jill/txt

I gave a talk today for the staff of Bergens Tidende, one of our regional newspapers, on social media and journalism. Slides and links follow - all in Norwegian.

Takk til @benteka, @idaaa, @jeanburgess, @andemann og @carlchristian for tilbakemeldinger underveis!

Her er noen lenker fra foredraget og steder å begynne:

• Everyblock.com gir datagenererte nyheter om amerikanske nabolag. Er det et eksempel på “asosiale medier”? Her hjemme kan vi bl.a. søke i norske solgte boliger - men informasjonen er foreløpig ikke samlet. Outside.in bruker i stedet brukerskapt innhold for å lage lokale nyheter.
• About the Norwegian “drittunge” scandal
• Jack Schafer: In Praise of Insensitive Reporters
• Washington Post: Faces of the Fallen
• Bloggurat, Sonitus.org, Google bloggsøk, valgprat.no, Norske hageblogger
• Avansert Twittersøk (prøv f.eks. å søk etter alle twitters fra Bergen)
• Mashable: The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter
• NONA: Personer journalister bør følge på Twitter, fra NONA: Nettverket for oss som jobber med nettmedier (mye om journalistikk på nettet)
• Carl Christian Grøndahl om journalister og sosiale medier
• Tvitre.no

Om det er noe jeg har glemt, skriv det gjerne inn i kommentarene!

I posted a draft of the paper I’m working on on Google Docs on Friday and asked for feedback and help - and already more than thirty people have looked at it and five people have left comments - and of course some people have messaged me to let me know that they’d like to but haven’t had time to read it yet. Reading and giving feedback on a 5000 word draft can be a fairly time-consuming process. But I must say, the feedback I’ve received is really useful, and even just the knowledge that people have looked at it and not had any comments is valuable. Part of the reason I want drafts out there before it’s published is simply quality control. The article is going to be published in the European Journal of Communication, and it will be vetted by experts in communications studies and copy-edited by experts in citation technique and so forth - but the editors aren’t experts in social media. And there are only a few of them. So getting feedback from more people is bound to help improve the article.

For instance, the core of my article is probably my sorting out of different ways in which social media organise our data into stories or patterns. Here they are (and I would love feedback on this!)

1. Patterns that show TIME
• A Documented Life (this is hand-crafted, not generated)
• Flickr organises your photo archives as a calendar - for instance, here are Elin Sjursen’s public photos from September 2005
• daily pic videos (here there’s a handcrafted original: Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years - you can generate your own at dailybooth.com.
• Trixietracker (the baby sleep tracker I wrote about a few months ago)
2. Patterns that show RELATIONSHIPS (and popularity?)
• tag clouds (see tagcloud-generator.com or tagcrowd.com)
• twitterfriends
• technorati rank
• Facebook friend visualiser
3. Patterns that show CONTEXT (is this a subset of relationships? (or vice versa)
• Friendfeed.com – gathers your data from several sources, shows your friends’ data from several sources
• Dagbladet profile (I blogged about this)
• Spock.com (same idea as Friendfeed)
• Tumblr.com – creates a public site for your gathering your info from Twitter, blogs, Flickr, etc.
4. Patterns that show GEOGRAPHY
brightkite.com (check in with GPS-enabled device)
• dopplr.com (logs travels, creates visualisations for individual users, like this one it made for me)
• Google maps – the customised/hand-crafted ones
• Flickr map view – see photos on map
• Nike’s running logs, using data from Nike/iPod running shoe thing-me-gig and allowing you to add geo-data (these also show time, development of runs over time)

I’ve received a few comments on this - I’m wondering how to present it, whether the division of categories makes sense, and what to do with it. Here’s how people responded:

I’ll be getting feedback on the draft from my colleagues in my research group too, but while they’re all very savvy about digital culture in general, none of them really specialise on social media - and so I’m very grateful to all extra feedback I can get. And of course, I’ve also asked Scott for feedback, and as always, his feedback is thorough and extremely useful. And maybe more customised than most - Scott knows my writing and can remind me of what I do well and gently suggest stripping away some of the blah blah (he wants more examples and less of the general and not-very-revealing references - and I think he’s right). Here’s one of his comments on the categories:

So do you think my categories of generated stories in user data make sense? Or do you have other good examples for me? Do share, please!

Twitter has become huge in Norway, and recently newspapers like Dagbladet.no started embedding unfiltered feeds of tweets about a topic in their articles. So if you tag a tweet #aker it’ll show up in articles about Kjell-Inge Røkke, one of Norway’s richest industrialists and the owner of the Aker concern. @mikkelgruner a.k.a. Mikkel Grüner decided to sabotage this, and wrote a tweet that translated reads “I’m shocked that dagbladet.no called Kjell-Inge Røkke a “syphilitic whore’s cunt” on their website. Remember the Press’s Ethical Guidelines!” #AKER”. Sure enough, his tweet showed up in the latest article on Røkke (and I’ve borrowed the screenshot from Mikkel - I hope he doesn’t mind).

Mikkel continued by using the same strategy on various other issues, arguing that it was a protest against a capitalist media empire acting as a megaphone for the rich and powerful and then additionally profiting from the words of the masses, simply assuming that of course any of us plebs on Twitter would be eternally grateful to be re-published in the newspaper and that of course they needn’t ask permission and of course we wouldn’t mind having our words republished as eye-catching cool stuff that would help the newspaper sell more ads.

Personally I tweet in public and I’m happy for my words to be reused, re-tweeted, and generally used as people wish. Preferably not against me, I suppose, but even that I’ll take. But Mikkel does have a point. Twitter’s terms of service state that users retain copyright of their tweets:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

So technically, Dagbladet’s republishing tweets is a breach of copyright. Worse yet, Mikkel writes, they’re making money off it - there are ads placed right beside the tweets.

On the other hand, as @osol has pointed out, Mikkel had deliberately used a hashtag - #aker - and hashtags on Twitter have come to mean that you’re sending a tweet to a “channel”, or allowing your tweet to be syndicated along with other tweets using that hashtag. The question is whether users really know this, and whether they’ve considered that it means newspapers and political parties may republish your content without your knowledge or explicit permission - and earn money or voters from it.

Further, the Twitter terms of service go on to say:

The Twitter service makes it possible to post images and text hosted on Twitter to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display data hosted on Twitter.com must provide a link back to Twitter.

I think Twitter needs to offer users several licenses. I’d choose a CC attribution license, allowing people to use my tweets in any way so long as they’re attributed to me, whereas Mikkel might want either a non-commercial license so newspapers can’t make money off his tweets, or perhaps an old-fashioned copyright license, so the tweets can’t be republished at all. That way, Dagbladet and other sites can simply suck in the tweets that have a license allowing that kind of republishing. Problem solved. Other sites, like Flickr, offer this - and perhaps the reason Twitter hasn’t yet is simply that they haven’t thought of commercial newspapers and so forth using tweets in this way.

Actually, there’s an external service that lets you license your Tweets as you wish: tweetCC lets you send a tweet to them that states your chosen license, and they’ll archive it and make it easy for people to know. Only 2000 or so people have done so, and this really is a service that should be offered by Twitter itself, but at least this is a start.

Companies re-using tweets like Dagbladet have a larger problem of course. You need some kind of moderation of tweets - or there are going to be more and more trolls or “terrorists” like Mikkel. And it’s not just newspapers. The political party Høyre is having their annual meeting
and are embedding live tweets that use the hashtag #hlm (Høyres landsmøte). Mikkel attacked them too - classic troll behaviour, I suppose - and complained when they tried to ask him politely, on Twitter, not to sabotage their attempts at an open discussion. Interestingly, Høyre then felt the need to write a long apology for blocking him on their blog, painstakingly arguing that it wasn’t censorship but blocking a troll. (This post seems to have been deleted, but there’s a screenshot on Mikkel’s blog.)

I don’t think Høyre really needs to apologise for that. But I’m quite sure Mikkel won’t be the last troll using Twitter to get embedded on other websites. It’s a wonder spammers aren’t using it already to get their viagra ads on Dagbladet and Høyre’s websites. The utopic harmony of the early days of Twittering, where spammers and trolls hadn’t quite discovered it, is hardly going to last.

I found one discussion of a similar issue internationally, where the sports network ESPN republished tweets by Mark Cuban, a “dot.com billionaire” who made his fortune on webcasting basketball in the late nineties and who’s heavily involved in NBA sports and owns a competing cable channel to ESPN. Obviously this is very different from Dagbladet’s “theft of the words of the powerless”, to paraphrase Mikkel Grüner, but the issues of copyright are similar. There’s quite a long discussion about it in the comments on his blog post.

Are the other cases of Twitter “terrorism” internationally?

Update, May 31: Kottke posts a comment from a lawyer on this issue.

An experiment: here’s the current draft of the paper I’m writing on ways in which social media visualise and narrativise their users historical data, providing us with new kinds of mirrors in which to see ourselves and decide who we are. Here’s my previous blog post about the paper. It’s due in four weeks and there’s still plenty to do, but I’d love comments, feedback, corrections etc if you have the time and inclination.

Stuff I’d particularly like feedback on includes: are there more than the three ways of researching social media that I identify in the fourth paragraph and on? What do you think of the patterns/templates I identify in the visualisations? Are there more dark sides (towards the end of the paper)? Who should I cite and how should I make the argument that we use narratives to understand our lives and construct our identities, and that often these narratives build on cultural templates/norms that define what is important?

The paper’s in Google docs and the link above lets you be a collaborator. I’d appreciate it if you simply add comments (using the insert –> comment tool or using a different text colour) at relevant places in the text - or write a comment here, or whatever.

Twitter is so easy that I keep feeding my quick finds into tweets (I’m @jilltxt on Twitter) instead of writing something more about them for the blog - which is fun and fast, and gets quick and interesting responses, but doesn’t lead to the steadier, more long-term thinking and conversations that I enjoy on blogs. And of course, as Nick Montfort (who just made associate professor and got tenured at MIT: congrats!) pointed out to me last night, Twitter is proprietary - and that does worry me. My blog is on my own server, I use an open source system that I could (if I could be bothered) reprogram or modify at will, and I own my words completely. Twitter is totally corporate and I have no control over it whatsoever. But Twitter is so alive these days. Norwegians in particular seem to be flocking to Twitter en masse, and it’s a great way to keep abreast with what people interested in new media in Norway are thinking about.

I find that Twitter makes me much more geographically located than blogging. Because Twitter is so immediate it’s much more reliant on time. I tweet mostly during office hours here in Norway, and so if you live in New York or California you’re still asleep when I’m tweeting. If you live in Singapore or Australia you’re likely having dinner, putting the kids to bed or out having a drink. So my conversations are with Norwegians and to some extent with Europeans. I do like being more “present” in Norway but I miss the connections with the rest of world. Because blogging is slower, and because archives and links are more important, geography and time zones matter far less - in fact I’ve never really felt that they matter at all. If anything, I enjoy waking up and seeing that other bloggers have been writing while I slept. On Twitter, I’m unlikely to ever see those tweets - I’d have to individually go through their archives, which is a painful process, and unlikely to happen since there’s always so much happening in the live feed.

Twitter does have an open API and it’s probably through all the external services the really interesting things will happen. Of course there are so many of these that it’s hard to keep track! Yesterday’s Norwegian one was Tvitre.no, which ranks Norwegian Twitter users according to location, followers and categories. The day before the rage was the #selvtwitterangivelse” where Norwegian users tagged themselves and it was compiled into a tag cloud of Norwegian Twitter users.

The fast conversations can be frustrating - your comments disappear so fast, and if you answer too late because it was nighttime when the conversation was going on, you’re really not participating. But because the investment on each individual tweet is so low, you really do get some fast answers and useful responses from interesting people. For instance, last night I was writing about phatic communication in social media and I used the prompts in Facebook and Twitter as examples.

Facebook asks “What’s on your mind” now and I was flaking on what they used to ask - I knew it was different before the latest redesign. So I asked Twitter.

Now that was kind of a lazy question, really - I actually found the answer myself by searching for old screenshots: it’s “What are you doing right now?”. But in addition to the kind straight forward answers I also received a more interesting answer, about the difference between Facebook’s prompt and Twitter’s prompt.

Oddly enough, Facebook’s new prompt is closer to the way most people (or most people I follow) seem to actually use Twitter. Here’s the prompt and the little box you type into at Twitter:

I know nothing about gestalt therapy vs psychoanalysis, but the difference between prompts is interesting. It says a lot about what the site’s creators are looking for - what they think we want to do online, what they want us to do with their site. The “What are you doing” prompts encourage all those “boring” things people complain about Twitter and blogs doing: the sandwich you had for lunch, what your cat’s doing, and so on. This is what parodies tend to play on. “What’s on your mind?” is a somewhat more sophisticated question. And at the same time as Facebook switched their prompt they removed the automated “is”, so you now have to type in “is doing something” to make your status message read “Jill Walker Rettberg is doing something.” That allows for different ways of using the status line.

But common to all these prompts is the way they prioritise the phatic function of language. Roman Jakobsen wrote about that decades ago: only one of the several functions of language is to communicate information, and that’s not even really the most important way we use language. The phatic function of language is about confirming connection. What we’re really saying when we answer these prompts is, more or less, this, according to anthropologist Grant McCracken:

1. I exist.
2. I’m ok.
3. You exist.
4. You’re ok.
5. The channel is open.
6. The network exists.
7. The network is active.
8. The network is flowing.

Our use of mobile phones, for instance, is very often phatic - “Hey, how are you doing?” “What are you up to?” A lot of text messages and so on are mostly saying “I’m thinking of you.”

So Twitter and Facebook are not just about sharing information - they’re about connections. Being part of a community, and being aware of it.

Do you know about other prompt questions asked by other social network sites or other communication/publication platforms that would be interesting to compare? Perhaps someone should write a whole paper about writing prompts in communication templates. I bet there are even pre-digital examples - baby journals are prime examples of prompted writing of course, and even diaries come with implicit prompts. I’m not sure whether examples exist of pre-digital prompted writing that’s primarily communicative rather than archival, like a diary, though?