One of the main themes at TEDGlobal this year was a lively debate between optimistic and pessimistic voices on the social potential (or doom) of the web. This outlook was somewhat more somber than I expected at a TED conference, perhaps – as some attendees suspected – due to the cultural differences between Long Beach and Oxford. There was definitely a palpable sense of enlightened skepticism at the conference, a distinctly European tone that serves as welcome counterweight to the Californian brand of optimism that TED is often associated with (just read this amusingly British commentary in the Times of London).
One of the most vocal and polemic representatives of this kind of socio-techno-skepticism was Internet researcher Evgeny Morozov. Arguing that the web impedes democratization, he chastised social web apostles for naively believing that the medium is the action and scoffed at the phenomenon of “slacktivism” (saving the world one click at a time through Facebook Causes). Morozov coined some catchy terms such as “iPod liberalism” and “Spinternet: (Spin + Internet) to expose what he considers a rather one-sided view of online activism and in fact a delusional assumption about the social power of global, collective voices on the web. Morozov's biting sarcasm (“There was a time when governments had to torture people to get intelligence. Now they just need to go to their Facebook pages.”) was refreshing and welcome amidst the usual choir of politics 2.0 cheerleaders, however, he failed to provide much evidence for his heretical claims. He might indeed underestimate the smartness and agility of digital natives, especially when he questioned the role of Twitter during the Iranian protests. Sure, each new technology comes with Faustian ambivalence, but even though the Twitter protesters may not have lead to any substantial change (yet), I’d argue that the worldwide attention (and sympathy) for the cause of the Iranian people was significantly enhanced through the hundreds of thousands of Twitterers who used #iranelection (especially given #CNNfail). Was this ad-hoc Twitter community a political movement? Maybe not. But it politicized and generated social power that can instigate political change. Or does Morozov really think Obama won the election because of TV commercials and townhall meetings?
Anthropologist Stefana Broadbent added some more nuances to the discussion: She drew from research she conducted and presented some interesting numbers that prove what she calls the “democratization intimacy” – the observation that most social web users communicate with a nucleus of 1-5 people and cultivate strong ties rather than adding weak ones to their networks. In other words: They aren't expanding their circle of friends but strengthening their most important relationships. And they do this at work: According to a recent Pew study, more than 50% of office workers in the US use email and messaging services for private communications. Broadbent concluded that we are witnessing a “re-appropriation of the personal sphere:” “Through their communication channels, people are breaking an imposed isolation that institutions are imposing on them.”
Jonathan Zittrain had begun the session with a general state-of-the-web analysis that was a real shock-and-awe fireworks. It says something about the unstoppable momentum of the Internet if talks like his consist mainly of screenshots of goofy web sites like “Cats that Look Like Hitler,” social phenomena like couchsurfing, and other Internet memorabilia. Apparently, the Web is much wilder than theorists can make it. Indeed, the Internet does not have a business model, as Zittrain poignantly remarked, and yes, it is a verb not a noun. Consequently, he ended his talk with a simple: “Let’s march.”
Speaking of verbs and nouns (and marching), Aza Raskin from the Mozilla Foundation wants to bring language back into the user experience in order to turn a functional task management paradigm into what he calls “you-centric computing” – putting the user in charge, making computing human(e). And yet, as rain followed sun in Oxford this week, idealism was immediately juxtaposed with a rather melancholic interlude: a short film titled “Real Human Interface,” starring a human, imprisoned in a small (in and out)box, nurtured by a constant flow of mundane communication and tasks. A sad and lonely tale of OK Computer happiness and the 21st century answer to what Alain de Botton calls the quintessential 21st century question:
“What do you do?” – Interfacing.
(Credit:
Multileveler)
Looking at the many positive responses it received, Pico Iyer’s recent NY Times blog post on "The Joy of Less" appears to have struck a chord:
"But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world)."
I take Iyer’s account as further anecdotal proof of my thesis that we are moving towards a new era of post-materialism, in which the quest for meaning, simply put: collective action for the common good, social impact, sustainability, enlightenment, values, etc., trumps purebred material satisfaction derived from the accumulation of things. If ownership, the tyranny of more, means slavery to objects, the less is ephemeral and offers an infinite number of possibilities.
However, I disagree with Iyer on the role of media stimuli. I tend to have a more optimistic view and believe that Twitter, as the modern, accelerated Haiku, can indeed provide you with that “joy of less” that Iyer describes. To counter Iyer with the very Hamlet citation he uses in his text: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” What if Twitter is the impulse purchase of the enlightened digital citizen? What if it has shifted the need for instant gratification from a purely materialistic to a more intellectual realm? On Twitter, the only thing you can truly own is your account; everything else, even your followers, are ever-changing and highly volatile. Needless to say that tweets come and go as much as anything can come and go, and that Twitter doesn’t have a memory, so that all lives on it are limited to the here and now. That’s quite a moment of Zen. And yet, paradoxically, while ‘less is more’ certainly applies to its tweet format, the true attraction of Twitter lies in a ‘more is more’ network effect. The more people join, the more valuable the social conversation becomes.
This weekend, in the aftermath of the Iranian election, Twitter’s ability to build a mass audience by virally connecting myriad micro-audiences through micro-messages has proven again to have real impact. When the Iranian police started cracking down on protesters, CNN chose to air a repeat of Larry King’s interview with the stars of the American Chopper show, which drove the Twittersphere berserk. Other news networks, too, failed to properly cover the dramatic events that unfolded in Iran, but CNN was an easy target because it is so iconic. While the world was tweeting, the ‘most trusted source in news’ misjudged the situation and failed to turn history in the making into a story. In fact, it completely missed the beat and responded somewhat defensively to Twitterers’ accusations:
(Credit:
CNN)
The anger at CNN may have been collateral damage of Twitterers’ frustration due to having only limited impact over the events in Iran. But the effect was impressive: Within a couple of hours, #cnnfail became one of the top trending topics on Twitter, CNN was faced with a major image backlash, and you could follow the development live on Twitter. Twitter effectively acted as “media watchdog,” as Mashable commented. Citizen journalism outperformed professional journalism -- in real-time. When Ahmadinejad shut down all mobile services and social networks, only a few Iranian Twitterers, with just the trusted authority of a genuine voice, were able to stay connected to the rest of the world and report on the frightening events in Iran. Synchronicity, real-time reporting, should have been CNN’s bastion but it didn’t get any of this. Twitter did.
The parallels are striking: The tentative revolution in Iran coincided with a revolution in the American living room. The protests against the Iran regime corresponded with protests against old school gatekeeper media. The social media grassroots campaign against traditional media became a mainstream media story itself. It will be interesting to see if CNN realizes the other startling parallel, the elephant in the room: Both Iran and CNN have cracks in the wall. The days of the old models are numbered. The revolution will happen but it won’t be televised.
The other key take-away from this media weekend is that on Twitter the main story was not the story. The main story is never the story. Twitter is the mainstream for alternative streams. This is why Twitterfall, which displays tweets grouped by trending topics as a top-down waterfall, is the congenial visualization, the most effective user interface for Twitter. Twitterfall expresses the escalation that is an inherent part of Twitter. On Saturday night, #iranelection and #cnnfail tweets broke down in staccato-pace, many tweets per second. It was hard to take your eyes off; it was too easy, too tempting to stand still amidst the constant motion.
Events are synchronous, multi-dimensional, multi-layered, and social, and so must be news. What if the future of news was Google Wave, as Jeff Jarvis suggests, or other "email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware"? “Imagine a team of reporters - together with witnesses on the scene - able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address - a permalink for the story - that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.”
Or is there a news model based on a horizontal comparison of real-time and filtered search (Twitter vs. Google), a la Twoquick? In either case, the aggregators will win (or have already won). The only model that would keep mainstream media in the game would be to combine vertical motion (Twitterfall) with contextual content that is carefully curated: immediacy AND accuracy, intimacy AND authority. Mashable gets it right when it interprets this weekend’s events as an opportunity rather than a swan song for traditional media: “While social media sites are both a source of unfiltered information and a venue for public discussion, we still look to CNN, the BBC and their ilk to add context and meaning to this flood of data. And when they fail us, we demand more of them.“
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