Mark Higginson

I had the same thought as John Gruber  over at Daring Fireball on reading the now all-but-confirmed rumours that Google's new phone will be called the Nexus One. They should get White Zombie involved with the marketing.

I hope it really is going to be SIM-free and available in the UK as I would much rather pay up front for the hardware and then pick from the variety of one month notice SIM offers that are available with data. The current crop of 18 and 24 month contracts are an awful obligation and not much cheaper. In short, I would give up my iPhone, the best electronic device I have ever used and switch to the Nexus One.

The reasons are simple, I use Google's free services daily so want tight integration rather than via Exchange. I'm in no mood to pay for MobileMe. I need a device with manufacturer supported multi-tasking, e.g. so you can run Google Latitude in the background. I also want flexibility, to be able to switch contracts if necessary. O2 are miles better than the woeful Orange; at least I can actually make phone calls in Brighton now. However, the 3G component of O2's service is terrible. I sat next to a friend on T-Mobile the other month trying to access email while he merrily streamed video off Youtube as we travelled down the motorway. Improbable but true. Finally I don't find the availability of apps to be enough to keep me using the iPhone as the ones I've downloaded I hardly use.

Ultimately I'll probably end up with an iPod touch for Apple's peerless user experience alongside a Nexus One, which I'll be completely sold on if it comes with Google Voice in the UK.

Update: O2 says iPhone demand strained its London network. Surely an entirely predictable event? Just as with the problems being experienced with AT&T in the States it is the fat and lazy carriers who continually let customers down with poor service.

In the same month as Apple release their multi-touch Magic Mouse to buy Microsoft announced a series of multi-touch mouse prototypes that look as though they've flash-forwarded from the 1980s. I was reminded of a post I wrote this time last year that quoted the Counternotions blog on Why Apple Doesn't do 'concept products' which is worth revisiting in light of this example:

"A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products."

One might be tempted to say Microsoft looks less and less relevant as time goes on, but then they always have been runners-up on the ideas front. This time round however they just don't seem to be able to innovate, explore and execute on multiple plans the way they did when they were growing to dominate the OS market.

I had been looking for a way into discussing what is defined as ‘social media’ when I encountered this funny post in which the author alludes to its panoptical nature. It provoked a lot of rattling of cell bars in the comments though no one recognised that the problem lies in the definition itself. In this shared reality people ‘go and do stuff on the web’. In the parallel world of marketing these people may or may not be described as ‘participating in social media’. It has been defined as:

"... a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues into dialogues... the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content or consumer-generated media."

Similar to this argument that the web is neither subject nor object we should question our acceptance of the idea that ‘social’ is part of the fabric of the ‘media’ itself rather than an outcome of the discourse it provokes. The definition is based on the presupposition that, in the context described, conversation ("monologues", "dialogues") is part of a power relationship ("democratization") in which currently the discussion is owned ("consumer-generated"). The implication is that this social technology places the means of production in the hands of content creators; the only other form that may exist being that of professional operations ("publishers"). This is a capitalist fantasy of how the social dynamics of the web function. Before the term was used by a groups of experts, was contributing to forums, newsgroups, using IRC or sending group emails social media? Was participating on Plastic back in the distant days of 2001 social media? How about chatting with friends? Or painting on the wall of a cave? Here’s my alternate definition:

"The monitoring of comment and opinion on the web by power elites for the purposes of reporting and response with the goal of altering the perception surrounding the interests of the organisation concerned."

Why the difference? Well, if you consider what the first definition is trying to describe then nothing has actually changed apart from the fact that what is loosely called ‘conversation’ can now be interrogated through the use of technology as part of a permanent and ever-expanding dossier on people’s opinions. Evidence for justification of this use of social technology is to be found in the language used; definitions are being created by self-appointed gatekeepers to knowledge who understand that this perception management can be geared towards attaining ‘competitive advantage’ for their clients and themselves and that in this context this is being driven by the profit motive. Take this chap, a self-described “evangelist of social media”, and his identification of this issue:

"How do these corporations intend to use these vast records of our behavior... corporations whose main motivation is not in service of 'customer empowerment' but on the traditional goals of manipulating behavior to grow their share of wallet."

Customer empowerment is one and the same as market share in the larger scheme of things. He can’t see beyond this, thinking our defining role in society is as consumers, confused as to which side of the bars he is actually on. This artificial distinction that is called social media by its proponents could more accurately be seen and described as an attempt to form a social technocracy via the co-option of ideas that define a framework that already exists, that people are widely aware of and is determined to be suitable for manipulation, i.e. the web. To further the achieving of this goal it is useful to question the 'nature of the thing', not to develop the 'thing' per se but to give it a discrete integrity that then allows the testing of the boundaries that presently define it, e.g. referencing The Enlightenment is an attempt to give it both a historicity and a validity for the purposes of advancing the overarching agenda.

Update: I am sobbing quietly. Responsibility rests with this post entitled: Social Media is the New Punk. There is a hideous video with sound and everything. I rest my case.

2 original comments:

Terrif post. I think you’re talking along the lines of the extraction of surplus value and the harnessing of mass intellect Marky Marxist.
I recommend that you have a look at the work of Adam Arviddson. Quite a few of his papers online.
He doesn’t write explicitly about social meed, but I think much of his argument about branding is very relevant here.
Comment by Chloe — 1 July, 2009 @ 2:08 pm

Thank you for the comment; it was your fantastic Bruno Latour post that set me thinking about this. I will go and look up Adam Arviddson immediately while I’m still occupied with these ideas.
Comment by Mark — 1 July, 2009 @ 2:15 pm

This is great. I love the fact that this designer has taken a ubiquitous and clunky item and redesigned it to become something svelte and more easily portable. Plugs, with their bulk and three prongs are a pain to pack and transport.

Three-prong folding plug design

(via BoingBoing Gadgets)

At the other end of the scale is this, a winner of an award but really no more than an exercise in futility and graphic design. Unlike the above this project is not a serious attempt to solve a problem through good design as the issue of bike use in the city is more mundane. We already have bikes. We do not need more expensive bikes with transparent solar panels in the wheels. What we do need is more bike lanes, more roads closed to vehicles, more bike racks, bike theft to be taken more seriously by the police, more shared space, vehicle users who respect cyclists right to space, cyclists who respect pedestrians right to space and pedestrians who don't bumble in front of cyclists.

A solution in search of a problem

(via Wired Gadget Lab)

What do you think of my suggestion?

Hoverboard from 'Back to the Future Part II'

It too is based on non-existent technology and also solves the problem of urban mobility in a functional space-saving design. Award please.

Update: We (heart) stuff features the folding plug mentioned above. The designer's name is Min Kyu Choi. He deserves to be very successful.

1 original comment:

Mark, my Mum mentioned this folding plug to me the other day, this is the first time I’ve seen it. Nice design indeed. I saw something similar recently, an American backpacker had a folding, two-pronged European-style plug – that was super-compact.
I’m always bemused by our bulky three-pronged plugs when I return from abroad. When on the road, once you’ve put an adaptor on the end of a charger you end up with a connection to the socket that’s more often than not bigger than the device you want to recharge, much to the bemusement of some foreigners who’ve never seen our three-pronged electric behemoths. However, I confess to a warm, fuzzy feeling when I found them in Hong Kong of all places this year!
Re: cycling – your comments are all valid. One very simple solution, move to Copenhagen where all of the above have come true, it’s cycle paradise, I kid you not ;)
Comment by CharlieO — 24 August, 2009 @ 4:45 pm

If reading an 83-page Apple patent application isn't your bag then at least skim this summary: Apple exploring wireless system for quantifying the unquantifiable over on AppleInsider. The "sprawling patent" talks of "sensing systems" that collect data about what happens to objects as they move through space and time. Although the article doesn't use this term Apple are essentially applying for patents on a variety of types of spime, one of those technologies that, like the barcode, will have both a sudden ubiquity and a profound effect on how we view the world of manufactured objects that surrounds us.

If you want to indulge in a little further reading on what's coming next then try When Blobjects Rule the Earth. If your interest is sufficiently piqued follow-up with  Shaping Things; both the speech and the pamphlet are by Bruce Sterling who coined this particular neologism. In fact I believe spimes first appeared, but were not referred to as such, in his 1998 novel Distraction, which is well worth a read.

More of my time is being spent preparing reports on what people are talking about on the web. There are a number of companies offering tools that do this kind of thing. The way they work is by identifying keywords in a dataset and pulling out pertinent information around the word(s) such as date of mention, where it occurred, on a webpage fitting what kind of recognised format, etc. This data is then presented in the form of a 'dashboard', i.e. a few charts, possibly with some sort of 'score' attached. I prefer to work with the actual data retrieved by a crawler for particular keywords rather than use an automated summary as I want to be able to check the accuracy of the underlying information. There doesn't seem to be an offering out there that doesn't provide some sort of bell-or-whistle that tracks 'influencers' or 'emerging trends' or promises the dreaded ability to analyse sentiment... however:

Algorithm-based sentiment analysis doesn't work accurately

If it were possible then natural language processing would allow me to have a friendly chat with Google when I wanted something and not have to parse my requests into a few pithy search terms. The reason sentiment analysis is a key part of tracking is that most of us who use these tools would like to believe the promise that they can discover when people are saying good or bad things about the topic we're interested in. Unfortunately this knowledge is not perceived as valuable enough to have a real live human read and assess every mention that has been discovered so inaccurate methods are employed in an attempt to achieve useful results. Conversations on the web are human conversations with all the nuance and multiple meanings afforded by the language used and the context in which the conversation occurs, e.g. correctly identifying sarcasm is at present an impossible challenge for a computer. If you're looking into using one of these tools then ask these questions of the supplier:

• Can I export the data to CSV, XML, etc.?
• How do you identify and remove spam?
• On average what percentage of mentions identified constititute spam?
• How accurate is your sentiment analysis?
• Please may I see the human assessed sample of mentions versus machine assessed sentiment that you used to produce that figure?
• Which academic / research papers would you suggest I read to find out more about the fields of natural langauage and sentiment analysis?

Dashboards and scorecards are only as good as the data that lies behind them so if you can't see the actual data or easily compare 'scores' across multiple keywords and understand what the differences mean you should run a mile. I've been through and am still going through trying to make monitoring work effectively and am currently working on an efficient way of working out sentiment that is not subject to the flaws outlined above.

I've mentioned J.P. Morgan before on this blog, one of the investors in the Wardenclyffe Tower project, but don't think I've mentioned my admiration for Nikola Tesla. Admiration is an understatement. I am in awe of the man and his achievements that have gone unsung for far too long. The New York Times has an article that Gizmodo have picked up on saying that the land on which the tower sat, along with the adjoining laboratory is up for sale. The ruins could be demolished to make way for development, which would be a shame as I would love to see the site where Tesla was betrayed by people driven by profit turned into a celebration of all of his achievements. To give you an idea of the man I include my favourite quote by him below:

"Really, we are something different, like waves in subjective time and space and when these waves disappear, nothing remains of us. There is no personality. We cannot see that waves in the ocean have individuality. There is only an illusionary sequence of waves, which go one after another. We are not the same as that which was yesterday; I am only a sequence of relative existences, which are not similar. This sequence is the thing which creates an effect of continuity, not my subjective and mistaken understanding of my real life."
(Note: I need to confirm the source of this)

This month sees the launch of a UK edition of Wired, a second attempt after the version that first appeared in 1995 flamed out. Personally speaking, and as I say here, Wired piqued my interest in the web and the implications that a new communications technology held for society at large.

Looking inside Wired 1.01 from 1995

So what's changed?

• I had no internet access
• I didn't have an email address
• I certainly didn't have a laptop... but we did own a shared family computer
• I didn't have a mobile phone
• I'd never purchased anything from a website
• The job I do now didn't exist
• The company I work for didn't exist
• Google didn't exist

... I'm sure there's a lot more to add to this list, but just having a quick think makes me realise how much has shifted in those intervening years.

2 original comments:

Using and sharing digital media – photos, videos et al – is another thing you probably weren’t doing much of in 1995.
Comment by Simon Mustoe — 6 April, 2009 @ 11:25 am

I was a subscriber to the UK Wired first time round. Coincidentally doing some spring cleaning over the weekend, I unearthed the whole lot and read Edition 1 last night. It kicked off with the following statement from Marchall McLuhan:
“The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and ever institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing… you, your family, your education, your neighbourhood, your government, your job, your relation to “the others”. And they’re changing dramatically.”
One thing that struck me was that the idea of free online content was virtually unthinkable – people were preparing themselves for the inevitable subscription models once traffic hit a critical point. What do we have to lose by Douglas Adams is worth reading to give a broader perspective about this issue, from that time.
Another thing we didn’t have back then was content subscription or RSS: I think Pattie Maes got it wrong with her view of software agents being necessary to handle the unthinkable complexity. We just needed free RSS subscription.
Comment by Jason Ryan — 6 April, 2009 @ 1:35 pm

Funny haha, scary terrifying or an attempt to soften us up given I assume Google are working on this stuff already?

"Will CADIE herself at some point connect her own electromagnetic dots in some idiosyncratic manner which turns her into something we are no longer capable of understanding in any sort of productive way, much as that aforementioned toddler, waving at herself in the mirror, leaves primates forever behind in their own tragically limited world? We don't know. Did you really think we possibly could?"
The CADIE Team, 31st March 2009

One day.

Dan and Caroline get building

I forgot to post about this a couple of weeks back but it's worth going back to as it's quite important apropos my previous posts about energy displays and how we can relate to the resources we use. Google's remit to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" is now being extended to electricity use with their announcement of Google PowerMeter. They are hanging this on the proposed installation of smart meters in the US and the need to be able to see the data these meters collect and compare it to what other people use.

"But deploying smart meters alone isn't enough. This needs to be coupled with a strategy to provide customers with easy access to energy information. That's why we believe that open protocols and standards should serve as the cornerstone of smart grid projects.... We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in an open standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see your data, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it."
Power to the People, Official Google Blog, 2nd February 2009

All very interesting. I wonder whether there is a fit here for companies working on energy displays, an intermediary step towards smart metering and smart grids? There are a number of devices out there that work on the basis of clipping a sensor to the cable coming into your home that then sends information wirelessly to a display you can easily see as well as saving this data for viewing on your computer. Presumably if these sensors could be made cheaply I could clip them to all the electrical devices in my home, skip the display and have them feeding directly to a website that collated that information, such as Google PowerMeter. This would be very attractive as the resulting data could be anonymised for comparison purposes, adding value to the service and allow for the collection of data regarding the average power consumption of individual devices. Rather than a separate display this data could just be viewed through an iPhone app or equivalent with some fancy animations to better visualise how much power you're pulling. I wonder if a powerstrip with these sensors built-in could be made that would also be remotely addressable? You could then cycle the power on devices that were plugged into the strip directly from the app.

Update: great quote in the video from Google explaining PowerMeter:

"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it."
Lord Kelvin

... which applies to so many aspects of the way we live our lives: if you cannot measure it you also tend to ignore it or not value it.