Very New Media

New Technology

2006-11-28T20:53:00.000-08:00

I've got a few new toys around the house -- a Wii, a Sling Box, and a Zune -- but what I'd rather talk about is a new simple (and free!) piece of software: the Google Browser Sync extension for Firefox, which has had a great effect on the way I've been thinking about personal software lately. Basically, this browser extension allows you to store these things:

Cookies
Passwords
Bookmarks
History
Tabs and Windows

So, for example, if you're the kind of person who logs onto more than two or three (or four... or seven) computers in a day, this extension will allow you to store information from session to session. I find this immensely valuable for making my bookmarks portable. I have a list of sites that I visit in the day at work and at night at home, and I'd like that list to be consistent from computer to computer. This achieves that. (And for those whose security alarms go off the second they hear this, note that the data can be encrypted.)

I've been thinking about this extension in conjunction with another one, the Attention Recorder for Firefox. The idea here is that it captures all the "attention" you are giving to sites in your daily internet browsing. Sounds like Big Brother -- why would you want to do that?! Well, first of all, you have control over that clickstream, no one else does. And maybe you'd like to build a library of stuff you visit over the years. Or another idea, tied to the notion of attention economy, is that you own your click stream, and perhaps there should be a way for you to make money from this.

Those are two things I'm into lately -- storage and portability.

Vigilante Newsgather

2006-11-21T02:07:00.000-08:00

When Gillmor's We, The Media was first released two years ago, it was the kind of book that everyone who was vaguely involved in new media was immediately citing. This wasn't so much because it offered a new vision for where we're going or a new framework for what needs to be done. Rather, the allure of Gillmor's treatise was that it gave a lot of people in the industry hope -- hope that if we can prove our flexibility, if we can get our hands around social media and collaborative news-making and audience participation, then maybe, just maybe, we (journalists) will all still have a job in five years.

The chapter that our group is assigned is titled "The Former Audience Joins the Party." Its function is to invigorate the activist wing of the journalism field, calling to the stand DIY organizations to take back the media: "The grassroots are transcending the pallid consumerism that has characterized news coverage and consumption in the past half-century or more." The websites he chooses to illustrate this re-appropriation of media include Healing Iraq, PersianBlog, IndyMedia, and Democracy Now, and Back To Iraq. All of these can be characterized as new media outlets that offer inside voices -- stories told by people from inside regions that are part of the mainstream media's diet but are seldom relayed in such a personal and direct manner. In short, they tell it like it is.

Indeed, this is a poignant observation, but it already feels a little stale. Of course Gillmor is right about the empowering characteristics of blogging for minority and disenfranchised communities -- we have hundreds of examples by now.

However, there's a small point in the text that I'd like to focus on, which I've been thinking about for a couple years. The germ of the idea started with reading about Back To Iraq in this book. Quickly told, Back To Iraq was a blog by a former AP reporter, Chris Allbritton, who had been in Iraq during the first Gulf War. He wanted to return to the region, but do so outside of the confines of an embedded reporter for a mainstream news organization. So he started a blog that asked users for financial contributions to fund his return to Iraq. After Wired News picked up his story, Allbritton made enough money from user donations to go to Iraq and report on it independently.

So far, so good.

I remember reading an interview with Allbritton at the time (I've forgotten where -- I'll try to look it up later) in which he describes some of his interactive reporting. Fascinating stuff -- answering emails on the battlefield, etc. But there was a point where I remember reading that people who contributed money could also ask Allbritton to report on certain issues -- perhaps go check out an arms depot they read about in the Times or a wounded soldier mentioned on the BBC. Now, this might not seem peculiar at first, but when you start to think about it, you have to wonder: is this a form of vigilante reporting?

I don't mean to accuse Allbritton of anything -- he did great work in Iraq. But I'm interested in the implication of Back To Iraq, especially given some of the implications in recent inventions of interactive reporting. In particular, Mark Cuban's new journalism startup, Sleuth Share, seems a particularly dangerous prospect. The gist: Cuban hires a reporter to investigate publicly traded companies. On the day that the reports are published, Cuban shorts the stock of the company -- thereby making money off this venture's journalism. Pretty crafty, right? Yeah, and also pretty freakin dangerous. (And also, totally legal.)

This is the problem with new media: it breaks categories, thereby creating situations we're not quite prepared for. We, The Media might give us some hope, but we've got a long ride ahead of us.

The Ascendency of the Commons

2006-11-12T23:56:00.000-08:00

Just a few pages into "The Net and the Future of Politics: The Ascendancy of the Commons," a couple things became clear to me:

1) In 2006, we are not rustled by the same anxieties as those from 1994. Although the fears of net access haven't completely disappeared, a dozen years of change has yielded a situation that isn't as dire as suggested in the piece. There are still pockets that lack access, but to give just one example where the gap has been filled: my mother who lives in rural North Dakota (about as "nowhere" as you can get) has not only library internet access but also broadband home access.

2) However, while we continue to close the gap on universal access in America, a new set of challenges has emerged. The following two issues seem like natural segues to contemporary issues that bear some similarity to the access debates of the '90s.

Net Neutrality

Today's reading seems to perfectly set up a discussion about net neutrality, which in many ways is an analogue to the situation in 1994. I've followed the debate over the past year pretty closely, but I didn't know have a handy introductory resource link. The Wikipedia link is a fine introduction and the CNet package has a bevy of additional coverage, but I'm actually going to suggest two other links, both found on YouTube:

Net Neutrality. This three-minute clip is a good introduction to the topic, explained with a series of scenarios.

The Daily Show: Ted Stevens and the Internet. Okay, this isn't a great scholarly example, but it's not here just because it's funny -- this clip actually introduced a lot of people to the difficult topic of net neutrality and set up one of the great internet joke metaphors of the past few years: "a series of tubes."

Public WiFi

The access debate is truly still alive if you consider the battles that are going on in cities across America on the possibility of offering public WiFi.

CNet Public WiFi Map. This gives a good sampling of how deep the penetration is in city wireless.

MuniWireless. This trade organization tracks the most recent developments in municipal wireless access.

There are several different models under consideration (a government-owned utility that is either free or paid, a government license to a single provider, several different providers, etc). It seems like this will take several years to completely sort out.

Internet Communities

2006-11-04T23:12:00.000-08:00

I've been involved in online communities for over a decade, so I've got a million stories to tell about hidden identities, community interaction, and the general murkiness of the whole collective internet experience. I'll relate two quick anecdotes:

1) My most recent "big project" was a citizen journalism project in Minneapolis (where I emigrated from last year) called MNspeak.com. It was a hybrid of different forms -- part group blog, part community aggregator, part media, part gossip. But mostly, it was immense fun. In the time that I ran the site (which I sold before moving to Seattle), it broke many stories that were later picked up by the daily papers. One interesting examplewas the story of a mysterious blimp that was spotted floating around the metro area. It became a fascinating instance that illustrates how people collected together around a website can commit acts of journalism -- in this case, following up rumors of the dirigible's origin (Oprah Winfrey, a mayoral candidate) with actual phone calls. To repeat for emphasis: people without any journalistic training whom I have never met before picked up the phone to verify rumors and then reported them back to the website, just like real reporters. Astonishing!

2) A couple years ago, a prominent female blogger mysteriously disappeared from the internet, which led to many of her fans investigating the impetus for her disappearance. After a long investigation (all performed online, with an elaborate set of sleuthing techniques), it was revealed that the girlblogger was actually a middle-aged dude. A strong contingent of her followers were extremely upset but this. I wrote a story and interviewed the guy for the local alt-weekly. What I didn't actually reveal in the story is that I was one of the sad sods who was completely hoodwinked by this guy -- so much so that I had several late night IM conversation with her (him). When I finally met him (her) for the interview, I still sorta wanted to punch him.

While I Was Dreaming

2006-10-29T23:40:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if it's worth comparing Postman's dystopic infolust to Friedman's sanguine globalization, but the contrast is successful in suggesting what The World Is Flat seems to get right and wrong. In contrast to Postman, Friedman definitely grasps the role of technology on human interaction. And he generally seems to nail the direction business will take in the next decade, by spinning lines that ring with an adapt-or-die motif, such as outlining new business practices "which were less about command and control and more about connecting and collaborating horizontally." New York Times columnists are obliged to spin buzzwords ("Bobo," anyone?), and "home-sourcing" and "in-sourcing" are as good as any at encapsulating the shifting business landscape.

Where Friedman seems misguided, of course, is in his glee for globalization. Let's try this snippet: "The scale of the global community that is soon going to be able to participate in all sorts of discovery and innovation is something the world has simply never seen before." Since this isn't a political philosophy class, it's probably not the place to dive into this, but I wonder if anyone bothered to suggest a reading of Empire in advance of all this flattening. Or heck, how about just watching the Frontline episode on Wal-Mart?

Back to the sociological, it's worth noting how Friedman's reportage on micro-trends (such as the Jet Blue's home-sourcing and McDonalds' remote order-fulfillment) is valuable and interesting -- but so far nothing more than that. It quickly bring to mind the dream of the tele-commuter and the paperless office. As we say back home¹, my dear Friedman, geography continues to matter.

1. Friedman and I are both from Minnesota. Nice guy, but his writing had a little of that gosh, shucks character to it.

What's New?

2006-10-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

I have a pretty great day job: I devise and develop new product idea for a large internet media company. The far edges of my brain get a work-out -- the visualization cortex designs new interfaces, the engineering neurons try to spin prototypes into reality, and the social synapses trigger ideas about how people will use my products to communicate with each other. Hoping to come up with new ideas, my time is spent devouring stories about new products, watching people use the internet, and scribbling little prototypes. I've spent over a decade trying to design products for what people will do next on the internet. And yet, despite years of consideration, I still believe that I know little more than most people about what the Next Big Thing will be. Or, to put it another way, I think everyone knows approximately what the next big thing will be, but only a select few will create exactly what it looks like.

Sections of today's reading of Roger Fidler's Mediamorphosis support my thesis. For instance: "When Alexander Graham Bell submitted his patent application for a telephone in 1876, he was no more certain than anyone else how it would be used." Interestingly, his initial thought was that the telephone would be used to broadcast entertainment. Conversely, we get this bit on Marconi regarding the radio: "The idea that people in rural America might one day be able to communicate instantaneously 'through the air' with friends and neighbors, as well as with people in distant lands, was now exciting." So the radio was to be a communication device, while the phone was thought to be a broadcast device. What about TV?

Live broadcasts of sports and news events, entertainment, and political speeches that combined moving images with sound had been anticipated for decades. The development oftelevision was, in fact, a much longer process than most people today realize. It's progenitors and dominant traits can be traced back to the 1830s and the early simultaneous inventions of photography and electric telegraphy.

This suggests that people sorta kinda know what the future is before it is about to happen. All of this leads me to wonder: what is innovation?

It's difficult to quantify, specifically because innovation includes so many areas, from visual to auditory, mathematical to creative, timeless to historically-dependent, and many more things in between. But to generalize about technology innovation (and communication technology at that), it seems we can establish at least a couple guidelines:

1) We don't always know what exactly an innovation will be used for, but consensus seems to arise around the potential of innovative products.

2) The trajectory is usually right, but the velocity is usually wrong. That is, we tend to know the direction an innovation will take us, but we're bad at determining how fast it will get there.

Vannever Bush's "As We May Think" is rife with examples of both. His prescience on hypertext is amazing, yet his vision of the office computer is Dilbertesque. Not only is he generally right, but you get the feeling that he's summarizing what many people probably thought the 20th century would look like, similar to how William Gibson articulated a plausible vision of the 21st century.

Which brings us to the future. I've written too much already, so let's conclude by quickly listing some of the more obvious consensus views of the future of media:

1) Everything will be more networked. Between wearable computing and ubiquitous wireless, it seems inevitable that my socks will eventually get an IP address.

2) Everything will be more public. With the decrease in storage space and the increase of personal media devices (digital cameras, cell phones, etc.), we seem to be breaking down the barriers of public and private, for better or for worse.

3) Everything will be more collaborative. Wikipedia and other crowd-sourcing trends all point to a hive approach to learning and creating.

4) Everything will be controllable. "Control of media" is the mantra of the last 15 years.

So what does the future look like? Like Barbarella, but with more robots. (Kidding.)

Supervening Necessity

2006-10-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

Today's readings deal primarily with technological adoption. Stafford and Stafford approach it from a research level with an attempt to introduce social dynamics into traditional thinking about consumer gratification online, while Winston approaches it historically by introducing the notion of "supervening necessity." I like Winston's notion, because it introduces a model to account for the seemingly illogical gaps that occur in adoption.

A well developed model of supervening necessity seems like it could account for everything from the rise of NPR (supervening necessity: traffic congestion) to the success of city magazines (supervening necessity: condo culture). So there are two examples where broad cultural changes affect communication strategies. Could the next step in the process be to identify other major cultural shifts (a mobile citizenry, a lower marriage rate, etc.) and try to develop media strategies around those?

Disinforming Ourselves To Death

2006-10-14T19:40:00.000-07:00

If I didn't have enough reasons to dismiss Neil Postman on philosophical, practical, and moral grounds, today's reading of "Informing Ourselves To Death" only supplies more evidence, and a chance to call him a crazy old coot.

Where shall we start?

Postman wants you to believe "the computer" (that ominous gray box) is bad. Really bad. He wishes you would read more books, watch less TV, and take long walks on the beach. To make his argument, he needs to set up a straw men that he can knock down with platitudes. His argument looks like this:

1) "I have never heard anyone speak seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of computer technology."

2) "After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not in equal measure."

3) "The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise."

To summarize: 1) No one has criticized the computer, so Postman will. 2) Technology sometimes has bad consequences. 3) We live in a relativistic culture.

The problem with these syllogistic summaries of history is that they seem completely uncontestable as statements. Of course, technology can have good and bad results -- this is trenchant? We need historical evidence to support claims like this, but when actually applied to real phenomena, the best examples Postman can muster include the printing press, which "destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration" (!?), and the clock, which is a means by which of "synchronizing and controlling the actions of men." Apparently we're supposed to respond, "Damn you, clocks!"

Postman builds steam, as he mounts his case for what is the ultimate enemy of this diatribe: information. Whipping up some testy prose like "deluge of chaos" and "cultural AIDS" to describe the information glut, Postman realizes that the computer didn't create the situation so he transitions with this historical turn: "Now, into this situation comes the computer."

Indeed, this is where we should begin to describe the potential of a networked populace. This is where we should begin to outline the potential of filtering mechanisms, of algorithms, of peer recommendations, of the democratization of information, and of self-publishing. But alas, this is how Postman instead proceeds, which I quote at length, just because it's pretty funny:

Did Iraq invade Kuwait because of a lack of information? If a hideous war should ensue between Iraq and the U. S., will it happen because of a lack of information? If children die of starvation in Ethiopia, does it occur because of a lack of information? Does racism in South Africa exist because of a lack of information? If criminals roam the streets of New York City, do they do so because of a lack of information?

Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your spouse are unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen because of a lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring shame to your family, does it happen because of a lack of information? If someone in your family has a mental breakdown, will it happen because of a lack of information?

And then:

Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better - best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.

If I may summarize: You kids think your computer is so special!

Not only does Postman sound like my grandpa who still believes rock 'n roll is a fad, he commits horrible logic. Because the computer can't turn back time, destroy Hitler, and bring Jesus back to life, it must be bad. Brilliant logic.

Postman's fault, of course, is his conception of the computer. In his world, the computer is a proper noun, capitalized and ominous, similar to the bomb in Dr. Strangelove: The Computer. However, the revolution of the computer is not its centralized databases, its infinite storage facility, its terabytes of data. Rather, the marvel of the computer is its network -- it's ability to connect to other computers, share information, and find like-minded individuals. We've come to realize that the computer is just a person, and a network is a series of people, and software is just the glue that brings them together.

It seems almost unfair to laugh at Postman with the historical lens of 15 years since his speech. But If I dismiss Postman too quickly, it's because I know the kind of person he'd be today: ranting on Fox News about the atomizing effects of the internet, declaring the end of community, and foreboding the demise of newspapers. In other words, he would be disinforming himself to death.

Talking About A Revolution

2006-10-10T00:05:00.000-07:00

Brian Winston begins his history of electronic media with the voice of a contrarian -- so contrarian, in fact, that he tells you exactly what this book will not be about in the very first sentence: "An image of history as something other than a progressive chain of events informs this book." With the whiff and a wave, be prepared for your faulty "image of history" to be wisped away.

Winston starts on solid ground. He's two-thirds material determinist and one-third structuralist. That is, he's a historian who wishes to do away with the illusions of the now -- the "visions of techno-glory or apocalypse," as he calls them. But he also seeks to replace these visions with a constructivist theory of everything.

Thankfully, Winston's theory works most of the time, even if it gets obsessive in its preponderance with inventing elaborate phrases ("supervening social necessities" and "the law of the suppression of radical potential") for simple ideas ("do people want it?" and "new ideas are suppressed"). His system seems capable as a historical model to account for innovation and invention. His stern voice is a megaphone of social determinism aimed at "inspired" Romantics and "individualist" Modernists. "What is hyperbolized as a revolutionary train of events can be seen as a far more evolutionary and less transforming process." Fair enough, but how much hyperbolizing does Winston himself commit in dissembling the non-revolutionariness of revolutions? Even the French Revolution had its clear determining factors, but historical consciousness doesn't mean it's not a revolution.

Perhaps this is quibbling. Winston and I would agree, for instance, that the iPod did not miraculously appear out of nowhere. We'd also likely agree that the cult of Steve Jobs could use some historical determinism thrown at it. But it seems unwise to understate the disruptive, the seditious, the revolutionary effect of the iPod. If not a revolution in cause, it was certainly one in effect.

Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus"

2006-10-09T23:57:00.000-07:00

VOIP Killed The Telephone Star

2006-10-08T23:13:00.000-07:00

In business schools across America, aspiring MBAs are being taught one simple lesson about the advances of communications technology of the past couple decades: adapt or die. Unfortunately, it's too late to go back and re-educate media executives on these same points.

This is the context that makes "How the Internet Killed the Phone Business" (The Economist, Sept. 2005) an important lesson for media professionals who continue to cling to the belief they can litigate their way back into control. Each part of the media/culture industry has been forced to rethink its business because of a major disruptive technology. Whether it's Napster (music) or YouTube (television) or blogging (newspapers), every media company is being forced to grapple with the implications of a disintermediated world. Why? How? Simply, the public has wrested control of their consumption habits from media companies. An entirely new consumer identity has even been carved out and labeled: the user. By now, it's nearly a foregone conclusion that companies that don't figure out how to adapt to this user-centric view will perish.

However, there is a more latent idea in the development of VOIP outlined in The Economist -- one with less clear implications: how exactly does eBay fit into this? Nearly a year after eBay's purchase of Skype, we still have no clear understanding of how eBay plans to integrate the product into the online auction experience. In the annals of recent purchases, we have clear cases of success (Media Corp. buying MySpace, eBay buying PayPal) and clear cases of failure (Yahoo buying Broadcast.com, Bertelsmannbuying Napster, and of course the AOL Time-Warner merger). How eBay applies VOIP remains to be seen, but merely displaying a willingness to adapt shows they're ahead of many of the media companies out there.

First Post

2006-10-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

Hello, world.

Here is a link to my real blog, which covers issues related to media, pop culture, and technology:

Fimoculous.com

It has existed since before "blog" was a word, and is maintained with custom software that I wrote.