Posts filed under 'technology'
Losing interest in Facebook
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.
Add comment 2 August 2010
Facing off about privacy
Andrew Curry writes:
The current row over Facebook’s successive changes to its privacy settings has several strategic implications for the way that businesses – not just in the digital sector – relate to their customers. In case you’ve missed the story: Facebook has radically reduced the default privacy settings for its users since the autumn of last year, meaning that users are likely to be sharing far more details across the internet than they previously did. (I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, but a visit to ouropenbook.org gives a sense of the scale of it.)
The reason? Well, the company says that ‘radical transparency‘ is good for you, in a moral sense. Others say that it is part of a long campaign by Facebook (two steps forward, one step back, according to Nick Carr) to set itself up as the owner of its users’ online identity, which is a more lucrative proposition than being a mere social network, even one with several hundred million members.
So what are the implications of this for businesses?
#1: When the mental map which your customer has of your product or service becomes too divergent from their experience of it, the business suffers. (This is what happened when Gerald Ratner described one of his company’s products as ‘crap’). In the case of Facebook, the actual experience is no longer represented by the map. The researcher danah boyd has explained this well:
A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping. Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what doesn’t match up with reality.
#2: Privacy isn’t dead, although it is fashionable for digerati to say so. People still expect organisations they do business with to maintain appropriate levels of privacy – and to be able to check these for themselves. We think that this expectation increases as the web becomes more ubiquitous and more portable, and there are more opportunities for breach. At least some users will engage reluctantly because of fear of theft, fraud, or inappropriate social exchanges. In the digital world, companies which take care of their users’ privacy will be less profitable in the short-term, but more sustainable in the long-term.
#3: Facebook is effectively polluting the “commons” represented by the internet – all of the public resources and protocols – through self-interested behaviour. It is possible that other suppliers which also depend on a trusted internet for their business will intervene; Google, its own privacy problems notwithstanding, has done a little of this recently. But usually what happens when public interest goods are polluted by commercial interests is that regulation follows. The cases brought against Facebook under trade and competition law, along with the initial responses from privacy regulators, are harbingers of this.
The cartoon at the top of the post is one of a string of acerbic strips about Facebook at the excellent Joy of Tech, and is used here with thanks. You may enjoy this one as well.
Add comment 25 May 2010
The future of payments
Andrew Curry writes:
I was invited earlier this month to speak on the future of payments at the Digital Money Forum in London, now in its thirteenth year and as provocative as ever. Of course, it’s a future that’s increasingly bound up with technology. My version is based on the work that’s been done by the historian of economics and technology, Carlota Perez (which I’ve blogged about elsewhere, at length) on long technology cycles.
We’ve seen five long technology surges, each of around 50-60 years, starting with steam, cotton and canals in 1771. The first half of the cycle, the installation phase, is driven by investment and finance capital. The second half, the deployment phase, is driven by production capital. And in between the two is a financial crash, when investment expectations get ahead of themselves.
In the current information and communications technology surge, we’re a few years into the deployment phase, when people start to do “new things in new ways” with technology. The smart phone and the tablet computer are archetypal deployment products, and digital payments will inevitably get caught up in the rush, as new applications emerge.
One of the likely effects is the fragmentation of devices, rather than convergence (we may use a digitally enabled key to get into our house, or a card or fob s a store of value, but we’re unlikely to leave them lying on a table during a meeting). We should expect fragmentation of currencies as well; local currencies such as the Lewes pound work much better when they don’t have to be printed. There are already viable currencies within every online multi-player game (and one of the things I learnt at the Forum was that Chinese workers employed to dig virtual gold in online games earn more than Chinese gold miners who dig the physical commodity, and in much better conditions). One of the other speakers talked about the emergence of currencies backed by units of energy consumption. This isn’t hypothetical.
This potentially represents that same sort of democratisation of production that we’ve seen in other sectors, ending the monopoly of the banks (mostly the commercial banks) on credit creation. This thought seemed to cause some nervousness in the audience at the Digital Money Forum, and the questions turned quite quickly to fraud and regulation, although potential fraudsters in an energy-backed currency would be doing very well to steal a fraction of the money that Bernie Madoff took from his investors.
What’s standing in the way? The banks, who aren’t trusted, and the mobile operators, who aren’t particularly interested in payments, at least not in the rich world. It seems likely that the market will need its own ‘iTunes’ moment, when an outsider steps in to create a decisive disruptive change.
The image above is courtesy of Flickr user Bohman, and is used under a Creative Commons licence with thanks.
Add comment 24 March 2010
Data for all
Oliver Wright writes:
Last Thursday was something of a watershed for the UK government. Data.gov.uk was launched, becoming one of a growing number of government portals giving us access to reams of official government data. That might not sound terribly exciting, but for businesses and research organisations that use official and reliable information, the announcement may fundamentally change the way they operate.
Government data has traditionally been stored in departmental silos where it is difficult to access. Many aggregation sites, such as the ONS, are notoriously hard to navigate.
The Guardian has been campaigning for such an initiative for some time, although its progress could only be described as incremental. In one of a number of articles on the site (you can find them here), they trace the birth of data.gov.uk to a comment made by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, to the Prime Minister at a dinner for recipients of the Order of Merit:
“Gordon Brown said to me, ‘How should the UK make the best use of the internet?’ and I replied that the government should just put all of its data on it,” Berners-Lee recalled. “And he said ‘OK, let’s do it’.”
The site has been open to developers since October, in which time – without wanting to rely too heavily on one newspaper – The Guardian has created a portal which allows you to search for data from other ‘open government’ sources. It’s rather ambitiously called World Government Data, although currently supports only Anglophone countries. It mimics other efforts to combine official data from around the globe in an accessible way.
Why is this good news? Firstly, it seems only fair that taxpayers have access to information whose collection they have financed. Secondly, releasing such a vast body of data to the public enables a greater pool of talent to find ways to use it, in building new applications or finding new insight.
Ito World, for example, created some great visualisations using transport data . They were also responsible for this amazing video showing the edits made to OpenStreetMap over the course of 2008:
Greater access to data like this can have profound consequences. Members of the online mapping community scrambled together data from various sources to create an OpenStreetMap of Port-au-Prince that aid workers could use to help co-ordinate their efforts. Whilst their work was undoubtedly appreciated, it would have been made far easier with greater access. Here’s to Open Data.
The image above is used with kind permission of Jason Hawkes.
Add comment 27 January 2010
Sporting tw**ts
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 3rd 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.
Add comment 5 August 2009
Bits (or bytes) of the future
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.
1 comment 6 July 2009
Still trusting Twitter
Oliver Wright writes:
Since my last post on the role Twitter is playing in relation to more traditional media, a couple of events have highlighted how Twitter, and social media in general, is having a greater influence on significant news events.
When riots recently broke out in Moldova’s capital, Chisinau, thousands of young Moldovans protested against elections whose outcome ensured the communist government would stay in power. The events were quick to grab the headlines, with Twitter once again thrust into the limelight as an example of microblogging’s ability to mobilise people.
It was quickly dubbed “Moldova’s Twitter Revolution”, at least by journalists, but after a week of protests (judges subsequently ordered a recount) a more nuanced story has emerged. Those involved in organising the protests explained they used many online tools to organise the protest; planning involved blogs and LiveJournal accounts, followed closer to the actual event by facebook groups and text messaging. Twitter was, among other things, a clever way of ensuring their message gained space in influential media outlets. By this measure the protests have been a resounding success. (For some more in-depth analysis, take a look here and here.)
Closer to home, the political scandal that has dominated media discourse has been ‘smeargate’ (or #smeargate in Twitter), the saga in which Gordon Brown’s political and press adviser, Damian McBride, resigned after leaked emails described plans to publish gossip stories about senior opposition party politicians on a ‘political gossip’ blog, Red Rag. These were, it was said, primarily to be a response to claimed slurs about members of the Labour party on the Conservative-leaning Guido Fawkes’ blog – a Westminster rumour mill.
Whatever one’s political affiliations, the incident highlights the importance placed within government on the influence of the blogosphere. As a result (unintended), the public is now more aware of political mudslinging previously shared between small groups of politically motivated bloggers. In Moldova, a couple of shrewd planners used their knowledge of how the media operates to take advantage of social networks, particularly the viral nature and gravitas of Twitter, in order to garner the maximum media exposure for their cause.
As we’ve noted earlier, taken individually, services like Twitter, and previously facebook, can seem like isolated fads, but seen within the context of an increasingly savvy and networked online community, they take on greater significance.
The picture at the top of the post was borrowed, with thanks, from the Political Graffiti blog.
Add comment 27 April 2009
Trusting Twitter
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.
Add comment 4 March 2009
Impossible polaroids
Tom Ding writes:
“One day I will tire of digital photography
and ‘get back to basics.’
While my pictures will not be
easy to share with friends and family
[via popular photo sharing websites]
If a photo is unsharable,
does that make it more personal,
therefore
more meaningful to me?”
(Carles, Hipster Runoff)
Now that everyone and their mum has a super-compact, many mega-pixel camera in their bag (and another on their phone), some have begun to miss the bits of photography that they have left behind. The lomography movement has been around for a while now, long enough to spawn satirical blog post poetry and iphone imitations anyway, but the impossible project feels more substantial. And more interesting.
In case you hadn’t heard, almost a year ago Polaroid announced that due to a lack of demand, they were to cease production of the film used in their cameras; the countdown to the final time when someone would truly “shake it like a polaroid picture” had started. Most enthusiasts were left with no option but to pay over the odds on ebay for the last scraps of the stuff, but a few have embarked on something altogether more ambitious: ‘the impossible project’.
Inspired by the original inventor Edwin Land (“Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible”), a team of twelve amateur experts have acquired the equipment from one of the old factories. They are determined that by 2010 they will have invented a new type of film, compatible with the original cameras, but that uses components that are still in production. On the website a new clock is ticking (29,333,530 seconds at the time of writing); if they manage it, and if Russell Davies is right when he says that this is going to be a year for ‘real, post-digital things’, then it may have been a manifestly good idea.
The photograph, from The Impossible Project website, is of the former Polaroid film factory.
Add comment 29 January 2009
Beyond the human
Stacey Yates and Denise Hicks write:
Stelarc is an Australian artist and post-humanist who believes that the human body is obsolete. He is acting on his belief, using his own body as an experimental laboratory. So who better to have on a panel at an event organised by Kinetica Museum about the convergence of art and science within the realms of robotics and cybernetics?
If the human body is obsolete, the only way forward is to embrace our already co-dependent (at times dependent) relationship with technology. Stelarc believes that it’s time to create a new design and architecture for the human body. To demonstrate its potential, he has been growing a left ear on his left forearm since early 2007, with the goal of making his body ‘internet enabled’.
After a year and a half, the ear is only in relief on his arm, but a third operation will lift it from the arm, giving it better definition. After that, he plans to implant a miniature microphone into the ear, connected to a bluetooth transmitter, enabling a wireless connection to the internet.
The microphone and transmitter will allow people to hear what the ear is listening to, wherever they may be. When electronically complete, it will form part of a distributed Bluetooth headset.
The body becomes internet enabled. The extra ear becomes an internet organ.
Although this all seems extreme, technology is increasingly being used surgically in cases of disability, such as cochlear implants for those that are deaf or hard of hearing. A quarter of teenagers say they are willing to go under the knife to improve the body they have (according to Great Ormond Street Hospital), and the quest for everlasting life (or at least a youthful glow) is a permanent feature in cosmetics aisles. Corrective laser eye surgery has become commonplace. If artists see the extremes of the future more clearly than the rest of us, Stelarc’s work suggests that it is only a matter of time before able-bodied consumers turn to technological ‘improvements’ to break through through the flesh-bound limitations of their body. Is it ‘man’ or ‘machine’? The question is already out of date. It will be both.
1 comment 8 December 2008
