When I posted the video of my 9-month-old tickling Talking Carl on the iPhone, I thought it was a) pretty cute and b) amazing that the touch screen interface seemed usable by someone who can’t read and doesn’t know where reality ends.
Recently I’ve had further evidence that we’re at a turning point in HCI (human computer interaction). The baby came into contact this past week with the digital display on my breast pump (yeah, I said breast pump. Can I be a social media blogger AND a mommy blogger for a minute? Thanks!) and the display on my dSLR.
Both times, she wiggled her finger on the screen. Neither device giggled, but I was stunned that a) she expected she was interacting with a responsive device and b) she thought touching the screen would initiate interaction.
Either my baby is a genius (let’s assume she is), or touch/gesture interaction is the most natural extension of human will manifest. Until we can control devices with our thoughts, touch is a big upgrade.
Ever notice when we, uh, pretend to cast magic spells (totally pretend, of course), that the power of our intent is in our gesture? In our hands? Think Harry Potter’s gesture-based stylus interface.
The carpal-tunnel-inducing secretary-wrist-mangling mouse interface is finally an unnecessary proxy, hooray! Clicking, if you think about it, was the next iteration of inserting punch cards. No wonder our extremities got so tired.
We heard the story this week of the 99-year-old who’s first computer, the touch-based iPad, “opened up the world”. It seems the extremes of age and inexperience alike find the touch screen remarkably intuitive.
It makes sense. In observing the development of a baby, one is struck by the need to touch to understand the world. Grasping and gestures are the natural way one expects, as an unmolded infant, to learn about and control the world.
The upcoming generation are going to be digital natives on a different order of magnitude. May their wrists remain unburdened by silly stop-gap interfaces.
Facebook has taken the web-swallowing step of adding a personalization platform, Open Graph, to as much of the web as will allow it. This means ads and content will be targeted according to your Facebook profile.
Yikes. The web shouldn’t be personalized for me. Here’s why:
1. My interests don’t encompass everything important that happens. The news is what is new and valuable for me to know to understand the world, but I’m not the best judge of that, nor are my Facebook interests a predictor of it. I prefer to rely on the professional judgment of news directors, editors, and journalists to make sure I know what’s up across the globe, not just in my narrow band of interest.
2. I keep very limited info on Facebook out of privacy concerns, and what is there may not reflect my real interests. I might fan a page because it belongs to a friend and I want to support them, or because I’m trying to win a contest.
3. Part of what I’m doing on the web is looking for new things I don’t know I want to find. Serendipity, syntopic analysis, and random discovery make you smarter. Finding more of the same, however novel, doesn’t.
4. I don’t want my biases confirmed or my stereotypes perpetuated. Feeding me what I like surrounds me with people who think like I do, talk like I do, and know what I know. The more insular our thinking and the fewer challenges presented to it, the more homogenous, boring, and satisfied we become. That’s not who I want to be.
5. My friends aren’t that bright either. (Just kidding, guys). Privileging news on CNN, for instance, that amused or captivated one of my friends would work if I was 14, but I’m an adult with a broad range of acquaintanceships. Their interests aren’t any better a source for my daily news than my own; neither would their shopping habits or music tastes necessarily suit me.
6. It impacts the fun I have on Facebook. I’m increasingly nervous about the things I post there. I lock down as much as I can, and think twice before private messaging anything I don’t want to accidentally show up on my wall due to some “glitch”. Now I have to consider the ramifications of listing a favourite book, as the tentacles of my professed liking spread throughout the web and potentially affect everthing I see and read thereafter. Holy pressure = a lot less fun.
Siloam Mission, a Winnipeg non-profit offering services to people experiencing homelessness, has done an amazing job reaching out to the community through social media.
Blair Barkeley, Siloam’s Website and Social Media Coordinator, has been a “connecting point between the compassionate and Winnipeg’s less fortunate”, and I chatted with him about his experience.
Unfortunately Blair, along with 17 other staff at Siloam, was laid off “due to a 15 to 25 percent decrease in donations and public support”. Today is his last day, and I’m sorry to see this channel of public outreach temporarily lost.
Q. Siloam Mission is using many social media channels (Larry Updike’s blog, Facebook, Twitter, Twestival, YouTube). Where did that social media savvy come from? Was a it a directive from management that resulted in a social engagement hire, or did a young person with a digital skill set come on board and bring the idea to the CEO? Was there an identified need to engage with Winnipeggers (either in the online space, or just in general)?
Blair Barkeley: Siloam’s social media savvy actually came from both. A web & social media position was created by management for the very purpose to get into the whole social media world and start connecting with new people and new possible supporters. And then I was hired to fill the position.
My job and goal was to engage with people online and starting entering the new social media phenomenon so that Siloam Mission could capture a whole new rage of supporters. Read the rest of this entry »
There are two camps in the social media flea market, with crossover. There’s the shopkeepers—marketers, community managers, entrepreneurs, developers, media—and the customers, the non-industry people who interact on the framework so carefully crafted by the shopkeepers. The crossover is the fact that shopkeepers are also consumers.
Why? Well, the participatory web has attached your face to your online presence. It’s a Twitter chestnut: ensure your bio really contains info about you and your avatar really represents you. You know, for humanization purposes. Add that to logging in with Facebook Connect to comment on someone’s blog, multiply by an obsession with personal branding, and you got yourselves a web where you’ve got to be on your best behaviour at all times.
Your mother-in-law is, in fact, watching. And just like IRL, she’s affected by how you act in front of the world.
So it’s no surprise there’s a new trend towards social networks that niche on being less than nice. Both Failings—where you invite “friends” to anonymously suggest areas in need of personal, um, improvement—and Unvarnished, a sort of LinkedIn for a$$hole$—seek a social counterculture where nice is not necessary.
We get sick of being too nice. It’s like work. It is work. Social networks, customer-side, were meant to be places to relax and let it all hang out. Then socializing morphed into networking.
One thing we’ve learned in the struggle to come to grips with online privacy is that your opinions, once professed, are forever. Google caching isn’t the worst of it, either—Twitter just “donated” our tweeting histories to the American Library of Congress, for pity’s sake. How’s that for archival? I’m so glad I always delete tweets I think are too mean!
About Face
Being yourself, the only person you can be in these days of increasing online personal responsibility, means always having to say you’re sorry. If you’re a shopkeeper, you probably also have the weight of a company, brand or a host of clients who, disclaimers aside, are indeed reflected on if you go mental on the web. It’s a bit of a burden, this perpetually archived “conversation”. God forbid you have a bad hair day.
Failings and Unvarnished represent an attempt to steer things towards the dirt that people actually enjoy dishing & consuming. Bring sexy back, if you will. There are evolutionary motivators for enjoying gossip, but a cursory explanation is that it’s just more freakin’ fun, more cathartic, more hair-down-letting than always being upbeat and awesome-sauce.
I’d never use these networks, because I’m kept in line by the nonsense drive to eradicate everything questionable about me from the internet forever. But I get what their existence means. People are fed up with toeing the line.
“Drive by Anonymity”
Not surprisingly, in order to function, the bad (re: truthful) social sites collect the dirt anonymously. The attacked is known, but not the attacker.
To help reviewers be honest and candid in their reviews, Unvarnished obscures the identity of review authors. This lets reviewers share their true, nuanced opinions without fear of repercussions.
—Unvarnished About Page
Hey, a return to the original anonymous Wild West flame wars of yore!
Jaron Lanier, a guy who thinks about the web the way God thinks about Creation, says in his humanist exhortation You Are Not A Gadget that anonymity breeds trollishness, potential “unforseen social patholog(ies)”, and that
to have a substantial exchange…you need to be fully present. That is why facing one’s accuser is a fundamental right of the accused.
What he’s saying is you being you is the best way for you to be.
SoMe is here to stay
I think it’s obvious social is gonna be baked into to the web’s crust going forward. People have had a taste of participation, and they liked being the centre of attention. Corporations have had to get transparent, brands have had to respect consumer’s intelligence. It’s the natural shift in the balance of power when attention becomes scarce, and people dig it.
Social isn’t going anywhere, but we still have to come to terms we can live with in the always-on, reputation-based future. We’ve got Kirk Cameron-level growing pains.
Maybe this is a GenX thing; I’ve heard it said that digital natives are quite comfortable always thinking of themselves as having an audience. Perhaps the niceness overload we grownups are experiencing will wash away when the cool waves of the next Pepsi Refresh splash over us, reinvigorating our love for this thing called social media.
There’s an upside to global warming, according to Bill McKibbon’s book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Though we’re going to be challenged by seismic shifts in our attitudes about resources, food, fossil fuels, and money, our social networks may just get a little stronger.
The suburban, Garage Mahal, big box car culture the last few generations grew up in almost completely erased the need for people to meet, know and help their neighbours. We were self-contained, and we were lonesome. The average American lost almost a third of their besties from 1985-2004, dropping from 2.94 to 2.08 close friends, according to a Duke University study.
That’s all going to change when we’re forced to adopt new prosocial behaviour, McKibbon speculates. “Local” and “community” are going to have more meaning when you’re buying your potatoes from Merve up the road instead of paying a premium to have them trucked from the Midwest.
When the resources run out, we’re going to return, by necessity, to the golden rule. And it’s great we’re getting a head start with all this practice online.
Social networks can help transition society from minivans and megamarts to knowing what nearby farmer’s markets have in season (Twitter), where local artisans sell their goods (Foursquare), and who’s celebrating a life-changing event (Facebook). As we shift to a slower, more present (instead of future) pace, the joy of being neighbourly will return. Go on…accept my friend request!
Last in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.
Sacha Chua is a Torontonian technology-loving girl geek, by which I mean she’s an application developer at IBM, for Pete’s sake. She’s also an Enterprise 2.0 consultant, helping people understand and use online collaboration tools.
I tend to not think about gender much.
I almost reflexively check the gender balance at conferences (still pretty bad, but better than it was before, although there’s still a lack of women speakers), but I don’t consider gender when I’m helping people or linking to them, and I’ve never intentionally “held people down”.
No point in making things an ego contest. Life is more fun when you share!
If you’re not familiar with the unboxing phenomenon, you’re going to think I’m mental, but basically when geeks order something super cool from the internet, they get so stoked to open it that they document taking it out of the box.
My copy of Brian Solis‘s Engage finally arrived, so here’s the reveal. I let my baby do the unboxing, because she really, really likes cardboard.
This book is “the complete guide for brands and businesses to build, cultivate, and measure success in the new web”. I’ll let you know what I learn, how I’m applying it, and what my ROI on the $25 is
You know you’re at the dawn of a new age in human-computer interaction when a 9-month-old baby can operate—and get a kick out of—an iPhone app. Look at that pinch-to-tickle gesture!
Content. The iPad was designed for you to “consume” it. The big brands that are rushing to animate their brochures so you can consume them on the iPad are sorta philosophically stealing your human agency of creation and replacing it with mind-numbing broadcast. That’s not very 2.0.
5. to undergo destruction; waste away
6. to use or use up
Social tools allow us to create, contribute, and pass along. Different people have different levels of interaction with content—knowledge, information, art—but we value highest the most creative minds: people who create content with a grain of truth in it, be it music, images, mashups, curations, stories. He who creates something beautiful or elucidates the truth through syntopic analysis is celebrated by other humans, and rightly so, as having an intellectual gift.
The iPad has the capability to serve up those creative objects, but the high cost of entry means that marketing messages have the loudest initial voice.
Jeff Jarvis tells us that the mythic social media influencer—whether they exist or not and however useful in spreading ideas they may be—is merely the mouthpiece of broadcast. Marketing strategy dictates locating the widest reach for the lowest cost. Unfortunately for marketers of “content”, the quality of the message dictates it’s spread, not the follower count of the spreader.
Jeff also posits that all actions online—liking, fanning, uploading, commenting—are content too, and they are, to Google and Facebook. Who add their own powerful aggregations by connecting your social graph and your activites—and selling it to marketers.
The meta layer that Facebook ads to our actions is being created for only one thing: to make money. See how Pete Warden’s recent attempt to use ostensibly public data from Facebook to create something a little more meta–and how quickly he was nearly sued into oblivion by the web giant. (Pete was trying to use the content in a way that commented on society, showing interesting correlations like where the most fans of Glenn Beck live and what pages they’re most likely to fan).
Even as broadcasting and passive consumption refuse to die, Umair Haque takes us beyond the social media channel with the idea that organizations should develop a social strategy, using the new tools of connection for a more meaningful place in the world, producing more meaningful stuff (content, if you will—if relationships, voice, and ethics are content).
The tools can do nothing short of connecting people, and we’re squandering them on product placement: the one positioning opportunity you can’t TiVo.
The most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people.
—Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
That’s the same as Umair’s explanation of ‘medium is the message’. The iPad paradigm, consumption, and the advertising-orchestrated conviction that every bit of personal data we give up—I like this, I fan this—is valuable content has an impact on us as we conceive of ourselves.
We might be letting the algorithms of marketing conversions dictate our thinking when we equate liking a brand to creativity. This situation was created by us, but not to serve the greater good. The humanist perspective places people at the heart of meaning.
Meaning comes from truth. Expose, expand, spread a truth and you are truly creating content.
The motivations that used to work on people have to be acknowledged on some level, however subconscious, to inspire action. But what if we can’t admit our wants and desires because we’re afraid they’ll be catalogued and later exposed?
Let’s look at fear and the need to belong. The fear that you won’t belong, tribalism. Conformity. That’s the force behind a lot of product marketing: deodorant, makeup, toothpaste.
Wanna fit in? Sure we do. And oral freshness is key! So here’s a YouTube ad (or “promoted video”) that’s supposed to light up our social acceptance sensors and inspire a click.
We’re talking about some intrinsic psychological factors here. Second from the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, is, you guessed it, self-esteem, confidence and mutual respect. All of which perishes in the face of stinky breath. It’s practically vital that we check out this video and discover if we’re going to be outcasted social pariahs or what.
BUT…what if we were scared to? What if everyone found out we clicked that link? What if Google, who is totally writing this stuff down, spilled the beans and let the world know we’re stinky breath checkers?
Isn’t that more embarrassing than the problem it’s supposed to be solving (which might or might not exist)?
The motivation to fit in by not getting caught clicking embarrassing videos is actually stronger than the motivation to fit in by being Scopey-fresh. We’re pretty sure our breath is ok. But we have no idea what’s going to leak out of “secure” places next.
Who wants to own their insecurities? Ick!
This kind of exposure of our base intincts interferes with persuasion. It might be paranoia, but if the perception exists that my attention is being monitored, I’m not going to click.
Nice to meet you
Thanks for the comments & the kind words. Best place to get my immediate attention is Twitter, but you could also email me.
When I posted the video of my 9-month-old tickling Talking Carl on the iPhone, I thought it was a) pretty cute and b) amazing that the touch screen interface seemed usable by someone who can’t read and doesn’t know where reality ends.
