meish dot org: life, unfolding

On the bus earlier today, I overheard a woman on the phone telling someone “I’ll missed-call you when I’m near your place, so you can come and meet me”

I mentioned this on Twitter, and various people responded, sharing their own versions of this little trick.

“My mum says ‘I’ll give you 3 rings’” (@a_williams)

“Brings back familiar sound of a trimphone ringing three times after grandparents got home safely” (@crouchingbadger)

“Even better, in italian, they have a proper word for it: ’squillino’ which means ‘miss call’ or ‘buzz’” (@dvydra)

“V standard in Italy…they call it giving someone ‘uno squillo’” (@ron_n)

“In Australia, we say ‘I’ll prank you’ referring to a prank call you’re not supposed to pick up” (@lukely78)

“Known as the ‘one-ring’ round my parts” (@genzaichi)

“When I was little, my mum would get ‘three rings’ when I was heading home from a neighbour’s house” (@philgyford)

I’ve known for a while that people in (especially) sub-saharan Africa have used the missed-call functionality - calling someone, letting it ring once, then hanging up before they answer, so they see a missed call from the original caller, and use their mobile credit or account to call back. They call this “Beeping” and there are established social rules for doing it.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, I’ve heard (but can’t find a reference for, sorry) about pirate radio stations using hangups as a way of collecting votes on a particular track (”If you like this track, beep me now….that last song got 87 beeps”)

Twenty years ago or so, when I was living abroad and travelling around a lot, I used a nifty way of checking in with my family periodically, without costing anyone anything.

The ruse was simple, and played out as follows:

1. Place a collect (reverse charges) call to your family back home via the operator
2. When the operator asks for a name, you tell them you’re called “Alice Oakey”
3. When someone answers the phone, the operator says “I’ve got a collect call for you from Alice Oakey. Will you accept the charges?”
4. The hapless family member says no.
5. The operator disconnects the call, but by this point - for free - your family knows Alice Oakey…or to put it another way, “All is OK” (A friend subsequently invented another version which involved the name “Amy Fine” and a male friend later created an alter ego of “Noel Probbs”)

This means that if you ever had to place a call that needed a response, or you were in trouble or anything, you could give your real name and your family would know to accept the charges. But at all other times, the message would get through, without cost.

I’ve no idea whether this still works, or if they’ve changed the way that collect calls are placed. But at the time, it was rather handy for periodic messageless checking in.

I missed the actual tenth birthday of this blog/me blogging but I can’t let a milestone like that go unmarked, can I?

Originally started as a place to store and share links, this blog gradually became a place to playfully interact with the world, and over time that turned from introspection to exploration of the world, media, experiences and ideas. I don’t think I’m alone in that kind of journey with blogs.

I am immensely (unreasonably, perhaps even pathetically) proud of having been blogging for so long. I can say confidently that I was in at the beginning, when all this were fields. I was here before many of you young whippersnappers who have gone on to eclipse me, and blogging, and the web entirely in their success and influence. I don’t put my early involvement down to canny prescience about the way the web was turning so much as an inevitability given my proclivity for tinkering with web things, my early academic and personal interest in communicating online and my inability to shut up. Blogging and me; it was only a matter of time and technology before we found each other.

I was there. I remember the start, and the hype, popularisation, commercialisation and ubiquitisation which followed. I couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, but my blogging was to introduce me to dozens of interesting people, influence others to start doing it too, cause interesting opportunities (and worrying situations) to develop. Blogging has become part of what I am, what I do. I blog now for the same reasons I did in early 2000: because I can’t not tinker with and publish to the web.

Ten years ago, I was embarrassed to mention having a blog in polite company, because it was so difficult to understand - not just what but why. These days, even both my parents have blogs. It’s not a weird niche oddball geek thing anymore. It’s so normal it’s almost passé. Good.

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I realised the other day that I hadn’t even thought about FriendsReunited for at least a year.

I clocked this only when mucking out untended folders within my gmail account, where I’d long ago set up a rule to filter newsletters from sites which I barely ever visited. I suddenly discovered that FriendsReunited had been emailing me regularly, with increasing desperation. The emails hinted at the potential to rediscover lost connections; spy on former classmates, announce things to the world; pimp one’s profile; add photos, reunion notes, avatars.

This was enough to spur me into action. Without hesitation I headed over to the site with the intention of removing myself from it altogether - committing social networking suicide. Long overdue and undoubtedly not the only one to have done so in recent time.

Before I went, though, I noticed this alert box, which sort of sums up the problem with FriendsReunited for me:

Why don’t I add myself to those contexts? Because they’re completely bloody irrelevant, that’s why.

I’ve never attended those institutions or lived or worked in those places, so why would I add myself to them? Just to be more present and “out there” on the Internet? To meet more people? Who I don’t know (yet)? Or in the hope that lurking somewhere in one of those places there may be someone I once knew, waiting to be discovered? Er, no.

FR was a turn-of-the-century novelty: one of the first ways that you could easily, legitimately and contextually hunt down your old schoolmates and peer nosily into their current lives without the need for (or fear of) reciprocation. Socially-acceptable stalking, dressed up as old-friendship-inspired curiosity.

The personal, public, externalising internet made that easier over the years, and experiences with global traction like Facebook soon eclipsed the relevance of FR, even if they came with their own array of pitfalls and social etiquette dilemmas.

Now the internet’s social spaces overlap, with people having multiple accounts across a range of social services, reproducing their social graphs wherever they create an identity. Increasingly, folk are feeding identical information into multiple outlets, to the extent that I’m overdosing on some people’s news, photos, statuses and updates. Twitter updates are fed into Facebook status updates. Notes saved on delicious are fed into Facebook notes. Pics posted on Flickr are rechannelled into Facebook galleries.

This means I sometimes see things twice, three times, from the same person but in different spaces. It has the effect of overwhelming and drowning out the updates of others - the less prolific, less connected, less socialwebbed, less loud.

So in light of that and the increasing noise from all corners, I’ve started a tactical withdrawal from social spaces - or rather, I’ve started to prune the social spaces I occupy to better tune into the signal that is there.

The immediate upshot of this is that I’m unfollowing/unfriending (as if that’s even a word, or at least as if that doesn’t come with all sorts of loaded connotations) a bunch of people on FB, not because I don’t like them but because I already hear them more loudly, frequently and appropriately in other places - like Twitter, or at work, or on mailing lists.

If this happens to you, it’s not about you: it’s about me, and my ability to give you proper attention, in devoted contextual space. I want to keep hearing from you; I just want to hear you - and others - better.

Back in the nineties, when the web was young…

…most web pages took over a minute to load
…the song of one’s home 14.4kbps modem was more familiar than any novelty ringtone (what’s one of those, then?)
…AOL was a groundbreaking kind of company
…chatrooms were still a non-sleazy novelty
…marquee and blink tags were in common usage
…a web-ring was a social navigational device, not a gang of kiddy-fiddlers
…many web sites had an entire page dedicated to links
…the use of nested tables to layout a website was cutting-edge
…Google, Blogger and Amazon were just a twinkle in the eyes of their founders
…Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter were just random meaningless utterings
…building a web page was something only total weirdos would do

…dear, (now) departed Geocities was a vibrant and bustling place for play and experimentation, consisting of “neighbourhoods” and suburbs with particular themes or personalities, named after real or imagined geographical locations - SouthBeach, TheTropics, EnchantedForest, Tokyo, MotorCity, PicketFence, Petsburgh, Athens.

And each of these was stuffed with hundreds of citizens, tending hundreds upon thousands of lovingly constructed pages, each brimming with animated gifs, eye-bleeding backgrounds and a never-ending stream of scrolling, blinking, neon, capitalised, centre-justified text and badly-compressed, rasterized photos.

Including me, for a short while.

At the time, one of the most common phrases on the internet was “this page is under construction” - a sort of excuse or explanation, I suppose, often accompanied by a representation or parody of the symbols usually associated with road-works or construction sites in the non-virtual world. Strips of black and yellow tape or triangular red, black and white icons of ‘Men At Work’.

But thinking about it, it was a strange statement to make. At the time, the entire Internet was itself under construction; being built and explored and defined and designed and conquered and claimed by users just like me. By definition, web pages could (and can) continue being constructed, built upon, refined and redesigned forever - there’s no end to the work: even now, a redesign is only ever a temporary thing and its unveiling tends to be just a brief resting status in between periods of intense redevelopment activity.

The point is, the Internet can’t ever be completed, at least in the traditional sense of the word. It’s a living work in progress. The constant ripple of activity keeps it being. When it stops evolving, it stops being relevant. That was the point of web pages versus print and then as now, the idea of publishing flat print-like pages without interactivity or hypertextuality or even contextuality and formatting to the web is quite daft.

The web is alive: as long as there is networking occurring - both social and electronic - the Internet will exist and be continuously re-invented, never quite the same from one second to the next.

Back in the nineties, I used the idea of being under construction as the central focus for my (now horribly outdated and quite shuddersomely facile) MA Thesis: Under Construction: (Re)Defining Culture and Community in Cyberspace.

Don’t read it though. You can garner more knowledge about internet culture and community from five minutes on Twitter these days - and if you do decide to plough through it, remember that in the nineties many, many people (including academics) didn’t know what the internet was, let alone a modem, which is why it’s so full of explanations and definitions of terms.

In fact, back in 1997 when I stated my intention to embark on research in this particular area, I was told by senior members of the Anthropology department that there was no such thing as culture and community in cyberspace, and that I should redirect my attentions to something proper instead.

WHO’S LAUGHING NOW, EH?

Ahem.

The phrase ‘Under Construction’ is interesting for Anthropologists and other social scientists, who sometimes theorise that that culture is itself a construction - made and reinforced by the actions of those who show up and participate. In my thesis, I explained that even perception is not a passive experience.

We are constantly constructing the world (through perception, etc.) as much as the world is constantly constructing (shaping, changing and influencing) us. The idea of a ‘passive media’ such as television takes on a new perspective when it is understood that the process of watching a soap-opera requires the brain to unconsciously perform startling feats of interpretation and imagination just to make sense - images - out of the millions of pixels and lines fired rapidly at the screen, not to mention understanding the plot.

Fascinated back then - and still - by the idea that just by showing up, we are causing the net to come into a new phase of being. Leaning forward makes that link even more tangible. That’s still true, of course. Perhaps moreso than ever?

As a sidenote, I was thinking the other day how long it had been since I used the acronym “IRL” or the expanded phrase “In Real Life.”

It used to be the thing we’d say when we meant “not on the internet”, and I’m glad that it has become gradually obsolete over the years, now that the internet is accepted as part of life.

The internet is real life: I am real, sat at my real computer, engaging with the screen and the world beyond that it unlocks, in real time, via my eyes, ears, keyboard, mouse, attention. Online and offline make much more sense, being descriptive of state rather than reality.

(Likewise, I’m glad that we don’t talk about “virtual communities” anymore - as if spending time with people interacting around common interests and deepening relationships over time was in any way less than real. Now we know it can be, and that gets proved and reproved every day.)

So anyway, today’s unplugging of the Geocities life-support made me think about how we shaped it, and it shaped us.

Geocities slowly became unloved, unused and eventually undermined by wave upon wave of new services which helped us to express ourselves; live out loud, on the screen; learn to create/tinker/experiment; play with our identities; find others; experience the thrill of seeing our words, our work in a public “space”.

But for all its faults, Geocities was, for many long-term residents of the web, the first place they called home(page). And because of that, we mourn its passing.

But its spirit lives on. The creative, tinkering itch still runs thunderous and irrepressible through us. Our web experiences - and we ourselves - are still under construction.

As part of Quadriga’s Online Communication 2009 conference, I was invited by the organisers to present some reflections about how to communicate with people online, drawn from both personal and professional experiences, in the form of an after-dinner speech. This was a new experience for me: I’ve never done an after-dinner speech before. Lots of presentations, lectures, debates and panels, but nothing in quite this format before, with no visual aid, nestled in between main course and dessert.

Rather than just post my notes, here’s a fully-written up version of what I said, including links to sources, resources, inspirations and further reading. Forgive the slightly odd formatting, with so many paragraphs - it’s structured this way to reflect the emphasis and pauses and topic sections as I spoke.

If anyone wants it, I was thinking about making an audio version available to download, because this is fairly long (about 25 minutes) - let me know if this would be interesting to you. And if you’re interested in me giving this presentation (or one similar) at an event you’re organising, do get in touch.

When I first told my friends I was coming to Amsterdam to speak to a room full of online communication executives, they asked me why I had to fly to Amsterdam to do that. Why do we all need to get together in one room? Couldn’t I just do it by email, maybe in a newsletter or a series of tweets?

Well, maybe – but if that had been the case, I wouldn’t have got to enjoy such a delicious meal and wouldn’t have met so many of you face to face. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that.

Actually, yesterday I asked my Twitter contacts whether there’s anything they’d recommend to a room full of the best and brightest communication professionals in Europe. I got a lot of interesting answers, many of which I’ll draw on later, but I particularly liked this suggestion from a contact who said:

“Just tell them they should promote the juniors for two months and let them run wild over the internet.”

Well, it’s an idea. Not sure it’s the first thing you could do, but still…

When Quadriga were putting together the conference programme, I was asked to present my perspective on online communication from “both sides of the wall” – as a keen online user both personally and professionally.

I’s just like to note that that implies the wall is somehow this insurmountable, divisive thing which is rarely scaled. In fact, the walls are coming down. I think it’s remarkably easy - and getting easier - to hop from one side to the other, and in fact the boundaries are blurring for many of us every day. I count myself as incredibly lucky that my professional life draws on my personal experiences and passions.

As part of that, I have a confession to make.
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I wanted to draw attention to this marvellous article about Twitter by early-era blogger and all round music’n'media maven Tom Ewing.

He’s written the article in a series of tweet-sized chunks, and there’s a lot to ponder on, there. I won’t reproduce the whole thing - you should read it all, in context - but a few of the most brilliant bits (IMO) follow:

There’s a deluge of Twitter hype from media flapmouths. None of them agree on what it’s for, just that it’s wonderful.

Now Twitter’s going mainstream and dipping down the hype curve there’s an equal rush of pieces damning it.

Is it a marketing platform? A news service? A celebrity hangout? A lame Facebook knock-off? A time sink for fools? Yes, yes, yes.

The boring truth is that Twitter is a communications tool, much like blogs or websites. It’s neutral– it simply enables certain effects.

A dip into the “public tweetstream”– the firehosed thoughts of 10 million minds– is indeed a one-way ticket to Moronopolis.

If what you see is idiocy, it’s because you’ve elected to follow idiots. Simple as that.

Depending on how you come at it, Twitter initially seems an idiot’s charter or a deserted echo chamber. The fun is creating your own order.

The good side of Twitter’s license to self-promote: The 140 limit forces you to focus thoughts and directs traffic to where you expand them.

I don’t follow any musicians on Twitter: I prefer my access mediated, ideally by Smash Hits magazine asking what color their socks are.

If musicians are talking about their socks of their own accord it’s not as fun somehow.

But from a musician’s point of view I can see exactly why you’d do it. Aside from being an incorrigible exhibitionist.

Endless disappointment is the cross the early adopter has to bear. As any indie rock fan knows.

Part of the reason I’m addicted is that Twitter reminds me of the internet in the 90s, but in accelerated microcosm.

There’s the same fascination and distrust with mainstream media, the same snobbish defensiveness, the same mix of chaos and excitement.

There’s the same random thrill of stumbling across great content, the same giddy sense that everyone is making it up as they go along.

And just like the old web, in two or three years the way we use Twitter now will seem really gauche and annoying and badly planned.

I think he absolutely nails it. Well said, Tom.

Incidentally, Tom’s Blackbeardblog tumblog is also well worth following if you’re interested in the intersection of social media and market research - full of insight and interesting ideas and links.

(And if you haven’t found it yet, I’ve got a tumblog too - more(ish) which is full of odds and sods and links and pictures and music and stuff)

A few days ago, I read one of those articles that social media consultants seem to constantly be producing, about how to make a Facebook fan page successful.

They mentioned widgets and SEO and viral activity and all sorts of other tips and techniques, but failed to mention one very basic thing. The omission was glaring - to me, at least - and rather sad.

At the time, I made a note of it on my tumblr scrapbook, saying:

I read 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page but I’m still wondering where “making a product that people want to become a fan of” comes into it.

But it’s been festering in my head ever since. Surely the best way to make sure your fan page is successful is to make something which inspires fandom. Then it just happens.

‘Twas ever thus!

Then this evening, I read Matt Haughey’s experience of buying a playground swing/slide set for his garden. He compared the experience to that of social media marketing, and said:

maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

Too right.

Social media is sometimes waved around like a magic stick, or an enchanted bean, which only some people - hallowed (mostly) self-identified consultants - can manipulate or unlock the secrets of.

But it’s not. Among other definitions, and at its most basic, social media is tools, situations and applications which enable people to talk to & with other people, about stuff they’re passionate or curious about.

Consultants can tell you interesting things about social media, and how it’s being used, and how it might develop or change over time, and how people might use it, but anyone - including me - who tells you that you absolutely MUST do X or Y to definitely make your magic social media beans flourish and grow, is making it up.

Sorry.

Andy Budd touched on this earlier this year when he pondered whether social media consulants were harming social media in the long run:

I don’t mean to sound cynical, but I do wonder what value a lot of social media consultants bring to their clients, and how long that value will last.

[...]

The problem I have with social media consultants … is less about the value they bring to their clients and more to do with the affect it’s having on the web.

Most social media consultants are actually people who are experienced enthusiasts with opinions about about tools and technologies - that’s fine, and they can play a really valuable evangelism role for organisations which need convincing about why social media matters, or how to get started.

Some (fewer, though) may even have valuable experience (professionally or as a passionate amateur) of actually building communities or creating products and tools which help people to share, curate and curate content (rather than just using them and talking about them). Again, they can tell you some really interesting stuff about user experience and interface design and the ethnology of participation.

And all of this can help your audience start talking to you, and to each other. No doubt about that.

But this knowledge and experience is only useful if you:

a) apply it in relevant ways for you and your audience/community, rather than following someone else’s recipe to the letter and
b) concentrate effort on making or having something which people want to talk about in the first place.

No amount of magic fairy dust can make an average, lacklustre proposition or product into a social object. Social media isn’t an exact science, full of calculated recipes and formulae. It’s about people.
And passion.
And communication.
And real stuff or experiences.

Last year at HICKtech in Owen Sound, Ontario, I gave a presentation about social media and community development which had as a central motif a big picture of shambolic detective Columbo, as a reminder that people participating in social experiences online (which only people like me ever call “participating in social experiences online”, while the people themselves call it “twittering” or “joining a Flickr group” or “writing on someone’s facebook wall”) need three things that homicide detectives always come back to in such hackneyed shows.

They need:

• Means
• Motive

and

• Opportunity

The echo-chamber of social media marketeers spends a lot of time thinking about the Means (ability, access, tools) and Opportunity (social graph, stimulus, habits, behaviours) for people to get involved in or pay attention to social activity online, but not nearly enough time thinking about Motive.

Why do people get excited and talk about stuff?
Because they care about it.
Because it’s good.
Because it’s worth talking about.

I wish product makers and media owners would spend a little less time thinking about manipulating audiences, and a little more time thinking about making good things to begin with.

To rather savagely paraphrase Matt Jones’ recent call to arms (now available in T-shirt or limited edition print form):

People get excited when you make good things.

So make your thing - whatever it is - good.

I’ve been twittering since 4.02pm on November 15, 2006, when I announced to the the world that I was sleepy after lunch.

Since then, there have been 2,730 equally insightful compact messages, though these days my Twitter updates are protected (I’m one of those weird people who wants to know who I’m telling things to, which means I mostly only add people who I know, have met, or are vouched for by other friends).

In a moment of navel-gazing curiosity, I had a poke around TweetStats and was interested to discover that I update twitter an average of 3.7 times a day (thought it was more, though there are many who must be thankful it isn’t), my big day is Tuesday (by a nose), and I’ve managed to send 196 perfect 140-character updates (I refuse to call them Twooshes, for fuck’s sake).

Most fascinating of all (well, to me) is the revelation that my five most frequently used words (although I assume they discount words of less than 2 characters, otherwise @StephenFry’s most frequent utterance would be x, surely?) are: going, home, people, day, train (which is pretty much a twitter update in itself).

It’s interesting how reading through the list of frequently-used words reveals someone’s “voice”. I wonder if you could identify your twitter-chums from their clouds alone?

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