Tag Archives: social media

Cognitive Surplus

Posted on by

From Amazon: “For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.”

A few of my highlighted excerpts from Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky (more after the jump).

“The postwar trends of emptying rural populations, urban growth, and increased suburban density, accompanied by rising educational attainment across almost all demographic groups, have marked a huge increase in the number of people paid to think or talk, rather than to produce or transport objects.” – page 4

“Someone born in 1960 has watched something like fifty thousand hours of TV already, and many watch another thirty thousand hours before she dies.” – page 6

“…in the whole of the developed world, the three most common activities are now work, sleep, and watching TV.” – page 6

“Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year. … We spend roughly a hundred million hours every weekend just watching commercials.” – page 10

“As long as the assumed purpose of media is to allow ordinary people to consume professionally created material, the proliferation of amateur-created stuff will seem incomprehensible.” – page 19

“Imagine that everything says 99 percent the same, that people continue to consume 99 percent of the television they used to, but 1 percent of that time gets carved out for producing and sharing. The connected population still watches well over a trillion hours of TV a year; 1 percent of that time is mor than one hundred Wikipedias’ worth of participation per year.” – page 23

“In 2010 the global internet-connected population will cross two billion people, and mobile hone accounts already number over three billion. Since there are something like 4.5 billion adults worldwide (roughly 30 percent of the global population is under fifteen), we live, for the first time in history, in a world where being part of a globally interconnected group is the normal case for most citizens.” – page 23

Continue reading →

Can Facebook really “connect?”

Posted on by
Reply

Reading David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect has piqued my interest in the service (which I do not use) so I’m unconsciously on the lookout for anything FB related. Like this post (at Mashable) by Ori Brafman, the co-author of Click: The Magic of Instant Connections. An excerpt:

“Social psychologists have found that the distance separating people greatly influences the likelihood of a connection. Think back to your friends in school. How many of them had a last name that began with a letter close to yours on the alphabet? That’s because teachers routinely assign seats alphabetically based on last name. The closer you sat to someone, the more likely you were to hit it off. When a researcher asked police cadets to name their friends from the academy, ninety percent of them named someone who sat adjacent to them. Likewise, scientists proved more likely to collaborate with other scientists who sat in the same corridor.”

“Facebook used to be an intimate community that only included your college buddies. Now, the company is starting to be perceived as Big Brother-like. If we write on someone’s wall, who else will see it? If we comment on someone’s status, whose newsfeed will it show up in? Sometimes it’s as if Facebook is a hidden microphone that threatens to expose what we’d really like to say. Without that ability to be vulnerable, it is difficult to really connect with friends.”

This idea really comes through, again and again, in the first half of Kirkpatrick’s book. And this absence of real (okay, online “real”) connection might be what’s missing for me.

The Facebook Effect

Posted on by
1

The sub-title of David Kirkpatrick’s book is, “The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World.” I like the idea of connecting the world and I’m finding Kirkpatrick’s book a real page-turner. While I can’t seem to fit Facebook into my online life, I want to understand it’s brief history while watching it being made.

UPDATE: I’ve finished the book and rank it among the most interesting I have read this year. Or, in a long time. David Kirkpatrick had me on the edge of my seat from cover to cover. After the jump are some excerpts that got some highlighter.

The Facebook Effect happens when the service puts people in touch with each other, often unexpectedly, about a common experience, interest, problem or cause.” pg 7

As Facebook grows and grows past 500 million members,one has to ask if there may not be a macro version of the Facebook Effect.Could it become a factor in helping bring together a world filled with political and religious strife and in the middle of environmental and economic breakdown? A communications system that includes people of all countries, all races, all religions, could not be a bad thing, could it? pg 9

“The most important investment theme for the first half of the twenty-first center will be the question of how globalization happens. If globalization doesn’t happen, then there is no future for the world. The way it doesn’t happen is that you have escalating conflicts and wars, and given where technology is today, it blows up the world. There’s no way to invest in a world where globalization fails.” — Peter Thiel pg 9

Were the growth rates of both Facebook and the Internet to remain steady, by 2013 every single person online worldwide would be on Facebook.  pg16

“I think what we’re doing is more interesting than what anyone else is doing, and that this is just a cool thing to be doing. I don’t spend my time thinking about (how to exit).” — Mark Zuckerberg  pg 139

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end and pretty quickly.” — MZ  pg 199

Facebook is founded on a radical social premise — that an inevitable enveloping transparency will overtake modern life.  For better or worse, Facebook is causing a mass resetting of the boundaries of personal intimacy.  pg 200

Facebook now sits squarely at the center of a fundamental realignment of capitalism. Marketing cannot be about companies shoving advertising in people’s faces, not because it’s wrong but because it doesn’t work anymore.”  pg 263

In seventeen countries around the world, more than 30 percent of all citizens — not Internet users but citizens  — are on Facebook. — Facebook Global Monitor  pg 275

Imagine you’re at a football game and your mobile device shows you which of your friends are also in the stadium — perhaps even where they’re sitting. Maybe it could tell you who in your section of the stands has attended exactly the same games as you in the past. Or who is a fan of the same teams as you. This may seem cool to many users. To others it may feel Orwellian.  pg 316

Facebook might even begin to function as a sort of auxiliary memory. As you walk down a street you could query your profile to learn when you were last there, and with whom. Or a location-aware mobile device could alert you to the proximity of people you’ve interacted with on Facebook, and remind you how.  pg 317

(Mark Zuckerberg) wants to rule not only Facebook, but in some sense the evolving communications infrastructure of the planet. pg 31

The closer Facebook gets to achieving its vision of providing a universal identity system for everyone on the Internet, the more likely it is to attract government attention. Facebook could have more data about you that governments do. pg 328

“Facebook Connect is basically your passport — your online passport. The government issues passports. Now you have somebody else worldwide who is issuing passports for people. That is competitive, there’s no doubt about it. But who says issuing passports is government’s job? This will be global citizenship.” — Yuri Milner, Russian FB investor pg 328

The average age of (Facebook’s) 1,400 employees is thirty-one. pg 331

Facebook is changing our notion of community, both at the neighborhood level and the planetary one. It may help us to move back toward a kind of intimacy that the ever-quickening pace of modern life has drawn away from. pg 332

“Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of society.” — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) pg 332

Facebook aims to assemble a directory of the entire human race, or at least those parts of it that are connected to the Internet. pg 333

Google Buzz Redux

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been (unconsciously) dividing web stuff into two piles. Something that has a little shelf-life (to me or others), and stuff that does not.

Increasingly, the first group is being made up of things I have written or created. These usually get posted here at smays.com. In the days before YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and all the rest… pretty much everything was posted here because there was nowhere else to park them. (This became very clear to me during my recent weeks-long clean-up.)

The second pile really never makes it to pile status. It’s commonly referred to as a “stream.” Bits and pieces that flow by but don’t warrant saving in the sense described above. In fact, tags and permalinks make it easy to find just about anything that drifts by.

There’s no real point to this post other than I’ve been thinking about this, so I write about it.

I’ve added Google Buzz back to my Gmail page and think I might make it the stream into which my other little tributaries flow. It really seems well-suited for this. If you’re a regular here and use Buzz as well, let me know.

I won’t abandon the blog because I have a good bit invested in it and it has more of a permanent quality to it. A place that I own and control.

Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare Time Revolution

Posted on by

“Someone born in 1960 has watched something like 50,000 hours of television already. Fifty thousand hours—more than five and a half solid years.”

Sweet Mother of God! I can tack another 7 or 8 years on that. That daunting stat is from an article in latest issue of WIRED Magazine in which Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink share some thoughts on what Mr. Shirky calls the “cognitive surplus”:

“Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.”

“Cognitive Surplus.” I love the very idea of that. I’m not sure I would be a better person had I spent those 50,000+ hours blogging instead of watching Maverick, but I would be different. And if I had to choose today, it would be an easy call. Come to think of it, I am choosing.

The secret to Farmville’s popularity

Posted on by
1

“The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We playFarmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.” — From an essay by y A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz

I’ve never played Farmville. Or any other Facebook game. I don’t have a Facebook account anymore and find myself unable to explain why I do not. So it’s hardly fair to use this thoughtful essay as an explanation. But the very essence of Facebook seems to be social obligation. I hate obligations and avoid them wherever possible.

Facebook/Farmville fans can tell me where Mr. Liszkiewicz misses the mark with his essay.

Why radio news guys don’t do social

Posted on by
Reply

Papper: Radio News Does not Make Use of Social Media from Poynter Institute on Vimeo.

From Mashable: “Although Facebook and Twitter are popular with TV stations, only 27% of radio newsrooms use Twitter and 1% have a Facebook page. The survey’s conductor, Robert Papper of Hofstra University, said the contrast in usage is due to staff size. “If you had a staff of three or more, you were involved in a number of social networking things. If you did not hit that magic number you were not involved.” He explains why radio stations do not participate more in social media in the video clip above.”

“Software Is Media”

Posted on by
Reply

As software has moved from running on local machines to running in the browser a number of important things have happened. One of the most important changes is software has become media.

Like other forms of media, software produces an emotional reaction when we use it. Software needs to have a “voice.” It needs to be more than a simple utility. We need to feel something when we use software. The best software does this incredibly well.

Like media, the interfaces that present software to us need to be stylized, designed, and elegant. Software can be beautiful and the best software is beautiful.

And like media, the most important measurement for software today is the number of engaged users. The more engaged users a piece of software has, the more impactful it can be.

Once we’ve begun to treat some of the software in our lives as media, we are going to treat all the software in our lives as media. And the software that is ugly, void of emotion and voice will not work as well for us. So I believe all software is media and will be seen as such by its users.

— Fred Wilson at Business Insider