jill/txt

The Colony is a TV series about a very serious pandemic that devastates our civilisation. As a teaser, Discovery Channel has set up a “personal simulation” using your Facebook data to show you how such an outbreak would affect “those closest to you”.

Of course I had to try; I love new ways of telling stories. But despite Discovery Channel’s dire warnings that if I found the simulation too realistic, I could always escape by closing my browser window, it didn’t really work all that well. Better for a giggle than a scare, really.

The problem is that my friends’ names, photos and locations really isn’t enough information. The main issue is tone of voice. All the status updates and comments are written in pretty much the same style. Quite apart from the fact that my friends write in different languages, they all have different ways of writing on Facebook. My husband Scott would never post an update like this one, for instance!

OMG indeed.

The next problem is that people have to give you too much back story in their status updates. Here, a friend suggests a way of charging a car battery using red wine. Of course she has to explain why this is necessary (mind you, they have power to use the internet so why not to use a starter cable?) - but most Facebook status updates don’t explain backstory to this extent.

Which also makes me think that a more authentic-seeming narrative would include more offhand jibes. Would EVERY UPDATE really be about the pandemic?

The simulation does use locations fairly well. “Kate Pullinger” talks about shops being empty in London - and this is a fairly realistic use of Facebook, too - people connect across different locations and like to share information about their local situation.

The simulation is divided into two pages. One simulates your Facebook news feed during the outbreak of the pandemic, and one shows a later stage, when a lot of people are dead already and society has pretty much collapsed. The tone of voice may not vary much from one character to another, but it does change a little from the first to the second period of time. And actually, the seriousness of the second section makes the glitches in voice less odd. This seems reasonably convincing to me - these people might actually have said those things. (Hadia Tajik is a Norwegian politician, by the way, not a friend, which makes this even more effective, in a way):

The characters also post more convincing messages with less backstory. Presumably this is because the action already happened: now they’re just showing us a scenario we’re really quite familiar with from science fiction movies and dystopias:

And yes, they do realise that it’s a bit of a stretch that Facebook is still up and running - I like this little meta-reflection:

In this case the tone of voice works coincidentally quite well - the real Kate Pullinger may well have written such a comment.

You might ask how “authentic” you’d really want a Facebook “personal simulation” narrative to be. It’s fiction, after all. But if it wants to work as a narrative, you don’t really want it to make you laugh instead of be chilled. On the other hand, it’s marketing - and actually, people are more likely to share things that make them laugh. So perhaps a severely flawed narrative is exactly right for the purpose.

I just gave a talk for Forskning.no’s seminar about research dissemination/popularisation, Fra forskning til forside v3.0. Here are the slides:

I had to leave right after my talk, because my Remix Culture students are presentating their research projects at noon, but I was able to hear Ove Dalen’s talk before mine about how to write online. He gave an engaging presentation with some interesting points: did you know that we now read more of an article presented online than we would if it were presented on paper? Also, while Jacob Nielsen in 1997 found that 80% of us scan online texts rather than reading them, that number’s dropped to around 50% according to a study by Poynter in 2009 (I’ll have to ask Ove Dalen for a more complete source for that: luckily he’s on Twitter so that’ll be easy!). Oh, and the first thing we notice on a website? The text, not the images. Ove Dalen has written a couple of books on writing for the web, and gives classes frequently, so I’ve seen his work online regularly over the last years, but this is the first time I’ve heard him speak in person.

I’m giving a talk at the Wikipedia Academy in Bergen Oct 14-15, and since it’s the Wikipedia, I thought it would be better form to plot the talk out in a blog post rather than making a shiny Powerpoint. Here’s the abstract, titled “Has Wikipedia grown up?”

[Update Jan 4, 2010: the “>video of the talk is now up]

Historically, social media sites don’t last for long. The Wikipedia has lasted far longer than most of its peers, but will it last forever?

The Wikipedia seems to have avoided the last phase - spam and monetization. Or at least, spam is largely kept at bay. Unfortunately, I think the greatest threat to the Wikipedia is its community.

I’m one of those occasional contributors who sometimes adds content about topics I’m an expert on. I find the nitty gritty editing and the debates between deletionists and inclusionists rather dull. In fact, until I started gathering links for this talk, I hadn’t logged in to my account in a few months, and was surprised to find on my talk page that one of the articles I contributed had been nominated for deletion. Fortunately nobody except the nominator wanted it deleted (one person even posted a great link to a statement by Jimmy Wales about how we should relax and accomodate someone who adds a good article about a possibly trivial thing. But really: what a wonderful confirmation of the recent articles arguing that the Wikipedia is scaring away the experts… I add information about something I’m knowledgeable about and it’s nominated for deletion by someone who calls a major research centre a “club/organization”? In both the articles I started that have been nominated for deletion, the nominator clearly knows nothing about the topic whatsoever.

My unhappy reunion with the Wikipedia easily connects to recent reports that the number of contributors to the Wikipedia is stagnating. Perhaps because there already are articles on most obvious encyclopedia topics. Or perhaps because of the Wikipedians, that tight community of copy-editors. Sue Gardner of the Wikimedia Foundation argues that the natural resource of the Wikipedia is emotion, “the rush of joy that you get the first time you make an edit to Wikipedia, and you realize that 330 million people are seeing it live”. Today most often that edit will be deleted.

And who deletes it?

The thing that surprised me the most in Jimmy Wales’ presentation on Wednesday was the extremely skewed demographics of Wikipedia contributors - 85% male, 65% or so single, almost all childless, and heavily weighted towards the under-thirties. I actually hadn’t realised how out of place I am as a contributor, old, married mother that I am. Given that the contributors are so young, male, childless and single, the idea that the Wikipedia has “grown up” seems rather out of place.

Mind you, as far as I can tell, these demographics are self-reported by heavy Wikipedia contributors, so quite likely not very representative. This preliminary survey analysis seems to be the source. Here (as a PDF) are the slides Wales spoke from, pretty much.

And the readers are a different kettle of fish. In Norway, at least, the Wikipedia is mainstream. When I tweeted about the demographics Wales presented, Petter Bae Brandtzæg, a PhD fellow at SINTEF, sent me some more info and gave me a link to slides for a talk he gave in Trondheim today with lots of statistics on Norwegian usage of social media. Slide 14 shows how huge the Wikipedia is and how fast it’s still growing. Over 2/3 of online Norwegian read it at least once a month. But slide 15 shows that daily or weekly reading is skewed by gender - 35% of men and only 21% women read the Wikipedia that often. However, Pew Internet found a far more even gender balance: in 2007, 39% of US men online read the Wikipedia, as did 34% of US women online. The differences make you wonder about the surveys’ methodologies.

[An aside: Men “define the net” Brandtzæg writes. I think that is to leave out vast portions of the net - google anything to do with children, pregnancy, home, work-life balance, crafts or fashion and you’ll find women discussing it extensively. These things are a major part of the net, though perhaps invisible to those who don’t participate in these discussions. Also, a presentation from Pew Internet given just last week gives stats showing that there are more women than men using social networking sites (see slide 8) - this is another major part of “the net” that’s left out of Brantzæg’s assertion. Regardless: I’m rather saddened that the gender differences are so traditional.]

Anyway, let’s get back to the Wikipedia. I think the question of demographics is huge. And yes, I definitely think it can scare people away. Look at any nomination for deletion, say this current nomination that the article on WoWWiki be deleted, for instance, and the bickering and aggression is really very off-putting. Someone wants it deleted because WoW is stupid. Great. Someone else thinks that numerous academic articles citing WoWWiki doesn’t show its notability because academic articles are “primary sources” and Wikipedia doesn’t allow original research in articles. Talk about misunderstanding. This discussion certainly sounds as though its being conducted by those sad 18 year old boys who can’t find girlfriends.

boyd’s law: “Adding more users to a social network [site] increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” With the Wikipedia, the problem is that it’s too good. There are so many articles out there that most of the activity is nit-picking.

Clearly we need copy-editors, which to a large extent is what “wikipedians” are. Without them, most articles would probably look like an “incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids (..) that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts”, as Nicholas Carr accused the articles on George Bush and Jane Fonda of being in 2006.

But there’s a rather dangerous balance between the copy-editors and the content-contributors. Certainly the copy-editors - the “Wikipedians” - do most of the editing. According to Aaron Schwartz in his interesting article “Who Writes Wikpedia“, Jimmy Wales has said that:

it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”

However, when Aaron Schwartz looked at several individual articles, analysing instead who had contributed the most content (i.e. words) rather than simply moved things around or formatted things, the proportions were almost reversed. Most of the content is contributed by people who have made less than 50 edits to the Wikipedia in total.

That might turn the demographics around significantly, too. Maybe 85% of the copy-editors and formatters are young, childless, single men, but occasional contributors - the people who actually write the Wikipedia - are more representative of the general population?

I love the Wikipedia, and I hate the Wikipedia. Most of what I hate about it is the bickering, the ignorance and the hidden agendas camouflaged by acronyms and templates and bragging about superior knowledge of the rules of Wikipedia. What I love about it is the content, the articles, and the freedom. I want to be able to read an article about anything I’m curious about. I’m thrilled to finally have access to a copy of something very close to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Despite the work of dedicated field researchers such as Ford Prefect, much of the contributions to the Guide are made on a strictly ad-hoc basis. With the permanent staff more likely to be on a lunch break than working, “most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing.”[7] This has led to the Guide being patchy in its coverage, cobbled together (Its entry on “The Universe” was copied from the back of a packet of breakfast cereal)[8] and often riddled with errors.

I want the Wikipedia to still be around in ten, fifteen, twenty years time.

Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves.

– Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p 170.

Forrester Research have just released (expensive) reports on how many people in the US and in some European and Asian countries are using social media. Forrester has their own classification of different kinds of users - “creators” actually upload their own content, “critics” rate or review other peoples’ content or contribute to wikis and discussion forums (which could be said to be creating, really), “collectors” tag content and use RSS, “joiners” are active on social network sites, “spectators” read, listen and watch user-generated content, and then there are the “inactive”, who, well, aren’t using social media at all. Their overall conclusions are that there are less and less “inactives” - but also that Europeans are adopting social media at a far slower rate than Americans. This widget’s kind of fun to play with to see the differences:

Why do you think Europeans are so much slower? Americans had a head start on access to technology, but surely that’s evening out by now? I actually think a major reason is Europe’s language barriers, that effectively slice Europe up into many very small media ecologies. With only 4.5 million people speaking Norwegian, the tipping point is hard to reach in Norwegian social media - although more and more people are certainly using social media here in Norway. We have very little or no contact with other European countries’ social media - barely even with Sweden and Denmark.

Another possibility is that Viviane Serfaty was right, and that blogging is a peculiarly American form, akin to the diary-writing of the Puritans. For the Puritans, Serfaty wrote, working through your everyday and religious doubts, feelings and choices by writing about them in a diary was an ethical necessity and very spiritual work. In Scandinavian Lutheran societies, on the other hand, the population was taught to read the bible but writing was seen as unnecessary for peasants. Further south, European Catholics had a more direct relationship with God, in spoken prayer and hail maries and penances. I don’t know enough about religion to know whether this is a completely tenable theory (I mused about it here, though, on page 7), but it’s an interesting thought. Serfaty was writing about blogging in particular, but perhaps one could look at all social media as similarly confessional and personal and so such cultural differences might continue to hold true?

The current case study at BlogHer Business is about how Coach ran a campaign to have consumers design their own Coach bags. The company wanted to engage a younger market, and the campaign was successful: they had 3200 submissions and had 6 million “engagements” with the site. The company told the agency “We want consumers to put their DNA on our bags” - much as Fiskars realised users wanted to tell the story of their life rather than talk about tools. The campaign invited users to “design the next Coach totes”, and the prize was that for the bag that was selected by Coach, they’d create the bag and throw a party for the creator and your friends in your local store. They gave users some patterns they could choose to use and uploaded it using share tools, named it, wrote about it. They had 3200 entries. Were picked up by over 30 blogs (interesting: that doesn’t really seem like a lot?)

They sold the bag in a limited edition for $220 at the store where the designer lived near, and a few other stores. But it was essentially a PR product, not that they really wanted to make money off the bag. I wonder whether the novelty of this kind of campaign will wear off? Will consumers get sick of this? Especially if their input is not sufficiently listened to by the company - after all, the bags weren’t really sold. Did the designs really influence the way Coach designs their bags? (Yes, they say towards the end - they went through all the designs looking for trends and inspirations.) They didn’t promote the bag chosen - is this a slap in the face to the creators?

There are three reasons why people participate, says Jamie Dicken from Brickfish, the agency doing this campaign, and that’s done similar campaigns for Victoria’s Secret and other brands.

1. I can do it - I can drag and click and create something quickly and easily.
2. I’m a creator - it’s my goal in life to create a bag for Coach.
3. I want to be a celebrity. 25% of young people believe they can be a celebrity.

Pretty interesting presentation - though there are quite a few other similar campaigns around.

A few weeks ago I was asked to give a talk on Twitter, but the dates didn’t work out - so I compiled a list of Norwegian experts who I think would do a great job speaking about social media. Some of these are people I know well, others were suggested to me on Twitter, and looking at their online work I think they look really interesting. I’m pasting in my list here because I know there are lots of people loooking for speakers on subjects like social media and Twitter, and I hope this will be useful. It’s in Norwegian though, sorry if you don’t read Norwegian.

Jeg satt nylig sammen en liste anbefalte foredragsholdere for en som trengte en til å snakke om Twitter - da særlig i forbindelse med journalistikk, men det er jo en god del overlapping der. Noen av disse kjenner jeg selv, andre fikk jeg tips om på Twitter. Her er listen jeg kom opp med:

• Bente Kalsnes har jeg stor sans for - hun har bl.a. vært community leder for Dagbladet.no, så frilansjournalist fra Brussels, men flytter nå hjem til Oslo 15. august. Hun er et fyrverkeri av skarpe meninger og skriver veldig bra i bloggen sin. Her er LinkedIn profilen hennes.
• Elin Sjursen er en tidligere kollega av meg som har gjort det stort i et av Londons mest spennende konsulentfirma, Made By Many - de leverer “digitale strategier” og er eksperter på sosiale medier. Elin er opprinnelig fra Bergen (vel, Askøy) men har bodd i mange år i USA, hvor hun bl.a. studerte med Henry Jenkins på MIT, og nå bor hun i London. Hun har arbeidet med digitale medier og det som nå heter sosiale medier i over ti år og er en dyktig visuell og fortellende formidler. Her er Elins poster på Made by Many bloggen.
• En annen dyktig taler er Marika Lüders - hun er på Sintef i Oslo og har skrevet doktoravhandling om hvordan ungdom bruker nettet (dette er fra hukommelsen, aknskje litt unøyaktig). Hun er god å snakke for seg og har veldig interessante meninger, samt at hun er internasjonalt anerkjent i forskermiljøet - i vår kom hun ut med en forskningsartikkel i prestisjetidsskriftet New Media and Society om “personlige medier” som altså står i kontrast til massemedier og omfatter alt fra dagbøker og fotoalbum til Twitter og Facebook og blogging. Hun er på Twitter og har en (ikke særlig oppdatert) blogg.
• Vi har en stipendiat her på UiB, Linda Elen Olsen, som skriver sin doktoravhandling om LinkedIn og Facebook og “trust” - høyaktuelle temaer! Jeg har ikke hørt henne holde foredrag ennå men på tomannshånd og i grupper er hun en aktiv debattant som gir et svært godt inntrykk - jeg gleder meg til å se mer av hva hun jobber med. Her er hun på Twitter og på LinkedIn
• Jeg fikk tips om Ragnhild K. Olsen som er høgskolelektor på BI hvor hun underviser i “flermodal ledelse“. Hun er også en av to bloggere på mediehus.org (”Mediehus.org er et nettsted om redaksjonell utvikling og konvergens. Det er en ressursblog for Mediehusrapporten 2008, en casestudie av redaksjonell organisering i ti norske mediehus.”) Og hun er på Twitter. Jeg har altså ikke personlig kjennskap til Ragnhild K. Olsen, jeg fikk dette som et tips fra en på twitter, men hun ser jo interessant ut.
• En annen Twitrer anbefalte Vilde Schanke Sundet (Twitter: http://twitter.com/vildess ) - hun er stipendiat på UiO og skriver en PhD “on media institutions’ use of new media platforms”. Ifølge @iacob tenker hun “smart om Twitter”. Jeg kjenner henne ikke personlig.
• Og da @carstenhp så at @ingeborgv hadde anbefalt Ragnhild K. Olsen kommenterte han “Nå er jo @ingeborgv litt beskjeden. Hun kan mye om Twitter selv fra sin tid på IJ.Og har foredratt i flere redaksjoner om temaet.” Så kanskje hun også er et alternativ! Ingeborg Volan - her er bloggen hennes.
• @VirrVarr, også kjent som Ida Jackson, har også holdt mange foredrag om Twitter - hun er kjent for boken Jenter som kommer, for å ha vunnet flere bloggpriser og for sin innovative bruk av sosiale medier.

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