continous partial social awareness

Drifting through my infoverse this week has been the phrase “what if the signal is the noise?” I can’t figure out where it was first coined, unfortunately, as I couldn’t find it in Google, del.icio.us (where I believe I first encountered it) or Technorati. (Plz help.)

Anyway, I’m ignoring “real work” this morning in favor of catching up with my del.icio.us bookmarks and Google Reader items while monitoring Twitter, Pounce and Gmail. There is usually a pretty decent signal-to-noise ratio with these mechanisms, because my friends and I tend to have somewhat similar interests. My del.icio.us network is heavily tipped towards other people investigating or studying social media, for example, and my Twitter friends tend to post memes that I enjoy. But this still assumes that the importance is the “noise” in the “signal”, finding the “importance” in the big cloud of links, comments, reviews, memes, essays, YouTube videos, etc. that we’re all confronted with daily.

For example, in the last hour I:
- Checked my LJ friends list
–Watched the new Kanye West Video based on a friend’s LJ post
— and posted a comment on the interplay of black and white culture on the LJ of my friend who posted the Kanye West video, based on a book (”The History of Hip”) that I’m reading
–Checked out the “Way of the Awesome” blog
–Read danah’s new essay responding to comments on her Facebook/MySpace issue, and thought very briefly about the class implications of my status project and how to best integrate class analysis into the proposal; then thought about how tired I am of the privileging of quantitative data and how many shoddy quantitative studies there are; then contemplated blogging about that, then decided it would not be in my best interests
-Checked Twitter
–Read through Metroblogging LA’s “famous fictional Los Angelenos” (and was happy to see Weetzie Bat AND Hiro Protagonist on there. Love!)
-Checked Pownce
–Found out that there’s a third leaked episode of Weeds pre-air on the torrents
–Made mental note to download it later while I’m making lunch
-Checked del.icio.us
–Noted that Fred had tagged my blog post on Echo Chambers from yesterday

.. and so forth and so on. I bet each of you reading this could put a similar chart together, maybe even in Visio if you’re real geeks. The web is hypertextual. It’s about linking and exploration. It’s not about linearity. It’s more like a game than a causal journey. It’s about leaving pages, learning about things, returning to places where you started, discovering new things, getting distracted. This is the antithesis of what we think of as “work”.

The “what if the signal is the noise” post/essay/blog seemed to be about how all the ephemeral social data we collect from blogs, LiveJournal, Twitter, dodgeball, Pownce, Facebook’s feed, etc. IS the point of all these applications. We don’t check del.icio.us so that we can get a neatly organized list of what’s important. We want to see what kinds of ideas are gaining currency and what people are talking about, to connect to a larger community. I was trying to explain to someone the other day that LiveJournal, for me, is about knowing that my friends are there, that we are co-present, even if we’re not talking. It is the location of self in a larger context that is the antithesis of the alienating internet.

But I also think that consuming all of these small, little pieces of data (music videos, microblogs) is part of gathering data to inform our views of the world. The Kanye West video gave me another example to think through a book that I’m reading. Skimming my del.icio.us network links list enables me to see what my peers are thinking about in terms of social software. So it’s not just connection and location but using hundreds or thousands of sources to build up pictures of things or ideas about things or philosophies or paradigms. My boyfriend reads tons of economics blogs every day. I mostly read blogs about social software, fashion, and consumerism. All the data we consume over the period of a day influences our overall outlook. It keeps us sharp and constantly changing.

Is this an overly optimistic view of meme-land? Of Wired’s snack-size info-bits? Perhaps. And I am probably in the minority of infojunkies in that I also read lots of lengthy essays and books as well, which sometimes means I have no idea what the latest, coolest idea is. But there’s something about this idea of the “infocloud” which creates an almost osmotic understanding of certain concepts. This doesn’t substitute for traditional knowledge or learning, but it is another form of it, perhaps “continuous partial social awareness”? With apologies to Linda Stone, and thanks to Tantek Çelik who I had a great conversation with about this stuff a few days ago.

Technorati Tags: signal to noise ratio, continous partial attention, infoclouds

studying the culture of marketing

As any regular reader of this blog knows, I’m fascinated by marketing, particularly online marketing. One of the many and endless fields that I affiliate myself with is “surveillance studies”, and my focus within that is on the ethics of marketing practices like behavioral tracking and targeting, astroturf, fake street team and guerilla campaigns, etc. (I may be speaking on this at SXSW this spring. I’ll keep you posted). My interests in participatory culture, fandom, social networks, and Web2.0 all overlap with marketing as well.

Very few academics work on “the culture of marketing”. One of the few who does is Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor, who wrote a brilliant book called Born to Buy about marketing to children. Arlene Davila, a cultural anthropologist, wrote Latinos Inc. about the strategic creation of “Latinos” as an identity closely tied to a lucrative demographic-cum-consumer group.

Of course, in the non-academic realm there are plenty of resources. I tend to find Adbusters a bit polemic and over-the-top, not to mention not always well-researched, but I really love Stay Free, an NYC-based zine about marketing, culture, and advertising.

Now, I’m in an interesting position because I’ve worked in marketing for years, and lots of my friends work in marketing. The academic viewpoint on this tends to be “marketing is evil, capitalism is evil, marketers are evil and they have no self-awareness.” Let’s break this down:

1. Regardless of what you think about American capitalism, it’s not going anywhere any time soon.

2. Likewise marketing.

3. Therefore, doesn’t it make more sense to try to work towards ethical marketing, or at least elimination of the more shady/egregious examples of the field, rather than eliminating it all?

4. And honestly, while there are plenty of rah-rah cheerleader marketroids in the field, there are plenty of people who are thoughtful, highly intelligent and introspective about their field.

Two blogs that come to mind are The Black Fox Blog, which covers marketing and technology. Market My Monkey is a similar blog, but more focused on the entertainment industry.

Why read this type of thing? Well, first, it is impossible to study online anything without paying attention to commercial and consumer-driven uses of the internet. Even if you’re looking at open source, Wikipedia, or “Progressive NetRoots” (yargh), it’s really crucial to look at how for-profit sites interact with other types of sites, how they share techniques or stand in opposition to each other, how they feed off for-profit sites, etc. Second, I hate to say it, but marketing, like pr0n, is becoming an indicator of successful social technology. It often hits weird, emergent behaviors dead-on. Out-there online campaigns might be more edge than early adopter, but they can still be useful to think with. Finally, if you’re interested in media studies at all, you have to look at marketing (or, overall, “the political economy of media”) in order to make sense of the overall media ecosystem (e.g. what gets funded, how does it make money, why is X chosen over Y, how does media consolidation affect things, etc.).

I have a lot of marketing / industry resources in the sidebar for anyone curious.

NPR

Yesterday, the Center for Media Research released a report on radio ratings. NPR is now the fourth most listened to radio format. That’s more popular than rock, dance, R&B/Urban or talk. The most popular format is News/Talk, with an audience of 19.4 million adult Americans, which is like, nothing. Second is country, and third is CHR, which is “Current Hit Radio” or Top 40. (See radio station format guide).

Since NPR isn’t advertiser supported, it is generally ignored by the general mechanisms to measure audience share. What’s interesting is that NPR is very high in the “most listened to” statistics, and it has a very high conversion rate– once you start listening to NPR, you generally continue.

The age of Big Media has not been kind to radio, mostly due to media consolidation. Media conglomerates have gobbled up locally owned stations, replacing their local DJs/morning shows/program directors with cheap syndicated content. The lack of actual people programming actual radio has caused problems during emergencies, as automated programming can’t provide local information (something radio’s very good at, traditionally). The rise in payola can be directly tied to media consolidation as radio station group owners (like Clear Channel) strike deals with independent “promoters” to provide radio time in exchange for kickbacks. And “vertical integration” means that many of the same companies who own radio stations own stadiums, billboards, and promotional companies, meaning they have a vested interest to cross-promote artists and festivals.

(Clear Channel is obviously the most egregious offender, from organizing and paying for pro-war rallies in 2003 to banning the Dixie Chicks from all their stations and stadiums due to their anti-Bush sentiments. More controversy in the Clear Channel Wikipedia entry.)

Result? A lack of diversity on radio: the same few songs hour after hour, entire formats basically absent from the airwaves, little local content and little of interest to most people. (And of course Clear Channel stalwartly pushing the Republican agenda). Satellite radio (XFM, Sirius) has built an entire business model around providing superior radio content in terms of musical diversity and genre formats.

NPR stations generally play little music, but they do fill the need for superior local content. Our local NYC affiliate covers NYC news in great depth, and consistently interviews New York writers, artists, musicians, politicians, pundits, and citizens. Although NPR is no threat to the advertising revenue of traditional radio, they are all competing for audiences. Best case scenario is that local commercial radio starts providing local content again.

It’s also interesting that in all the hubbub over Air America (which hasn’t been super successful, although my mom and the guy who sells me jewelry in Union Square both love it), people forget that we have a liberal radio network already.

More at Mediageek, a nice blog on the media landscape.

Technorati Tags: npr, media consolidation, radio

marketing surveillance 1: behavioral marketing

I talk a lot about online data mining and aggregation. Let’s talk specifically about the techniques online advertisers use to collect and “monetize” user information. First up is “behavioral marketing”, a hot buzzword in marketing since 2004.

Behavioral marketing is marketing to people based on their behavior. Say I sell pizza. I want to market my pizza directly towards people whose behavior shows that they are receptive to, or interested in, my pizza. Offline, it’s not that easy to figure this out: you could mine my grocery store rewards card to find that I like to buy frozen pizza, or you could access Domino’s or Local Pizzeria phone records, but all this information is locked up in “information silos” and not easy to combine. However, online the problem is that there is too much data, not too little. Thus, marketers concentrate on “high value data points”.

From iMedia:

The overriding and proven assumption here is that what pages Web site visitors click on and where they go from those pages indicates at least a presumptive interest in buying products related to the topics that they click on. For example, repeat visits to a Web page with reviews of sport utility vehicles, coupled with a cruise to the automotive section of classified ads on a site, clearly indicate at least a curiosity about SUVs.

Now, let us suppose that same visitor is also going to pages where she clicks through to an online book seller to a book about how to help your child adjust to kindergarten. Behavioral targeting specialists may look at this data and start to conclude that the site visitor is looking for an SUV to fit the transportation needs of her growing brood.

Often, this information is not just gleaned from one visit, but repeat visits over time. Perhaps on the first few visits to a newspaper site, most clicks are to articles about SUVs. On the second visit, or maybe the third, the articles are revisited, but the customer also clicks on the automotive ads. It does not take a degree in rocket science (or in marketing, for that matter) to recognize the likelihood the customer is on a likely trajectory from “investigate” to “purchase.”

This behavior, then, is extremely individualized, and marketing is designed to interface with users at the point where their behavior indicates they might be ready to purchase.

(Com scholars will appreciate this piece comparing mass advertising to the magic bullet theory & behavioral marketing to uses & gratifications theory.)

Here’s an illustration of how this works:

1. Users visit websites
2. Their site visits are tracked and aggregated across the sites using tracking cookies
3. Users are shuffled into psychographic/demographic groups based on behavior (like “hip mamas” or “car enthusiasts under 40″)
4. Users see different ads based on their demographic group.

This method is a perfect fit for Web2.0 companies (via Charlene Li):

A case in point: digg.com produces no content of their own but has a very unique way to look into the interests of its users. Kevin showed a very cool software tool they use internally called “Trace” that looks at the stories a specific user is reading, and shows in real time how that user’s attention jumps to other topics. Kevin also showed how “diggers” were related to each other based on the stories they mutually “dugg”. The traditional “audience management” advocates like Tacoda have shifted toward behavioral targeting, but at the core, understanding users at a highly granular level will be an essential skill for media companies.

Awesome! So keep this in mind next time you put together a kick-ass, totally personalized, super Web2.0 experience for yourself.

Technorati Tags: behavioral marketing, marketing surveillance, web2.0

Liveblogging the Privacy & Ethics of Surveillance Workshop

I am in Austin at David Phillips’ Ethical Surveillance Workshop at UT. This is a great, very cross-disciplinary mini-conference that brings people doing surveillance studies together from across the academy, including legal scholars, information school professors, geographers, artists, sociologists, cultural studies scholars and two other graduate students. We’ve been teasing out common threads on a huge variety of subjects: implants, identity presentation, consent to surveillance, techniques of surveillance, subjectivity, vehicle identification systems, CCTV, wiretapping and activism.

I’m going to selectively blog some of the sessions, since I didn’t bother to get anyone’s permission for this. Would this count as micro-surveillance? I wonder.

Notes from subject area sessions:
Surveillance, Technologies and Things
Politics and Activism

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using the internet

I’m writing a book review of the classic internet ethnographic study, creatively titled The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, by Daniel Miller and Don Slater. Despite the nondescript name, the book is a very rich text about internet use in Trinidad. The authors find much higher internet penetration rates than they had expected, and they find that Trinidadians (at the time) used the internet in a very wide variety of ways, in cybercafes, at neighbors’ houses, with friends. They write:

This degree of diffusion was impressive, but does not convey the shock of walking past the yard dogs in front of a squatter’s corrugated iron-and-plank built hut with no running water in order to ask the self-evidently daft question, “Do any members of your household use the Internet?”, only to find oneself in a very well-informed conversation about email, paying for computer courses, career prospects in IT and library access.

I’ve been thinking about the way that internet use is embedded in people’s lives. I know that now that I work at home, I surf the net in an entirely different way than I did when I was a 9-5er with plenty of free time on my hands. When I’m laptopping around the country, I use the internet very differently from when I’ve just got my machine on so that my giant torrent of The Amazing Race Season 3 can finish up. Anyway, I was reading this article¹ by John Carey on how people actually use the web, and I came upon this paragraph:

Lifestyles of people in the study group had a strong impact on how and when they usethe Web. Consider first a group of three recent college graduates who shared anapartment in Manhattan. They have very hectic and irregular schedules. On any given evening, one might be at a gym; another out on a date; or the three of them might be visiting a local sports bar. Much of their media use moved later into the evening and their apartment was crammed with media options: multiple televisions, PCs, cellphones, videogame consoles and MP-3 players. They also had broadband access to the Web and a wireless network. To reach them, media had to fit flexibly into their irregular schedules because they might not be available when regularly scheduled media were playing. Television was limited by having a schedule; the Web and other media such as videogames were generally schedule-free and therefore fit more easily into the routines of people with hectic, irregular schedules.

This basically describes me and everyone I know. Let’s look at TV: there are a few people I know who will make sure they see a certain program, and make it part of their weekly routine: folding laundry while watching Desperate Housewives, for example. But for most of the people I know, there are two options:

1. Pay for a DVR
2. Get all your media from the web.

Since 2 is basically free, since we all have broadband anyway, there’s not much compelling reason to do 1. When I’m watching TV on my computer, it becomes just another website that I’m looking at, often in a corner of the screen, movies and TV shows from past and present, US and abroad, cult and mainstream, cable and network are all undifferentiated.

I read something recently which referred to the “post-network” era of American broadcasting, which I think describes right now just fine. I don’t remember the last time I watched a sitcom. I watch a fair amount of TV: I download Grey’s Anatomy, Veronica Mars, the Amazing Race, and the Sopranos every week, and I work through the back catalogs of other shows that interest me. All of those shows, by the way, I got into by watching them on the web first (with the Sopranos, it was Netflixing DVDs, since it launched pre-torrent). This means that of all my friends, even if we’re all watching a show, one person is likely to be catching up on back DVDs, one person may TiVo it and watch it day of, and I may be three weeks behind because I haven’t bothered to download the torrents yet.

I’m more than happy to see the era of network TV lumber to a close, which may be hypocritical, because I still want to get entertainment products that I like and watch them when I want to. If I could pay a $10/mo fee for all-internet TV, with no DRM and total time-shifting, I’d probably do it just for the convenience, and because then I could watch shows that I really like, such as Made, which are never on the torrents.

But back to the internet: it becomes so hard to differentiate types of “media” from one another. Going physically to the movies, to me, is a fun activity to do with friends that displaces going to a club or a show if we’re feeling tired or there’s something really cool on. It’s not like I choose between going out to the movies and watching TV. Internet, video games, TV, DVDs are all kind of part of the same thing for me, and since I’m online most of the time, I’m usually working, taking a brief surfing break, working, watching an episode, working, etc. This is a pattern of media use that just doesn’t fit within old media models.

Big Media seems to be slowly stumbling into the sunlight and realizing they need to regroup; I have to say that the TV studios have been a lot less assly about P2P than, say, Jack Valenti or the RIAA. Anyway. Back to book review.

1.The Web Habit: An Ethnographic Study of Web Usage Patterns. Carey, John. Conference Papers — International Communication Association, 2005 Annual Meeting, New York, NY, p1-18.

Comedies of Fair Use Conference at NYU April 28-30

Lots of cool people I know are working on this. If you’re in the New York area, worth stopping in.

The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University will host “Comedies of Fair U$E: A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars,” Fri., April 28 through Sun., April 30 at NYU’s Hemmerdinger Hall (100 Washington Square East at Washington Place). The conference will feature copyright activist Lawrence Lessig, artist Art Spiegelman, filmmaker Errol Morris (“Fog of War,” “Thin Blue Line”), novelist Jonathan Lethem, essayist Lewis Hyde, U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski, and dozens of others. It is sponsored in association with the NYU Humanities Council.
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WAM keynote: Caryl Rivers

Caryl Rivers is a journalism professor at BU who writes awesome books around media literacy and the lying lies in mainstream media. She was the keynote at WAM this morning and was seriously great - she talked about something I’ve posted about several times, mainly the mainstream media’s penchant for studies that are (pick one) not peer reviewed, with a non-standard sample, extremely old, or the only one out of dozens that conclude a certain way. (See my post on Maureen Dowd doesn’t know how to deal with social science for an example).

She walked us through many of the mainstream media myths about women, like:

• Women who get too much education can’t get a man
• Women who work too much end up infertile
• Girls get all the attention in school while boys languish because of evil feminist teachers
• Ambitious women have lousy sex
• Women are dropping out of the workforce to take care of their kids

She examined mainstream media (NYT, Time, WaPo, etc.) stories on these issues and concluded that the majority of them used the following techniques:

• Citing a fake trend with no statistics to back it up
• Citing studies with small, non-representational samples
• Inferring causation from correlation (OMG top ten peeve)
• Backpedaling: make sweeping claims early in story and then back away from it
• Using anecdotes as evidence

Unsurprisingly, these stories usually follow a pretty similar discourse, and that’s the same one that Susan Faludi was talking about in 1990’s masterwork Backlash: women should quit working and getting an education or they won’t be able to get married and have babies. OH NOES.

Full notes after the jump.
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The problem with fair and balanced

This isn’t news to anyone else in Communication, but I just wanted to state for the record that the American tradition of providing “balanced” reporting does more harm than good. Say I am doing a story on global warming. Say 98% of reputable scientists agree that global warming is a serious concern. However, as a journalist I have to provide a “balanced” view. So I drag out some crackpot petroleum-funded scientitian to give the “other side”, which represents about 2% of the actual debate, but 50% of the coverage. So an issue that is for all intents and purposes settled becomes a debate. This happens all the time. Don’t get me started that “sources” are like 75% of the time people in government, politics, or law enforcement, when there are plenty of issues that regular people are concerned about that most people in government, politics, or law enforcement are not going to talk about on television or in the newspaper.

Related links:

• Fantastic post from realclimate.org about public discourse around evolution & global warming: similarities and differences.
• The very well-written decision in the Dover Panda Trial. (It gets really interesting around section E1.)
• New Yorker Q&A on the Dover Trial. They did a really great and comprehensive piece on the trial a few months ago, but it’s not available online.