Media & Culture — No comments
27
Jul 09
A conversation last night about post-structuralism and tropes got me thinking quite a bit about how tropes, both in the sense of the word as it applies in normal context to figures of speech – such as metaphor, allegory, synecdoche, etc – and in the more specific and technical form of trope theory as applied to such things as metaphysics and epistemology, realism, nominalism, and such.
Tropes are an important tool in understanding how to connect disparate views that span across cultures and forms, and can be a powerful tool in helping authors create stories. Hollywood has longed use various “devices” to push plots and develop characters. But how have major tropes in modern culture changed over the course of the last decade? Have technologies such as Twitter or Facebook had an impact on generalized cultural tropes that span across groups, whether they be of the same gender, age, race? Are there tropes that can be seen as being more universal (and “universal” in this context is not meant in the metaphysical or nominal sense)?And how many second-order signs are media and technology companies creating to drive people into patterns of conspicuous consumption?
It’s very interesting to think about the ability of the digital bourgeois to use powerful tropes to create second-order signs for the specific purpose to getting people to consume their content or purchase their goods in the ways they want. Apple is notoriously successful at this – the fact that most people believe that Apple computers are the computers for creative people, therefore creating the fallacy that by owning your own Apple computer will make you more creative and allow you to “Think Different”.
What tropes have been created by marketers specifically to improve their sales, and what tropes have been born out of a more grass roots process of transference of memes? I’m sure this will keep me awake for many nights to come…
Digital Media — No comments
14
Jul 09
Having spent most of my career trying to educate media companies from the inside about the effects that disruptive technologies will have on the future of our business, I’ve long thought about the changing patterns of consumption. This report from Morgan Stanley doesn’t repeat anything new, or tell us anything we haven’t heard before from either other reports or casual conversations with youth.
But it’s still an important reminder that even though we can easily be pulled into the cultural zeitgeist of a phenomenom like Twitter, it’s still important to place things in the right context. Certainly there is much to be impressed with about what Twitter has been able to accomplish, but one thing it hasn’t accomplished, which is echoed in this report, is modify the behavior of teens.
What’s amazing to consider for those folks in media who cling to the holy box is just how disruptive things like the iPhone will be on future consumption behaviors. A quick scan of YouTube will find lots of videos of toddlers and babies watching TV on their parent’s iPhone – even knowing how to navigate. It should be painfully clear that a child who grows up with not only vastly different understanding of “tangible” – what average teen today cares about buying CDs – and who grows up using devices like the iPhone as a primary interface for viewing video will most certainly not look at the “box” in the same way.
The most interesting thing will be when we, as programmers, really start to program to these new devices. Right now we’re still just repurposing TV content on other devices. The internet does work very well as a distribution medium, and certainly Hulu shows this well; however, there is so much more power in the internet for programmers than just as a distribution medium.
What happens to programming when you’re no longer just pushing linear time based stories over a simulcast network. What happens when you’re creating narrative environments in a multicast network where every viewer is addressable as an individual? What will “stories” look like in the future? Just as advancements in editing and filming technology changed the types of stories filmmakers were able to tell – evolving from single stationary cameras will little to no editing to what we see today – we, as storytellers, should be very excited about embracing the internet as more than a distrubtion medium, but as an environment that will enable us to tell stories in ways that we’ve never been able to before.
General — No comments
01
Jul 09
Social networks have long focused on how to balance individual privacy concerns and controls with how to create as much value for the audience. Facebook has long been saying that two of their key distinguishing traits are that users are “real” – i.e. they use their real name and have their real friends as their social graph – and that they provide a deep level of privacy controls. I’ve long wondered whether people really used any of those privacy controls at all.
First to the “real friends”. Perhaps this was true when Facebook first started and was growing. But I receive more and more “cold calls” via Facebook; people friending me whom I’ve never met before but who are trying to network and make connections. What does this do to the sanctity of the social graph?
Another interesting trend I’ve seen is how many people come out of the woodworks from the past – people you went to elementary school with. Suddenly the new feed looks like HS all over again, except oddly enough people who were never friends in HS are suddenly buddies on FB.
On the privacy front, a brief sampling of my friend’s and relative’s FB usage indicates that most people don’t appear to go beyond the defaults. Only a few of the people I asked used even the “limited profile” list in FB, let alone created their own arbitrary lists of friends. The ones that did such things were exactly who you’d expect – digerati adapt at using technology for marketing.
So how much do those features matter to the mainstream? Perhaps they are just like a comfort blanket. You might not ever use the privacy controls yourself, but you like knowing they’re there in case you change your mind. But it’s nice to know that Facebook has finally gotten around to simplifying their piravacy settings. Maybe now I’ll be less lazy about using them…
flux — No comments
30
Jun 09
I’m very proud to say that the labor of love that I’ve been working on for the last two some-odd years has grown to over 11 million registered users. We’ve also added a slew of new sites to our publisher network and a ton of new features. Read more about it over in the flux blog!
We’ve also totally overhauled our developer site to add much better, more searchable documentation, so you can check out developer.flux.com and get started building your own site in flux today!
Crowdsourcing — No comments
30
Jun 09
Paidcontent today writes about whether or not crowdsourcing is exploitation in their article, “Is Crowd-Sourcing Helping Businesses Leverage Social Media, Or Just Get Cheap Labor?” which of course leads to the question of how and when to draw the line, and how do we define exploitation in this age?
If LinkedIn asks people to contribute translations and 90% of people refuse on the grounds that it’s exploitation, but 10% decide to contribute for whatever reason – perhaps they just want the experience, or the notoriety, or they just really want to see LinkedIn in their language and don’t feel like waiting for them to get around to it – then does the end justify the means? Should they ignore the negative backlash?
It’s interesting to note that in Russia an exact duplicate clone of Facebook was created and is generating far more traffic than the actual Facebook was in that country, and in fact is one of the most trafficked web sites in Russia. Facebook’s solution? Get the Russian company that invested in that clone to invest in them, granting equity in return for a sizeable investment, perhaps indicating the pitfals of trying to expand globally but moving too slowly to provide localized languages.