Posts Tagged ‘social media’
Communication in a Tweet of a Facebook – What's all the Flutter?
April 7th, 2009 | 
Author: I love it when I’m in the middle of a long discussion about a subject and the world catches up with me. Last post: what kind of communication are we creating in social media and its implications for us? Today, along comes Flutter, a humorous take on the on-going shortening of communications online. Where Twitter is microblogging, Flutter now creates a new category called nanoblogging, which limits all communications to 26 characters.
Now, I happen to find this paraody hilarious, but even as this was happening, my old buddy from Sun/JavaSoft, Miko Matsumura – the original Java evangelist, took reductio ad absurdem even further with the term femtoblogging, which is communicating in a single character. While he did not define the vocabulary and grammar, I assume that ! becomes I, K becomes “I’m great” but k is a simple ”I’m ok,” just to give a few examples. Miko had 30 single character responses, all of which everyone else seemed to understand, so clearly a true language with semantics and syntax has developed. (I am proud to say however, that my response was in full sentences and required people to actually read something – which means it was clearly out of step with current reality and no one read it. )
What femtoblogging reminds me of is the !Kung click language. A click could be considered the equivalent of a single character in femtoblogging, but the San people who speak !Kung seem to understand it and communicate very effectively with it. However, in click languages, clicks are more like ones and zeros – long strings of specific clicks accumulate to express complex ideas. But that doesn’t take away the importance of the analogy. Why would advanced civilizations with thousands of years of development of complex, deep, and profound written systems move to a form of society (socializing) which values shorter and shorter messages which by definition must contain less content? There has to be some kind of trade-off – we have to get something in return for the “loss of signal” in our communications. What tradeoff did the San people make and why are they still speaking a click language hundreds of years after being exposed to more robust and efficient oral communication tools (with an almost infinite combination of consonants and vowels)?
The tradeoff we make is twofold. First, in a society where time is an increasingly valuable commodity (although that whole treadmill links to a topic for another day), learning to communicate quickly in short bursts about elements of one’s status – what I am doing and what I know or have discovered that may have use to you right now - is worth the reduction in signal volume. The other tradeoff that makes bursty communication worthwhile is the ability to keep track of many more people over a wider geographic range than we could previously. So in a way, we are substituting volume for depth. The bandwidth has not changed at all. What has changed is that each communication requires less bandwidth and allows us to communicate with more people in parallel.
But that is a result, not a cause. Why is communicating with more people in parallel, more immediately, of value? I could understand that if we were talking about a marketplace or stock exchange where the freshness of information lasted only a few minutes or seconds and we needed to quickly communicate our “price” to a large number of people in real time. But for more typical human interactions, communicating this way seems counterintuitive and ineffective.
The other question we should ask is why suddenly are these parodies of our technology arising on the same day? Parodies evolve from real situations that have some element of the absurd in their nature which a comic can expose and explore. They bring out something about a situation that is inherently uncomfortable for or inconsistent to us and cause us to not only look at what is making us uncomfortable but to also laugh at it.
What oddity fundamental to the essence of Twitter, Facebook, Flutter, and other similar sites is making us uncomfortable, like a grain of sand in an oyster? Why do we accept the implications of a world where communication is in short, bursty messages, and yet fear its consequences?
We’ll pick it up in the morning.
Communication in the Tweet of a Facebook (as captured on 12seconds)
Communication. It’s something simple to understand. There is a message, a sender of the message and a receiver of the message. If the receiver receives the message the sender sends, that is a communication. Communication is nothing more than the act of sending and recieving the message. Nothing more, nothing less?
Well, let’s take some examples. I am sending you a message:
2380 jsdaop oj sdoppojsd ppjpodsj.
You just received the message (we hope). Is that communication? I certainly doubt you feel it is. To you and me it’s a garbage string, has no meaning. We’ve gone through the act of communicating (in a sense), but we have not communicated.
Let’s take another:
Ad praesens ova cras pullis sunt melior
More than likely you do not speak Latin. So to you, I have not communicated very well. You can hypothesize from the grammar and word combinations that it is a “true” communication of some kind, but in a language you don’t understand. If you spoke Latin, you’d know that the phrase I just wrote is “Eggs today are better than chickens tomorrow.” And if I thought you knew Latin, then that would be all the message I did send. But since you don’t speak Latin, you may feel I’m showing off and the message you received was “I’m superior to you because I can speak an ancient language and you cannot.” (I certainly hope you don’t feel that – as I don’t really speak Latin, I used the Web). But I didn’t even vaguely send a message like that – so where did the message you received come from?
In this case, the message you “received” was an emergent property of the context of the communication. The context was the medium of the communication, the situation in which it was sent, and the psychology of the receiver (what I like to call the “communication veil”). I didn’t send anything vaguely resembling your message, but as my message moved through the communication veil, a substitution occurred in which a new message was created because you didn’t understand the original message, which I assumed you did, and you were therefore able to insert a new message into the “hole” that existed. You knew I was trying to communicate something, but didn’t know what. You also assumed I knew you didn’t know Latin. Through your veil, I was therefore purposely being abstruse. So you “filled in the gap” as it were with your best guess of what my implied message was. Unfortunately for me, your best guess was not what I intended.
It often amazes me given all the communication veils, the unpredictable situations we experience daily, and our mediums that are both noisy and odd at times, that sender and receiver come even close to having a true meeting of the minds.
So we now have a new medium – a social medium. It can be written, photographic, audio only, or video and audio. When it is written, it is between 140 characters (Twitter and SMS) and 450 characters (Facebook), with many sites/services limited to the 250 character level. Photos usually extend to 4 or 5 in a short space (with the ability to click to a larger page) and audio/video have minimal limits (unless the site, like 12seconds, limits length).
Written communication in 140 characters? What kind of communication is this? Let’s look at some examples from Twitter:
FacebookSocial Create a profile for your Twitter account! http://bit.ly/4FJRcw
The first is an ad – and may I add (no pun intended) that we are seeing Twitter become overwhelmed with advertisements now. From my perspective, it is getting to the point where I cannot maintain any kind of “conversation” (back to that term shortly) flow with all the noise. If something doesn’t happen to limit this, Twitter is quickly going to find itself obsoleted.
The second is a personal note. The third is a share about something of interest to the sender. The fourth and fifth are an information request I made about whether others were noticing trouble with Twitter and one person’s response
What can we say about these messages and communications in this medium?
First:
The first three messages do not seem to request a response. They appear to be monologues. Are they? Depends on the context of the receiver. But what is unique about social media is just that fact: it makes no distinction from the sender’s or receivers’ (not the plural) perspective. Unless I do a direct message, I don’t necessarily expect or require a response. I don’t even know who is listening, and I don’t care. It’s as if I were in a cafe with hundreds of people all talking – some to themselves, and some to others – and I’m shouting a message that I hope, but can’t know, that anyone will really hear.
The receiver’s pespective is similar but opposite. I’m listening for specific messages among the noise. I can tell when someone is talking to me (or even about me) because there are visual or other clues (e.g. the @sign) that allow the volume of those messages to raise above the din. But there may be other interesting things these monologers are saying, so I can’t ignore the noise totally. What I can do is filter the voices of only those I think I might care to hear. This reduces the signal to noise ratio substantially, but doesn’t remove it altogether. It may cause me to miss other messages of interest, as well.
As a receiver, I can chose to send a message back, but it is not required or expected. That is very different from previous conversational media: when a message was sent, a response was expected. So, if there is a message sent and you can’t know if anyone hears it, are we really engaging in communication? To a certain extent, this is the online version of a message in a bottle – only the ocean is filled with thousands of bottles. Not only can I not know if someone will receive my message (even my followers), but with thousands of other messages out there, they may not be able to find it, even if they are looking for it. Certainly as a sender I am trying to communicate, but on the surface it would appear an awfully inefficient and ineffective mechanism. We’ll come back to this.
So what are the purposes of these communications? Why send a message someone may receive but I can’t be sure and I can’t truly identify who will be the receiver? We’ll also come back to that in a moment.
On the other hand, the fourth message requests a response – so it is a more traditional form of communication. Its purpose is to get a broader perspective on an issue important to me. I’m trying to confirm a fact or a situation and determine whether it is specific to me (a personal problem that I must take action to solve) or whether it impacts the whole community (in which case, others may be acting to solve the problem). It is also probably a timely issue, otherwise I would not necessarily send it via social media. I say probably because that isn’t necessarily true. Communication is about habits. If I am in the habit of communicating mainly through social media, I may chose that as my medium, even though it may not be the most efficient.
The fifth message is a directed response to me. It is very likely I will receive it, but not guaranteed (if I am away from my desk or phone). But it is also sent to everyone listening, so the intent has to be to engage a broader group in the conversation. So in that regard, it has the same basic properties as the first four messages.
Second:
What about the content of these communications? Certainly, they are not rambly blogs on deep subjects that no one will ever read…. (I have no self-delusions on that subject). They cannot and do not contain Ideas – even Matt Cutt’s entry doesn’t contain an Idea – it contains a pointer to something that to him contains an important Idea. But isn’t Danny Sullivan’t comment about the Karate Kid an Idea? Isn’t it expressing something unique? The answer is it expresses a unique opinion, but it does not contain a new Idea – it is instead commenting on the validity of Ideas expressed in a longer and denser medium.
You cannot express substantive thoughts – big Ideas – in 140 characters, and probably not in 450 characters. And I am the first to say – and please hear me because I don’t want anyone thinking this is some kind of elitist claptrap – that most communication is NOT about big Ideas – otherwise we wouldn’t identify specialized subsets of humanity as visionaries, philosophers, or gurus. The point is social media is not a vehicle, nor is it expected to be a vehicle for conceiving, developing, or communicating Ideas with a capital I.
So what about stories? Storytelling is deeply ingrained and fundamental to human communication. In fact, I would argue that most everything we try to communicate is done in the form of a story. I used to love to say that as our ancestors used to sit around the campfire at night and listen to the shaman tell a story about the Gods, today we sit around the projector in a dark room listening to shamans tell us about the Gods of profit and technical wizardry.
So does social media contain stories?
We’ll leave that to tomorrow’s entry.
Tweet verus est rara avis – A true Tweet is a rare bird
(OK, NOW I’m showing off)
We're All Atwitter
So it begins…..
I have been building and marketing online businesses since 1992, and I have never had a regular blog. Never seemed important when I was “stoking the star maker machinery of the high tech throng ” (apologies to Joanie Mitchell). 100 hour weeks, people to hire, budgets to get approved, boards to assuage, teams to motivate, CEOs to placate, and all the rest. Those people who did blogs either had too much time on their hands or had a business marketing their visions for high tech (like my buddies/classmates Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin … hmmm.. am I allowed to mention these two in the same sentence?) and so used the blogs as a podium to further expand on their visions from a daily and more immediate perspective. Guy was kind enough to support my first attempts at a blog, but that effort quickly died when he and the folks at Garage Technology Ventures were kind enough to engage me for a travel adventure of theirs called cfares (which is still alive and doing well). 100 hour weeks…no time to blog.
But while I was head down with the yoke around my neck, blogging evolved into the mainstream (as Seth, Guy, and others predicted) and then social media got added into the mix. Now, if you are going to be anywhere in online, you’d better BE online (so “Hello World!”). That means exactly what it says – your identity, the creative output of your soul, the thing that Marx in his Hegelian days said that every time you put it forth you put forth a piece of yourself – must be extended into the online realm. Privacy as we once knew it is gone. With the web, we have now become the Transparent Society, where much of what we do (and I fear someday all of what we do) is there for anyone in the world to see. That is not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. It means we have to be more honest in what we say and do, since there are more ways to check the veracity of what people and organizations tell us. What would be wrong if private sessions of various government agencies were available online in real time where activities had to be judged in the harsh light of public opinion? Don’t you think that might have an impact on how bureaucrats decided how to spend our tax dollars? What about someone who behaves badly (hopefully not you)? What they do is no longer as private as it once was – bad actors can be outed in a heartbeat. I had a personal case recently where someone tried to hijack my email address. Once I called him on it publicly, he backed down, knowing that his reputation could easily be damaged by his own bad acts if it got out into the Twittersphere.
Which brings me to the story my son told me yesterday – urban legend or not (actually not) - about doctors who were Twittering while they were doing heart surgery. This is the ultimate example of how more and more everything is being connected in real-time through vehicles like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, wikia, and hundeds of others (264 at the last count -we actually do spend time researching the entire social media universe). We do not just have presences online, we are being on line. Just do a search on my online username – arthurofsun. In Google, depending on the day, you can find between 500 and 1,000 search results from me (searching my name is a bit harder because there are some very famous people with my name), including the 3 comments I made yesterday about Google’s Vincent release. And I haven’t been online much until now. And oh, btw, if you look at the entries, they have my age (how dare they), my location, my interests, my profession and other facts that would have been more or less private in the olden days. Try someone who publishes every day like Danny Sullivan (actually nowadays it’s every 30 seconds because Danny has become a Tweetaholic)- he’s got 1.7mm entries. Give me a year or two and I’ll be right up there.
All of this is to say there is a fundamental shift going on. We are living and being more online every day. One of the impacts of this is that now, especially with Twitter and Facebook, everyone has become a publisher. You get up in the morning, grab a cup of coffee, sit at your computer, and the first thing you do is go to Facebook or Twitter and make an entry. Then if you are like me, or Danny, or Guy, or Seth, or Stephen Spencer, etc. etc. you write 2-3 paragraphs in your blog. Then you go do your other work – you know, the one that pays the bills?
So we are now all publishers. Which means the nature of news and what is relevant information has changed utterly. And that’s where I’m going to leave it for today, because tomorrow I am going to get back up on my soapbox and talk in more detail about why Google’s Vincent release really isn’t a good thing.