Last week during #journchat, I saw a reference to a post titled Does Your Twitter Handle Belong on Your Resume? The author is a PR college student, and the conversation around the post is mainly tactical, but the bigger picture surrounding our online identities is one I’ve been wanting to address for some time, so this gives me the opportunity. I’ll briefly cover some basic points about the nature of online space, but then I want to dig into the opportunities that are available in a networked culture.
#1. The Web is made up of mediated publics.
I think the first time I heard the term “mediated publics” was in a paper written by danah boyd while she was still a PhD candidate. In it, she described social networks as a type of public space, but with four unique properties:
- Persistence – What you say sticks around. This is great for asynchronous communication, but it also means that what you said at 15 is still accessible when you are 30 and have purportedly outgrown those childish days.
- Searchability – My mother would’ve loved the ability to scream “Find!” into the ether and determine where I was hanging out with my friends. She couldn’t, and I’m thankful. Today’s teens’ parents have found their hangouts with the flick of a few keystrokes.
- Replicability – Digital bits are copyable; this means that you can copy a conversation from one place and paste it into another place. It also means that it’s difficult to determine if the content was doctored.
- Invisible audiences – While it is common to face strangers in public life, our eyes provide a good sense of who can overhear our expressions. In mediated publics, not only are lurkers invisible, but persistence, searchability, and replicability introduce audiences that were never present at the time when the expression was created.
A quick review of these characteristics serve as a good reminder that what you do/say/post online is effectively being done in public. When framed in this context, the results of much of the research being done around managing online information seem expected. For instance, take a look at this chart, taken from ‘Recruiters really care about your online reputation even if you don’t.’ The top five reasons mentioned here to reject a candidate for recruitment are things that would be equally inappropriate if done directly in front of that potential employer. read more…
I’ve quietly been watching all the opinions about the potential impact of the iPad over the past few days, and want to provide a roundup of perspectives. Though my initial reaction was lukewarm, (I believe my tweet was “iWasExpectingToBeMoreImpressed”), I decided that that reaction was completely ignorant. So, after spending some time *thinking* instead of just reacting, an interesting picture is beginning to form. Let’s take a look. Oh, and if you haven’t seen the keynote address or the video released by Apple, you can watch it here.
Naysayers
Many of the thoughts about the iPad are focused around what it’s missing, namely Flash, USB, camera, and multitasking. There are also heated arguments about it being a closed system that will kill creativity. I want to share some views around the web addressing these points:
I checked out a post over on Scoble’s blog, “Can Flash Be Saved?“, to get a sense of the conversation around this one. I found this in the comments section:
Steve Jobs is a genius in deciding which technologies are obsolete and thus should be discarded. He did this first with Floppies (and now the world has no floppies). He did this with serial ports and SCSI ports (and how we have USB). He is now doing the same with Flash. Thus, I predict Flash will be dead to the rest of the world soon. When Google has its HTML-5 YouTube up and running, then there will be no reason for using Flash on YouTube. read more…
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I was approached recently by Design Feast, a blog described as “a go-to resource for students, professionals, educators and the design-curious—delivering relevant and diverse design content, creative voices and projects” to contribute some thoughts about the hows and why of blogging. Below are my responses, originally posted here.
Venessa Miemis describes herself as a “Futurist” and “Metacog.” She is an avid reader, from The Age of Spiritual Machines to her latest indulgence in complexity science. Adjacent to her reading appetite, she practices her hobby of picking up new hobbies like yoga and gardening, even beer brewing. She also takes full advantage of the highly diverse cultural scene of New York City. One of her pursuits is a Masters in Media Studies at the New School which shares space with Parsons. I discovered Venessa and her blog Emergent by Design via@designthinkers. It is where I discovered her insightful post about design thinking. Her blogging reflects her holistic attitude and practice, and her sustained web-based publishing experience may help your entrance into the blogosphere or further inform your current work in it:
Why did you create a web site of regular entries?
I had a lot of ideas swirling around in my head, and got really frustrated when I couldn’t articulate them to people in conversation. The process of putting it down on paper and figuring out how to communicate in a clear, simple manner has been incredibly helpful in understanding what it is I’m actually trying to say. It’s also intrinsically rewarding to have people come to the site and engage with the ideas presented there. read more…
Maybe it was sparked by a new course I’m taking on digital media strategy, or some recent data on Twitter users and engagement, but it got me to thinking about the big question of how Twitter is going to make money. I’ve come to the conclusion that advertising simply won’t work. Two reasons:
#1 – the domain where conversations happen is sacred
OK, ’sacred’ might be a bit mystical, but think about it – we’re social creatures, and we’re practicing our fullest expression of being human when we’re engaging with others. Whether it’s exchanging tips, ideas, or gossip, the ability to share ourselves with another person is what being alive is all about. People refuse to have their space violated at that most fundamental level – where conversations happen – and the current online version of that space is Twitter. read more…
Over the past few days, several posts and conversations have led me to reflect on what it means to be a woman in today’s society, and where we’re going from here. I’d like to share my thoughts. Let me just give a little overview of what’s been happening:
A few days ago, NYU professor and media researcher Clay Shirky wrote a post titled A Rant About Women, which has ruffled some feathers and sparked a lot of commentary in response. Here’s a few clips from his rant:
And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so.
Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time.
It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions.
I don’t want to manipulate the tone of the piece by pulling those quotes out of context, but they were the ones that stood out most to me. I interpreted much of what he said as a call for women to do more lying and self-promotion in order to get ahead in society. Whether his intention was to make a statement about the disparity caused by the system, or the failure of women to play by its rules, I don’t know. You can read his full post here and decide for yourself.
Having tried to contact Shirky in the past myself, I felt compelled to respond. Here is the comment I left on his post: read more…
If you’re a businessperson or someone interested in understanding how to facilitate innovation, you’ve probably heard of “design thinking” by now. Coined by IDEO’s David Kelley, the term refers to a set of principles, from mindset to process, that can be applied to solve complex problems. I’ve seen articles lately ranging from those that highlight its potential, [Design Thinking for Social Innovation, How does design thinking give companies a competitive advantage?] to those that warn of it’s impending failure as a practice [Why Design Thinking Won't Save You , The Coming Boom and Bust of Design Thinking]. I’ve been eager to enter into the conversation, especially because some of the arguments around the topic don’t make sense to me and I wanted to know why. Change by Design, written by IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown, was on my winter reading list anyway, so I decided to finish it before bringing in my own perspectives.
I just got through the book a few days ago, and feel like I “get it.” So I’ve spent a few days reflecting on it and rereading some innovation articles, and think there is a bigger picture at the essence of design thinking that is being lost on some. I’m going to provide a brief summary of the book (from my interpretation), and tie in some other areas that brought me insights into these ideas. read more…
We’ve entered into a new year, the channels have been flooded with list upon list of 2010 predictions and trends, and now we’re laying the foundations for how we’d like to characterize the times – David Houle is calling it the Transformation Decade, a tweet from @RitaJKing mentioned The Imagination Age, and Seth Godin rang in the new year with a post titled “Welcome to the frustration decade (and the decade of change).”
Organizations are still scratching their heads about how to implement a social media strategy into their business plan and how to measure ROI, educators are wondering how to bring it into the classroom, marketers want to spam the hell out of it, and the layperson just wants to connect and share.
There are many levels of experimentation going on in the space, and there will be for years. But I wonder, is there a bigger picture here that might indicate what all this means? Most of us here, who seem to co-exist on and offline, feel pretty comfortable that we “get” social media. Or we think we do. But do we really understand what these tools represent, and what they enable? I’d like to share my view of what seems to be happening. I’m going to try to provide a context and make some connections. If it seems unrelated at first, just bear with me, I’m going to do my best to bring it all home in the end. 
read more…
Here are a few recurring themes that have been popping up on my radar. (click to enlarge)
This short video provides an overview of the skills involved with critical thinking, like how to methodically evaluate the information we consume. The amount of garbage content and spam we come across every day is growing exponentially, so this seemed like a good refresher for reminding ourselves to be careful about the amount of value or merit we put into the things we read. As you watch, think about some of the tweets that pass through your stream, and some of the posts you read on people’s blogs that are positioned as facts instead of opinions. Now that everyone has the ability to be a publisher and broadcast their messages, knowing how to determine what’s worth retaining is…well….critical!
(thanks to @Mgandon for finding this)
Thanks to all of you that have been exploring the social web with me over the past few months via this blog and on Twitter. We’ve done a lot of thinking about what Twitter is, how to use it effectively, whether there’s a decent way to measure social media ROI, and debating the merits of this medium as a credible source for information at all. It’s time to take theory to practice.
My 2010 experiment is to do a 6 month case study to really see what measurable results can be gotten from utilizing online channels. I’m taking a three-prong approach: a blog, Ning & Twitter. I haven’t had time to really explore Facebook or Linkedin or other networks, so instead of spreading my effort too thin, I’m sticking with the 3.
Rationale:
- A blog serves as an anchor point for you to share your knowledge or expertise and establish your personal or professional brand
- Ning is a platform for building your own niche social network. (Someone has already done the work of building a Ning site for our city, so I’m just going to continue being active there.)
- Twitter is… well, I’ve reflected on what Twitter is here and here. Twitter is whatever you want it to be. From a business perspective, it’s a communications platform for developing relationships with colleagues and potential clients, and for distributing the content from your blog.
Problem being addressed:
A few years ago, I was getting ready to buy my first house, and decided to get a real estate license so I’d know what they know. What I found was an industry operating in an outdated model with virtually no means for public accountability, making it a breeding ground for greedy, dishonest shysters. (subprime mortgage crisis, anyone?) Fast forward a few years, and the real estate industry is still ripe for an overhaul. read more…
