to chew on.)

I realize that folks didn't like the politicians because they felt as though they didn't pay to hear propaganda. I had a totally different take. For me, they were the best part. Why? Precisely because they didn't say anything. Everyone's always telling me that politicians now understand the web, want to be a part of it, want to listen to their constituents. I found the French politician's attitude proof that they were just as clueless as American politicians. They know that this tech thing is important but they don't actually understand it, and still they want to find a way to manipulate it to make them look good. I was particularly humored by the old media person who got up to be a complete contrarian, arguing that new media has no value. To solidify this point, he wouldn't let Loic actually translate what he was saying - he wanted to dominate the airwaves his way. Of course, this was all complicated by the fact that there were press - old and new - EVERYWHERE. I couldn't walk ten feet without getting interviewed by someone for a podcast, a newspaper, a live TV show, a blog, etc. It was obscene to see how many people wanted to "cover" the event... in fact, it seemed like there were more there to cover it than to listen to it. In that way, it felt like a political convention... Only the primary actor ("technology") was a concept instead of a person. Since we were talking about tech, talking about the agency tech had, i thought that the fact that the politicians were there making a mess of things was FANTASTIC.

All of that chaos meant that i got more out of Le Web 3 than i've gotten out of a conference program in years. Of course, there were downsides to this... I had to figure out how to cut my 30 minute talk to 15 on the fly on stage and i feel like i wasn't as clear as i wanted to be. That's unfortunate because i wanted to give a solid talk. Le sigh. Another thing that was uber depressing was that i knew 2/3 of the women in the room. People may bitch about there being no women speakers but at Le Web 3, there were no female attendees (other than femalepress). It was a sea of middle-aged white men dressed in business casual. After 4 days in Paris (a surprisingly diverse city), this was a complete shock. And i thought that American conferences were homogeneous!

The ever-present press also meant that it was really hard to just hang out and catch up with people that i knew. I find hallway conversations to be the highlight of a conference... and they were key to Le Web 3 too, but it was hard to get some privacy to talk to people. At the same time, it was super nice that there was only one stage, one main chitter chat room, and one place where everyone ate lunch. I really really liked the total immersion.

At the same time, i was sick as a dog so i only got to attend part of each day. I spent most of the first day trying not to faint and putting on the best ::blink::smile:: face that i could possibly muster. I couldn't attend the party, couldn't eat any food (or drink any wine), or even be a werewolf in Paris. Much to my chagrin, i spent a lot of time in the bathroom trying to stop the dizzy feeling. I had to spend the majority of the first day in bed; the second day was spent trying to ward off the terrible nausea. All of this made it really hard to really engage with folks and i probably came across as a total bitch when i'd fade out and then go run off to the bathroom. (Cuz "excuse me, i have to go to the bathroom" is a pretty known excuse to get out of a conversation... And i was forced to say that to probably 20 people rather than puke on their shoes.) Majorly unfortunate.

Yet, even sick as a dog, i really enjoyed the conference; i would totally go back. And hundreds of people bitching means that people got really worked up. While this is seen as a "bad" thing, i actually think it's pretty awesome. Then again, i believe in living life by doing things that will be memorable. Le Web 3 will DEFINITELY be memorable. As for Paris, i'd be happy to go back anytime.

Category: web2.0

Tags: paris leweb3 conference

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:24 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

November 25, 2006

making net neutrality relevant

Discussions concerning network neutrality have been occurring in the blogosphere for years now. Yet, at family events like Thanksgiving, i'm reminded of how incomprehensible this issue is to most educated people in this country. I'm curious if others out there are having difficulty explaining this issue (and its significance) to their parents, cousins, and other relatives who think email is a recent invention? What tactics have you taken?

Here's the best explanation i could muster:

Y'know how when you look at videos online, it's kinda slow? What if that slowness was intentional to dissuade you from watching those videos? I don't mean to get all conspiracy theory on you, but what if the cable company thought that the people putting the video up online were cutting into their main business so they choose to slow it down? What if they made it easier for you to acquire content that people paid them to serve to you? In other words, what if the network wasn't neutral? If you think of this in terms of freeways, what if the rich people were allowed to go faster than the poor people simply because they paid more taxes?

The reason that the Internet is so revolutionary is because (theoretically) anyone can get on that information highway, add information and consume others' information. While the Internet has not been the great equalizer that everyone wants, it's really important that the structure is as open as possible so that things can grow.

All around us, market forces are disrupting innovation and access. You know how you hear about neat things that phones do in other countries? The reason your phone doesn't do that is because people like me can't add things onto the phone without the permission of the telephone carriers (like Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.). This is because the mobile phone network isn't neutral. As a result, innovation is majorly hampered and in regions where there aren't these restrictions, development of new ideas is flourishing.

There are lots of ways to look at net neutrality. From one POV, you can see it as unpatriotic. It is destroying America's ability to innovate (although, from a global market perspective, you might not care or from a anti-innovation perspective, this might be a good thing). Another POV is that it's simply not fair (although you might not care about fairness and would prefer that the rich get richer). Another POV is that it closes access to information and makes certain that a few people control what information you get (again, if you're on a certain side of that equation, you might relish this).

But how do you make net neutrality something that people like my mother want to stand up and fight for? While i'm stoked that this war is going to be Goliath vs. Goliath (Google vs. the cables/carriers), i still think that educated people should understand what is going on. But i don't think that they do. And i don't think that our rhetoric around net neutrality makes any sense to them. How would you fix this?

Category: web2.0

Tags: netneutrality

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:13 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

August 28, 2006

open hack day at Yahoo!

Continuing on the geek thread, i'd like to invite everyone to Hack Day at Yahoo! on September 29. The way hack days work at Yahoo! is that you come with an idea of how to mashup different tools at Yahoo! and then you hack like mad for 24 hours. It's super fun and very geeky. You have to signup to go so make sure to visit the website!

Note: much to my utter sadness, i won't be able to go since i will be presenting a paper in New York that day.

Category: web2.0

Tags: hackday yahoo

   

Posted by zephoria at 5:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

geeks and werewolves (some notes on FOO)

This past weekend, i went to FOO Camp - Tim O'Reilly's annual sleepover gathering of geeks in the backyard of his office. (Yes, i camped in an office park.) Because some consider it an elite event (you must be invited), i get squirmy about screaming, OMG this weekend was unbelievable! But the truth is, it was. I can't do justice in providing a recap, but the conversations were quite illuminating and i felt refreshed, especially because i got to meet so many new and interesting people. One of the most fascinating of such new connections was Moshe Cohen from Clowns Without Borders. Laughter really is the best medicine. Speaking of which, there was much werewolf and a reverse scavenger hunt in cahoots with Ms. Jane. I even got to see Greg Stein give birth to a baby girl to break a tie! I'm really a big fan of connecting people through play and i love watching Jane do magic in engaging an audience. It really is great when people who should know each other first meet through play. One of the coolest things about Werewolf is that there is an intimacy that provides furtile ground for future professional conversations. I'm a strong believer that meaningful ties require more than just a work connection.

While i may have hosted far too many hours of Werewolf, i did also help host a session on teens misbehaving and attended many other talks. My favorite was a broad discussion about the future of IM hosted by Master Artur. I also got a prototype of a Chumby to hack. I haven't fucked with it yet but i'm super impressed by the cutsie-ness of the device, the shwag, the octopus, the name. There's just something that's so endearing about it. And it's fuzzy! Speaking of fuzzy, how much do you love Tim wearing my hat?? But anyhow, i will play with the Chumby and get back to you.

To get to FOO this year, i did a roadtrip with Kareem and Graeme from Fox. The conversation was unbelievably fun and uber geeky (in that delicious kind of way). Plus, we stopped at In-N-Out twice and i got to play with a really fun GPS toy that Kareem calls Peaches.

Returning for a moment to the issue of elitism, i want to highlight Bar Camp. Bar Camp started out as an alternative for FOO and some framed it as the gathering for people who are not "cool enough." There was animosity, jealously, and disappointment attached to it. It made me feel all guilty for going to and loving FOO. And then i moved to LA and connected to the Bar Camp folks here who have used that concept to build a community of geeks who gather monthly for food and are stoked to find ways to connect. Regardless of its origins, Bar Camp is an unbelievable mechanism for members of local communities to get to know the geeks amongst them. I'm completely in awe of how rapidly this meme has spread to cities around the world. During Bar Camp Earth this weekend, there were Bar Camps in Lithuania and India! In the next couple of months, there will be Bar Camps in places like Johannesburg and Shanghai. There may even be one near you.

One of the main reasons that FOO is closed is that it needs to be small to work. It was definitely pretty big this year, but still manageable. But it wouldn't work with 1000 people even though there are certainly thousands of geeks who would benefit from such community building. The cool thing about Bar Camp is that it's allowing many more people to enjoy the #1 benefit of FOO: connecting with interesting people. While FOO certainly has many Internet celebrities, Bar has people in your local community. The biggest value of both types of events is that they are doing so much to develop and enrich the geek community. While blogs and online connections are great, there's nothing like physical co-presence.

Update:

For those interested in what was contained in this year's scavenger hunt, Jane posted the complete rules as part of her write-up on FOO:

Please find the following objects:
1. A fully installed functional body modification (demo, please)
2. Spiritual computing object (demo, please)
3. A prop from the set of the 2042 Japanese remake of Snakes on a Plane (scene, please)
4. A viable alternate energy source (demo, please)
5. The new Third Life interface
6. When ThingLinks Go Wrong
7. Evidence of the most insidious viral marketing effort of the year 2007
8. The FOOFRACK™ Continuous Partial Attention Device
9. Proof that one of your team members is actually a Cylon, a Werewolf or a VC in disguise
10. A craft object from the BRAINS! Issue of Make Magazine (Vol. 13)

Rules:You have 60 minutes to “find” these objects.You can only use the 10 objects your team already has—no trading, no substitutions.You can hack and mod your objects any way you want.You cannot use an object to represent more than one item on the list.
Your success in finding these objects will be judged based on your live demonstrations and explanations. Prepare to be persuasive!In the case of a tie, teams will play a 60-second death-defying, single-object tiebreaker round.

Category: web2.0

Tags: foocamp barcamp

   

Posted by zephoria at 1:42 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

May 16, 2006

NextMUNI Mac Widget

For those of you San Franciscans who are always checking out NextMUNI to see how long you can procrastinate before leaving your house, now there a NextMUNI Widget for the Macheads.

(Tx David Nelson)

Category: web2.0

Tags: mac widget muni publictransportation

   

Posted by zephoria at 3:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

April 21, 2006

captcha gone very very wrong

Spam sucks - we all know that. While captcha certainly helps, it also alienates lots of folks. As a society, we've never been good at recognizing disabilities. I remember watching a near-blind computer user try to get past captchas and i felt terrible for what our industry does. Yet, i had never felt the frustration. Until today. The Webby Awards uses captcha on every vote. I wanted to vote for Cute Overload (omg... sooo cute) so i created an account to vote. It took me only 2 tries to get passed the first captcha. But the captcha that i got on Blog-Culture took me SEVEN tries to get right. I tried voting for two more categories - i got past the second one after 5 tries and then took another 8 to get past the next one. I gave up on voting. I wonder how many people stop participating because of stupid stuff like this? I'm trying to imagine my grandmother on her model dealing with captcha - that would so never happen (unless it looked like a Solitaire game).

Since i'm thinking about Cute Overload, i might as well share the picture from today that made me ooh and awww:

Category: web2.0

Tags: captcha

   

Posted by zephoria at 1:04 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

April 15, 2006

on being notable in Wikipedia

Back in July, Justin Hall created a Wikipedia entry for me. I found this very peculiar. I was also mildly intrigued by how i was described in such a setting. Since then, some of my colleagues have edited the entry and my advisors have taunted me continuously. The most that i could say was weird weird weird.

A month ago, a discussion emerged in the Talk section about whether or not i was notable and then i was nominated for deletion. My colleagues (who are also dear friends) were accused of crafting a vanity page. People wanted "proof" that i was notable; they wanted proof of every aspect of my profile. Then, when people in my field stood up for my entry in the discussion for deletion, they were attacked for not being Wikipedians. This was really intriguing to me, especially when Barry Wellman (who is an expert on social networks and online interaction) stood up for me. (I was completely honored.) Wikipedia is not prepared to handle domain experts. Of course, this is a difficult issue - how do you know someone is a domain expert? Still, something felt strange about the whole thing.

As the conversation progressed, people started editing my profile. While the earlier profile felt weird, the current profile is downright problematic. There are little mistakes (examples: my name is capitalized; there is an extra 'l' in my middle name; i was born in 1977; my blog is called Apophenia). There are other mistakes because mainstream media wrote something inaccurate and Wikipedia is unable to correct it (examples: i was on Epix not Compuserv and my mother didn't have an account; i was not associated with the people at Friendster; i didn't take the name Boyd immediately after Mattas and it didn't happen right after my mother's divorce; i didn't transfer to MIT - i went to grad school at the MIT Media Lab; i'm not a cultural anthropologist). Then there are also disconcerting framing issues - apparently my notability rests on my presence in mainstream media and i'm a cultural anthropologist because it said so on TV. Good grief.

Why does mainstream media play such a significant role in the Wikipedia validation process? We know damn well that mainstream media is often wrong. In the midst of this, the reference to my fuzzy hat had to be removed because it couldn't be substantiated by the press and because i didn't wear it on O'Reilly. Of course i didn't wear it on Fox - i was trying to get across to parents, not be myself. As much as i don't think of the hat as core to my identity, i'm very well aware that others do. Hell, just last week, John Seely Brown decided to start his keynote wearing my hat, talking about how the hat is the source of all of my brilliance while i turned beet red and scrunched down in my seat. As embarrassing as that was, it's more embarrassing that Wikipedia is relying on Fox over JSB for authority.

What really weirds me out about all of this is that everyone acts like i'm dead and incapable of speaking for myself. It is culturally inappropriate for me to edit my entry, even when there are parts of it that are dead wrong. No one asks me to fact check - journalists matter more than me. I understand why i shouldn't have the right to get rid of negative commentary about me, but wouldn't it make sense to allow living "notables" correct facts? Am i not the leading expert on the biographical facts of my life? I wonder who else is looking at their entry and shaking their head at the biographical inaccuracies.

I can't fully put my finger on why the media-centric thing bugs me, but it does. The media has decided that i'm an expert because of my knowledge in a specific domain; Wikipedia has decided that i'm notable because i'm on TV. Why is Wikipedia not using transitivity and saying that i'm notable because of my knowledge in a specific domain? Why does it matter more that i'm on TV than why i'm on TV?

Now, i love Wikipedia. But i think that there's something broken here. Personally, i would rather my entry been deleted than have this very inaccurate and media-centric entry written. (Deletion would've been far more entertaining.) I think that this approach to notability makes Wikipedia look downright foolish. Personally, i'm embarrassed by this public representation full of mistakes. There has to be a better way to handle living people. The "no original research" approach is really not working here.

I'm posting this both because it's interesting and because i can't fully get a handle on why this situation is really bugging me (other than the fact that it's weird to be an object of inspection). Anyone have any thoughts?

(Here's a proactive thank you to those who are inevitably going to correct my entry because of this blog post. For those who are looking at the entry after this correction, look at the April 13 version to see what i'm talking about here.)

Category: web2.0

Tags: wikipedia

   

Posted by zephoria at 8:21 PM | Comments (42) | TrackBack (0)

March 17, 2006

youth speak or Web2.0 company?

When did "q" gain the right to replace "k"? Or "ew" sounds be represented with 3+ "o"s? And since when is "z "such a popular letter in English? And why are we dropping "e"s? And how did words get dots in them?!?!

People often complain to me about the youth speak that i stare at on MySpace. Y'know the "suP WIt IT pLAY bOI." But these are the same people who are rattling on about companies named things like Sxip and Flickr and Revver and Goowy and del.icio.us and Zooomr and Oyogi and Zvents. ::smacking forehead:: Just because you're making weird words to get domain names doesn't make your behavior any different than the teens making up words to be unparsable by adults.

If you want to have a laugh, check out Cerado's Web2.0 or Star Wars Character?. I'm worried about the people who can win at this.

Category: web2.0

Tags: language

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:11 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

March 16, 2006

conference whirlwind

So, i completely loved having Etech and SXSW back-to-back. I found that this was super conducive to really getting to know some people, have a wonderful blend of serious discussion and complete goofiness. I'm a strong believer that you need play time in order to really bond with people. Folks need a chance to relax, be werewolves, drink a little/lot. Doing so with colleagues supports the working relationship.

It used to be super cool to go to conferences when i was at Brown and at MIT because there were always so many other Brown/MIT people out. Since i started working, i found that it is rare to have my work community all on the same page and attend a conference with the same mindset. Sure, my group would often go but not a sizable contingent of the company. It was really really cool to have Yahoo! there is large numbers and really behind the innovation that is going on. We were able to throw parties, gather interesting humans and really celebrate the people and ideas that are emerging. Plus, it was awesome to see people recognize that this old skool company is really embracing social software and that is why so many folks are going to Yahoo!

Anyhow, it's impossible to recap all of the great conversations and products i learned about... but it really was a joyous 10 days of information overload. And hangovers. Thanks to all of you who were there with me!

Category: web2.0

Tags: etech sxsw

   

Posted by zephoria at 6:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

February 25, 2006

"Academics: Get to work!"

I'm not sure if i should be offended or excited by John Dvorak's latest post Academics: Get to work!. On one hand, he argues that "we need social studies about the Net and computers" which is great because i couldn't agree more. Besides, that sounds like a statement that will keep me in business for a while... But on the other, his example is the lack of analysis on MySpace and blogging. Uhh.... ::raises hand:: There are quite a few academics studying this stuff from all sorts of different angles. People from communications, linguistics, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology... Now, whether or not anyone is listening to them is still an issue up for debate. But at least on a personal note, i would argue that there are a few people listening to me about MySpace and i've been rattling on about it since 2003, albeit on a limited basis on my blog in an attempt to not be accused of corrupting my data. And there's no doubt that i've been rattling on about blogging, LiveJournal, Friendster, tagging and quite a few other "Web2.0" schtuff. So, i'm a bit confused by Dvorak's column. Anyone closer to him have a sense of what that's about?

Category: web2.0

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:40 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

February 16, 2006

knowledge systems and collective questioning

Icarus Diving has the most hysterical post called Google the Magnificent which addresses the peculiarity of a "how do you use" search on Google resulting in the following suggestions:

As he puts, "Wow! That's amazing! I had no idea I wanted to know any of those things! And wasn't that a great example of what Web 2.0 has to offer? Well, keep at it guys. Any month now you'll be making the same impression on people that paper clip thing on Windows did." I cannot duplicate the humor of his post, so read it in full.

I reference this because i think it is a really important issue. We often talk about the power of collective knowledge/questioning and the transparency of such information without thinking about the moral issues. On one hand, it's a fascinating insight into what people are looking for. On the other, it's kinda disturbing. What if the queries were "How do you use a machine gun?" or "How do you use a hanger for an abortion?" ::shudder:: Regardless of where you stand on these issues, such queries would make you want to reach out to the person asking them, to see if you can help them. But you can't. Does the machine have a moral responsibility to prevent people's dangerous acts? Most people would probably say no. But what if the machine makes its knowledge transparent to people? What happens when those people feel responsible but only the machine has the ability to communicate back to the person in trouble?

Furthermore, how would you feel about your own query (or about the system) if a suggested query like that came up? The things that disturb our moral senses stick with us; they are hard to get out of our heads. Sometimes, there are costs to making the knowledge of a machine visible to people unrelated to the interaction between the person and machine. It's eavesdropping and it's not always wonderful to overhear things.

Category: web2.0

Tags: information queries

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:36 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

October 31, 2005

long tail camp and web2.0 humor

Long-Tail Camp will start on November 11, 2005 at a location of your choosing. Just show up and start talking about the long-tail of whatever. There might not be a lot of people paying attention or even showing up but hey, it's the long tail, what can you expect? We're certain that Long-Tail Camp will be a huge success and expect it will be over in about 10-12 years, depending on the exact parameters of the distribution...

ROFL. I love geek humor. Oh, and while you're at it, go Roll Yo Own Web2.0 Company that will guarantee VC attention. Mine is Blinkoious and we create a greasemonkey extension for bookmarks via bittorrent. (There's also a good one for tag-based dating via bittorrent - Blinodidoo!)

(Tx Barb)

Category: web2.0

Tags: geek humor web2.0 longtail businessmodel

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:30 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (3)

September 25, 2005

Why Web2.0 Matters, Round Two

This week, SIMS students came together to discuss Web2.0 - what is it and is it relevant to us? In the process, i found myself expanding my own understanding of what's going on and i wanted to share my thought process here, mostly to get push-back. Some of this is repetitive of others and my own thoughts, but i needed to write it all down for sanity sake.

Ebbs and Flows

I don't know many people who are a fan of the term Web2.0, but i also don't know a better term. Sure, folks talk about the semantic web and the read/write web but this is only a fraction of what's going on. Of course, Web2.0 is a business term... and for good reason. Let me explain.

The technology industry has its phases. Long before the masses were online, people were breaking down boundaries and talking to others across space and time. We were working towards a global village where everyone could share their ideas and passions. For all intents and purposes, it was small, intimate and homogenous. And then some businesspeople realized there was money to be made and we rushed full-speed into the boom.

Looking back, there are a lot of reasons to twitch about the boom (and they usually involve ill-will wishes directed at MBAs). Beneath the hype and chaos, there was genuine enthusiasm. This motivated so many people to think creatively, to expand their horizons, to envision a future and work towards it. It was like MDMA was being pumped through the faucets - serotonin was flowing everywhere.

And then, ::crash:: the Tuesday blues set in and people wandered the streets of SF looking like corpses without a bride in sight.

There is no doubt that things are uber hyped up right now. And that folks are a bit wary of hype. But why do ravers roll even when they know about the Tuesday blues? Because the high is worth it. Folks are brimming with creative thoughts, engaged with glitter in their eyes and really really wanting to innovate. Hype does that, even if it has a cost.

More than anything, what Web2.0 is demarcating is this hype, the next rush of enthusiasm that is hitting web developers. And it's already playing out in creativity, in passion, and in money. Of course, i saw enough MBA types at LoveParade yesterday to make my hair curl.

Economic Pressures

In Code, Lessig reminded us to always pay attention to four pillars that work as forces in all sorts of change: market, law, society and architecture (code). When all four align, evolution leaps forward. The boom emerged when market and architecture aligned in a way that brought society along. By and large, law stayed out of things. And then, it all came crashing down with the market and architecture splintering (no business model), the realization that society wasn't as enthused ("why do i want to buy everything online?") and increasing pressure from law (MS vs. Netscape, Napster).

We're in the next wave of collusion - the market and architecture are back at it, only this time, they're a little more aware of the importance of society (but still terrified of law). Web2.0 is the business term for this collusion, an attempt to mark a shift.

I've heard lots of folks bitch about labeling something to create a shift. "There is no sudden shift!" they complain. Technologically, they're right. Things have been progressing pretty linearly. Most of what is marked as Web2.0 technology is nothing new - glorified javascript, newly packaged publication tools, explicitly acknowledged openness. There's no technological shift happening but there is a very noticeable business shift.

Let's back up a bit. After the crash, left in the ruins were a handful of big companies in various degrees of shambles. Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Macromedia... For the most part, these companies weren't in competition and they spent the next couple of years trying to retrofit their companies, trying to make them a little more earthquake-resistent. Along came Google. At first, no one cared and many loved to quirky search company. But, slowly, Google has come to compete with every one of the boom survivors on their own turf. Alongside Google, energy re-emerged and start-ups began popping up, innovating in entirely new ways. This re-awakened the big beast-like survivors of Round 1 and we are back in full competitive swing. Of course, the competition is fascinating because people are having different approaches. Acquisitions are happening left right and center (four billion dollars!?!?!?). Google has never really seen competition before. Microsoft is more afraid of D.C. than other tech companies and so they're innovating in Asia to compete. Adobe is playing a Microsoft and simply buying their competitor (under the polite term "merger"). Web2.0 is a marker of the re-invigoration of competition more so than technology.

The fun thing about academics is that we're obsessed with long-term frameworks and we like to understand patterns situated in some broader body of knowledge. Some of us are sitting back trying to make sense of what all is emerging and what its economic, legal, social, and technological implications are going to be. We are the meta.

And we're off...

There will be increasing technological advancements, but to be significant will require adoption on a social level. Yeah, javascript and amateur publishing have been around but in the last two years, we've seen genuinely mass adoption because of AJAX and blogging tools. Of course, the funny thing is that i keep seeing adverts for "Web2.0 Developers" but i still haven't seen an advert for "Web2.0 Social Scientists." We are still working in an advertising economy which means eyeballs matter and acquisitions have shown that adoption matters. So why not hire people who understand people's needs? Anyhow...

I think that the biggest loose canon is the business model of all of this. Are we really comfortable relying on advertising still? How long will that last? Is there an economic innovation this round?

I also still believe that the answer to figuring out a lot of this is glocalization. It is not just about the social component, but introduces the legal, market and technological needs. We've got to move beyond the global village and focus on how people will repurpose it for their needs. This is why i think that issues of remix are essential to this narrative. What hiphop artists and anime remixers are doing is teaching us what it means to consume and produce as a connected process. In tech land, this is the value of OpenAPIs - this is fundamentally about remixing technology. Of course, all the efforts to legitimize this are dangerous. Part of the glory of hacking and remixing is the rebellious feeling of resistance. More importantly, anyone remixing is understandably wary of the institutions who are opening up or creative commons-ing the process. Aside from not wanting to be told what to do, there is fear of being too reliant on the master. This is part of the trick of OpenAPIs and CC licenses - they allow the owners to maintain power through a different incentive system. You are meant to feel like you have access as long as you want, but the one who giveth can taketh away. That, of course, is a longer conversation. But it's important to remember that the power issues in remix are not solved by OpenAPIs and CC licenses. Of course, i'm all in favor of OpenAPIs because i think that they will push us further into remix culture, much to the chagrin of current hegemonic institutions. We just need to be careful so that we don't get it all banned.

So what will Web2.0 be? Right now it's hype that's motivating innovation. Should it be slowed down for fear of another crash? Or should it be encouraged because innovation will occur? How do we keep greed from running the innovation ship aground? How can academics provide valuable frameworks and how can academia and industry learn from each other? How does business innovate on a social level without just simply trying to hoc their wares? How is law going to try to slow this down (remix is definitely playing with fire)? How will it support or disrupt hegemony? How can this innovative energy move beyond a few regions?

I know a lot of folks who don't want to engage because of the hype. (It's funny - business gets energized by hype; academia gets cynical.) For me, i think that everyone who cares about the next 5 years of technological innovation and techno-social culture needs to be involved and help move the big ship in a positive direction. Otherwise, it will collapse in the hands of business rather than pursuing its potential to affect people's lives for the better.

Category: web2.0

Tags: web2.0 glocalization

   

Posted by zephoria at 3:18 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack (5)

September 5, 2005

Why Web2.0 Matters: Preparing for Glocalization

Recently, i found myself needing to explain Web2.0. Unfortunately, here's a term that has been hyped up in all sorts of ways with no collectively understood definition. The Web2.0 conference talks about the web as a platform, a business-y concept that i find awfully fuzzy. Technologists and designers have differing views focused on either the technology and standards or the experience. Even Wikipedia seems confused and cumulative definitions are not inclusive. Buzzwords associated with Web2.0 include: remix, tagging, hackability, social networks, open APIs, microcontent, personalization. People discuss how the web is moving from a read-only system to a read/write system and they focus on technologies like GreaseMonkey, Ajax, RSS/Atom, Ruby on Rails. Of course, others talk about the paradoxical relationship between openness and control. The reality is that when people talk about Web2.0, they're talking about a political affiliation with The Next Cool Thing, even if no one has a clue what it is yet.

Personally, i don't find comfort in any of the business, technological or experiential explanations. Yet, i do believe that a shift is occurring and i find myself emotionally invested in it. So then i had to ask myself: what is Web2.0 and why does it matter? The answer is glocalization.

Glocalized Networks

In business, glocalization usually refers to a sort of internationalization where a global product is adapted to fit the local norms of a particular region. Yet, in the social sciences, the term is often used to describe an active process where there's an ongoing negotiation between the local and the global (not simply a directed settling point). In other words, there is a global influence that is altered by local culture and re-inserted into the global in a constant cycle. Think of it as a complex tango improvisational dance with information constantly flowing between the global and the local, altered at each junction.

During the boom, there was a rush to get everything and everyone online. It was about creating a global village. Yet, packing everyone into the town square is utter chaos. People have different needs, different goals. People manipulate given structures to meet their desires. We are faced with a digital environment that has collective values. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in search. For example, is there a best result to the query "breasts"? It's all about context, right? I might be looking for information on cancer, what are you looking for?

A global village assumes heterogeneous context and a hierarchical search assumes universals. Both are poor approximations of people's practices. We keep creating technological solutions to improve this situation. Reputation systems, folksonomy, recommendations. But these are all partial derivatives, not the equation itself. This is not to dismiss them though because they are important; they allow us to build on the variables and approximate the path of the equation with greater accuracy. But what is the equation we're trying to solve?

On an economic level, globalization has both positive and negative implications. But on a personal level, no one actually wants to live in a global village. You can't actually be emotionally connected to everyone in the world. While the global village provides innumerable resources and the possibility to connect to anyone, people narrow their attention to only focus on the things that matter. What matters is conceptually "local." In business, the local part of glocalization mostly refers to geography. Yet, the critical "local" in digital glocalization concerns culture and social networks. You care about the people that are like you and the cultural elements that resonate with you. In the most extreme sense, the local is simply you alone. There is certain a geographical component to the local because the people in your region probably share more cultural factors with you and are more likely connected to you in network terms, but this is not a given. In fact, the folks who were most geographically alienated were the first on the digital bandwagon - they wanted the global so that they could find others like them regardless of physical location.

When the web started, the hype was that geography would no longer matter. Of course, we know that now to be utterly false. But the digital architecture did alter the network structure of society, allowing interest-driven bonds to complement geographically-manifested ones. Web1.0 created the infrastructure for glocalized networks.

Glocalizing Web2.0 Systems

Glocalized structures and networks are the backbone of Web2.0. Rather than conceptualizing the world in geographical terms, it is now necessary to use a networked model, to understand the interrelations between people and culture, to think about localizing in terms of social structures not in terms of location. This is bloody tricky because the networks do not have clear boundaries or clusters; the complexity of society just went up an order of magnitude.

Our first rough approximation at this was the individual vs. the collective. The personal is critical - it is the maximal localization and contribution stems from the individual first. Think about tagging - it's all about starting with the individual and building into collectives. But the goal should not be universal collectives but rather locally constituted ones whereby one participates in many different local contexts. This is critical because the individual and the collective do not exist without each other; they are co-constructed and defined by their interplay. Individual identity gets crafted in context of a collective and collectives emerge through the interplay of individuals.

Social networks give us a vantage point for seeing the relationship between collectives and individuals. As such, they have been at the root of the Web2.0 narrative. We want to understand how people and collectives are interrelated in order to support local needs. Articulation was the first step but, more than anything, it let us understand how broken our questions are, how complex the structure is. These models are not good enough for Web2.0 but they are a decent initial approximation.

Reputation systems emerge to help localize the social structure, to indicate contextualized trust, respect and relations. Reputation is not a universal structure, but one deeply embedded in particular cultural contexts.

The complex relationship between personal, local collectives, and global must all be modeled in glocalized networks for Web2.0 to work. We need to break out of the global village model, the universal "truth" approach to information access. We need to situate information access in glocalized culture. Folksonomy is emerging as a dance between the individual and the collective; remix occurs as individual and collective responses to the global. They are forms of organizing and situating global information in a glocalized fashion.

Glocalized information access does not mean separate but equal. Instead, globally accessible information needs to be organized in a local context where meaning is made. Recommendations emerge as a way for local collectives to organize information, sitting on top of individual recommendations combined with networks and reputation.

Institutional Structures

In addition to the techno-social systems that are being developed to allow for glocalized information access, there are institutional structures at play. While Open APIs certainly have political cachet, they are also critical to glocalization. People want to slice information for local cultures; this means that the local cultures need to be able to do the slicing rather than rely on institutions that are more likely to create universal organization schemas. No organization has the diversity necessary to build all of the different glocalized systems that people desire.

The structure of companies is also critical to Web2.0 and there is going to be an interesting relationship between innovative start-ups and big corporations. Startups can focus on particular technologies and build for specific cultural contexts, but they do not have the resources to build the larger infrastructure. This is where big companies come into play because they will be the ones putting the pieces together. Yet, the responsibility of big Web2.0 companies is to provide flexible glue to all of this innovation, to provide the information infrastructure that will permit glocalization, to allow for openness. Big companies span multiple cultural contexts but if they try to homogenize across them, they will fail at Web2.0. They need to be stretchy glue not cement. Cement works when you want a global village, when you want universals but it is not the way of Web2.0, it is not the next wave.

Conclusion

Web2.0 is about glocalization, it is about making global information available to local social contexts and giving people the flexibility to find, organize, share and create information in a locally meaningful fashion that is globally accessible. Technology and experience are both critical factors in this process, but they themselves are not Web2.0. Web2.0 is a structural shift in information flow. It is not simply about global->local or 1->many; it is about a constantly shifting, multi-directional complex flow of information with the information evolving as it flows. It is about new network structures that emerge out of global and local structures.

In order for Web2.0 to work, we need to pay attention to how different cultural contexts interpret the technology and support them in their variable interpretations. We need to create flexible infrastructures and build the unexpected connections that will permit creative re-use.

It's important to realize that Web2.0 is not a given - it is possible to fuck it up, especially if power and control get in the way. Web2.0 is a socio-technical problem and it cannot be solved in a technodeterminist way. Technology needs to support social and cultural practices rather than determining culture. Technology is architecture and, thus, the design of it is critical because the decisions made will have dramatic effects. Digital architecture is unburdened by atoms but it is not unburdened by human tendencies for control. We've already seen plenty of digital architects try to control the flexibility of their artifacts rather than allowing them to morph and evolve.

Web2.0 requires giving up control and ownership of information; information is meaningless to someone else if they can't repurpose it to make sense of it in their context. It is for this reason that technology is not enough - there will be political features of Web2.0 as technological development and cultural desires run head-on against legislation and political support of old skool information organizations. This is why IP and copyright issues are also critical to Web2.0.

Web2.0 also requires keeping local cultural values consciously present at all times. There is a great potential to be problematically disruptive, to destroy local culture while trying to support it. We all have a tendency to build our needs into technology but the value of Web2.0 is to allow everyone to build their needs into the technology, not just those doing the building. Trampling culture would be devastating.

For Web2.0 to be successful, technology and policy must follow glocalized needs and desires. This will be a complex and challenging process full of complicated issues as technologists, designers, social scientists and politicos engage in an unknown dance with very different values and pressures. This dance can and probably will disrupt nation-state and institutional structures; these groups will work hard to stop the destruction of their power. Neither China nor the RIAA really wants Web2.0 to happen and folks like them have the potential to really foul it up.

Those who believe that Web2.0 is the way to go must take on the responsibility of focusing on the people first, to keep them and their needs at the forefront of your mind while you design and build, re-design and re-build. Let the technology and business follow the desires and needs of people. Otherwise, Web2.0 could completely collapse or simply become a tool for the maintenance of structural power.

I will say, it's an interesting time to be in the Valley. There's so much potential and i really want to see Web2.0 go as far as possible in supporting a meaningfully distributed glocalized society.

Special thanks to Barb and Marc for helping me think through this.

Category: web2.0

Tags: glocalization web2.0

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:30 PM | Comments (31) | TrackBack (22)