I Can Do This Stuff Too!

After covering so much material in only a few weeks, I feel like I have a much better understanding of the history — and the complexity — of this ongoing phenomenon we call “new media.”  More specifically, I have a profound respect for the reciprocal relationship between technologies and people.  One transforms the other, and vice versa, and the developments that result keep moving us into socio-technological environments (social media is a great example) that augment the human communication machine.

Admittedly, I have held on to the idea that I’m just not a new media person for a bit too long.   That has changed though, since I have come to the realization that I really do enjoy this stuff (I gave in to Twitter and dammit I’m hooked).  The big idea behind it all is that anyone can be a writer, a photographer, a musician, a videographer, hell…a porn star if they are so inclined, and that is something that no other era has enabled.  So my biggest attitude change is simple: I can play this game too.

The most surprising thing about the material we have studied is the number of common threads that run throughout.  Vannevar Bush had the same basic desire in the 40′s as did the Google guys in the 90′s and Mark Zuckerberg in 2004: They all strove for a more efficient and accessible way to organize seemingly insurmountable amounts of information.  And they are now deities of the human race.

I think an interesting topic to which more time could be devoted is that of media literacy as it pertains to the Web.  The ability to critically engage with online content is critical, and will become even more so in the future.  It will be intriguing to see how the ideas of viability and credibility will change in the “good enough” revolution.

Data and the Future of Journalism

It seems that the word “data” connotes numbers, spreadsheets, calculations — basically boring things to be drooled-over by math nerds and computer science geeks.  But as the Web puts more and more information at the disposal of journalists and other media professionals, data is becoming the sexy new commodity among those who are in the business of presenting a compelling story and/or message.

Alas, there are still calculations to be made with said data.  Today’s (and the future’s) storytellers must crunch the numbers, sans calculator, in order to derive just the right formula for presenting information to an increasingly hungry audience.  Our readings and class discussions have emphasized the importance of synthesizing data and presenting it in a way that engages the audience.  It’s all about putting things together to convey a message.  The numbers don’t lie, but they also don’t tell the whole story.  That part is up to the person using them.

So journalists, and those educating them, need to embrace the dynamics of data, as overwhelming as that may seem.  The beauty of the whole thing is that data means different things to different users, so potential stories for journalists are in virtually endless supply.  This means that there is really no such thing as the perfect story; instead there are a number of great stories, waiting for the right data miners to uncover and construct them.

Social Media Use by Academic Department

It seems that a healthy percentage of Journalism and Mass Communication students use social media — not a big surprise — but I wonder to what extent students in other academic departments are using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.  Are concrete engineering majors using social media in the same numbers as communication design majors, for example?

We’ve discussed extensively (in this class and several others) how social media are infiltrating every aspect of human existence, so it would be interesting to see if there is any variance in use between students in different academic departments at Texas State, and assuming ample time and resources to conduct such a study, at other universities as well.

The proposed research question: How does social media use vary between university students of different academic disciplines?

Such a study would be best conducted via survey, and operationalization of “social media use” would proceed according to the following basic questions/prompts:

• Do you have accounts with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, Gowalla, or any similar services?
• List all such accounts, and provide the following information for each:

1. Approximately how many hours per week do you use
2. How often do you post information (status updates, multimedia, Tweets, Check In, etc.) to accounts?
3. Are you more of a passive consumer or active user or is it about even?

A Likert scale, with the following statements, would be valuable:

• Social media are important to my everyday life
• The first thing I do in the morning is check SM accounts
• The last thing I do before bed is check SM accounts
• I use SM for fun and for serious matters
• I use SM to get news
• I use SM for school assignments/projects
• I use SM to enhance my offline socialization
• I encourage others to use SM

These are basic steps toward the operationalization of “social media use.”  Obviously, much more detail would go into an actual study, but I think this is a good start.

It would say a lot if agriculture students were using SM just as prolifically as mass comm students; it would be further evidence that these tools are becoming ubiquitous beyond just the halls and devices of media and tech geeks.

Scale and the Tail: Stabilizing the Moving Beast

I’m consistently amazed at how the ideas we read about seem so intuitive in hindsight, yet at publication time were probably cutting edge and/or controversial.  I’ve heard vaguely about the Long Tail and Free ideas before, but after reading more into them, I have developed a profound respect for Chris Anderson.  The man gives new meaning to the phrase “he wrote the book on…”

Stepping away from my new-found man crush on Chris Anderson (he has huge…ideas!), the Long Tail and Free concepts really just make perfect sense.  We’ve known for centuries that mankind is infinitely complex — one human being alone is given to endless permutations of thoughts, desires, and actions.  Multiply that by 6.7 billion and you get…well you can do the extrapolation.

The beauty of the Internet era, and of the Long Tail and Free concepts, is that they are the natural manifestation of the human consumption machine.  We have circumnavigated the confines of physical space, and therefore even the smallest of niches have a place (“Have a place,” for the purposes of this discussion, means “can be catered to.”) in the Web world.  The result is that a “long tail” of products, merchandise, and abstract goods has emerged to satisfy the whims of pretty much anyone and everyone.

The Free idea is perhaps a bit frightening to all those entrepreneurial spirits out there.  After all, if everything is headed toward zero, who benefits?  Anderson points out that “digital technologies have become too cheap to meter,” and thus the business of business will have to change.  Money-making enterprises will have to adapt to all the things we truly value, says Anderson, and those things go well beyond the traditional ideas of value.  The development of the three-way market gives rise to a business approach that emphasizes the importance of cross-subsidies.  It’s the basic idea of advertising, only dramatically redesigned for the Web.

Scale is the integral concept behind the Long Tail and Free ideas.  The Internet has given rise to a global communications infrastructure that doesn’t play by any rules, and has no regard for limits.  Abundance — not scarcity — is the new paradigm, and the Web’s tail will do what nature designed tails to do in animals: stabilize the moving beast, even if it is moving toward zero.

Dr. Kaku and Dr. Drew on the Small Things

Today’s blog assignment: Find an instructional and/or informative YouTube video and explain why or why not it is a good way to deliver information.

Michio Kaku is pretty much the Dr. Drew of Quantum Physics; he’s smart and charismatic — the rock star of his field — and he explains in simple terms how complex theories and phenomena are both ruining and advancing the human race.  And he also talks a lot about size, silicon, and “vibrating in unison:”

Quantum computing, the demise of Silicon Valley, technological adaptation; this video is a good find for a new media grad student.  It strikes all the nerd nerves, and it involves Twitter.

Dr. Kaku‘s conversation (this is one of a series of videos in which he discusses cool stuff about quantum physics) is compelling and concise.  This is a great way to convey information; Dr. Kaku’s delivery and charisma make a highly academic subject appealing to the viewer.  If one were to read a transcript of this video, it would probably be boring and would fail to engage pretty much anyone who is not a particle physicist.

Back to Dr. Drew:

Surprisingly, even the subject of anal STD transmission is more compelling via video.

The Next Big Thing for Social Media: Institutional Restructuring

Every big innovation in the social media sphere seems to be the ultimate.  Facebook’s mapping of the “social graph,” as discussed in several of today’s articles, seems to be the perfect way to organize the online community.  Twitter’s user-derived adaptations, also explored heavily in today’s readings, are surely the future of the Web.  How could the fundamental mechanisms behind these ideas be improved upon?

They probably can’t.  Steven Johnson’s observation that Twitter is analogous to plumbing is simple, yet conveys perfectly the idea that Twitter’s basic form will live on, regardless of what happens to Twitter itself.  I wonder if Johnson realized that his analogy is even more appropriate when considering that Twitter — much like plumbing pipes — delivers both life-sustaining water and the unbearable stink of shit.

The good news is that social media monsters like Twitter produce a lot more gold nuggets than turds.  These breakthroughs allow for the simplification and amplification of information transmission.  As Zuck, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone point out, established and intimate social networks are much more efficient conveyors of data.

That’s why the next big thing for social media could very well be an institutional restructuring based on that efficiency.  The idea is pretty simple: Instead of institutions (universities, organizations, companies, legislative bodies, etc.) carving out their spaces in current social media, they will operate as social networks themselves.  These entities will operate based on the community (already occurring, I know), and will feature the functionality of innovators like Facebook and Twitter.

The best way to envision this is to think of a university.  Universities already function largely on the Web, but imagine a university in the form of a social network.  All classes, transactions, resources — anything imaginably associated with a university — will take place under the streamlined auspices of an online social community.  Face-to-face interaction will still be necessary for some things; one can hardly learn surgery without physically operating, for example.  For the most part, though, these institutions which are currently physically-based will conduct most business via social media.  The whole movement could even get one of those catchy acronyms; I’ll suggest CHOIR (Community Hosted Online Institutional Restructuring).

I don’t know what the specifics of this type of movement would be, and I understand that this idea could be construed as the stupidest thing ever contrived.  No one knows for sure where this stuff is headed though, so when today’s children start making laws and earning doctoral degrees via some Twitter-like interface, maybe this little blog post will be more than just shit clogging the pipes.

How Many Zeros are in a Google?

The answer, as a quick Google search will reveal, is 100.  And while the numerically-named company’s annual revenue numbers usually contain a mere 10 or 11 zeros, it’s safe to say that there is some cash flowing into the search giant.

Pardon me; there is cash flowing into the “advertising system,” as Eric Schmidt referred to the company in his Wired interview.  That system sells ad spots via auction; entities bid to have their advertisements displayed prominently alongside search terms.  Google also uses AdSense to enter into “joint ventures” with websites.  My own experience with this concept comes from writing articles for Suite101, an “online magazine” that makes money when visitors click on advertisements.  Suite101 gets paid, I get paid, and Google gets PAID.

It seems unlikely that other media organizations could adopt this model as successfully as Google has.  As another Wired article told us, Yahoo blew it.  The challenge is relevance.  Google has thousands of minds working to extract the perfect system for optimizing its data and advertising schemes, and those minds are just the ones on Google’s payroll.  Google users, who number roughly 80 trillion (based on my assumption that Google has figured out a way to mine data and value from dead people and theoretical organisms), are constantly giving the company insight into how to stay ahead of the game.  In today’s world it would be naïve to assume that no other company will usurp Google’s success, but they’ve got a long way to go — and a lot of math to do — before that happens.

For now, Google seems to be in control of the global crunching of numbers, and the zeros are adding up.

Investigating Interactivity

Oh, those “i” words.  Interactivity is probably the single most influential idea in the Internet era, and in discussing the inherently intricate concept, I can’t help but think immediately about another “i” word: innovation.

The thing that struck me most about innovation was the idea that it is relative.  What is innovative now will not  be tomorrow, and what is innovative to a metropolitan hipster gadget geek will probably be something along the lines of frightening to a Nebraska corn farmer.  That same indeterminacy applies to interactivity, rendering the concept almost indefinite.

But the scholars have certainly given it their best attempts.  Downes and McMillan gave us message-based and participant-based dimensions of interactivity.  They do refer, importantly, to the notion that interactivity is changing every day, and to the idea that it exists more on a continuum than in any definite parameters.

Kiousis focused on the relationships between technologies, environments, and persons in an attempt to move toward a way to define interactivity.  All of the readings emphasized the very simple idea that interactivity is constantly evolving.

Based on that idea, it seems to me that two of the big “i” words, interactivity and innovation, are connected in ways that we could explore ad infinitum.  One drives the other, and vice versa, and so on.

Interactivity, to me, is the ability of systems (whether those systems be persons, technological networks, knitting groups, etc.) to act, react, change, advance, and recognize the significance of every single part of the system.  In our rapidly evolving mediated world, interactivity gives rise to a daunting paradox: systems grow increasingly connected, but those connections engender more connections to be made.  That’s why interactivity changes the way it does.

Bush, Engelbart, and McLuhan on Machines, Minds, Media, and Messages

Three iconic figures in the realm of New Media — Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, and Marshall McLuhan — described in great detail various aspects of the interplay between man, mind, machine, and media.  Though these giants of the New Media field emphasized different parts of an increasingly complex machine, all three believed unrelentingly that change was upon them, and that the nature of change itself would continue to be transformed.

Bush focused on the machine.  His Memex idea, a sagacious foray into the possibilities and probabilities of mechanized mankind, addressed a simple, yet profound problem: Human information had far outgrown human ability to access that information.  Bush proposed the Memex, illustrated with well-described examples, as a device for organizing and accessing man’s wealth of information.

Engelbart focused on the man.  His central objective was to create a framework through which humans could achieve augmented intellectual capability.  A ridiculously ambitious endeavor, Engelbart sought to systematically approach the problem of overwhelming amounts of information.  Like Bush, Engelbart recognized that all human knowledge and achievement was indelibly interlinked, whether through natural or induced connections.

McLuhan focused the medium/message relationship.  His work was more concerned with defining messages, and how they are disseminated to an increasingly complex society.  “The “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs,” proclaimed McLuhan.  Like Bush and Engelbart before him, McLuhan had the vision to recognize change, the nature of which itself would necessarily be altered with every exploration and innovation, no matter how large or small.

All three visionaries saw exponential change.  All three welcomed that change, and recognized the necessity to organize information based on human connections, not linear ones.  And all three envisioned a future in which the entirety of mankind’s knowledge would be accessible.

New Media: Revolution or Evolution?

I, T.C. Sprencel, am a graduate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University-San Marcos.  Dr. Royal’s Issues in New Media class (my third class with Dr. Royal) will complete my New Media Concentration, one short semester before that master’s degree is mine!

My own definition of new media is subversive, if such a term can really be applied to the definition of something that has no objective definition (and thus has infinite subjective definitions).  Philosophical babble aside, I think that when people conceptualize “new media,” they think of it in terms of what is new to their own generation.  So my generation, for example, thinks of new media as computer-based, convergent multimedia.  That is new media to us, for sure, but it won’t be for long.

What I took from the reading was the basic concept of evolution, and how perfectly it applies to both the physical manifestation of humans and to the mediated contexts in which humans operate and are operated upon.  All of the readings traced the development of media paradigms and technology, and it was Manovich who really spoke to me when he said: “Film images would sooth movie audiences, who were too eager to escape the reality outside, the reality which no longer could be adequately handled by their own sampling and data processing systems (i.e., their brains).”

As society grows increasingly crowded and information-rich, new media, to me, are those institutions and innovations that will continue to evolve and help us make some sense of what would otherwise be overwhelming.  The question, then, is: Do new media contribute to the clutter and overcrowding which they supposedly combat?