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:
design mind)
I've been conference-hopping through Europe for the past two weeks. In Berlin, I discussed new "quality of life" concepts for Germany, and in Geneva I listened to speakers who held Utopian visions from an earlier era accountable for what could have been but wasn't. My own personal well-being was more mundane. I schlepped two big suitcases with me and saw the sun shine only twice. When you travel so much, you start to feel like Tyler Brule: quality of life is defined by the quality of the airports you pass through, the quality of the Wi-Fi connections, the quality of the hotel room showers, the quality of the food in the random restaurant next to your hotel, and the quality of the casual human interactions along the way. Really, it's that simple. Travel, as we know, makes the human all too human, bringing to the forefront the five basic human desires that David Rose described in his LIFT09 talk: the desire to know, the desire to protect, the desire to heal, the desire to communicate, and the desire to travel.
Indeed, life is basic when you travel, yet I am frustrated with my inability to process the complexity of everything I hear and see on the road. I know I should blog about all the panels I've attended but I can't even decipher my notes anymore because they're a week old and life has changed. "We must write the story before we forget," as CERN's James Gillies noted in his LIFT09 talk about the origins of the Internet. We live in the now and here, and there is no there there.
Mindful of this preamble, the LIFT09 conference, dedicated to discussing the social implications of technology, came with a special twist this year. Bypassing the here and now, it attempted to directly link yesterday and tomorrow: "Where did the future go?" was the big question during the two days in Geneva, and the program was carefully designed to draw lessons from "a history of the future" in order to develop more enlightened concepts for tomorrow. Re-booting the future, so to speak.
In keeping with the current grim economic mood, the conference bemoaned the shallow glory of sci-fi future visions that, to date, haven't lived up to their promise. What is worse though? Dystopian visions that have become real or utopian visions that haven't? For Patrick J. Gyger, a Swiss historian, curator, and writer, it is clearly the latter. He revisited former notions of the future and investigated what became of them: "What happened to the flying car?" Well, it actually made it to market, like many other product aspirations, yet without much fanfare. Or as Gyger dryly remarked: "The future is here and we're not impressed." Instead, a profound disillusionment with technology-driven visions of a better life has kicked in (space travel, end of poverty, the smart Internet, anyone?), and free-market capitalism has betrayed the idea of sustainable prosperity.
Nicolas Nova applied this retro-skeptical view to the world of business, walking the audience through "the recurring failure of holy grails." He presented a nonchalant history of product flops (from the picture phone to the smart fridge to location-based services), which were in his judgment all hampered by "over-optimism," "lack of knowledge," and "blind faith in the Zeitgeist." Yet I found his definition of product success flawed as it was obviously based on the principle of mass adoption – a questionable proposition in times of increasingly fragmented audiences and micro-markets. Which new product – besides maybe the iPod and the iPhone – has really gone mainstream in the past 10 years? Many of the products and technologies Nova stigmatized as "failures" have found their audience in some form and created significant value both for their inventors and consumers. Yet we simply fail to recognize their success since it occurs in market niches and communities.
Both Nova and Gyger heralded a more pragmatic model of future-oriented thinking. But I'm not sure if I share their skepticism toward grand visions. What if the future has arrived, however – to paraphrase William Gibson – it is so widely distributed (that is, buried in fragmented micro-markets) that we don't notice it?
(Credit:
Stephanie Booth)
In any case, for a no-show, the future was still suspiciously present at LIFT09. Matt Webb (co-author of "Mind Hacks") described "the pleasure of watching things unfold" and recommended a "narrative" process for invention and creation (of which his Olinda radio prototype is a brilliant example), highlighting in particular the role of writing in the context of design: "Design is a way of walking over the landscape of possible worlds."
Clive van Heerden, senior director of design-led innovation at Philips Design, showed some of Phillips' PROBES videos that explore 'emotional sensing' – from electronic tattoos to skin dresses to food creation.
Fabio Sergio, creative director at frog design's Milan studio, laid out the power of "design thinking for the future." He used the case study of Project Masiluleke (a large-scale initiative that leverages mobile technologies to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa) to illustrate a model of design that "is not about creating compelling visions of perfect futures but rather shaping betas of presents of a future we want to live in." Quoting an Italian bus customer ("In the past you had to stamp the ticket. Now you simply have to caress the machine."), he spanned the arch from 'form follows function' to 'form follows emotion' to 'form follows meaning' (design that resonates with people's value systems). Empathy, technology as "material to sketch with," people-centered user experiences, and social impact – these are, according to Sergio, the characteristics of "meaningful design."
Empathy, in particular, is not only the foundation for meaningful social innovation projects (pro-bono or for-profit), it is also the very prerequisite for every act of human cooperation. Sympathy creates compassion, empathy breeds solidarity. However, solidarity does not always mean consensus, as UCLA's Ramesh Srinivasan pointed out. He suggested the indigenous use of digital objects and called for systems that "celebrate difference" instead of eradicating it.
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CD Sleeve Design)
Finally, Bill Thompson's vision of the future was optimistically fatalistic or pessimistically upbeat, depending on your point of view. He rocked the house with a provocative obituary. "Privacy is dead," he argued passionately, "get over it!" Instead of complaining about this, Thompson pledged we should embrace the new freedom that comes with radical transparency. The abstract of his talk is so succinct that I simply want to repost it here verbatim:
"The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality', how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user at Lift is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted--in all senses--disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organization but new ways of being human."
This new post-privacy era is not without risks: Thompson conceded that "some will suffer, some will even suffer imprisonment." But that wouldn't release us, the digital avant-garde, from our responsibilities. His mandate for the creative tech community assembled at LIFT09 was in fact a moral obligation: "You need to act as mentors for everyone living their life in the open."
I have, I do, I will.
(Credit:
David Reece)
A few months after Barack Obama’s historic election, and a couple of weeks after the release of Barry Libert’s and Rick Faulk’s book Obama Inc. (and, of course, Obama's inauguration), the first start-ups are popping up that directly apply some of the widely heralded business lessons emerging from the innovative campaign. The fact that most of these lessons lie in the marketing domain supports the view I’ve expressed earlier and on numerous occasions: 1) Marketing will (again) become the number one change agent in business, 2) when it follows the new rules of “marketing with meaning,” that is, marketing which (simply put) consistently creates added social value – not as an afterthought but a sine qua non. While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and “activating” the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good, for profit. Marketing, as the “voice” of business, is THE interface in a time when interface is everything. Marketing is the software. And software drives the value of products.
A recent example of this kind of Obama Inc. start-up, San Francisco-based firm Virgance, was featured in the Economist this week, and the article indicates that social impact in an activism 2.0 world is shifting from a welcome side benefit to an integral component in the business models of Internet entrepreneurs. The new kids on the web have internalized the lessons from the Obama campaign, and now they want to make a difference, too – and money. The Economist describes Virgance’s model as “for-profit-activism.” Named after a plot device in Star Wars, the company aims to support social causes through a multi-pronged campaign platform that resembles the way Obama for America mobilized its supporters, and it typically consists of four core elements: a web-empowered volunteer network, a presence on Facebook, a team of paid bloggers to promote the campaigns, and YouTube viral videos. Among the first Virgance-supported campaigns are 1BOG (“one block off the grid” – aiming to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy), Carrotmobs (public contests that incentivize retailers to become green), and Lend Me Some Sugar (based on the Facebook application that gives users virtual sugar cubes for donations to a cause of their choice).
Virgance is not the first for-profit-do-gooder of course; there have been plenty of others whose business model combines bottom line thinking with social value: the Economist, for example, puts Virgance in a line with Project RED. But Virgance is more like Facebook Causes. It adopts the forces of “Here Comes Everybody” and builds its entire business on a social web platform, embracing the principles of open-source, mass collaboration, and transparency: “If a for-profit company did the type of work that non-profits often do, but did it more efficiently, would people trust it the same way they trust non-profits?” the Virgance web site describes the company’s ambitious mission. ”What if everything the company did was completely transparent? What if it was open source? If we can create this kind of company, and succeed, how many other companies would follow our example? Along the way, could we change the face of the business world itself?”
Does that language sound familiar? The Obamapreneurs are adept at turning their campaigns into movements. Clearly, the Obamanization of business – both in terms of substance and style – has arrived in reality, and we will see more Obama Inc.’s in 2009.
On February 27-28, IESE Business School will gather entrepreneurs, scientists, foundations, and corporations at its annual student-run Doing Good and Doing Well conference in Barcelona. It’ll be interesting to see how the Obama gem will make its way into the more old-school world of CSR (corporate social responsibility).
With everyone becoming a producer in the YouTube age, self-branding ("The Brand Called You") has evolved from a fancy to a necessity.
Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame have shrunk to 5 seconds of microfame, and in the contained public arena of social networks, amateur paparazzi--thanks to the viral nature of social media--have the power to grant celebrity status. That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Clive Thompson's poignant piece for Wired on the rise of "microcelebrities."
As Facebook walls make personal communications open to the rest of your trusted network, even your most private moments become public relations. What used to be said in e-mail is now "the writing on the wall." This radical transparency lets more and more Internet users nurture their image, manage their privacy, stage their public appearances, and distribute carefully chosen content to their circle of online friends.
PR professionals will have mixed emotions about this trend, as the borders between profession and confession are increasingly blurry. Thompson quotes Theresa Senft, a media studies professor and one of the first to identify the rise of microcelebrities: "People are using the same techniques employed on Madison Avenue to manage their personal lives. Corporations are getting humanized, and humans are getting corporatized." And he writes: "In essence, I'm sending out press releases. Adapting to microcelebrity means learning to manage our own identity and 'message' almost like a self-contained public-relations department."
The growing sophistication for managing one's online reputation is supported by the findings of a recently released study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, stating that Internet users have become more aware of their digital footprint: In 2007, 47 percent searched for information about themselves online, compared to just 22 percent in 2002, and 60 percent of U.S. Internet users surveyed were not concerned about how much information is available about them online.
This stands in stark contrast to the 84 percent, who, in a similar study in 2000, had expressed concern about third parties getting personal information about them from the Internet. Teenagers, the Pew study shows, understand the implications of their digital footprint best, protecting their privacy by using pseudonyms or private accounts, and locking personal details into "walled gardens."
One can interpret this as the second reformation of the Internet -- in the first one, users emancipated themselves from a closed set of service and content providers, realizing that they held the power of the web in their own hands. And now, online identities, objects, and connections detach themselves from the grid of the web that constrains their movements. Relationships are disenfranchised from the "container" in which they're held.
Berners-Lee writes: "Biologists are interested in proteins, drugs, genes. Businesspeople are interested in customers, products, sales. We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is a lot of blogging about the strain, and total frustration that, while you have a set of friends, the Web is providing you with separate documents about your friends. One in facebook, one on linkedin, one in livejournal, one on advogato, and so on. The frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again. The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing -- but the system doesn't know it. (...) There are cries from the heart (e.g The Open Social Web Bill of Rights) for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites. (...) It's not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web."
And further:
"In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildly differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."
Not everyone is happy about the term "graph." The most fervent rebuke stems from Dave Winer: "Before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don't want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated." Robert Scoble, on the other hand, points out that your social network is who you know, while your social graph is who you're connected to based on interests, location, work, etc.: "The Social Graph is NOT my social network," Scoble writes, "My Social Network is my friends list. But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that."
Berners-Lee would agree with that. For him, the Giant Global Graph is the natural evolution of networking: from computer (net) to documents (web) to things (and friends). Call it Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, the Open Social Web, the Hyper-Social Network, or the Giant Global Graph -- the idea isn't really new, but it appears as if this paradigm is slowly becoming mainstream thinking. As the Global Graph, or whatever you want to call it, is replacing the traditional World Wide Web, new players will want to influence its composition, as they did with hyperlinks and traffic boosting mechanisms on the "old" web. Will we soon see "graph designers"?
Answer a few questions to see where you fit in the typology of information and communication technology users developed by the Pew Internet Project.
(Credit:
Areae)
It's not the most innovative name but the concept may be revolutionary. Metaplace, a virtual community that is currently being tested for launch in spring 2008, was one of the most talked about start-ups at the TechCrunch40 Conference. The new platform allows anyone to build a virtual world from scratch -- for the web or even mobile applications -- without any programming knowledge. Like other virtual communities such as Second Life, There, Entropia Universe, or World of Warcraft, the Metaplace worlds can be used for gaming, socializing, and e-commerce. And they come with the usual community features: forums, user ratings, wikis etc.
Unlike Second Life et al, however, users will not need to download any special software to engage in their respective virtual spaces; the service is hosted, so everything happens inside a browser. Because the Metaplace worlds are based on standard web technology, they can be embedded in blogs, Facebook profiles, MySpace pages, or web sites. "It's basically an MMO accessible through Flash apps, 3D clients, cell phones," as Om Malik writes: "While Second Life is evolving as an immersive 3D metaverse which slowly incorporates web elements like XML and RSS in-world, Metaplace is beginning as a web-based network which swallows the attributes of online worlds."
Metaplace is the brainchild of Ultima Online creator Ralph Koster. Koster ultimately envisions people share thousands of user-created virtual worlds with one another and tear down the walls between existing platforms. "We want to see 10,000 virtual worlds so that lots of wild and crazy stuff gets made because that is the only way it will advance as a medium," Koster says. His vision is just the latest in a series of moves to open up the "walled gardens" in online communities: Facebook opened up its platform for third-party developers, Second Life did, and MySpace is supposed to follow soon. Technology Review depicted a mash-up of Google Earth and Second Life into a "Second Earth" meta-verse, and models like Pageflakes allow users to completely customize their homepages. Metaplace presents an even more radical step -- the fully convergent virtual meta-platform for divergent user-generated content.
Slowly but surely we are seeing what may be the tentative contours of web 3.0: a user-generated, entirely customizable "world wide sim" that is mashed-up of geo-mapping (Google Earth), immersive 3D virtual worlds (Metaplace), and social networking features (Facebook) -- peppered with the power of the semantic web (Radar Networks) and a constant lifestream of user content.
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