Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Rupert Murdoch on Sky News:
Make of it what you will. It seems pretty incoherent to me. I think Cory Doctorow’s pretty much right – these musings are fantasies, and his editors are going to have a horrible time trying to implement all these confused thought bubbles.
Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson.
One of the sharpest sociological observers of social media on the block, danah boyd, has written a cracker of a post at apophenia pointing out that people actually tend to use Facebook status updates and Twitter for different purposes, and that the social context of each is quite distinct. It’s refreshing to see this kind of analysis, when many so-called ’social media experts’ are just obsessed with whether x is the new y. There’s space for all sorts of things in a healthy digital culture ecology.
There’s a big confab on in Sydney on the 5th and 6th of November on all things social media and future of journalism – Media140. Rachel Hills is running a competition to win a free pass to the conference. For details, please see her post!
A lot of the most reliable data on web use and social media comes from the World Internet Project. Most of the findings from the project derive from rigorous quantitative research, and unlike a lot of what purports to be analysis of the web and social media is therefore free of commercial or ideological and boosterish agendas.
WIP’s founder, Professor Jeffrey Cole, is currently in Australia.
Margaret Simons observed in today’s Crikey email that he’d given a briefing to a Fairfax strategy meeting on Monday:
So when Cole speaks, media executives tend to listen, even if they don’t like what they hear. Cole told me yesterday that Fairfax’s Melbourne chief executive, Don Churchill, was “at one with me” on the future of print newspapers, but that some other members of management seemed to think, or at least hope, that the bad times for Fairfax papers would fade with the end of the global financial crisis.
Yesterday afternoon Cole expanded on his views at a public lecture at Swinburne University. He said that print newspapers will cease to exist in the United States within 3-6 years. The rate of decline in Australia is more gradual, but he gives us a maximum of 10 years, with the only possible bright spot being weekend newspapers, because they are more like magazines, some of which will continue to do well.
Simons has posted a longer summary of Cole’s thoughts at her blog, Content Makers. Continue reading ‘The web, everyday life and the future of media’
There’s been a fair bit of interesting reading about government 2.0 initiatives (the new ‘branding’ for what used to be called e-democracy or e-government) lately; probably prompted by a summit on the topic in Washington DC and the Australian government’s initiative in this area (and, no doubt, in some instances, by a confluence between the two).
Among notable articles are a somewhat sceptical take in the New York Times from Anand Giradharadas and much closer to home, a piece by Tim Watts at On Line Opinion:
It’s all too easy to get caught up in the “cool” factor of Web 2.0. The potential of the technology is so amazing that sometimes we can forget that at the end of the day, it’s still people on either end of the tubes. It’s important to remember that Web 2.0 is all about people. As Michael Wesch has said, “The Machine is Us”. The Government 2.0 Taskforce could do worse than to follow the lead of one of the great political campaigners of our time and hang a sign in the group’s (virtual) war room constantly bringing it back to this fundamental theme. It could read: It’s the Community, Stupid!
Watts’ argument, with which I would agree, might be summed up by the short paraphrase, “if you build it, they won’t necessarily come”. Or perhaps, as I’ve been arguing recently, some decisions have to be made about which populations are being incited to come, and for what purposes; I’ve previously written on some issues around the digital divide in discussing the Australian iniatives.
It seems to me, analytically, that a number of issues have to be sorted out which haven’t always been well thought through in much of the discussion of government 2.0:
Fairfax has revived an old masthead for its new opinion site. In some ways, that’s probably the most interesting aspect of the launch – those who remember the old National Times might well also recall the days when genuinely hard hitting investigative journalism in the public interest was the stock in trade of at least one Australian newspaper.
Commentary and analysis on the new commentary and analysis site has concentrated on the claim made, in this instance by Darrin Goodsir, that this sort of online opinion vehicle somehow represents ‘the best of journalism’. Something similar was said by David Penberthy when News Limited launched The Punch.
Enough spin, from publications that also boast their commitment to cutting through it. Let’s call these websites what they really are: another cheap web platform for advertising.
Everyone has been asking me what I think of Fairfax’s new National Times website.
The answer is: not much. From Fairfax’s point of view, I can see the sense. Why wouldn’t you slice and dice your content in a different way, given the opportunity and the low costs involved? By doing so you maximise the national audience and create more real estate for advertising. As for the content, so far it is unremarkable – a mixture of stuff aggregated from the Fairfax papers’ staffers, and extremely variable content from other contributors.
Simons also hones in on the practice of not paying contributors who aren’t staffers. I guess that’s the logical extension of hoovering up traffic through encouraging long comments threads by writing provocative content as a ‘blog’, which has been the typical approach of the MSM mastheads to interactivity. Unless this stuff disappears behind a paywall, it looks like it’s the proverbial citizens (and a motley crew of pollies and academics and interest group folks) who are going to be the putative financial saviours of Big Media.
I also wonder if they’ve been skimping on web designers. What is it with these sites and really busy layouts that break most of the rules of design?
At New Matilda, Jason Wilson takes on the prevailing wisdom about the News Limited paywall plans:
The notion that News Corp’s proposed paywall “won’t work” is in danger of becoming common sense. The problem with this is that, on the contrary, I can see how it might well work.
While some of the caveats Wilson enters about the received narrative are no doubt valid, I don’t know that he is actually providing “facts” that have been “overlooked” – as the tag line says (though that may be a bit of sub-editing, rather than Wilson’s opinion). Among other points, he argues that bundling selected niche content might find a market, in a similar way to Foxtel style channels.
I can (just) believe that there’s a chance that people might pay for sport, but I think if there was a huge paying market for right wing opinionistas, they wouldn’t be giving Quadrant away free to so many libraries.
The missing question that needs answering is how much of the content News generates is actually stuff people want at all, and then how much do they want it… I suspect MX is a better representation of what most people want to read, but I doubt anyone would pay for it. You can bundle up celebrity stories with a heap of other stuff and make a magazine that will be purchased at the check out, but I’m still not sure that most of this ‘content’ has any market value online – in part because the way people read online is very different from print.
Elsewhere: Debra Adams.
The Centre for Policy Development has released a new issue of its online magazine, Insight:
As the internet continues to make transparency and collaboration cheaper and easier, governments around the world face increasing pressure to become more open and more participatory. This edition of InSight looks at the idea of Upgrading Democracy: combining open access to government information with collaborative policy development to increase citizens’ influence over the decisions that affect their lives. The ‘Government 2.0 Taskforce’ is currently putting together its advice on how to open up access to public sector information and use online tools to improve the conversation between government and citizens. This InSight, which has also doubled as a submission to the Taskforce, unpacks the ‘Government 2.0′ concept for the non-geeks out there, as well as featuring some hot new ideas for those who are already in the thick of it.
You can read the issue here.
Bizarrely, I found “highly evolved human” Brad Pitt’s tips for social media etiquette in Wired somewhat persuasive.
On Line Opinion has been featuring pieces on the internet and everyday life throughout August. My contribution, published today, examines some questions about the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, and in the process, busts some myths about ‘Digital Natives’ and cyber-utopianism. I think it’s important to have a realistic grasp of the actual cultural uses of social media in order to avoid the important questions which do arise collapsing into silly and dichotomised arguments about how the intertubes will either save the world or destroy all good things. The reach of the social web has now become pervasive enough that we’re in a position to assess where we are, and to debunk some of the more hyperbolised claims on both sides of the non-debate we have all too often about the web and social life.
I’ll have more to say about this soon, as this OLO piece is a spinoff from my talk for the Queensland Writers Centre on the Digital Age and the future of writing. I’m working that up in longer form for publication.
One of the most interesting teaching assignments I’ve had for a while is tutoring in a course in New Communications Technologies offered through the School of Humanities at Griffith. Some of the class discussions we’ve had so far this semester have been really interesting – confirming some hunches I have about the fallacies of the ‘Digital Natives’ discourse among other things. But one of the most intriguing aspects of our interchanges has been the articulation of differing views on and revelation of different levels of knowledge about the issue of privacy in the use of social media, and particularly social networking sites such as Facebook (whose use is now so ubiquitous that like Google, it’s morphed from a proper noun into a verb).
It would seem that I’m not the only person facilitating such conversations in a university context. Melissa Gregg, from Sydney Uni, wrote a really ace post the other day about some issues which had arisen in tutorials she convened about Facebook and employers’ demands for profiles as part of the recruitment and selection process. She writes about this at home cooked theory:
…for me, the most disturbing revelation came in tutorials, when students started talking about how many employers are now asking for print-outs of Facebook profiles from job applicants. It sounded particularly common in entertainment and service industries, even though I detected some were suggesting it was commonplace in corporate interviews as well–that it should be taken for granted if you were looking to work for a significant firm.
Her remarks sparked some interesting comments, and prompted a post on the legal issues surrounding this sort of demand by Legal Eagle at Skepticlawyer. Legal Eagle’s post, as usual assured in its comprehensiveness and insight, correctly notes that the law has not kept up with technology in this domain, as in many others.
There’s another set of issues arising here about the increasing blurring of professional and personal identity. Continue reading ‘Facebook, social media, subjectivity and workplace privacy’
An American Court has required Google to disclose the identity of a blogger who allegedly defamed a New York model, Liskula Cohen, so that she could take an action for libel:
Judge Madden rejected the claims by the blogger’s lawyer that the comments were mere opinion or “trash talk”, and that only factual assertions could be considered libellous.
“The thrust of the blog is that the petitioner is a sexually promiscuous woman,” Judge Madden wrote in her judgment, noting that the comments were run alongside photos of Cohen in suggestive poses.
The blog, which was shut down in March, was almost entirely devoted to slagging off Cohen. It contained just five entries, all of which were published on August 21 last year.
It’s interesting to ponder how some of the comments on prominent blogs hosted by mainstream media organisations might fare if this precedent were followed in Australia. We all know what I’m talking about, but for a sample of the sort of bilge that is far too blithely published, see the quotes in Jason Wilson’s piece yesterday at New Matilda.
To some degree, bloggers on MSM sites have a practical, if not legal, immunity because of the deep pockets of their employers. But those who effectively make money for those mastheads, as Wilson argues, by eagerly responding to the elicitation of grossly offensive and personalised comments, might pause and consider whether they’d individually be prepared to defend them in court. I doubt the bloggers who foster attack speech would offer anything other than rhetorical support.
Some comments threads on independent blogs might also be problematic. I can think of some blogs where the comments consist almost entirely of vilification and abuse of individuals.
It’s also well worth noting that misogynistic slurs were the basis for this court decision.
Elsewhere: Mashable.
Update: Bronwen Clune.
Update: Legal Eagle.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
The ABC of Drumming up some online
opinionanalysisWhen the ABC’s Drum was launched, Margaret Simons cited a piece by Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes on internal discussions of ABC journos writing opinion pieces, which I referred to in this post:
I was thinking about this again yesterday, prompted partly by the renewed criticism of the right wing balancing act on the ABC, and partly by a snippet from a Crikey reader (more of that later). Annabel Crabb also popped up to discuss her practice as a ‘political sketch writer’ [deconstructed here by Andrew Elder]. Continue reading ‘The ABC of Drumming up some online
opinionanalysis’