social media « As We Now Think

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Link Drop 9/16

Published September 16, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
Tags: danah boyd, Politics, social media

Just saw a link to two articles of note on The Root (one of Slate’s sister sites, apparently targeting a middle to upper-middle class African American audience). Both referenced danah boyd’s address to the Personal Democracy Forum. I’m a big fan of boyd’s work, which has done an excellent job of illuminating how existing class and racial disparities are reflected (and in some cases) magnified online, despite the seeming promise of a classless Web.

Something caught my eye in the latter article, this phrase (italics mine): “presented her controversial work … on June 30 at the Personal Democracy Forum”

“Controversial?”, I naively thought, “surely anybody interested enough in social dynamics online to have heard of danah boyd wouldn’t find the work controversial. That’s a poor choice of words.”

And then I looked into the comments. As is unfortunately to be expected on the internet, they ran the full gamut from actively racist to misinformed to ‘why does this matter?’ Although we always have to be aware of the self-selection bias when extrapolating anything from blog comments, the responses demonstrate some unfortunate truths:

Many people are unable to recognize that their own experience says nothing about larger reality. A lot of the posts are in the form of “I have lots of black friends of Facebook”
Many respondents failed to understand that the particular sites they use are a function of their social network, stating features of the sites that they ‘prefer’… Despite the fact the boyd points out that such notions are just rationalizations on that very page.
In general, people fail to understand that racial and class disparities are problematic even when they are disconnected from a prejudiced, ‘racist’ person. Institutional racism and structural disparity are apparently beyond the understanding of the average person.
Very few people understand the difference between access to technology and the complicated set of factors that determine use and proficiency with those technologies.

None of these observations are new to these articles, but the comment sections are a good (if somewhat despiritng) reminder of how bad of a guide personal experience and ‘common sense’ can be.

Finally, some empirical data

Published August 13, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
Tags: forrester, Politics, social media

One of the reasons I started this blog was to continue exploring the effects of social media on political campaigns. For well over a year now, I’ve been saying that I thought that Democrats had a big advantage over Republicans in this area, and that this advantage was not due to strategy differences between the parties. Rather, these differences are largely because of the breakdowns of who participates in these media.

Until now, I had to rely on indirect methods to demonstrate this. Democrats were younger, more likely to be in college, etc., and thus more likely to use social media tools. But I’ve finally come across some data that finally reinforce these ideas. Check out this page. [With thanks to Josh Bernoff at Forrester Research].

Bernoff writes:

Right away you can see there is a persistent tendency for Democrats to participate more fully in social technologies. Looking at the index (all adults = 100), you can see that Democrats are at least 10% more likely to do just about anything involving social technologies. The Republicans are the opposite — they’re a lot LESS likely to participate (like Nixon’s “silent majority”). They’re 22% less likely to be a social network (Joiners) and 21% less likely to be uploading video or blogging (Creators). These are not extreme differences, but there are definite tendencies here, likely correlated to the fact that Republicans tend to be older than Democrats on the average. Notice that the Republicans are near par for Spectators, though — they’re watching, even if they’re not as active participants. The Independents are somewhere in the middle, approaching the average in Joiner and Critic activity.

Interesting, no? But I wonder what these technographics will look like in a few years as social technology becomes an even greater part of our lives. Will Republicans finally catch up? I don’t think so, because I believe that they have done too much to alienate the creative class, which overwhelmingly supports Democrats.

And while social technology becomes more relevant in setting our national agenda, this will become an even greater problem for the GOP. Even if conservatives can catch up, their supporters will still have far less experience (and, presumably, skill) using these tools.

I’ve said all of this before, but it’s nice to see some direct data.

Side note: the especially high indices for Al Gore among social media participants makes me wonder what would have happened if those tools were available in 2000. With such a razor-thin margin that year, do you think that those differences would have swayed the election? I do.

Voluntary Response Bias and Social Media Part Two: Learning to Contextualize

Published July 30, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment
Tags: demographics, hipsters, Marketing, social media, society, voluntary response bias

In my last post, I argued that the effects of social media will not simply empower all consumers, nor reflect common public opinion, but will give disproportionate influence to a narrow group. Because there will always be disparity in levels of skill and participation, understanding these effects requires understanding human social behavior. In this post, I will briefly discuss how we can contextualize these media.

In a January 2008 White Paper (‘Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media’), Jonny Bentwood of Edelman proposed a formula to analyze the influence of any particular individual online. Namely, he suggested that influence can be computed as: (Volume and Quality of Attention x Time)/Size and Quality of Audience.

That it is possible to create a formula (albeit incomplete) to quantify influence on an individual level says more about the potential of social media than I ever could. While such a formula is useful in certain industries (communications and marketing), I am mentioning Bentwood’s paper to highlight a different aspect: the ‘Forrester Social Technographics Ladder’ on page 12. According to this, more than half of the users on the internet (52%) are not in any involved in social media. Only 13% qualify as actual content creators.

What are we to make of these findings? As already suggested, Bentwood argues that communicators and marketing professionals ought to quantify the influence of particular individuals in order to effectively find the most influential. However, I am not as interested in micro-level communications here. Rather, my focus is on the larger, societal effects of social media. Thus, such calculations are secondary to my approach.

Continue reading ‘Voluntary Response Bias and Social Media Part Two: Learning to Contextualize’

Damnit, Gladwell!

Published July 6, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
Tags: Anderson, Free, Gladwell, social media

This week’s New Yorker features a piece by my favorite author, Malcolm Gladwell, discussing Chris Anderson’s new book Free. Unsurprisingly, Gladwell does a far more eloquent, better-thought-out job of critiquing Anderson than I could ever hope to do. In particular, I enjoyed the final paragraph, wherein he points out (as I often have) the Apple paradox. Unlike most companies, Apple has never embraced ‘Free!’, yet it has done extremely well over the past decade, largely by selling intellectual property.

Other highlights:

Condescendingly referring to Wired luminaries as ‘technological utopians’.
Connecting the famous Lewis Strauss declaration that atomic energy will make electricity ‘too cheap to meter’ to Anderson’s ideas
Pointing out the obvious (and mostly unanswered) issue of YouTube’s inability to make money

Basically, you should just read the article yourself. But it got me thinking about a point I want to clarify in my own thinking about this issue. Specifically, the central problem I have with the whole ‘information wants to be free’ notion is that its advocates seem to always assume that there are ways to monetize anything. That it will always be worth the price of hosting content because hosting content is inherently valuable.

That may be the case. But I’m not so sure. As Gladwell helpfully points out, one of the main reasons YouTube doesn’t generate revenue is that most advertisers don’t value being placed next to ‘crap’ videos. And, as we all know, most of what is on YouTube is crap — at least from the point of view of someone trying to sell products. So even if the price of bandwidth and storage does go down to (actual, not effective) zero, and it was capable of being absolutely, 100% free, would it ever be a business model?

Not if there’s not any real, actionable value to be had on those videos.

Increasingly, I am beginning to think that that is the case. If so, whether or not Anderson is correct about the price issue, there is still (as I’ve written) no business model in his ideas. And who will pay for the servers, bandwidth, and professionals necessary to run a non-business business?

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