Category: web

Social networks “are creating a vain generation of self-obsessed people with child-like need for feedback”

I am afraid the following claims contain a certain level of truth, despite the sensational tone that forces the reader to take the whole piece carefully. I am convinced there is a form of addiction to social feedback, and that we are just starting to find out the extent of changes this will trigger “in real life”.

Let’s wait and see if other “top scientists” back these claims. I still find it amazing that there are not more studies on social networks users, and the impact on actual social life. Have you seen such research?

Facebook and Twitter have created a generation obsessed with themselves, who have short attention spans and a childlike desire for constant feedback on their lives, a top scientist believes.

Repeated exposure to social networking sites leaves users with an ‘identity crisis’, wanting attention in the manner of a toddler saying: ‘Look at me, Mummy, I’ve done this.’

Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, believes the growth of internet ‘friendships’ – as well as greater use of computer games – could effectively ‘rewire’ the brain.

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The (online) persecution of Daniel Lee

I’m totally puzzled by the story of Daniel Lee being persecuted over a completely imaginary story of diploma forgery. The proportions this took are insane. I met Daniel (aka Tablo) a couple of years ago in Korea, he’s a super talented, smart, well educated young man that certainly didn’t deserve all the crap that came his way.

As usual, this all comes down to a few bored jerks who, hidden behind the anonymity conferred by their computer screens, feel like they can say whatever they want without consequences. Scary, and this form of harassment will soon spread to all wired countries.

The Persecution of Daniel Lee
An Internet smear campaign nearly destroyed the South Korean star, but he fought back with the only weapon he had: the truth.
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The ambiguity of web 2.0′s vocabulary

Recent events have shown how inadequate the standard web 2.0 vocabulary can be. See a few examples below, from liking someone’s death, to liking the Oslo bombing, to Amy Winehouse passing away being “most popular”.


Seen on Facebook, “RIP Amy Winehouse, XXX likes this”. The like is quite ambigious. Is the person happy for the death, or just adding up his/her thoughts on the RIP?

 


Seen on YouTube: “Oslo bomb attacks, liked by XXX”. This one is not even ambiguous. Just  a standard term coming short because of the context.

 


Seen on CNN: Amy Winehouse’s death is “most popular”. Of course it is the article, and not the death itself. But again the standard vocabulary shows its limits.

These are a few examples found recently, and I have been seeing such mishaps over and over again in the past months. Did you find some too? And by the way, what could replace “like” and still work in those contexts?

The invisible rule of proportionate attention in online communication (and why social technologies are not magical)

4027006557_983abab28e_o.jpegI send a lot of emails. I post a lot of messages on my blog or on Facebook.

One thing I have noticed over the years: there is an invisible rule that seems to reign on the online world, regardless of the medium: the more care you put in a message, the more chance there is it generates an answer (email) or interaction (social networks).

Take email. When you send a newsletter, if you get 50% of people opening your message (as we do at Lift) you can be pretty satisfied. The industry standard is more around 20%. That is what you get for sending messages that have not been specifically written for the recipient. They feel that, and have no pressure to answer whatsoever as it has been sent to thousands of people.

In a typical one to one communication, answer rate is probably closer to 95% as long as you write to people you know, and who are at the same “level” than you.

Now for my editorial job at Lift, I get to invite pretty busy people as we try to convince them to join us for the conference. We don’t always succeed in having them, but at least I get around 80% of answers to my messages, positive or negative. I get this answering rate by carefully crafting my messages to make the recipient feel I value him or her, as I invest a lot of my time in reaching out. If I send a quick message, it is likely I will not get an answer. If I take time to research the person I am contacting, find out what their recent projects are, add a few personal sentences about the city they live in, the chances for a response get much higher.

My point here is that it seems that electronic communication is not totally deprived of context. When you talk to someone, your body language gives hints of how you feel, and influences the answers you get. In electronic form, these implicit messages can also be conveyed. I care about the discussion we’re having, I’m willing to invest time in reaching out to you. That matters.

I noticed the same happens on my blog and on Facebook. On the blog, articles where I simply pass a link (as I often do to set them aside for my personal archive) receive little feedback, while longer and more personal articles generate more comments. On Facebook, I have an even more tangible proof. For a long time, the Lift page was managed manually. I would replicate each article carefully, adding a custom message different from the title of the news I was pushing to the community. As soon as we installed an automatic app (RSS graffiti) to republish articles automatically, the number of interactions almost halved. It was the same content, but our followers felt we were not putting as much energy in the process of pushing the information to them. They felt less engaged, maybe less cared for, and the number of interactions dropped.

That’s why social technologies will never be magical. They promise us more personalized interactions with followers, as we know who they are. Truth is, mass updates will always have a different feeling from a message written specifically for a recipient. Nobody can escape the time consuming task of writing personal messages. And if you have 10’000 fans, that will take a while.

Cyberbullying, coming to a social network near you

I wrote in 2007 that cyberbullying would reach us in 2-3 years (other articles on the topic here and here). Well, it is now spreading through Facebook, and as Dave Pell writes on the Huffington Post, “while it used to require a certain set of characteristics to thrive as a bully, the internet makes it simple for almost anyone to graduate from cowering weakling to kicking virtual sand in the face of friends and strangers in no time”. But the playing field can be leveled with a bit of creativity.

The connection between bully and target is so seamless that hate speech can often spread more rapidly than its originator ever intended. One assumes that’s the case with UCLA student Alexandra Wallace, who recorded a three-minute rant against Asian students, in particular those who use cell phones in her school library. In the video, which she posted on YouTube, Wallace shared her version of the Asian language (including several ching chongs and ling longs), urged Asians who come to UCLA to first adopt “American manners,” and for good measure even managed to work in a reference to the tsunami in Japan.

The video went viral. Its contents and the reaction it generated made it all the way to the pages of the New York Times. In a previous era, it would have taken Alexandra Wallace several lifetimes to even encounter as many Asian students as she managed to offend in three minutes. [...]

Modern victims of bullying have a much broader arsenal of tools with which to defend themselves. I’m reminded of those old match box covers that featured a Charles Atlas advertisement with the line: “Tired of having sand kicked in your face?”

Back then, the ad was for a muscle building program. [Today's] version of that ad could read: “Tired of having sand kicked in your face? Get a video phone and learn to develop snappy retorts that are shorter than 140 characters.”

None of this is intended to suggest a future free of bullying or a panacea that helps all the little guys win in the end. But in some ways, the playing field has been leveled. It’s not just about being physically tougher or being the type of person who thrives on conflict. Sometimes it’s about being smarter, funnier or more creative.

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Another one of these moments where the media will be tempted to say “technologies are evil”. Truth is, technologies just mirror the real world, and sometimes with a certain delay (who would expect that). At least we had 22 years of WWW without that becoming too much of an issue. I’m in a glass half full mood as you can see ;)

Online, quality beats quantity

Online used to be a world of “the more the better”. Search engines would brag about indexing X zillion of pages, the race for LinkedIn contacts was raging between users, and even professional sites like Alibaba would base their communication on the fact they allowed to reach thousands of suppliers in one click.

For early adopters, every single piece of information published on the network was a small victory. Each page indexed by Altavista was one more step towards the society of information that we were trying to build.

This was the old world of megabytes. Not the world of 2011, measured in exabytes. Tons of information have now created noise when we increasingly need relevance. From a world whose problem was to add information, we now enter a world where the problem is to find which one can be ignored, hidden, or deleted. Let’s take the three examples again:

  • Do you really care if Google indexes one or two more billion pages? No, you care about the top 10 results. The challenge is not to index 90 million pages containing the word “bank”, it is to hide the 89.99M that are not relevant to the current context.
  • Users are coming back from the “more friends is more fun” mantra. I see people remove or hide friends, some now cap the number of contacts to a “few” hundred. But the key is advertising: once social advertising happens (whatever it’s form), more friends will likely mean more ads. “De-Friendization” will then accelerate. And what is the point anyway, when we all lost the followers race to Lady Gaga anyway ;)
  • If you have to find a supplier, would you rather have a lot of offers, or the right ones? Sites like needeo work with selected suppliers, not “all the world’s suppliers”, and in that case quality and trust will always beat quantity.

Another sign this trend is here to stay can be found in services like Path which, in their DNA, embed the fact that you can not keep in touch with more than 50 people. Also Beluga (acquired by Facebook), Brizzly, the trend is now to launch closed group apps, to capitalize on the fact that it will be easier to monetize systems based on quality relationships than on a lof of relationships. The data mining will be easier (less data to make sense of), the social ads will be more effective (users are more likely to click on a recommendation coming from a close friend than from an acquaintance), and it will be possible to create real trust between the users and the system, with no fear of privacy boundaries being crossed.

From a world of quantity, we now live in a world of quality. The key is not to have a lot of signals, but to have the right ones. Social networks make it possible as long as they don’t encourage us to have lots of friends, just the right ones. Do you now better understand the 75b$ valuations of Facebook?

The ambitious job titles of the bubble years

Following up on my brief history of internet hype (updated timeline here), Emily Turrettini sent me a link to a presentation she gave on the bubble years. I like this particular excerpt on the titles entrepreneurs were giving themselves during the euphoria of 1998-2001:

Tim Roberts — Chief Visionary Officer — Broadband Investment Group

David Roberts — Chief Zaplet — FireDrop Inc.

Sheri Falco — Chief Catalyst — Libida.com

John Sculley — Chief Listener — Apple Computer

Dark Jedi—Organic Inc.

Code Therapist — Organic Inc.

Duchess of Chaos — Netscape Communications Corp

Virtual Reality Evangelist — Silicon Graphics

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The history of Internet hype

I am working on a slide retracing the history of Internet/Web hype. Remember the “you need a second life island” days, or the “portal” phenomena? What were the things you HAD to have as an organization or business to survive on the Internet? Did it work out (Facebook, Twitter), did it dissolve in the rest of the web (homepage, blog, portal) or did it falter (MySpace, RSS)?

Please help me add what is missing via email or comments!

[Updated image following your feedback, click to enlarge]

First version:

Technologies increase the “cost of repression”

I have been thinking a lot about the true role of technologies in the recent political movements in Northern Africa. I feel right now it is wise to wait a bit while the facts are gathered.

I am panicked when I see pretty serious magazines making simplifications like “the Facebook group « We are all Khaled Saïd » has 500 000 members, 10 % of Egypt’s internet users“.

How do you know these 500’000 members are all from Egypt? A recent research on Twitter users active during the revolution showed only 0.027% of users were identifying their location as Egypt, Yemen or Tunisia. Smart users from those countries “likely do not provide their location information to protect their identities”, but it still hints that the massive amount of traction social media gave to these phenomena was very likely coming from outside of these countries.

As I said, let’s wait before hurrying up to conclusions as NOBODY knows right now if the protesters gathered because of Facebook, Al Jazeera, SMS, word to mouth, or something else. We will probably never know for sure.

Trying to find a relevant and neutral point of view, I came across this article from Marc Saint-Upéry on the Russian International News Agency, making a key point: new communication raise considerably the cost of repression.

The new electronic media do not miraculously abolish the laws of the political universe. They create new synergies, but they do not invent or recombine at will the arsenal of social protest. The young Egyptian cyberactivists knew that. [...] They also knew that “something was in the air,” as blogger Hossama Halawy, a consummate interpreter of Egyptian street life, had already written back in October. “No one knows when the explosion is going to happen, but it seems everyone I meet or bump into today feels it’s inevitable,” reads one of his posts. [...]

Since 2004, there was a growing number of social protests. Blue-collar workers, doctors, lawyers, judges, slum residents and even real estate tax collectors would stage a sit-in in front of their workplace or any significant institution and call the desks of private newspapers such as Al Masri al Youm, Al Shuruk or Al Dustur. Photographs and reporters would be sent and, the day after, the protesters were often invited to a talk-show seen by millions of Egyptians.

That’s also how police brutality could become part of the show. New communication technologies don’t build social movements out of thin air, but they do raise considerably the cost of repression by enhancing its visibility.

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