What she said

I've tried twice to explain how the big tech companies have disproportionate (and often morally questionable) influence over our culture and our commerce.  Rebecca MacKinnon comes from a different perspective but she did a much better job explaining it than I did.

Off the Cuff visits Raleigh Denim: social media at its best

Victor Lytvinenko of Raleigh Denim (L) and Chris Hogan

Last week my family got a visit from Chris Hogan's family.  We have known each other for years and I'm fortunate to call them great friends.

Chris is also founder and editor of Off the Cuff, one of the most prominent men's fashion blogs you'll find.  He's often featured in mainstream publications as an expert. His work in social media is a well-recognized case study of best practices. So as one might expect, when we firmed up the details of his visit Chris sent out a tweet to his followers:

"Heading to Raleigh, NC, in a few weeks. Looking for some stores/brands to check out, visit. Suggestions?"

Not surprisingly, he got a number of people suggesting he visit the proprietors of Raleigh Denim, one of the last  places in America where jeans (and some other items) are made by hand, all under one roof.  You can find their clothes in elite stores like Barneys New York.  They're not cheap, but they're not cheap, if you know what I mean. So Chris reached out to the owners and arranged a visit, and (after burgers and beers) he let me tag along.

When we arrived on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, founders/owners Victor and Sarah Lytvinenko were busy putting together denim bags for shipment. Victor took us around the shop and I assumed "fly on the wall" status as  Chris talked with him about his approach to making clothes and the company's story.

And it's a great story.  Victor is a rare blend of artist and entrepreneur.  He loved that schools in the Raleigh area were producing students with great ideas about textiles but lamented the fact that very few of those students were ever able to bring ideas to market.

He also talked about trying to start the business in late 2009 and early 2010, one of the worst economic environments in our history.  Family members were pitching in and they were working around the clock, making samples and trying to convince stores to carry their product.  After finally managing to send a small order to Barneys, he received a request for a larger order, but didn't have the capital to buy raw materials or tools to accommodate them.  Since the economy was in the depths of the credit crunch, no bank would lend him the money.  Then President Obama's stimulus package became law - and Victor soon after got a call from the bank, telling him he could get that loan.  Now Victor and Sarah aren't worrying about growing their business - they're worrying about growing it too quickly.

Most of the afternoon, however, was spent talking about the craftsmanship, history, and philosophy that goes into making clothes at Raleigh Denim.  It was clear from the outset that Victor and Chris were of the same mind on this - other than jotting down a few numbers, Chris didn't really have to take notes because it was all obvious to him.  Once Chris got home he wrote and published a great blog post that summarizes his takeaways from the visit.   He also sent out a tweet that suggested a potential new partner and opportunity:

Someone please explain why @jcrew_insider isn't knocking on @raleighdenim 's door? Amazing jeans, made like we used to make 'em in America.

This is how social media often works best - a person reaches out to a network for ideas, acts on those ideas, and develops more ideas that can benefit more people.  The fact that Chris used specific tools was secondary to the experience - what really mattered is that Chris reached out to people who were part of a community, and that he leveraged online relationships to accomplish a goal.

That's why he's better than you at this.

What does the debt limit fight look like?

If you ever thought you needed a Cliff's Notes version of the Cliff's Notes, Wordle is the tool for you.  It makes those attractive "word clouds" I've published here before.  You submit text, and it counts the number of times a particular word appears.  The more instances of the word, the larger it appears in the cloud.

I sometimes use it to analyze a conversation or compare viewpoints and then develop more questions.  Last night we saw an interesting example of this- President Obama and Speaker Boehner each "took their case to the American people" on the fight over raising the national debt limit. So I compared the "word clouds" of the speeches from President Obama and Speaker Boehner to see if we could learn anything about what they're really trying to say.

Here's what the President's speech looks like:

And here's what the Speaker's speech looks like:

As I read it, the President is presenting a book report and the Speaker is telling you who he thinks is to blame for the mess we're in.  Looking at the clouds, I also think the Speaker's remarks were "message tested" for his natural constituency while the President's really wasn't.

The Speaker keeps using words like "bipartisan" (whether you think he's bipartisan or not) and the words "spending" and "debt," but doesn't mention his preferred cuts (no mention of cutting Medicare or Social Security)  and above all positions the President as the problem.  He's clearly on the attack. Further, I think it was a very smart political move from the GOP to put the Speaker out there immediately after the speech - they didn't give the President even a minute to "own" the news cycle.

I think the President was just putting it out there, just explaining what's going on - "here are the approaches we're looking at right now."  He's doubled down on being the conciliatory centrist - it's a gamble because there's a fine line between "being the adult in the room" and coming off as just another aloof, arrogant intellectual.

We'll see who's right - it remains possible they'll meet somewhere in the middle, but I don't think these speeches brought us any closer to a compromise.

Norway: when the news doesn't fit the narrative

When confronted with events like what happened in Norway last week - events that shock the system and leave people yearning for answers and explanations that will likely never come - many people often rush to the familiar albeit profoundly disturbing memories that help us come to terms.  So to many Americans, this event had elements of some of our worst and all-too-real nightmares: Columbine, Oklahoma City, and 9/11.  This is the experiential lens through which many Americans view domestic and global terror.

But this isn't Columbine.  It isn't Oklahoma City or 9/11.  This tragedy is unique.  And while many Americans (and others) may have some understanding of the grief and anguish many Norwegians are feeling today, we must resist the urge to define this event simply in the terms we understand - and we must also resist the urge to define the perpetrator of this horrible crime in terms that suit our ideology or political interests.

We haven't done very well with that lately.

When Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Federal Judge John Roll and 17 other people were shot at a supermarket in Arizona in January, within hours people were suggesting that the gunman was motivated by conservative political rhetoric, including Governor Palin's now-infamous graphic of the Congresswoman's district in a gun's crosshairs.  As facts emerged, it became more evident that the alleged assassin was motivated more from illness than ideology.  The facts didn't prevent the discussion about rhetoric from spiraling out of control - the attacks on Governor Palin and her poorly-chosen words in response to the criticism only entrenched interests further.  We are now to the point where she can misspeak about something as innocent as the story of Paul Revere's "midnight ride" and her supporters flock to wikipedia, attempting to "correct the record" by including her obvious misstatements as fact.

Now of course we have the lightning-fast editorializing (and actual coverage) wrongly tying the Norway attacks to Islamic extremists. Ujala Sehgal at The Atlantic Wire has a thorough description of how quickly so many of our top publications embraced the "Muslims did it" narrative and how they even took steps to maintain that narrative once the facts came to light.  One notable offender was the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin who quickly asserted the "jihadist" link, only to walk it back a day later, but still insisting that "there are many more jihadists than blonde Norwegians out to kill Americans" and this is really about a domestic political fight between conservatives and liberals over spending priorities.   As if this somehow matters to grieving parents in Oslo.

Now information is beginning to emerge that suggests the alleged killer in Norway may be the type of right-wing ideologue swayed by violent political rhetoric that people were too quick to assert was at work in Arizona.  Let the blame game begin again.

To me, the real culprit is (again) homophily - the phenomenon that we describe sometimes with the cliche "birds of a feather flock together."  Increasingly, we only read the news sources that reflect our interests and ideology.  We only speak with people of the same ilk. There's a growing body of research that discusses this - for example, the British Psychological Society recently reported a study that we even choose to sit next to people who look like us. In PR we call this community of people who just agree with and repeat each other it the "echo chamber," and its effects are intensified through online social media.  

As I wrote last week, our common experiences enrich our lives but they also limit our perspectives if we fail to explore. We develop deeper relationships with the people who share our values and our interests, but we grow more polarized in our politics and our consuming behavior.   Homophily manifests itself through our unwillingness or inability to compromise on important issues.  It results in litmus tests - religious or otherwise - for our political leaders.  It leads some to define those who are different as somehow less human.  We combat homophily by meeting new people, different people.  As we get to know different people more, we accept them and tend to support their basic rights, and we grow more tolerant and creative and we solve more problems.  For example, even polls dating back to 2005 and earlier suggest the more gay people we know the more supportive of their civil rights we become and the more likely we are to solve the unique issues facing gay families. 

So to those whose voices are amplified because their names sit next to headlines or because they currently reside in seats of power, I have some simple advice: you need to get out more. 

And a little child shall lead them: the future of media convergence

“I’d like to paint and draw right on the computer screen
and have it show up.”
  - 8-year-old girl, Ogden, Utah, USA

We often joke that if we want to understand the latest new techno-gadget, we just ask our kids.  Turns out we might want to ask our kids about the next new techno-gadget and quite a bit more. If we listen to the youngest among us we will hopefully understand that "media convergence" isn't simply when TV stations use Twitter or how Craigslist has replaced old-school classified ads.   True convergence will take place when the virtual merges with the physical in almost everything we do.  And it will be here sooner than you think.

 I recently had the opportunity to talk with Kim Gaskins, Director of Content Development at Latitude, an international research consultancy based in Massachusetts. We discussed a new study she helped write called Children's Future Requests for Computers and the Internet. From the release:

Latitude asked kids across the world to draw the answer to this question: “What would you like your computer or the Internet to do that it can’t do right now?” The goal of the study was to catch a glimpse into possible futures for technology as seen by digital natives, and to highlight actionable opportunities for new content, user experience (UX), and technology offerings...

More than 200 kid-innovators, ages 12 and under, from Argentina, Australia, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, India, Mexico, The Netherlands, Panama, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States participated and submitted drawings of their imagined technologies.

Overall, the drawings demonstrated that kids wanted their technology to be more interactive and human, better integrated with their physical lives, and empowering to users by assisting new knowledge or abilities. Several study participants imagined technologies that are just beginning to appear in tech-forward circles, such as Google’s revamped image search, announced on June 14th 2011, which allows users to place images, rather than text, in Google's search box to perform a query.

Kim and her colleagues didn't set out to prove the "social media guru" crowd is no better than a bunch of 8-year-olds.  (That's actually old news.)  They were trying to demonstrate something about the sources of creativity and they were clearly suggesting that the Internet isn't going to be limited to something with a screen for much longer.

Having worked in a pediatrics department and for a brief time on children's policy issues in Washington, the idea that Latitude sought out children for guidance really resonated with me.  To be honest I hadn't thought of them as a focus group for user experience brainstorming before, but it really makes sense. "Kids are important when you're searching for ideas because they're not as concerned with what’s practical or possible," Kim told me. "They have a great freedom of thought and they're great problem solvers."

That was a great point.  Think about it - the people trying to come up with the next big idea on the Internet are largely cut from the same thirty-something technophile cloth.  Our common experiences enrich our lives but they also limit our perspectives if we fail to explore.  (Ethan Zuckerman wrote a great piece on this in 2008.)  I've written about this before in my attempts to find bridge figures for distinct online communities.

So what did the kids teach us?  There were a number of excellent takeaways, but Kim did a good job summarizing the one I found most interesting - "The experience of content shouldn't end at the computer."  Nearly 40 percent of the children talked about the bridging of the physical and virtual spaces.  Like the girl from Utah who wanted to "paint" on a screen and then the painting showed up in her room. Or taking actions in the physical world - exercising, recycling, you name it - that also manifest themselves online.

We're obviously not here yet. Kim says our current attempts to open this door look a bit like bells and whistles (think the QR codes at Central Park idea) right now and "no one has figured out the transmedia thing yet."  But Kim echoed a relevant question she gleaned from the kids' insights - "why can't the Internet surround me?"

We're already developing the ability to look at an object through a smartphone lens and gain information about that object. For example, I can take a picture of a tree and my phone will tell me what species of tree it is.  I'm also immediately able to catalog that tree and work with others to determine how unique it is to its area, and if we need more of them. We can arrive at a specific address and through GPS get certain information about it. (If it's a restaurant, I can get the menu as well as those of its nearby competitors.)  We're almost to the point where it's just a matter of building a big enough database to just look at an object and have every bit of information about it right in front of you.  You know, like the digital readout in the Terminator's eye but probably without the "killing everything in sight" part. The ramifications of this massive expansion of accessible information are amazing.

We discussed other ideas and I may explore them further on this blog. For example, I found it quite interesting that Latitude partnered with the Lego Learning Institute on this project and released the results with Radical Parenting's Vanessa Van Petten.  Meantime, check out the report and learn something.

What a game!

Stolen footage from a recent pitch

So realistic it's scary.

The #AskObama experiment: democracy or distraction?

I read a very interesting piece from Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review Blog about the recent "Twitter Town Hall" held at the White House.   Equal parts political cynicism and technological utopianism, Haque asserts the one-time nature of the event demonstrates the Administration isn't truly interested in the truly participatory democracy that social media technology can help create.  From the piece:

The promise of social technologies is to fundamentally reimagine and reboot yesterday's crumbling institutions (and disempower the bumbling beancounters who run them). In political terms? They should be used — right now, right here, right this very second — to build a deeper democracy, one where via deliberation, citizens have a bottom-up impact on policy-making, which as it stands today is totally disconnected from and unresponsive to the general populace and unable to do much of anything about anything. They should be used to help ignite an authentic prosperity, by redrawing the boundaries of political freedom for the underprivileged and the powerless — and to blow apart a polity that protects and props up the privileged and the powerful.

Emphasis his.  Sadly, I agree with much of Haque's cynicism though I think it's nothing new.  For me the worst moment was two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, when President Bush was getting hammered with criticism over his inadequate response.  That political brain trust decided to have the President give a speech in Jackson Square in New Orleans - and for some reason to do it at night.  Of course, power had not been restored to that area yet, so the federal government flew in with an arsenal of lights and generators to create an amazing visual backdrop so the President could promise we would "rebuild" but not offer anything in terms of a strategy.  Then the speech ended, and the political advance team made a swift exit - and took the lights and generators with them.

I suspect many people think the country is increasingly frustrated by a real and perceived growing separation between the government and the governed, that the government listens only to the privileged few, and the rest of us are paid lip service at best.  I think people also feel let down by the fourth estate - perhaps the one valuable tidbit from this White House event was the observation that "regular folks" on Twitter seem to have different priorities than the White House Press Corps.

I was struck by one other quote from the piece, where Haque adds a geopolitical element to this disconnect:

And what you're really telling me is this: in some parts of the world, social tools can fuel the revolutions that topple dictators. Here, in the nation that invented them? They're used for marketing stunts.

This is where I disagree somewhat with Haque. He's right that the beltway crowd still largely views social media as a gimmick to exploit - we focus too much on the word "Twitter" and not enough on the words "Town Hall." But as important as they clearly are, I don't think social tools "fuel revolutions." People do. Ideas do.

In August 2009 I interviewed Hamid Tehrani, Iran editor for Global Voices Online. We spoke just after the controversial presidential elections in Iran - an event that some say led to the great "Arab Spring" of 2011. Hamid's coverage - and his courage in contradicting and defying state-run media there - was amazing. Here's what I wrote then, and it's still valid today:

So much of the "social media coverage" of these protests has been about the tools, and they're no doubt important. But I still think this story is still about the people, the messages, the stories, and what's at stake. Hamid made some excellent points about how social classes have come together in protests, something you wouldn't expect to see in Iran. And for all the talk about Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, I loved his point about history. In 1978 the Ayahtolla distributed audio cassettes to spread his message and people climbed to their rooftops to yell "God is great" in protest. Today, they're using social media tools, but the protesters are still going to the rooftops and they're still chanting "God is great."

Of course, the issue that Haque and so many communicators in Washington and beyond are dancing around with this Twitter event is commonly referred to as "media convergence." It's a term coined by marketing and PR gurus to encompass the "3C's" - computing, content, and communication - and the discussion typically focuses on how you can read a newspaper on your mobile phone now or we don't do classified ads the same way anymore. To me, however, the "C's" (some people add a fourth C, consumers) are ancillary to the conversation. Media convergence is, and always has been, a story about power.

I'll write about this more in the future.

All you sucka sci blog networks better REALIZE you play for second place

Bora launched his blog network at Scientific American.  He took his time, did it right.

Don't get me wrong - I love the writing at Wired Science, ScienceBlogs.com, Discover, Scientopia, Guardian Science Blogs, Nature Network, PLoS Blogs, and so on - but Bora was really smart about this. He saw the growth in the niche, looked at what was working best, saw what could improve, and just plain NAILED IT:

Another thing I was particularly interested in was to find bloggers who in some way connect the “Two Cultures” as described by C.P.Snow. Some connect science to history, philosophy, sociology or ethics. Many are very interested in science education, communication and outreach. Some make connections between science and popular culture, music, art, illustration, photography, cartoons/comic strips, poetry, literature, books, movies, TV, video, etc. Several produce such cross-discipline and cross-cultural material themselves – at least two are musicians, two are professional photographers, several produce videos, two are professional artists, a couple are authors of multiple books, some produce their own blog illustrations. But there are also commonalities – they all have strong knowledge of their topic, they strictly adhere to the standards of scientific evidence, they are all very strong writers, and they are all enthusiastic to share their work with a broader audience. 

When I put together this group, with such diverse interests and styles, it was not surprising to discover that, without really having to try hard to make it so, they also display diversity in many other areas: geography, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, personal/professional/scientific background and more. This is something that is important for science, and is important in the science blogging world.

This is brilliant for two big reasons: first, diversity is a source of enormous strength in science and pretty much everything else.  It's the right thing to do.  Second because it makes science immediately relevant to people with diverse interests - music, art, history, pop-culture, sports, education, and so on - the network has the capacity to grow its readership much more than other science blog networks.

My initial reaction is that SciAm's emergence with a large, smart roster may thin the herd of networks a little bit. I notice some writers have left their networks to join SciAm's, and since there are only so many blog posts you can read in a day, readers will go for the quality content first.

I may flesh this thinking out a bit more but here's one prediction/caution for those writing for another network. If you start to get several emails from your editors or managers providing "guidelines" on how to write in ways that generate more traffic like throwing celebrity references in the titles or providing more posts with repetitive phrases, your network is following an unsustainable strategy.  Your editors care more about Google search terms than you.  They want your words but not necessarily your thoughts.  The first network to do this will probably be the first one to go.

UPDATE: PZ Myers is already declaring ScienceBlogs.com "dead" and hinting that he's leaving.  Pharyngula is basically half of SEED/SB's traffic and I notice that the new SciAm network has at least a couple of SB peeps on it. I'm guessing the folks at National Geographic aren't pleased.  Leave it to an evolutionary biologist to tell us what happens when something doesn't adapt to a changing environment...