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Outside of a small circle of friends, there’s only connections…

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"A Dance to the Music of Time" is an epic tale of friendships and relationships

How many true friends can a person really have? Friends you would go to the cinema with, and who would walk out with you if you didn’t like the film? Friends whom you would invite to stay at your home for the holidays? Friends who would tell you when you had made a fool of yourself, but not hold it against you? Friends from whom you would borrow money or to whom you would lend money?

Social networking makes it all too easy to connect with people we’ve barely or never met. Instead of investing our time and effort in cultivating meaningful and lasting friendships, social media encourages us to “collect” as many virtual friends as possible, and we spend increasing amounts of time in vicarious “sharing” – but how many of these “connections” can we actually count on as our friends?

The question occurred to me as I read the First Movement of Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time”, a literary tour de force situated somewhere between Marcel Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” and Evelyn Waugh’s sequence of novels from “Decline and Fall” to the “Sword of Honour” trilogy.

At the heart of Powell’s 12-novel saga is a group of four friends – Jenkins, the narrator, and his three contemporaries from school – Templer, Stringham and Widmerpool. As we follow their adventures over a 50-year period, we discover the interweaving relationships and often tangential connections that run through their lives. We also witness the subtle change in relationships between the main characters – especially the ebb and flow of their individual circumstances as they fall out of favour and lose contact with one another for years at a time. The reflective and considered format of the novel allows us to see that as in real life, there are periods when the friends positively dislike each other and are frequently disappointed by their personal shortcomings and irritated by their annoying habits.

Powell’s epic work of fiction reminds us that even among our strongest and most enduring friendships, there can be episodes of absolute dislike, as well as times of empathy, loyalty and support; and of course, being only human, our opinions and views of our friends can change over time. Powell’s perspective also confirms that most of the people we encounter in social and professional situations are mere acquaintances. We must surely recognize that our personal friendships are each valued on their own merits, and we enjoy different friendships for different reasons – we do not simply have a homogenous group of “connections” that are all exactly the same. There is nothing wrong with being part of well-connected and inter-related networks, but we must guard against reducing all these relationships to a single dimension.

Unfortunately, most social networking platforms operate on a binary structure where we are forced to make simplistic choices of either “friend” or “unfriend”, “like” or “unlike”, “follow” or “unfollow”. And there is something rather materialistic and incredibly narcissistic in the way that the number of “likes”, “follows” and “shares” we collect on-line is not only representative of our popularity, but it is somehow an indication of how fabulous a friend we really are.

Unlike the real world, these on-line platforms do not recognize the subtle dynamics of our true friendships, nor do they acknowledge that we value each of our friendships for the different experiences that we draw from them. We also have different friends with whom we enjoy doing different things, and we probably don’t introduce all our friends to one another (and certainly not at the same time).

Of course, younger generations who have grown up with social media may have no qualms about the reductionist nature of social networking, and the inherent opportunity it affords them to “connect” with as many different people as they can. But for someone like myself who is quite happy to count fewer than a score of people as my true friends, I relish the quality of my friendships, not the quantity.

Apologies to Phil Ochs for (mis-)appropriating his song title.

Social Media – finding its own level?

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Social media is accessible to all...

Social Media is accessible to all…

Recently I’ve come to see that as a communication tool Social Media is just like any other resource or commodity – it’s not an end in itself, it’s what you can do with it that makes it valuable.

If I had to make a comparison, I would say that Social Media is most like water – not just because we seem to be swimming (if not drowning) in the stuff; but because like water, it will find its own level. And as Myer CEO Bernie Brookes found out this week, something that sustains us can also be unleashed against us.

As content pours into our Social Media aquifers, it will naturally flow, collect and disperse. The rivers of content being uploaded daily* suggest that unlike other resources, Social Media will not run out any time soon:

  • Twitter: 400 million Tweets posted per day
  • Instagram: 40 million photos uploaded per day
  • YouTube: 72 hours of videos posted every minute
  • Facebook: 2.5 billion content items shared per day
  • LinkedIn: 175,000 new profiles created every day
  • SoundCloud: 10 hours of audio uploaded every minute

These reservoirs of digital content that we are creating could be put to good use (like dams that provide hydro-electricity). Viewed from this perspective, Social Media can be seen as a potential source of energy. Rather like waterwheels that harness the power of rivers, Social Media can be used to drive a range of applications; but left to its own devices, and with nowhere else to go, all this content will simply collect in stagnant pools – sometimes you need to use part of that energy to keep the water flowing downstream.

In just the past week I’ve been exposed to three more Social Media platforms, each of which is at advanced beta stage: @IFTTT – a tool to re-publish selected updates to multiple platforms via a series of automated decision trees; @Poptip – a tool for conducting polls via Twitter; and a personalized viral marketing tool which I probably cannot mention by name because I had to sign an NDA in order to participate in the pre-launch.

Each of these new platforms is trying to harness the potential of Social Media and keep the communication flowing (the waterwheel analogy). Similar to other Social Media platforms, these tools also act like aqueducts carrying water to where it’s needed. It’s as if we are using the content to feed a Social Media irrigation system – the results of which allow us to harvest followers, “likes” and customers.

The question is, who will we look to for inspiration when we come to write Social Media’s epitaph – will it be Smith, Bell, Coleridge or Goethe?** Will we end up drowning in the stuff (but no-one will notice until it’s too late)? Will we wish we had used it more sparingly? Will we be faced with an abundance that we cannot actually make use of? Or will it be a case of “be careful what you wish for”? (Clearly, King Canute is of no assistance, as it’s far too late to turn back the tide….)

* Note: Statistics gathered from a casual internet search of company websites, press releases and industry commentaries. No claims as to accuracy, currency or verification.

** Literary references: Stevie Smith – “Not Waving but Drowning”; William Bell – “You Don’t Miss Your Water (Till Your Well Runs Dry)”; Samuel Taylor Coleridge – “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink”; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

Why we need a “Steam Internet”

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1981 Alcatel Minitel terminal(Photo by Jef Poskanzer - Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike)

1981 Alcatel Minitel terminal
(Photo by Jef Poskanzer – Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike)

The Internet is passing through a period of consolidation, as befits an industry that has reached maturity:

1. A small number of mega-players dominate the market: Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, YouTube and Wikipedia.

2. Product lines are being rationalized, as companies trim their offerings to focus on core business – the latest victim being Google’s Reader tool for RSS feeds.

3. The distinctions between hardware, software, content and apps are blurred because of overlapping services, increased inter-connectivity via mobile platforms, and cloud-based solutions.

4. The business model for Internet access and Web usage is primarily based on data consumption and/or underwritten by 3rd party advertising. Social Media and search services are often not counted as part of the usage, thus confusing our understanding of what content actually costs.

5. Since our concept of what constitutes “news” is rapidly being redefined by Social Media, and readers increasingly rely on Social Media channels to access news, it is harder for content providers to charge a premium for value-added  information services such as quality journalism and objective news reporting.

I would argue that to rediscover a key purpose of the Net (as a means to send/receive meaningful news and information), we need to reflect on how radio broadcasting repositioned itself when television came along – hence “Steam Internet”.

“Steam Radio” was a term used in 1950’s Britain to differentiate sound broadcasting (radio) from audio-visual broadcasts (television). Although somewhat self-deprecating (suggesting something slow, and obsolete – echoing the demise of steam railways following the introduction of electric and diesel locomotives), it actually helped to embed specific values and purpose around the role of radio as a simple but effective medium to inform, educate and entertain, despite its apparent limitations.

My interest in radio means that I continue to use it as a primary source of daily news and current affairs, and as a convenient means to access international content. The discipline of radio means that content is generally well structured, the format’s limitations emphasise quality over quantity, and when done well there is both an immediacy and an intimate atmosphere that can really only be achieved by the audio format.

Far from becoming an obsolete medium in the Internet age, the growth of digital stations (as well as Internet radio and mobile-streaming) means that radio is undergoing a renaissance as it increasingly provides very specific choices in content, and offers ease of access without a lot of the “noise” of many news and information websites, with their pop-up ads, unstable video and data-hungry graphics.

Over the past decade, the major growth in Internet traffic in general, and World-wide Web usage in particular, has been driven by Social Media. However, neither the Net nor the Web was originally designed to be a mass-media platform, but the success of a highly interactive, deeply personalized and far-reaching network threatens the viability of the Internet as a means to effective communication.

As Web content and functionality has become more complex, so it actually becomes harder and more frustrating to find exactly what we want, because:

  • search and retrieval is advertising-driven and based on popularity, frequency and connectivity (rather than on context, relevance and quality);
  • content searches reduce everything to a common level of “hits” and “results”; and
  • there is little or no hierarchy as to how information and search results are structured (maybe we need a Dewey Decimal system for organising Web content?). This is one reason why Twitter is enhancing its search function by using human intervention (i.e., contextual interpretation) to make more sense of trending news themes.

I’d like to offer a short historical perspective to provide further context for the need for “Steam Internet” services:

Along with bankers and brokers, lawyers were among the first to recognize the importance of dedicated Internet services for transacting data and information. The first on-line information service I ever used was Lexis-Nexis (a research tool for lawyers) when I was a paralegal in the 1980’s. Lexis-Nexis is a database that enables users to search summaries, transcripts and reports of relevant court decisions regarding specific points of law. It is a very structured and hierarchical content source. Back then, it was a dial-up service, requiring the user to place the handset of a fixed-line telephone into an external modem that was connected to the computer terminal from which the search was conducted. The reason I can remember it so vividly is because the first time I used it, I forgot to specify sufficiently narrow search terms, which meant pages and pages of text being churned out – and probably a bill of over $200, as the service was charged according to the number of results returned and pages printed.

In the mid-1990’s, when I was setting up my Internet access, the ISP was owned and run by a university, which made sense when we think that the Net grew out of the academic world. But even though I had an ISP account, I still had to download, install and configure a graphical browser (Mosaic) to access the Web – or alternatively, I could subscribe to a dedicated dial-up service such as AOL, that offered a limited number of dedicated information services. Otherwise, my Internet access really only supported e-mail via DOS-based applications, and the exchange of files. (This was pre-Explorer and pre-Netscape, and the browser wars of the 1990’s and early-2000’s – which continue to this day with Microsoft copping another EU fine just this month.)

As the Web became more interactive, but also more dependant on “push”-content driven by advertising-based search, user experience was enhanced by RSS readers – to get to the information we really needed, and to personalize what content would be pushed to our desktops. When I was demonstrating financial market information services to new clients the built-in RSS reader was a useful talking-point, because I had configured it to display scores from the English Premier League as well as general news and industry headlines. (There is an urban myth that some of the most popular news screens on Bloomberg are the sports results…)

Just a few years ago, pre-Social Media, there were discussions about building a dedicated, faster, more robust and more secure business-oriented Internet platform, because the popular and public demands placed on the Web were putting an inordinate strain on the whole system. Businesses felt the need to create a separate platform – not just VPN’s, but a new “Internet 2” for government, universities and businesses to communicate and interact.  In the end, all that has happened is an expansion of the Top-Level Domains (.biz, .mobi), with a continued programme of generic TLD’s in the works, but this is simply creating more real-estate on the Web, not building a dedicated data and information-led Internet for business.

At this point, it’s worth reflecting that only last year, France’s Minitel videotex service and the UK’s Ceefax teletext service were both finally decommissioned, each having been in operation for over 30 years. In their prime, these were innovative precursors to the Web, even though neither of them was considered to be part of the Internet. Their relevance as dedicated information services should not be overlooked just because technology has overtaken them; that’s like saying the news media are redundant because their print circulation is in decline.

In conclusion, I’m therefore very attracted to the idea of a Steam Internet which mainly carries news and information services as a way to bring focus and structure to this content.    

 

Declaration of interest: from time-to-time the author is a presenter on Community Radio, but does not currently derive an income from this activity, so no commercial or financial bias should be implied by his personal enthusiasm for this broadcast medium.    

Broadcastr signs off: 9 Challenges for Social Media

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Social Media platforms – there seems to be one born every minute. By the time you finish reading this article, another 5 will have been launched somewhere in the world. And probably 5 more will have been shut down.

A recent casualty of what I call the “50 Shades of Social Media” syndrome is Broadcastr, a user-contributed audio content platform for location-based story telling.

In their farewell note to the Broadcastr user community, co-founders Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum stated:

“While we’d love to keep Broadcastr alive, technology requires money, active development, and maintenance. We’re a small team, and, sadly, don’t have the resources to continue development.”

Broadcastr has inevitably lost out to category-killer SoundCloud, an earlier site that dominates Social Media audio content (and is also the likely cause for the wavering fortunes of MySpace). In recent months, iTunes has withdrawn its Ping social networking application for music fans; Webdoc has rebranded itself as Urturn (possibly due to confusion surrounding its name) and Yahoo! has just announced it is withdrawing a number of Social Media products – not forgetting that Yahoo! dumped Buzz, a social news site that was hard to distinguish from Digg. There are even some mutterings that Google+ does not yet justify the hype as a serious Social Media platform to take on Facebook or Twitter.

Even if you are first to market with a new Social Media platform, most sites are just a different (not necessarily better) mousetrap – same bait to tempt you in, same tools to capture your attention. The sheer volume of sites means that they are hard to differentiate from one another – hence the “50 Shades of Social Media” syndrome. Each Social Media site is trying to become THE destination for its target audience, but as The Cure once sang, “In the caves, all cats are grey.” Despite their differences, all Social Media platforms end up looking pretty much the same.

In light of the heated competition for market traction, here are 9 challenges to success in Social Media:

1 There are essentially only 5 types of Social Media platform:

2 There are only a limited number of activities you can do within these sites, such as “like”, “follow”, “share”, “post”, “publish”, “comment”, “recommend” and “tag”.

3 Increasingly, single-purpose or single-interest Social Media sites are attempting to cross over into adjacent domains, in an attempt to build scale and stickiness, and to improve the user experience.

4 This diversification means Social Media lose focus, dilute their original offering, and potentially alienate users.

5 Every Social Media platform starts out claiming to be different and offering something unique – but both the content and the business models are relatively easy to replicate, which is why we see multiple variations of the same concept or minor iterations with each new site.

6 As we engage with multiple Social Media platforms, we need our own personal media monitoring and management systems just to keep tabs on everything, especially when sites start to overlap as they encompass richer media formats and enhanced content functionality.

7 Meanwhile, the increasing inter-connectivity between different sites means that as individual users we can multi-channel as if we are our own mini cable networks.

8 But as with cable TV, multi-channelling leads to audience fragmentation and narrowcasting (which in turn has an impact on advertising revenue).

9 The Social Media industry will be subject to further mergers and acquisitions like Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, and consolidation will inevitably result in an oligarchy of dominant players, as happens with all media.