• The Essential Chomsky
• Spotify playlists – latest here
• Chaos theory
• Krugman’s Effective Frequency
• Applying critical theory and literary analogies from the 19th century to social media
• Spider and the Flies
• Dadaism
• Watching this list of horror films
• Modeselektor
• Using Flickr and Vimeo more often
• Obsessing over the Amazon and Layer iPhone apps

So, now you know. Just click one, it’ll make you feel closer to me. All fuzzy and nice.

(I had to write a post like this after I read through my last five – they were sooo serious.)

I feel like I had to explain my stance before I begin to write what I’m about to write…

Is the internet a good vehicle for democracy and ‘the voice of the people’? I don’t think so.

Before you scroll straight to the comment box, let me explain.

By opening up politics, you’ll bring in too many voices. Everyone’s opinion is slightly different, and trying to reach a common goal will still leave each voice slightly disappointed. Giving power to the people will only result in mass disappointment when that power is given to someone in power.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time.The Internet won’t appease all of the people all of the time.

The only way that the Internet could represent a powerful vehicle for change would be if there was a seismic shift in our definition of government. Decentralisation, distilled into a super-local level would still be too far from our expectations if we’re promised total democracy.

I need to work these thoughts up more, but I’m finding that I use my blog more and more as a memory dump.

Not just normal reading either, potentially insightful reading. I’ve been reading all about Herbert Krugman. Now, here’s a quick Herbert Krugman lesson…

Herbert Krugman was born sometime this decade, not sure when as he seems to be a bit like Lord Lucan. Could you fix it for me Jim, for Herb to find me and let me interview him a bit?

He worked at General Electric in the 60’s and while he was there, he had a few thoughts about how television advertising affects the decision making process.

More specifically he looked at the psychology behind decision making. Now, the term effective frequency wasn’t coined by Krugman, it’s been around for a while and there are various conflating opinions on it, but here’s the Jed definition;

Effective Frequency is the amount of exposure a person needs to have their decision making process swayed towards a specific product. IE, the amount of times someone needs to see a PS3 advert before they decide to buy one.

So, a guy called Thomas Smith wrote a guide called Successful Advertising in 1885 and believed that people needed to be exposed to an advert 20 times before they’d be swayed, and each time they’d feel something slightly different;

The first time people look at any given ad, they don’t even see it.
The second time, they don’t notice it.
The third time, they are aware that it is there.
The fourth time, they have a fleeting sense that they’ve seen it somewhere before.
The fifth time, they actually read the ad.
The sixth time they thumb their nose at it.
The seventh time, they start to get a little irritated with it.
The eighth time, they start to think, "Here’s that confounded ad again."
The ninth time, they start to wonder if they’re missing out on something.
The tenth time, they ask their friends and neighbors if they’ve tried it.
The eleventh time, they wonder how the company is paying for all these ads.
The twelfth time, they start to think that it must be a good product.
The thirteenth time, they start to feel the product has value.
The fourteenth time, they start to remember wanting a product exactly like this for a long time.
The fifteenth time, they start to yearn for it because they can’t afford to buy it.
The sixteenth time, they accept the fact that they will buy it sometime in the future.
The seventeenth time, they make a note to buy the product.
The eighteenth time, they curse their poverty for not allowing them to buy this terrific product.
The nineteenth time, they count their money very carefully.
The twentieth time prospects see the ad, they buy what is offering.

Now, Krugman decided that Smith was being a bit over zealous, he believed that you only needed to be exposed to an advert three times for it to remain in your conscious. He thought that the third stage just repeated itself until you bought something, so, without further ado, here’s big Herb’s three stages;

Curiosity.

Recognition.

Decision.

If you’re still reading by this point, you’ll probably be wondering why I’m writing about some fella called Herb. Well, my lovelies, Krugman’s theory still stands, but now it also stands in social media.

(Before you jump on my back and hit me on the skull, I know that there are a wealth of distinctions between advertising and social media – but psychological theory applies to every discipline of communications.)

Social media, and more widely the internet, are ADHD inducing mediums. People want information by the second, not hour. So people only have time to give media three opportunities… Here’s how I see things;

Curiosity – this is the brands job, they need to innovate to spike curiosity.

Recognition – the content should then enable recognition.

Decision – providing the context is correct, the decision should have already been made. This is still a key stage though.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot at Wolfstar is an educational understanding of how to explain social activity to brands – it’s too easy to stay within the bubble and expect the world to understand their RSS from their iPadio.

So, a simple explanation (quickly followed by tons of examples) to good social activity is;

Innovate

Provide content

Do both in context

That’s it really, probably my most longwinded post this year, but I think it was necessary and hopefully you’ll disagree with my ideas and we can fight it out for a bit.

So, thoughts?

I studied English Literature at university and read a module called Fin de siècle, which was basically a group of books about both French and English society with a bit of philosophy thrown in for good measure. That’s probably the worst spark notes edition of Fin de siècle literature ever. Oh well.

So, pulling back onto the tracks briefly, when I read these texts I was pretty blown away. Then when I got a bit geeky and started using the internet (surprisingly, I didn’t get geeky until about 18 months ago – I know, hard to believe) I realised that there were some odd parallels between philosophical and critical theories from the Fin de siècle and the way people behave online.

Here are probably the most prominent examples of the transposition;

• The crowd (read Emile Zola’s Nana, you’ll see what I mean)
• The carnivalesque – Bakhtinian theory, based on Rabelais and His World
• The fragmentation of ‘high-society’ in both Arthur Conan Doyle and Zola’s work

I’m going to read much more Fin de siècle literature, find more examples and then explain why I’ve just cited those three, but as I’ve been trying to write this post for about six months, I’m publishing the first half of it as a push for me to write the second half of it.

I’d also like you to contribute and speculate as to why I’ve pulled those three areas out…

This is true. And you know what is also true? The internet won’t change our lives, it will add to our lives. It will contribute value, it will stick on, it will plaster over queasy relationships and it will make us all more knowledgeable, more aware, more… socially intelligent.

I recently turned off push updates from Foursquare, mainly because Michael Litman seems to want to be the mayor of everywhere. Let’s not see this as a slight, Michael is using a new technology and trying to smash home the social element. The only reason I became a bit irritated is because he’s in London and I’m in Leeds. That’s quite a commute for just one beer.

Let’s jump right back to my original point; the internet, and more specifically, social media, wont change the world. MySpace changed the music industry (didn’t), Facebook changed our lives (didn’t), Twitter changed the way we connect with people (didn’t really). All that the aforementioned three have done is add value to existing relationships. Yeah, sure, they may have facilitated the creation of a few relationships, in fact, they may have created 30 billion* relationships, but what the actual relationship is built on is similarities. Familiarisations. The same things ‘real life’ friendships are built on. All social networks do is add another level of communication to the mix.

Let’s look at real life for a second: Jason and myself** have been best friends for over ten years, I love the guy, he’s great, but if he text me every fifteen minutes I’d end up posting him something horrible in the mail. As things are, we talk about once a week, we text a few times a week and I check his Facebook profile probably once a day to see what’s going on. If he joins Twitter I’ll follow him, but all it will do is add value to our relationship. I’ll know more about him (but only as much as he wants me to know, but that’s a conversation for another time) and I’ll know what he’s up to immediately. It won’t alter our relationship, it will add to it. If he starts using Foursquare, or Dopplr, or Songkick, or Wave – all that will change is the way we connect, not our relationship. We’ll still be friends with embarrassing stories we’d prefer kept off of the internet. We’ll still be normal friends.

But wait, I hear you cry, what when relationships are the other way around? OK, so I’m friends with Tim Hoang. There, I said it, now everyone knows. Well, I met Tim on Twitter about a year ago. In fact, and I quote, he called me ‘a whore’, which was nice. I’ve probably @’d him 20 times in a year, I’ve probably seen him eight times this year, I’ve spoken to him about 40 times on the phone, I’ve text him (probably) thousands of (drunken and inappropriate) messages. See, and this is the point, we met online, but because we’re similar folk, we bonded offline. A ‘relationship’ in social media or public relations as a whole is only worth anything if it’s a friendship. Let’s not ‘work a room’ or ‘manipulate our contacts’ let’s work with our friends and build something meaningful.

Next week on Sesame Street, the number four.

* This is not fact, although please expect it to be the number quoted at some point in a UK national newspaper.

** Real life example.

** I’ve made a few grammatical edits to this post, nothing more, nothing less. **

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media believes that Spotify is a house of cards (the video, in case you missed it), that Spotify is built on an unsustainable business model and that music subscription services don’t work because people want to own their music.

Now in my opinion, he’s not a million miles away, music subscription services haven’t  worked before – but his argument on ownership is.

Loren believes that you have to physically own a CD to have a connection to it. Nope, wrong.

Music is beautiful, disgusting, emotional, cold, heart-warming, soul destroying. Music is emotion. And emotion is about connection rather than ownership. Here’s what I’m trying to get at; if you read a book and it changes your life, you don’t have to own a copy for it to still have an effect. You’ve already got your connection. The artist doesn’t make the jewel case, he makes the music.

Once Spotify goes mobile (which will hopefully be soon) it’ll be as dramatic as the invention of MP3’s. And everyone wins, the artist still makes a living (albeit a slightly more modest one, but artists should create for art’s sake, not for fame or money – that’s an argument for another day).

You don’t need to own something to be connected to it. You just need to be able to connect to it.

The weirdest thing is, where does the sharing stop and the competition start? Businesses rarely used to share things, they kept everything close to their chest. Rightly so, why would you share? But since the internet forced us to all be nice to each other there’s this odd atmosphere. How much can I tell you? If we share everything we’ll undoubtedly improve the industry, but at what cost? There’d be some casualties.

Where does community end and corporation begin?

So, I’m going to throw this whole malarky to the floor. A problem shared is a problem halved. And if I get five people involved it’s a problem sixthed.

So, David, Sally, Neville, Wadds, and Stuart… What do you guys consider as ‘too much information’?

Now, I’m going to be honest, I put some things on the list that I hadn’t heard before. But I am going to pretend that I’m a cool hipster with an immaculate knowledge of new and exciting music. Shhhh. It’s our secret.

Here’s a link to the playlist. Enjoy.

I’ve been feeling a bit geeky recently. I know, I hear your cries of ‘Nooo, you’re not geeky Jed’ but t’is true. I am. In a cool way though. Like cool-geeky how Ferris Bueller is a bit geeky. Or how Weird Science is a cool film about geeks.

Jesus my language skills need a little revisit. My sentences are starting to read like cut-away scenes from Family Guy.

Drew Benvie posted a link to the latest ReadWriteWeb article on the Gartner Hype Cycle and the Interweb and I was a bit shocked at the lack of knowledge I had about some of the technologies on the graph… So I started Googling like a mad man. Not a character from Mad Men, but a crazy man. Like Mad Max. But without the DUI charges.

So, here’s what I’m learning about at the moment (oh, and I’m only giving out Wikipedia links, I’m going to read up in everything in a decent amount of depth and then post definitions and applications of each later this week – I promise!);

• Mesh Networking
• Service-orientated architecture
• The Internet of Things
• Telepresence
• Behavioural economics 

And here’s the swiney graphic that started it all…

I ran away this weekend. It’s the first time I’ve done that since I was about 16. I had my reasons (which I won’t go into) and here is the photo log of my adventure…

Oh, and like me (if you’ve met me) there is absolutely no cohesion.

[Disclaimer: these photos were taken using a Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. Sony Ericsson is a client of Wolfstar, Wolfstar employs me]