“Let us say that making a lolcat is the stupidest possible creative act….Yet anyone seeing a lolcat gets a second message: You can play this game too… The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.” Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus
I’ve been wondering for a while what it is about the iPad that bugs me so much. Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus has finally shown me what is wrong with it: it’s incredibly difficult to make a lolcat on an iPad. Cognitive Surplus is a book about the joy of the ‘Publish’ button, the story how the internet has given hundreds of millions of people both the opportunity and the incentive to become creative. It’s the story of the coming victory of active, sharing media over passive, solitary ones.
Courtesy of *right-click* *save image as* (and Helge.at)
But the iPad transforms the web into a passive medium –you can consume video, pictures, sounds and words on it, but it’s extremely difficult to create anything. Even sending a Tweet on an iPad takes three times as long as it does on a Blackberry. Compared to a laptop or a netbook, it’s agonisingly slow to use.
There are two things that an iPad is amazing at:
1) Looking at stuff. It is absolutely the best device in its weight class for watching Youtube videos, or flicking through photos.
2) Symbolising its owner’s wealth and importance.
For anything else, it’s full of barriers: there’s no right-click, which means no ‘view source’, no ‘image info’, no ‘save target as’, none of those essential tools for a blogger to get the stuff they need; there’s no really accurate pointer, which means copy-paste takes nine times longer than it should; even typing is a chore. Worse still, in exchange for the hermetically sealed world of gimmicky junk in the App Store, you’ve closed down the infinite possibilities of the open source world. No GIMP, no WinAmp, no OpenOffice, let alone Drupal, Apache or PHP. Instead of Googling your kitten, copy-pasting it into GIMP, clicking the text tool, and writing a few rofltastic words, you have an endless fiddle with Apps, fat fingers and the iPad’s broken file management system. And if you can’t make a lolcat, the ‘stupidest possible creative act’, you can’t do anything.
Apple market themselves as enabling creativity, and perhaps once that was true. Apple gave non-technical people tools that were once available only to geeks, breaking down barriers in editing films and photos, and producing music. But The iPad is a sad pacifier, as destructive to creativity as the television. If you truly embody the values Apple claims to promote – artistic, sociable, inspiring – you need to bin your glowing rectangular status symbol.
Because if they did an ‘I am a netbook, I am an iPad’ advert, the netbook would be Che Guevara, constantly on the move, stirring up a revolution, while the iPad would be a morbidly obese child, endlessly hitting a single button in order to watch yet another 3-second Youtube clip.
When MySpace came out, I decided instantly that it was a lame ‘my-first-website’ kit for people too lazy to even figure out Geocities.
When I first heard about Twitter, I thought it sounded dumber than a box of hammers. Who wants a blogging service that limits them to a completely arbitrary number of characters? Cutesy silicon valley crap that nobody in their right mind would ever bother with.
You are mayor of a farm. Whoop-de-do.
I still think Foursquare is a sort of jumped-up version of Farmville – a site whose success is solely a consequence of its ability to spam other social networks.
Obviously, I was wrong. MySpace’s successor Facebook is a completely essential part of my social life. Twitter has almost completely replaced all other media as my source of news, gossip and viral lulz. Eventually, Foursquare, or some equivalent, is going to hook me as well.
All those world-changing social websites were, initially, baffling. They had to be, because they were using a new technology to create a completely new set of behaviours in a massive audience.
So what about Google+?
Well, it’s a mixture of the best aspects of Facebook and Twitter with some clever, useful ways of organising contacts and a slick video-conferencing tool. I like it, as far as it goes, but I can tell you right now that it’s not going to change the world. If they’d released it 5 years ago, I’d have said Google+? WTF?’ Then it might have had a chance.
Social has been the glamorous end of digital marketing for the last 5 years, while email is a bit of an ugly stepchild – always there, but everyone would rather avoid talking about it.
Social networking hanging out with crowdsourcing and location - email (right) trying to be friends
To some extent, this is because email marketing involves such an intense, single-minded and boring focus on deliverability. Unless social moves in the same direction soon, its practitioners are going to find themselves in all kinds of trouble.
Email marketing circa 2002, Facebook marketing circa 2011
Every email marketer above a certain age will, early on in their career, have ruined someone’s business. We were flying blind: we didn’t know about spam filters; we didn’t understand whitelisting; we ended up getting our employers’ email addresses blacklisted so severely that even internal emails were disappearing into Junk Mail folders.
Now the legion of self-proclaimed ‘social media experts’ are making the same mistake.
Your Edgerank decides whether your updates appear in someone’s Facebook Top News feed. It’s calculated on how often that friend (or one of their friends), interacts with you. Every time they, or their friends, looks at your page, clicks your links, likes or comments on your status, your Edgerank will rise. This means it’s self-sustaining. Maintain a good relationship with someone, and your updates will stay in their feed – making it easier for you to strengthen that relationship further, as well as improving your Edgerank with their friends.
But if you slip out of someone’s Top News feed, then you’re gone for good, unless one of their friends remains keen. Slip all the way out of a network’s feeds, and there’s no way for you to get back in. You can have a million friends, but unless they happen to switch their news feed from ‘Top News’ to ‘Most Recent’ (and no-one ever does) none of them will see your updates. Ever.
Just like incompetent emailers, inept Facebookers don’t just fail to provide value-for-money: they do irrevocable harm.
In the early days, the Internet was for reading and writing. Images took forever to load, and the nature of HTML meant accuracy was a necessity for putting anything online. As a result, the words on the web were often rather well written. Even the flame wars were in properly punctuated sentences.
Things changed: ecommerce brought people online to shop; YouTube gave the goggle-eyed TV-viewing masses to Google; finally, social networks made it easy for everyone to spew their most trivial thoughts into the cloud. Over time, search engine optimisation and the exigencies of linkbait culture have driven ‘style’ to the digital margins, a minor consideration against the all-important secret sauce of killer content and a great keyword-packed headline.
Here, then, are a few choice delicacies for anyone out there who still loves the baroque, the discursive and the prolix. Make yourself comfortable (and don’t click these links if your lunchbreak ends in 5 minutes):
Dangerous Minds, by Malcolm Gladwell
From the New Yorker, the spiritual home of long-form journalism, a perfect twisty-turny Malcolm Gladwell analysis
The Women’s Crusade, by Sheryl WuDunn
Is there any major UK newspaper or website that would publish and promote a 7-page argument for the role women’s rights play in international development?
The Great American Bubble Machine, by Matt Taibbi
“[Goldman Sachs is] a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Wow. Just wow.
Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, by Michael Lewis
The Liar’s Poker author has written an absolutely jaw-dropping dissection of the Greek financial crisis.
Know any great content that takes more than 10 minutes to read? Give me a few links in the comments below:
After my post Facebook’s dirty secret: your profile page, in which I suggested that Facebook had moved beyond the ‘game’ mechanisms of its early days, someone on Twitter (can’t remember who, sorry) pointed me in the direction of this brilliant rant from Cory Doctorow. He reckons that it is still a game of sorts, but, curiously for a social network, it’s a private game: closer to a slot machine than a sport. You pull the lever, and sometimes you get a wonderful social reward.
Anyway, watch the video. It’s a great talk, and also contains some excellent advice about how to educate your kids.
If, in your professional digital life, you are only looking at top-line stats like Visits, Pageviews and Conversions, then you are failing miserably at digital marketing. You urgently need to pay a visit to Occam’s Razor and learn how to genuinely judge your website’s performance.
If, however, the blog you write as a hobby has had an amazingly successful month on those top-line stats, and you decide to set up a few more sophisticated segments to see how many of these visitors from all over the world are actually engaging with your content, I would strongly recommend you think again. It can be a VERY depressing experience.
Professional wind-up merchant Brendan O’Neill, of Spiked (something he describes as an ‘independent online phenomenon’, though everyone else would call it a ‘shit blog’) has written an attack on Twitter in the Daily Telegraph:
Twitterers’ supposed passion for freedom of speech quickly shrivels up and evaporates if anyone dares to say something that goes against liberal orthodoxies. That is because, for all the claims that Twitter is an un-policeable, almost anarchic space in which law fears to tread, in truth it has created its own hierarchy and its own forms of conformism… The general political outlook of influential Twitterers is summed up in the fact that 76.1% of tweets about the AV referendum were pro-AV (and only 23.9% were anti), compared with 67.9% of the electorate that firmly said no to AV.
The liberal consensus, and its corresponding intolerance of consensus-breakers, has been fairly successfully transported into Twitter, making this social networking site a surprisingly conformist and uncritical arena.
This is the kind of tedious linkbait that wouldn’t normally be worthy of response – except that he happened to write it on the 10th anniversary of of Douglas Adams’ death, and Adams’ 1999 essay How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet provides the perfect riposte. I’ve swapped the words ‘Internet’ and ‘web’ for ‘Twitter’, but everything else is Douglas Adams’ own:
Because Twitter is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish on Twitter, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on Twitter. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone.
Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on Twitter anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’
What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on Twitter on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from Twitter is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
Brendan O’Neill: a man so ignorant about the web that he can be torn apart by a someone who died in the days of dial-up.
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly
exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order
of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s
been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
A couple of weeks ago, I was explaining Facebook to a non-user (they do still exist), and I did something I realised I haven’t done for over a year.
I looked at my own profile page.
It wasn’t a pretty sight. In fact, it made me look like a tedious, self-important, rambling fool.
Why is it that so many deeply private people, people like me, are happy to expose themselves on Facebook? And why is it that someone like me whose job involves a fair amount of work on social media for brands can let their personal page look so crappy?
Because part of the genius of Facebook is that you never have to see your own profile.
Social networks as social competitions
Facebook’s 2005-2008 incarnation, just like MySpace and Bebo, encouraged you to recruit new users by making profile pages a competition. There was a competitive gaming element where you tried to outdo your acquaintances with exciting photographs, your taste in films and music and, above all, the number of friends you had. Your profile was your landing page and, since interactions took place either there or on friends’ profile pages, you were always aware of how you were doing.
Image courtesy of http://www.352media.com/blog/
It was a social network that appealed, as Twitter and Foursquare do now, to the socially competitive. Your profile page was where you kept the score: your photos, your wall, your details, your friends.
The 2008 rebuild changed that and opened Facebook up to a huge new user-base: the shy, the introverted, the ordinary people who didn’t want to shout about how great their lives were. Since 2008, interactions have taken place through the newsfeed, with the effect that you never have a reason to land on your own profile page, and see how other users might perceive you. The creation of the ‘Like’ button took that a step further, allowing users to edit details about personal tastes in music, movies and brands, without even realising that they were changing their profile pages.
That freed Facebook from a lot of social awkwardness. It ceased to be about building your personal profile – it became all about your friends and what they were up to right now. Some people still ‘play’ Facebook in the same competitive spirit: I have friends who get a buzz from ‘Likes’ and comments. But even those people are never really aware that anyone else is watching how they do.
Facebook’s hidden data capture
One hugely beneficial result for Facebook – whether by accident or design – is that you no longer even notice which personal details you’ve fed into the social network.
We Don’t Have Facebook Accounts, Say People Who Care About Privacy
Millions of users who are quite happy to write down everything about themselves and then show it to people complained that their privacy was being compromised.
It was funny, but a little unfair. Facebook does everything it can to avoid showing you what you personally have put in. Its unique selling point, strangely for a social network, is the very strong impression that you are invisible. That’s how Mark Zuckerburg has persuaded all those shy, reserved, normal people – people who hated MySpace and all the garish showing off it entailed – to put their lives on the internet.
Have a look at your profile page today. It may surprise you…
Putting a web address on your print campaigns no longer works.
A couple of weeks ago, we put a shortcut URL on a letter we were sending to a few supporters about a project in Uganda: “www.actionaid.org.uk/giriki” is what we printed at the bottom of the page. We included the ‘www’ because we knew that this group weren’t particularly digitally savvy, and would understand it better if they had the World Wide Web prefix. 40% of them typed it into their address bar, and ended up in the right place.
But 60% of them did this:
And because we’d used a 301 redirect to a newly published page for SEO reasons too boring to explain, they ended up with a search that had the wrong page as the top result.
People no longer know what the address bar is for
For anyone who came to the internet after about 2006, the Google widget in your browser is what you use to navigate the web. The address bar is just a weird set of letters and punctuation that changes every time you hit a link.
Those late adopters now represent a huge proportion of Internet users: last month alone, Google saw 226,000,000 searches for ‘gmail’. And this is what Google predicts if you put ‘www.’ into a search:
If you want your audience to go from print or display advertising to your website, you need to tell them what to search for on Google, not what to type in the address bar.
And Google’s grip on the web gets a little bit tighter…
