Andy Stubbings writes:

“If you want to know how people will use technology tomorrow” a popular saying goes, “look at what young people are doing today”.

To add to the bubbling anti-Facebook resentment that we have discussed here before, we’re seeing growing signs of disenchantment and dipping enthusiasm for Facebook amongst younger people. One survey of teens by gaming site Roiworld shows one in five are using Facebook less; the main reason for this is ‘lack of interest’. After the buzz around ‘defriending’, there seems to be more interest on ‘deactivating’ or leaving the site – apparently quite an exhilarating experience, at least according to this account of a ‘post-college calibration’. And there are earlier discussions of why young people leave social networks – there’s too much drama, it’s not their space anymore, and people prefer face to face interaction where possible.

Curiously, this also tallies with a general trend that we have picked up with our Global Monitor survey this year – when asked, people in almost every country overwhelmingly expressed a preference for a small number of quality connections they can rely on rather than a large quantity of connections they can call on (levels of agreement are practically the same across all age groups as well – which you might not necessarily expect from those gregarious Millennials). Facebook’s business model is built on the opposite assumption – that people want to continually add as many contacts as possible (and then lump them all together in the same group as their ‘friends’).

There has been attention given to the fact that the average age of Facebook users is increasing, often arguing that this is a sign that the site is broadening its appeal by going mainstream. However, I’d suggest, tentatively for the moment, that a fall in engagement amongst younger people – and in this context the leading edge – represents a decline that will eventually ripple out to a mainstream made up by mainly by over-30s, a decline that will accelerate as soon as a genuine alternative to Facebook emerges.

Facebook isn’t growing up; it’s growing old.

The image is from the site of the web designer Sharath G, and is used with thanks.

Andrew Curry writes:

It’s become a cult on the web since Tiger Woods crashed his car in mysterious circumstances last weekend, but this CGI-enhanced report from Taiwanese television of the possible chains of events, embedded above, is certainly worth watching.

Leaving aside some of the aesthetic issues (such as Tiger’s South Asian appearance, doubtless hung off an existing CGI wireframe) this does raise some interesting questions. The first is whether such reconstructions are more or less plausible than the traditional ‘news’ alternative of filming a reconstruction. Probably less so: we can see that this is a CGI reconstruction, so it’s been made up. But this will become less true as the technology improves.

Second, is whether it will become more common – to which the answer must be yes. News producers need pictures – when I was trained as a TV news journalist I was told always to check the pictures before I started writing the story – and news reporters inevitably have to describe things which weren’t seen and where events are still contested. Making up your own pictures seems too good to be true, but it’s no more ethically challenging than having a reporter describe what might have happened.

The most interesting question is about ownership. The BBC used CGI reconstruction of the goals in the European Nations Cup in 2008 on its website because it didn’t have the rights to show video there. But who owns the digital reconstruction of an event? On the face of it, no-one. But begging to differ, here come rights lawyers and privacy advocates in their gowns and wigs. Another digital battleground is opening up in front of us.

Oliver Wright writes:

Humans have always been predisposed to gossip. French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville once said “If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.” In this vein, celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry have done themselves no harm by revealing the minutiae of their day to day activities to the masses.

Celebrities, of course, usually have a slick PR machine on their side to ensure that potential pitfalls are avoided. The new wave of sports tweeters (twits, if you prefer), however, seem to lack this essential facility. Where the sporting media may have previously traded on snippets from a group of closely guarded sources, they can now rely upon a host of tweeters for a steady stream of bitesize stories.

These messages left on social networks and microblogging sites have the nasty habit of transforming tittle-tattle, hearsay, and rumour into cold, hard evidence – often supplied by the protagonist. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen cyclist Lance Armstrong show his hot headed reactions to Alberto Contador’s comments on his teammates after the latter claimed the Tour de France’s yellow jersey. Also tweeting regularly (and with a little more restraint), was fellow cyclist Bradley Wiggins, who quashed media speculation regarding his team affiliations next year half way through the tour. After the tour’s epic climb up Mont Ventoux, he later paid tribute to Tom Simpson, a British rider who collapsed and died on the stage in 1967.

More recently, Australia’s Philip Hughes let slip that he had been dropped for the 3^rd Ashes test due to start that morning – inadvertently informing anyone studious enough to notice of Australia’s batting line up, which they didn’t have to divulge until much later. Darren Bent also fell foul to his emotions on twitter (and later apologised), perhaps leading us to be thankful that most footballers’ 140-character musings are usually confined to the pitch.

Of course, sportsmen and women aren’t the only ones adapting to new media. As politicians have taken to using Twitter, Whitehall has released a rather lengthy guide for ministers thinking of using the service, no doubt in a spirit of public dialogue. Thanks heavens that British caution is not shared abroad.

Tom Ding writes:

You may have noticed that Wired, the ‘magazine about what’s next’, recently re-launched in the UK after a twelve year hiatus. We’ve held off rushing to judgment, but after three issues it’s possible to more reflective.

The editorial from the first (re)- issue explained: ‘Whatever may be happening in today’s economy, the pace of change in business, science and culture is not slowing – which is why, unreconstructed optimists that we are, we believe there’s no better time to launch an exciting, inspiring magazine.’ The time has come, apparently, to ‘Subscribe to the future.’

But of course, Wired is itself a contradiction: everyone knows that there will be no magazines in the future; everything will be digital. Bytes, or bits, will have replaced atoms. As one reader tweeted, Wired is ‘the mag that cuts down trees to write about the paperless office’, and the editors also seem to struggle with an existential tension: in the third issue there are reviews of the latest e-books and a ‘how to’ guide about turning the magazine into a snack bowl or a picture frame.

There are many brands that manage to exploit internal tensions – American Apparel, for example, maintains its cool by combining pioneering ethical production with a reputation for sexual controversy – but instead Wired seems trapped by its own status, by its format. For all its engaging content, the magazine is caught uncomfortably between the lads’ mags and the blogosphere, between the mainstream and the cutting-edge, between the past and the future.

Yet whilst subscribing to Wired may never truly feel like subscribing to the future, it would be a mistake to think the most exciting alternatives are all found behind a screen. Stack is a new service that delivers a different independent magazine each month to its online subscribers (shades here of Rough Trade’s music subscription service), and Russell Davies (who also writes for Wired) recently helped print a ground-breaking newspaper called ‘Things our friends have written on the internet’. Perhaps the key for true magazines of the future will be to embrace the tension between paper and screen, and make more of the benefits of both.

The picture at the top is borrowed, with thanks, from magculture.

Alex Steer writes:

The numbers are changing constantly, but at time of writing, somewhere around 1,800 people (over 1,600 in Mexico) have been infected with the new ‘swine flu’ strain, and 103 people have died. The World Health Organization is coordinating the response, calling it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

When reading headlines like these, our thoughts naturally turn to the past and the future: where did this come from, and where will it lead? Our impressions of the past often inform the futures we imagine. We know about the possibilities of pandemic disease, even if few of us have experienced them. In 1919 between 20 and 100 million people worldwide were killed by an influenza pandemic; between 1982 and 2007 more than 2 million died of AIDS.

From flesh-eating viruses to ebola to winter vomiting, we are fascinated by the extremely unpredictable: the small outlying cause that transforms our lives; the sick man on the plane who brings down a city. Modern zombie lore is driven more by our fear of inexplicable pandemic outbreaks than by our belief in voodoo. (If you don’t believe me, watch 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and Dead Set in succession. But don’t do it late at night.)

Pandemics, unlike zombies, have full and active social lives. Even events which seem radically unpredictable have driving forces, many of which don’t need a microscope to be seen. They range from urbanisation to the dense migration networks and transport systems which increase each infectious person’s sphere of influence; from healthcare policies which exclude uninsured low-income workers from care to lumbering organisational structures which make it hard to close roads or supply drugs at short notice. It takes a whole range of forces, not just a few strands of RNA, to make a pandemic.

Our own stories also drive our behaviour. In the hour before this post was written, 24,000 stories containing the word ‘swine flu’ were indexed by Google News. This morning airlines and hotel chains saw steep declines in their share value. Newspapers carried photos of travellers at UK airports wearing masks.

Swine flu may or may not go pandemic, but so far it isn’t even close. Each year 3-4,000 people in the UK die of normal-strain influenza. Our response is out of all proportion to the clinical risk. It reflects our fascination with the pigs-might-fly rareness of new diseases, and our unwillingness to grapple with the other factors that affect how, when, and where people get sick.

The picture of that childhood game of chance, “Pass the Pigs”, was borrowed, with thanks, from Kaptain Kobold on Flickr.

Oliver Wright writes:

The noise of Twitter has reached a crescendo over the past couple of months, partly because of its role in sharing and even breaking news. The fact that it’s been used for this says something about the gaps in conventional forms of media.

One of the first news events that caught the attention of ‘tweeters’ was the earthquake in Sichuan in May last year, where people across China started using various blogging services – including Twitter – to tell friends and family that they were safe. A technology blogger, Robert Scoble, reported news about the earthquake ahead of the US Geological Survey (which tracks earthquakes in real time) simply from tweets he received from his followers in China.

Similarly (but with greater media coverage) with the Mumbai terrorist attacks, where tweeters effectively covered the event live, mashing up news from sources on the ground via tweeters and other agencies as new stories emerged. Doubts about the accuracy of these versions of events eventually led the Mumbai authorities to call for tweeters to stop spreading the news – a call that was, predictably, ignored. The viral nature of the information being spread by Twitter was captured, perhaps chillingly, by one user, “naomieve”, who wrote:

Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.

The ‘social media experiment’ has continued with the Obama inauguration, the Hudson plane crash, and cyclist Lance Armstrong’s stolen bike (found) all receiving much publicity.

It was in the 1960s that the cultural analyst Marshall McLuhan argued that electronic media was a series of extensions to the human body which would create an ‘electronic interdependence’. As James Harkin observed recently in The Times,

The impact of this electronic information loop coursing through all our veins, McLuhan thought, could only enhance our ability to understand one another. It would, he felt sure, precipitate the rise of a “global village” and a new era of greater responsibility and understanding.

Instead, the cost of this electronic interdependence is a media landscape which is more fragmented than ever. Shared social experiences such as these are reduced to cultural nostalgia. But in an age where so much media, and politics, is carefully packaged, what Twitter – and media cousins such as the text message – can do is to reclaim a sense of immediacy, and to increase our sense of shared engagement in the events which are happening around us. Maybe McLuhan will have the last laugh after all.

The graphic is courtesy of Carrot Blog – on the addictive nature of Twitter.

Tagged: McLuhan, Twitter ]]> http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2009/03/04/trusting-twitter/feed/ 0 thenextwavefutures twitter http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2009/01/21/live-and-direct/ http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2009/01/21/live-and-direct/#comments Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:11:45 +0000 thenextwavefutures http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/?p=776 ]]>

Rebecca Nash writes:

Some anthropologists of religion work with people who seek unmediated contact with their gods. Their ethnographies contrast the experience of word as text (scriptural religions) with the immediate word (through a prophet or visions). Christian apostolics have told one anthropologist, ‘We don’t use the Bible, we receive the Holy Spirit, live and direct’.

Live and direct. Curiously this is the same claim that television news makes every day in the era of cheap satellite links and rolling news, but usually the live connection is to a reporter or an expert giving their mediated view of events, with technology – and graphics – providing a patina of immediacy.

And certainly, during the Obama campaign, there was plenty of mediated coverage, through more channels than ever before.  It became too easy, too occupying during the campaign to catch up on events by logging on to YouTube, skimming political blogs, monitoring poll data, reading coverage in magazines and newspapers. All of these channels were harnessed skillfully by Obama – his messages seemed to be everywhere. Alongside this, the media itself played a filtering role, interpreting messages, constructing meaning, and shaping opinion.

But every trend has its counter-trend. The more that’s recorded and interpreted, the more that people want to experience the live event for themselves, without interpretation. I think this desire for an unmediated experience explains in part the huge crowds at the ritual of Tuesday’s inaugural ceremony in Washington, DC.

I left work early myself to see the ceremony ‘live and direct’ (granted, on TV from my couch in London). As an American living in London I knew I wouldn’t have the self-control to watch it later, when the analysis and the commentary would have kicked in. But it was the kind of event where update and analysis were beside the point – the shared live experience, the immediate Word, not the text, was what mattered most.

Andy Stubbings writes:

One of the great lines in the film Network is when the news anchor Howard Beale covers the news of the 1970s recession by telling viewers,

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad! Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression!”

But in the days of 24-hour rolling news channels and multi-supplement newspapers, such brevity is no longer good enough. There’s a correlation between the amount of actual ‘news’ anyone can report, their level of knowledge of the subject, and the amount of cliche they generate. The formula for this is probably M x I = C, where M is how massive the story is, I is the journalists’ general level of ignorance, and C is the volume of cliche. There are even blogs which celebrate the best crunch cliches. Here’s my list of current favourites.

1. Brokers with their hands on their faces. The first and possibly still the best.
2. The dramatic falling red line on a graph. It’s like the classic cartoon graph, which plunges off the edge of the chart, and never (well hardly ever) has scales or axes.
3. The knock on effect. The human interest story designed to explain economics’ multiplier effect: the local corner shop skimps on window cleaning, so the window cleaners have cut back, so the chammy leather business is struggling, and in no time at all we’re at 3 million unemployed by Christmas.
4. The unlikely winners. The little-known (but still beaten-to-death-in-popular-journalism) phenomenon of unlikely goods, usually discretionary luxuries, succeeding in the prevailing economic environment. Examples cited include pizza home delivery, condoms, dining in for a tenner, and even Karl Marx.
5. The unfortunate loser. Sometimes seen alongside number 4. This sometimes appears to be the publication’s revenge on things it’s never liked much, from smoothies to BMWs.
6. The credit crunch as Malthusian check to greed and selfishness. To achieve full cliche status needs to include the phrase ‘financial wizardry’.
7. The undeserving bankers. If they aren’t about to be sacked (see number 1), they will be drinking champagne at an ING-sponsored party on the proceeds of the tax-payers’ bail-out.
8. The worst….since the great depression. Or other periods of general purpose crisis, such as the Second World War, Roosevelt’s New Deal, rationing, the Blitz, etc. The Sun is the runaway leader here. Its “Backing British Business” campaign even uses the slogan “Your country needs you“.
9. The list (ahem). Usually money saving tips which can be constantly recycled from one story to another.
10. ‘The credit crunch’. The biggest cliche of the lot. Used as shorthand for everything, and shoe-horned wherever possible into every other Sunday supplement article e.g. ‘credit crunch chic’, ‘credit crunch lunch’. And now being seen in other company as well – as in “the oil crunch“.

Thanks to Josh Hunt and Joe Ballantyne for their contributions. The picture at the top of this post comes from Brokers With Hands On Their Faces, and there’s a lot more there.

Pen Stuart writes:

The irresistible rise of social networking has long had media types trying to calculate the best ways to make some money from them. But marketers are increasingly finding that these routes work best when brands provide a service rather than just push their message, creating what’s become known as ‘branded utility’. There are recent examples. The Beef and Lamb Sector Company, EBLEX Ltd, has launched a Facebook application, “Beefy & Lamby’s Summer BBQ”, featuring – from the TV campaign – the sometime England cricketers Ian Botham and Allan Lamb to help people plan their summer barbeques. Leaving aside the question of whether 50-something cricketers are the best match for the somewhat younger Facebook crowd, it does give users a useful service that encourages consumption of their product and also raises brand awareness, even if it seems to be building its audience slowly (26 visitors on the day this post was written). The apparent selflessness of this service can help build brand loyalty in times when ravenous profiteering is increasingly frowned upon.

MakeTheTea.com, created by Cravendale, takes this one step further, devoting a whole site and social network to their utility. This allows office workers to input their tea (and coffee) preferences and link up with their colleagues. The site randomly selects one person to make the round, overcoming the reluctance of any individual to ask around and get stuck with the task. The site seems to be flourishing, with almost 70,000 brews made since its April launch

But there are still questions about the future of such ventures – they have the feel of short-term awareness campaigns which seem certain to be pulled in due course. Yet for low-maintenance promotion such as this, the best approach may be different, especially as these types of internet communities are endlessly discovered anew by different groups, each time creating waves of publicity through blogging and social network invites. In the world of social networking the fundamental assumptions of ‘offline’ publicity may need an overhaul. Or at least, as marketers like to say, more research may be required.

© Jake Goretzki