Mainstreaming of the social web and instant personal content: It’s (all) not pretty

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation about trends in the social web for 2010 to our clients at iCrossing in the UK.

Predicting anything about the web is a fool’s errand, but one somehow many of us can’t helping running anyhow. However, the main, underlying trend that it is hard to see being undone or even slowing down for some time, is what I called the “mainstreaming of social media”.

The image I jokingly used to illustrate this was a Daily Mail headline from early 2009: “How Facebook could raise your risk of cancer”

Image: Daily Mail Facebook cancer slide

If the Daily Mail says it gives you cancer, I reasoned, it was something that had become part of everyday life in Britain.

Ho ho ho…

There is a darker side to mainstreaming of the social web, of the putting into the hands of every single person the means of production and distribution of content. And the realtime element that Twitter and mobile devices brings makes that instant personal production and distribution.

Create. Capture images. Publish to the world in a moment.

Today I read thoughtful posts from both Paul Carr and Euan Semple about some of the “citizen journalism” that came out of the Fort Worth massacre last week and of other examples of where people have behaved in questionable ways using Twitter and the web while those around them suffered. Questionable…

Some thoughts on me blog about mainstreaming, citizen journalism etc…

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

Tweet This Post 

Image: Daily Mail Facebook cancer slide

If the Daily Mail says it gives you cancer, I reasoned, it was something that had become part of everyday life in Britain.

Ho ho ho…

There is a darker side to mainstreaming of the social web, of the putting into the hands of every single person the means of production and distribution of content. And the realtime element that Twitter and mobile devices brings makes that instant personal production and distribution.

Create. Capture images. Publish to the world in a moment.

Today I read thoughtful posts from both Paul Carr and Euan Semple about some of the “citizen journalism” that came out of the Fort Worth massacre last week and of other examples of where people have behaved in questionable ways using Twitter and the web while those around them suffered. Questionable…

Euan rightly talks about our sense of right and wrong needing to catch up with the technology. Absolutely: the next decade will see the emergence of new social norms (and doubtless some laws too) about what behaviours that are enabled by instant personal content.

Is it your prerogative to tag me in a photo of a party is the low end of the social conundrum. What about images of my children? What about tagging my house on a Foursquare map?

Are you being criminally negligent if photograph me bleeding in the street instead of instantly trying to apply a pressure bandage. How about if you photograph me being beaten up and don’t intervene? That might help me. How about if you photograph me being beaten by a police officer and pause to publish it to the web to ensure your device isn’t confiscated with the evidence before coming to apply a pressure bandage?

In situations like this where is the line between egotism (hey guys, check my citizen journalism style and also how edgy a life I am leading) as Carr would have it, and being useful by bearing witness? Where is the line of taste, legality and responsibility to be drawn.

We don’t know yet.

In my early days of blogging there were a lot of debates about responsibility. Were we citizen journalists? What did that mean? What interests did we need to declare, how did we ensure there was some fact-checking.

Two things have happened since. Creation / distribution of content has sped up – whether it is Posterous or Twitter or just much improved Wordpress, the means of doing this stuff just gets easier with every passing day.

And the other thing that has happened is that social media tools have spread. The original disruptors, look almost conservative when presented with the mass of people all experimenting and familiarising themselves with the realtime social web. Most people have no reference points around the journalistic profession, other than journalism as they often see it practiced: intrusive, trivial, exploitative, voyeuristic…

We’ll work this out, this social web thing. And there will be horror-shows, mis-steps and calamities along the way. But the fact that everyone can create and publish is here to say. Social media’s not something you can be for or against…

Tweet This Post 

How I Tweet

Nov 02, 2009 –

Way back in July of 2009, I explained how I used Twitter. Lots has changed since then, so this is an update to explain how I tweet. As a small business owner, you can adopt my techniques to use Twitter as a marketing tool.

Question: How can you follow more than 180,000 people? [...]

Guy Kawasaki is of the “personal brand” school of Twitter user – and what a personal brand it is. His use of Twitter is always evolving and it is always worth taking note of, even if it bears little relation to your personal use of the platform.

Few brands (yet) will have four full-time Twitter writers working on the platform or use the spread of processes and tools that Mr K does. But for Guy Kawasaki Twitter “is what I do” – maintaining his network and his personal brand’s usefulness to it is how he does business.

Look beyond the “how to” aspect of blog posts like this (and he links to a bunch of others at the end of it) and there are many interesting implications for individuals’ and organisations’ life in networks to be drawn out…

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

Tweet This Post 

Plans to make internet access a “fundamental right” are to be dropped, a move that paves the way for European law enforcement agencies to cut off web users who have been caught downloading pirated films and music.

The European parliament has agreed to drop an amendment that was aimed at countering so-called “three strikes” laws, legislation that allows law enforcement agencies to shut down internet connections that have been allegedly used for illegal file-sharing .

Once this silly three strikes distraction has passed from the minds of the industry and legislators, internet access will become a human right in the same way as access to water and electricity is.

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

Tweet This Post 

HuffPost’s Game Changers celebrates 100 innovators, visionaries, and leaders in 10 categories who are harnessing the power of new media to reshape their fields and change the world. With your help, we’ve picked 10 people who are changing the game in philanthropy. We honor and salute them.

Huffington Post runnings its Game Changers programme, asking people to vote for the innovators in media, green, politics, business and other areas. I’m looking forward to taking a look at them all but highly recommend you start with the philanthropy section, where innovators behind initiatives from Kiva to a social network for philanthropists are celebrated.

Lots of inspiration here, whatever your field…

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

Tweet This Post 

Proposing to terminate your access to the information society because you share living quarters with an accused copyright infringer is madness. The entertainment industry has mistaken the net for an apocalyptically uncontrolled entertainment medium. It wants to take charge of it so that it can be made into a medium more hospitable to its interests.

Cory Doctorow taking apart three strikes legislation makes many good points in this article.

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

Tweet This Post 

there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:

• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.

• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

This connects with some thoughts I have been having about the web as a “synchronicity engine”, about how developing networks literacies can help you make the right connections not only when using the web but all of your life…

I started developing some thoughts around this for “Me and My Web Shadow”, but in the final edit have removed them as it felt like too much of a tangent.

It’s great to see John Hagel developing the synchronicity theme for management thinking (see the video I posted a few days ago). I’m finding that line of thinking every useful indeed.

Blog post (almost certainly) to follow soon…

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

Tweet This Post 

In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

A quote from “The soul of man under socialism”, an essay by Oscar Wilde.

So many of the things Wilde accuses journalism of are what journalists accuse social media of now…

Via Stephen Fry’s Blessay – http://www.stephenfry.com/2009/10/19/poles-politeness-and-politics-in-the-age-of-twitter/

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

Tweet This Post 

#CabinetForum — Could the creative industry grasp the future? Mostly not.

• Share 

by Guest Author on October 30, 2009

[UK] This is a guest post by communications specialist Antony Mayfield (twitter: amayfield) about C&binet Forum, the trendily named three day conference this week featuring the great and the good from the UK’s political, media and ‘creative’ industries. This ‘creative business conference’ was run by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, as a result of their joint publication (with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Department for Innovation and Skills) of a strategy paper for the creative economy called Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy.

If you liked ampersands, the Government’s creative industries conference, C&binet Forum was a great place to be. The logo sat everywhere, from the signs for dinner to massive “&” sculpture in one of The Grove’s lobbies.

And, and, and…

…and the ampersand character fitted the complexity of the conference. Just when you thought you could define or dismiss C&binet in a sentence, you realised it was too complicated to be concise about. For instance…

I think I would add a qualifying “yet” to the end of the headline on this Techcrunch article I wrote about this week’s Cabinet Forum, but that’s the relentless optimist in me, I guess….

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

Tweet This Post 

CNN.com officially relaunched its website this week, and we’re pleased to announce that the updated CNN.com/TECH section now includes headlines syndicated from Mashable. This is in addition to a new column I’ll be writing on the site, going live Wednesday.

We’re in the middle of an exciting transition as social media and the mainstream begin to overlap in all sorts of interesting ways: this underlines our belief that social media isn’t some marketing fad, but rather a fundamental change to the way we consume and interact with content. We’ve been covering this transition for four years, from the rise of social networking to the birth of the “social media” movement as people began to use these tools of personal connection to pass content around the web.

Nice work by Mashable – what’s happening in social media is much bigger than its implications for marketing…

Posted via web from Antony’s posterous

Tweet This Post