Posts filed under 'digital'
Time as a ‘social surplus’
Andrew Curry writes:
The new media analyst Clay Shirky caused a bit of a stir in blogland last week with a compelling talk in which he described leisure time as a ‘social surplus’ which had been pretty much wasted over the past fifty years through watching TV. Actually, the argument was a bit more complex than that – his idea was that people had watched TV while we got used to the idea of having more leisure time, and now that we’d got used to it, we were starting to use bits of this time more productively, for example by building socially useful online applications.
There’s some interesting data in the talk. American TV watching (as a whole) takes up about two billion hours of time each year. And he calculates, with a little help, that building the whole of Wikipedia so far has taken about 100 million hours. American TV, in other words, takes up 2,000 Wikipedia projects per year.
Now the notion of time as a currency is one we talk about quite a lot round here. And it’s clear that there are different sorts of time. There’s work time (paid or unpaid); maintenance or ‘chore’ time (what you have to do to maintain your role); there’s recovery time (which is mostly where the TV watching comes in). And then there are the types which take you out of the work-eat-sleep cycle; ‘discovery’ time, or personal exploration time, and ‘identity’ time, which tend to be the places where personal roots are found.
I’m not sure about some of the social history in Clay’s talk, if only because, pre-television, there were rich social activities despite our having less leisure time (the huge 1930s ramblers’ campaign for the right of access to the countryside, for example), but I am persuaded by the underlying idea. It doesn’t take much of a switch from ‘recovery time’ to ‘discovery’ time to change the balance of social energy. This might not be online; book clubs, I think, would also fit the prospectus. But as he says:
It’s better to do something than to do nothing.
Futurismic has a video of Clay making his argument.
Photograph © Peter Curry 2008
Add comment 7 May 2008
The frenemy of my frenemy is my, err?
Alastair Morton writes:
Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s CEO, has long recognised Google as a frenemy (part friend, part enemy). On one hand Google offers communications agencies the chance to buy interactive ads for its clients but, on the other, Google makes no secret of its intention to allow anyone to buy ads for themselves, thus disintermediating agencies.
Google has now announced that it will cease to restrict keywords for ads served to users in the UK and Ireland. This means that surfers who key-in a trademarked brand name such as ‘O2′ may also see rival brands (Orange, Virgin etc) appearing in the search results alongside those for the brand they had sought. It seems that Google is now a frenemy of brands – providing access to huge audiences but potentially eroding brand equity – as well as of communications agencies.
And in all of this, is Google making any real friends? Well, consumers apparently. Matt Brittin, Google UK director, claims that ‘we are making this change because we want to give users greater choices to help them make informed decisions.’ But there is a problem with this line of argument. Our Planning for Consumer Change (PCC) data shows that more than half of UK consumers, and nearly two-thirds of those aged 15-24, feel that there is sometimes so much choice nowadays that they can’t make a decision. To borrow from Barry Schwatrz’s critique of the notion of choice [article here, opens in pdf, see video here] “choice maximisers” may welcome greater information, but find it harder to ‘maximise’ – while ‘choice satisficers’ – usually happy to make a ‘good enough’ choice – will feel greater pressure to maximise their choice from all the available options. Both groups are likely to be more frustrated.
In truth, many consumers actively use trusted and recognised brands and providers to sift the choices which face them. Whether or not Google’s intentions are admirable, I have a feeling that this change will have more effect in growing their ad revenues than in helping consumers manage their already complicated decisions.
Add comment 10 April 2008
Usability and simplicity
Andrew Curry writes:
Our former colleague Chad Wollen, who has spent the last few years working for digital media companies, sent me a cartoon by Eric Burke that’s being going the rounds in the digital community:
Judging by the response to the original post, it’s clearly struck a nerve among designers and programmers, even provoking some discussion about the purpose of jokes.
What’s interesting, reading the comments, is that people are taking a somewhat ‘binary’ view of simplicity (it’s either ‘good’ or ‘bad’). As John Maeda reminds us in his Laws of Simplicity, it’s a bit more complicated than that. One of the ‘laws’ of simplicity, he suggests, is to ‘reduce’, for example by removing functionality – the Apple and Google trick. But he also reminds us that simplicity often requires knowledge on the part of the user, that “simplicity and complexity need each other” – and that “some things can never be made simple”. The design skill is knowing what can be, and why.
Add comment 17 March 2008
Unravelling the cassette
Stacey Yates writes:
The audio cassette is 45 years old this year, and is reaching the end of its life, at least in Europe and the US. It peaked in the 1980s, but started to decline after the CD was rolled out in 1993. As our music consumption becomes increasingly intangible, people are pointing to some of the pleasures of more tangible forms – as a amusing post at the design blog Core 77 recently reminded me: the cassette as a design convention.
In contrast to the age of digital, the cassette was a lo-fi, low tech object and it was the first hard format to emerge in response to a more mobile society – the age of the Walkman preceded the iPod generation by 25 years. It could get stuck down the back of your sofa or crammed into your banger’s glove compartment for months, and you knew you could still rely on it to work when you found it again. Unlike the CD, it was near unbreakable and was always ready to play just where you left off. If it did get a bit chewed up, all you needed was a pencil or a biro to sort it.
The one time you might have been precious about a cassette was when you made a mix tape. In the 1980s creating a mix tape for someone was an act of dedication. Sitting through selected tapes with your finger hovering above the pause button took time and choosing the right mix of songs took creativity. The mix tape could also be a personal selection, creating a whole new way to mix and match music that has been reinforced by the rise of the celebrity DJ and by digital music. But let’s face it, there’s no romance in a USB stick. So perhaps it’s not surprising to find a site which, perhaps cunningly, is selling the ease of the digital ‘mix-stick’ - but in a package which offers all the personalisation that you used to get from the cassette.
Image © Stacey Yates
[Correction: A typo above has the CD launched, incorrectly, in 1993. In fact, it was launched commercially in Europe and the USA in 1983 (late 1982 in Japan). Thanks to Harry, in Comments, below, for pointing this out.]
6 comments 5 March 2008
iCoursework
Lucy Pickard writes:
In an interesting classroom change, A-level media studies students will now earn 20% of their marks by podcasting or blogging, according to various newspaper reports (Education Guardian, Mail). Formal essays are to be exchanged for voice-presented video clips and informal, blog-based writing in recognition of the skills needed to succeed in media today. The Queen’s English Society was quoted as lamenting the loss of traditional essay-based coursework, but the OCR exam board maintains that the changes are in line with both the growing demand for a ‘more modern and exciting’ media studies qualification and recent media developments.
The image is from the business blogging site RSSApplied.com
Add comment 5 January 2008
New ways to donate
Eleanor Cooksey writes:
With the rise of CSR and increasing interest in pro bono work, I was struck by an article in last week’s Economist which describes the range of projects now available which use spare processing capacity on ordinary PCs. They range from the biggest and best known, SETI@home, which started in 1999 searches for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, and now has over 3 million contributors, to projects looking for the next prime number. Whilst we are used to the idea of volunteering about ‘doing good’, donating spare PC processing power suggests we could think more laterally about how we can share under-used resources.
What is also interesting is the ever widening pool of those who might volunteer in this way. A growing number of other devices, including games consoles, also contain significant amounts of processing power and are internet enabled. One of the projects, Folding@home, (which looked at protein simulations) became the largest known distributed computing network thanks to its 40,000 plus PlayStation 3 volunteers.
Add comment 17 December 2007
Online couch potatoes
Becky Rowe writes:
Watching TV on your own or looking to indulge in the irreverent wit of a bunch of Guardian Unlimited readers? Then log on to the ‘Real time telly – talk about it now’ thread. The premise is that you can chat about what you are watching, whilst you are watching. Particularly good to spice up the solo viewing experience, or if your ‘witty’ comments have been banned by your sofa buddy, but you are still desperate to share…
This phenomenon came to my attention last Saturday when I noticed that the X-factor thread had become one of the most active on the GU discussion boards. Not only is a place to share observations about the contestants, or canvass votes for your favourite, but there is now a real sense of online community around the live Saturday night transmission. A perfect example of what happens when real (if you count X-factor as real!?) collides with virtual
Add comment 26 November 2007
Identity outsourcing
Jo Phillips writes:
A complication of identity as a result of the proliferation of online communities is identified today by the BBC. Some (particularly the famous) engage others to manage/update/improve their online presence on social networking sites such as Facebook or in MMORPGs. This goes beyond design services such as Pimp my Profile, to a more fundamental level of identity outsourcing. Another example is blog ‘shadow writing’ – for example Sarkozy’s campaign blog was written by technology entrepreneur Loic Le Meur.
But there are some quite subtle issues here. Journalists routinely ghost-write celebrity autobiographies, and we are used to the idea that speeches and articles are drafted by others. The question seems to be about authenticity. In which case: what it is about online media which requires higher standards of trust and transparency than more traditional channels?
Add comment 2 July 2007
Second Life interview
I know most interviews with site founders teeter on the grim line between marketing and hype, but there’s a surprisingly reflective interview with Second Life founder Philip Rosedale in today’s Technology Guardian,.
For those of you who haven’t got time to read it, the headline points are:
- Current turnover is $500m (and growing rapidly)
- The value of having its own virttual currency is that it enables micro-transactions.
- Retention of users is only 10% (they think because it takes 4 hours to get the hang of the place). If they can get that to 40 minutes they think that will rise to 50%
- The business model is less abstract than it appears: Rosedale describes it as: “What we are really selling you is computation. We are selling you CPU core. If you buy a 16-acre piece of land, which is about four city blocks, what you are renting is one processor.”
- They have plans to develop the avatars so they can function elsewhere on the web, outside of second life.
- And in response to a question about whether avatars can commit suicide, he says, ‘Yeah, in fact I think someone’s going to write a great dramatic book about that some day”.
Andrew
Add comment 17 May 2007
