Web and Flow

It's only a week away and, at rather short notice, I was asked to take part in the 'The Future of Policy Making' session. http://rebootbritain.sched.org/ 

I've thought of some hooks for this - and I may as well share them in case anyone has ideas to add.

1. Market Research faces certain issues when it gets involved with studying or using Social Media. I'm going to look at some of these, and our responses to them, and then I'm going to examine what the parallels are with something like 'deliberative e-Democracy' or whatever the newer names for this are.

2. One of these issues is the inequality of participation online. A little of this is about access to the channels, but much much more is about personality types and motivation. So let's look at the 1-9-90 of research and the 1-9-90 of policy making on-and-off line.

3. A key element in understanding inequality of participation, and wider issues of 'representativeness', is the crudely worded meta-question... 'who are these people?'. To what extent can we treat every 'input' as having come from a uniform and rational agent, or to what extent must it be contextualised by knowing who it comes from? To be clear, I don't think this is about good old demographics, or even values/lifestyles, any more. I argue it's about personality types, and therefore about what such people will also do in the world, in their lives. I will illustrate this by talking about 'who am I?' and showing how my background contextualises the reception to my presentation.

4. Is about emotion. Market Researchers are becoming more and more at home with, and attuned to exploring, the role of emotion, the subconscious, the group effect, etc in making what might otherwise be isolated as rational judgements and decisions. This goes hand in hand with what Social Media can give us access to - such as images as well as text - or to moments of personal experience. Yet the temptation for 'Social Media Policy Making' will be to make the process more rational, more structured, more prone to cleaning up the evidence. How does this stack up?

5. Is about three modes of 'getting communal' that Market Research has to contemplate... a) creating, and recruiting, artificial social spaces (and 'just for Christmas?') or b) striking up relationships with (and or recruting from) existing online communities, or c) eavesdropping on publicly conducted conversations on the web, often at scale and using automated crawling, harvesting and analysis.

6. Is maybe about the 'short circuit'. I've been thinking about the parallels here, between online adjuncts to policy making, and Market Research. But of course one way that the former can happen is when the policy makers employ Market Researchers to do 'online and social' with citizens in order to inform policy making. The main point I want to make here is that the 'client' in these scenarios is most often an official. Does this create competition with elected representatives and with political activists or pressure groups etc? This is probably a good place to briefly consider whether all this Policy Making stuff is about service design and civic consumerism, or whether it's about governance per se. In short - who sets the original agenda - another question, perhaps surprisingly, that some of our clients are waking up to.

Throughout, just to make it easy, I want to keep glancing across to the practical questions posed for Social Media usability, features, functions, architecture and 'marketing' by all of the above.

And the final afterthought. Crowdsourcing is often part of a recognition that a few people can't get their heads around the definition, status of and solution for some kind of problem. However, most models still (paradoxically?) work on the premise that the crowdsourced wisdom can then be condensed down to 'insights', followed by plans, that a small number of people can get their heads around. Can this be correct/right? What does the alternative look like - i.e. where the application of the 'distributed crowd insight' is also devolved to the crowd, where the elite representatives and officials 'let go'? Is it possible? Does Social Media make it more possible, conceivable or acceptable....? That, to me, seems like a good question to leave with Reboot Britain.

I was walking up the hill towards home the other day. There was a man walking towards me - slightly older than me I guess. To my unconscious social auto-pilot I now reckon he was a 'probable' - that is, somebody it was worth turning my open face to in the expectation of making eye contact and saying "hello". I don't know him, hadn't seen him before, but he was just of a certain generation...

I was wrong - there was no mutual connection. If anything his social radar tipped him off that I was looking towards him and, it seems, there was an intentional avoidance as we passed - to ensure we didn't connect by accident.

It made me think - as it does when this happens... on the assumption that I wasn't wearing a particularly scary face at the time, or that I am generally intimidating in dress, posture and demeanour.

This isn't what it was like where and when I grew up - and where I live now isn't much different as a place. I'm pretty sure that if I went back to my childhood neighbourhood, similar to this one, I would now get just as high a 'no-contact' score. Don't get me wrong - plenty of strangers say "hello" - but the count is down and seems to be dropping, not least amongst those I consider my generation.., people like me.

If I'm right - and it has something to do with inhibition, less social living, more concentration on small groups of trusted friends and family, fear of confrontation or just lack of experience and confidence in connecting with those we don't know... how does this sit with the supposed explosion in social media, in social networks and sharing, and in all that voting and joining in with Britain's Got Talent and Strictly Come Dancing?

Is it that we now connect by proxy? That somehow we can connect at the mind level because our faces and physical presences and social incompetence can't get in the way? Or is it that this is a facile poor substitute for the direct social contact that we are getting less good at, because we do it less - drive to the shopping mall, sit in a personal iPod bubble on the train, work with a small group of people - and deal with the rest by phone and e-mail?

There's plenty of society going on still - of course there is. But I'm interested in the trends and the majorities and how these relate to my personal count of those turned-away faces.

A grand scale argument would be that we are evolving again - into beings who can derive part of our social and mental satisfaction by connecting at a distance, via partial or virtual personae, and that in some ways this may lead to a larger number of deeper relationships - to supplement our 'normal' socialising and family life.

One's first reaction is to think of this as artificial - in particular to wonder whether our physiological and deep cognitive make-up can keep pace with such a change - if change there is - whether this will cause more disfunction and illness through a separation of physical and intellectual presence... a widening of Descartes' dualism.

But then - where do we draw the baseline for 'normal' levels of socialisation for the human species? If our natural programming is still that which works for a large family/small tribe living a semi-nomadic life on the African savannah... were the medieval agricultural fixed settlements of the Middle Ages (let alone the English suburbs and small towns of 'my' 1960s) any more natural to us than a world where we directly encounter few people - treat the rest as economic transactors (shop assistants, restaurant staff...) - and have quite other meaningful relationships with people we rarely or never see in the flesh?

This puts me in mind to do three things:

1. Go looking for whatever constitutes the hard data as regards real world 'connection' between strangers and its relationship to online connections and relationships.

2. Find out more about why campaigns like 'Love where you Live' and 'The Big Lunch' are suddenly cropping up. They bear a striking resemblance to ideas we discussed at UpMyStreet about local connection and the UpMyStreet Party... or UpMyStreet Street Party...

3. Resolve to keep turning my open face to everybody, put up with the disappointment when it's not returned, and refuse to be part of a process of disengagement. (One, that is, I've checked my teeth for spinach...)

Oh - by the way - "Good Morning"  ;0)

When I'm digging in my garden, and the activity clears out all the trivia, I often find myself thinking about work. It's OK... I really like my work, or at least the part that I think about when I'm digging, which is perhaps the ideal work that I would be doing all the time, if I could just clear out all the other stuff.

Typically it will be a movie playing in my head - of me addressing an audience of my colleagues - maybe small, maybe a full hall. It's not that when the movie starts I already know what I think about a particular subject, or that I know how I want to communicate it, the movie is to some degree the real time process through which I both clarify and share those thoughts.

Hang on - that's thinking out loud but in my head  !!!

Anyway, I wish it was possible to record these movies, with their passion and humour and, yes, self confidence because if I think, "Hang on that's a blog entry", by the time I sit down to write they have faded to something much more laborious. Also, as I write the first bits, reflect on them and ensure they are in tidy 'propositional' sentences - the later bits get overwritten in my memory, or fall off the end of the different kind of memory I'm accessing by then.

One - narcissistic - idea I had was to run in and sit down infront of our HDD video camera, or our web cam, and speak it rather than write it. Hmmm. [Is this a variant of that 'learning styles' thing?]

Anyway - here are the remains of todays (literally 'dug') thought.

When I'm explaining promoting some things to my colleagues about the web, about web2.0 and social media, one of the problems is that it is too wide a range of 'importances' and, since we all tend to start with background and the web2.0/social media background is MASSIVE!, I'm not left with time, stamina or audience forbearance, to move on to the other aspects. You'll see what I mean in a minute.

Solution. Deal with each of the three on different occasions. Supporting solutions: Ask some questions at the start to show, and to let the audience show each other, that we all have different degrees of understanding of, levels of enthusiasm for, and degree of personal immersion in, any of the 3 (yes three) dimensions of web2.0/social media for market researchers.

So I need three different (or three different families of) expositions on this subject.

1. World. How these things are being played out in the world - spread, types of activity, historical perspective - what it influences, but also what it is influenced by and confused with. THEORY. ACADEMIA.

2. Object of Study. What out clients ar interested in - so what they might ask us to investigate. How marketers are trying to interract with 'consumers' through these media. New behaviours and segmentations.  New theories of marketing or the death of marketing. This is where considerations, and versions, of the 1-9-90 question belong.

3. Medium of study. i.e. how we (i.e. our company) have, could, and how others have, used, and sought to use, the machinery of web2.0 to conduct research studies. In particular encourage exploration of whether each case is 'old work with new tools' or 'new work' - also how it relates to considerations, at 2, about types of participant... not just familiar segmentations - but segmentations by online behaviour, connectedness, openness.

Interestingly - social web mining - something I'm looking at at the moment, is one thiong that really straddles 2 and 3 in a stubborn way. Though I think it leans towards 3 at the moment.

So I need to deal with each of these, briefly and penetratingly, on it's own.

My notes to self are...

In each case be prepared to talk (not to 'present') and hence tap into my emotion/belief/hopes. Let the outcome be a group discussion and then the firing up of a number of bilateral conversations thereafter (more of those movies maybe, but no longer in my head) - this is in contrast to the outcome being a deck or a set of notes that people take away.

I think the next thing I need to do is collect favourite quotes, examples and things that make me rant.

We are extending our house. We are having an extension built. Our house is being extended...

Hmmm - I'm not sure what the proper verbs are here. It's our plan, we pay the money, we did some of the thinking, we make the tea - but an architect did the drawings and somebody else does the work.

It all started yesterday - just a bit of warm-up demolition of the roof of the existing garage and single storey utility room. But suddenly there's that air of inevitability - we're committed now. A ten week build - comfortably over by christmas - so long as we don't hit any snags and the weather is kind. Gulp!

It's a standard extension for a semi-detached house... extending sideways and going up a floor... to give us a ground floor bathroom, a significant expansion of our long thin kitchen, a small study upstairs and a new bedroom for one of our daughters.

Of course, I've taken a couple of photos, from fixed points and angles, before everything gets going. I'm hoping to do the same roughly every day and, if I get the angles right, I will have some kind of time lapse sequence to show for it.

Pictures on the blog soon...

I was reading an item on Jeff Jarvis's Buzz Machine blog the other day where he was drawing attention to a couple of YouTube videos attacking the Obama campaign.

They both use the same template. The first video is about voters in Michigan and Florida effectively losing their franchise in the primaries. It begins with someone sticking up print images of these voters - with their name and location written below.

I couldn't help noticing that 'Fred' from Michigan bore a striking resemblance to actor Ross Kemp. After a bit of pausing and reviewing I did a Google image search on "Ross Kemp" and the very first image result is exactly the same image as that of 'Fred' in the video. 

Try going to the YouTube original http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XvsrtO6O7g and pausing it at about 5-7 seconds to make the comparison.

So - there's a video on YouTube about hypocrisy... which seems, itself, to be misrepresenting reality...

Oooh! I'm so shocked...  

BTW - if anyone has Ross's agent's phone number why not let them know. I assume he's not aware.

Now I'm getting the hang of it - here's the video (about 5-7 seconds in OK?)

We Are One People (part 2)

... and here's the image

Ross_Kemp_detail

...and finally - I've managed a still from the clip

Fred

The first days of the New Year almost got me blogging again - on themes of blogging, not blogging, the psychology of the perception of time spent not blogging and so-on. But for all the reasons I haven't blogged for six months these impulses never quite made it to the top of the to-do list.

As ever, it has been seeing something on the news, and reacting to it, that finally hit the blog reflex.

There has been a story, triggered by the most recent suicide, about a sequence of clustered teenage suicides in the Bridgend area of South Wales. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7204172.stm

Because some of the people knew each other, and some of those communicated using social networks, there has been an 'Internet may be glamourising suicide' reaction from some quarters. Part of my initial reaction is, equally, to leap to the unconditional defence of social networks (e.g. "they're just a channel like phones, text messages, written notes, gossip, urban myth, newspaper coverage etc etc") against those who seem to want to lump them, or even 'the internet', into a single dark mass and find it responsible for all the ills of humanity. Part of that same defence is to say that we should be concentrating on why, if there are connections, circumstances have made young people so vulnerable to being 'infected'.

That epidemiological word immediately made me think of Malcolm Gladwell's 'Tipping Point' which talks about ideas as things that can be transmitted, like diseases, and can have real effects on those who are infected - for good or ill. Gladwell even has a whole chapter on teenage suicide in Micronesia during the 1970s and 1980s, long before the modern internet or social networks, creating a rate ten times that of anywhere else in the world. He observes that the manner and circumstances of those suicides were often strikingly similar - sometimes the individuals knew each other but sometimes a romantic mythology grew up around a case and the ideas then 'jumped' to another unconnected group via word of mouth or written texts. He also observes that there was something about being a teenager and male that made you particularly susceptible to infection... a feature of all but one of the Bridgend cases.

I'm aware that I'm talking in a rather analytical way about something that is very recent and very raw for families in that area and that these are all individuals with individual stories and realities - not some remote set of statistics in an old ledger somewhere. But I appreciate neither the way that some TV reporters seem to be manipulative in extracting and displaying 'real individual human emotion', nor the more cerebral one-dimensional attack on social networks. I think that's my main thought - these are people, let's not concentrate on the 'channel', let's try to understand how they were influenced by many things. Not least because that may help prevent a further spread.

But if we use the language of epidemics and recognise that social networks may have been the 'vector' for the disease in some instances, then my defence of them is no longer absolute. We may have to think of them as a new 'vector' in the way that all those airlines shifting large numbers of people around the world at great speed seem to have changed the model for the spread of more familiar types of infection such as flu viruses. That's a legitimate and proportionate interest.

Indeed everyone is interested right now in how ideas and dispositions propagate through social networks - especially those that lead to actual behaviours such as buying or voting. You can't move for social network analysis, social media mining, and theories of group mind. Social media didn't suddenly make all these things possible - specialists have studied these patterns in other media, not to mention direct personal contact, for many years and most of Gladwell's examples are pre-internet - but social media made the concepts easier to grasp for more people, they lay down easily detected traces of tangible evidence, and they have given the phenomenon itself potentially greater reach and speed. They have also caught the eye of people with serious marketing budgets, just as TV seems to be losing its giant's share of ad revenues.

So let's see more sophisticated reporting of cases like Bridgend - to reflect the sophistication of the work being demanded by the market.

Whilst we're at it, let's start tracking the spread of another meme. That's the one which goes, "Facebook/Bebo/Myspace (delete where applicable) continues to commit further atrocities on behalf of Satan". Social Networks or 'The Internet' seem increasingly to be being set up as the latest in a long line of technologically topical single issue/single solution analyses of what's 'wrong with the world'. Remember when it was television, or film, or the contraceptive pill, or the railways... ?

[BTW - I'm talking primarily about the GMTV school of reporting, as opposed to BBC News Online, even though the 'Internet of Satan' meme seems to afflict even the latter to a degree, albeit mainly via the words of the local MP.]

I sometimes wonder how much we over-estimate the quality of what's thought and written on the web. [Yes - take it as read that I'm commiting all sorts of precisely the same assumption, and betraying various prejudices, when I use the term "we". Who do I think "we" are then? I won't go there - but be assured that I'm aware.]

But here's what I meant.

Lots of research companies, software companies, various arms of marketing, are now keen to uncover the 'buzz', the word of mouth reputation of a given product, brand or idea. Of course a key part of that enterprise is filtering and discrimination - via a combination of applications to do the heavy lifting and increasingly expert people to do the nuancing and the tough semantics/semiotics.

But my default reflex is to visualise this as the trawling of a set of largely articulate, well meaning and discerning discussion. After a while I congratulate myself on getting down from that elitist high horse and say, 'No - it's also about a kind of relaxed, trivial, half focussed chit-chat, the purpose of which is not consciously to critique anything, but just to socialise, hang out, help friends and family and all that.' In fact - that's the sort of discourse that's really going to help provide insights into consumer/citizen values and semi-conscious influences, and so on.

Even then, what I'm not prepared for is drivel - and foul-mouthed drivel at that - where even the sheer lack of structure or style in the use of obscenity itself is part of what makes it drivel. I've got no problem with stylish, well-formed swearing. It's bad language as punctuation that gets me - but also the level of invective that it seems to be portraying in reaction to really inappropriate things.

Example:

I have a friend who wants to get a new mobile. His sight isn't as good as it was - so he wants bigger buttons. I thought maybe a touch screen phone would help. I remembered that, iPhone aside, there was an LG touch screen phone - Prada branded. I read some online reviews. Then I found a couple of demo clips on YouTube. Then I glanced down at the comments. YouTube comments clearly are part of the "social web's" totality of sentiment. Page after page of invective, foul language, seemingly mindless or just incomplete and unsubstantiated crticism. Innumerable pointless comparison with the iPhone - "the iPhone will own it"  "the iPhone will kick its ass" - and then much more that's nowhere as mild and repeatable as that. To what end? Should I be coming away with some grassroots revelation that the language of custom car (macho competitive) comparison has come to phones? Or should I be regarding this as just as disconnected and minority an activity as elite bloggers discussing the effect of the elite blogosphere, and complicated new apps, on the future of citizen journalism?

Setting aside my irritation at myself, for always defaulting to a sort of utopian reflex about what web2.0 can and will do, the point is that we know little or nothing about the people making these utterances - or about their assumptions of audience etc - compared to more specialised forums and communities dealing with, in this case, mobile handsets. They may say very little in their YouTube profile.

So I have two questions.

The first is not 'can we filter in all sorts of ways for utterances which have little or no intrinsic worth and no background?' but 'should we?' If so, on what basis - given that you have to do some filtering just to make material manageable, even enough to form the basis of some hypothetical segmentations? Who is out there making those sorts of decisions and explorations right now? For every one of them I bet there's a hundred who choose (not just out of my wishful kind of lapsing) to generalise about social networking as a positive revolutionary force. It's much easier...

The second, more personal, more heartfelt question, is "how can it be possible that a demo video of a touch screen mobile handset seems to stir up levels of passion, anger and conflict that I would normally associate with much bigger and more visceral issues and prejudices?" Or am I misreading the language from the wrong social milieu? If so - then the very last question is - what language (and 'language' is what we are trawling the web for) is there left over to indicate real extremes of response? 

To resume the pattern on this blog - thoughts about the social web mixed with my weight loss and fitness efforts, and the odd commentary on media and society, all with or without judicious use of VOX's three levels of privacy - here's an update on my weight loss.

I have now lost 21.4lbs. So I'm nearly half-way to my 50lbs and not yet half way through the year.

Complex calculations - called arithmetic - project this to success at the end of November.

Some patterns are emerging. I seem to lose weight one week and stand stil the next, then lose more, stand still and so on. The diet is forgiving of the odd 'episode' - so I'm not having to live austerely so long as I keep up the exercise. But there's always something threatening the gym routine - this time it was a couple of weeks of pain and antibiotics as a result of some heavy duty dental work I needed. The antibiotics made me feel weird and I also had to eat mush some of the time.

I feel fit, healthy, energetic and seem to be suffering from less stiffness and 'end-of-the-day' weariness. Fingers crossed.

I'm going to let work colleagues know about the sponsorship once we get into June - and let a few more people know at the same time.

In step with tomorrow's 'Social Impact of the Web' event at the RSA, David Wilcox has written an article for the RSA website exploring this question. He makes four statements about the necessary positives - but it's the follow up questions in each case that do such a good job of pinpointing where the potential and the frustrations lie. David writes

''It is people, not organisations, that collaborate - so their personalities and preferences are hugely important.
How do we better understand that, online as well as off?

Organisations create the cultures which may or may not encourage sharing.
Will blogs and other social media really help change that, when senior managers are often reluctant to use new tools?

Conversations and stories work better than bullet points to get people talking.
So why are many meeting rooms still dominated by immovable Board tables, and conferences by Powerpoint?

Effective collaboration requires trust, relationships and understanding that take time to develop.
Why are so many online systems still developed on the basis of "build it and they will come and work together" ... ending up with empty forums and a lot of money wasted? ''

I'm not going to attempt to answer the back-questions here, though I look forward to tomorrow's discussion. But I do want to introduce a thought about psychology, collaboration, knowledge and understanding which I think touches upon several of them - not least senior management culture and the persistence of Powerpoint 'lectures' at conferences.

It's this - we still don't believe that we can understand something or, therefore, manage it unless we can encompass and contain it. Individuals still strive to almost literally 'get their heads around' the facts or the process or the problem or the solution. They want to see the edges and they want to be able to see all the feedback in order to know that they are having the effect they desire. So there's a paradox in any place that individuals try to use collaboration, and what I would call 'distributed comprehension', to do something and yet want to drag all the outcomes and consequences back in and contain it within their own heads. Part of the voodoo of this is to capture the soul of the outcome in a Powerpoint presentation - and then let others peek at it in order to confirm your mastery. 

I'm subject to this as much as anyone - so this isn't about some stupid group of 'others'. If we believe that distributed groups can now bring about better outcomes and have unprecedented emergent effects then maybe we are just going to have to get used to only seeing part of the picture and controlling or influencing part of the action. On the one hand this looks like a new web2.0 phenomenon but on the other hand it's remeniscent of the experiences of a 19th century general in a major battle.

This is how I feel about the social web itself. I look out at the lightspeed expansion of content, connections, combinations, tools and, yes, rubbish out there and I feel two things. I want to get a handle on it, understand it, see those expanding edges and be able to explain and commend it to others. But I'm also in awe of it and have a growing feeling that I would be (or become) insane to try to capture it. I was suddenly put in mind of the Romantics arriving in the Alps and gazing on mountains of a scale they had never seen before. They talked about 'the sublime' - the uncontainable. They didn't just see really big impressive mountains (that could plausibly be represented on a relief map) they saw something that they realised they couldn't encompass, maybe they saw "nature" in general. They were overwhelmed and changed by it and spent their lives trying to find aesthetic forms which would allow them to communicate it, and express its impact on them, but not to contain it.

How does this translate to collaboration and engagement? I think that David's questions point to the fact that we haven't yet learned to let go. This way of doing things will only really take off when members of groups accept that the group, as a whole, may understand, resolve and do things which no individual member can understand, resolve or do. We do that with societies and economies, give or take the odd outbreak of totalitarianism, accepting that no one of us can determine the flow of the whole. But online collaboration has briefly made collective action look like a process, a system, which can have determinate outputs which can be owned, understood and powerpointed by one person.

Perhaps social media will compel us to accept that we all need to see, feel and participate in the world through other people - at least some of the time.

For two weeks running I've been stuck on 17lbs lost. Rationally I understand the factors - I've recovered from those two bugs and, being able to train as well, I've put back some muscle. I also had a few family events and outings, where it's harder to control what I'm eating.

So I know it's not time to panic or go for silly reductions in my calorie intake. But it's surprisingly hard to hold your nerve when you're not making that 1lb+ per week any more and your "eta" starts to slip to later in the year.

Good things: It's gardening weather. We've got the bikes out of the shed.

Tactics: Watch out for the odd food trap. Keep up the gym frequency but keep the weights low. Eliminate the last of my alcohol ration for the next couple of months.

It's a marathon - not a sprint.

Reminds me - good luck to Amanda Wheeler who's running her first (and, she hopes her last) marathon in the London on Sunday.