MixMedias - Montreal

I’m doing the closing keynote at MixMedias - Montreal next week: Curation In A Liquid Media World

Curation In A Liquid Media World

The rise of several mutually-reinforcing trends — ubiquitous connectivity, mobile devices, web-oriented operating platforms and apps, and the explosion of the social revolution online — are converging to transform the fundamentals of media. I characterize that as the transition into liquid from solid, and so, we are seeing the emergence of liquid media. This will change everything, and will raise the role of curation to a new, central importance. We are seeing this first in the open web, in blogging and other media forms. But the greatest impacts will come when media companies adapt to these changes, and then, subsequently, as curation within the business becomes as critical as external community management is now.

Tympathy: Getting Into a Shared Tempo At Work

Had a fascinating talk yesterday with Deb Louison Lavoy as a part of my work on a new book, The Business Of Social Business (I hope to be done in June).  Deb mentioned a term that she’d read in a David Brooks column, of all places. He reels off a bunch of terms that he thinks are critical skills for the new world we are entering (I leave the others for other posts, perhaps). One was not like the others, in that he attempts to repurpose a term that is in common everyday use, but cast into a new meaning: sympathy.

The New Humanism - David Brooks via NYTimes.com

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

First, I think that we do need a term to represent the ability to share a tempo with others. I think it *is* a key skill, or trait.

However, I don’t think it is easy to extend the meaning of existing and commonly used terms, and to basically shoulder aside their established meanings.

So I am proposing tympathy for this purpose (‘tym’ for time (sort of), and ‘pathy’ for sensing). (Note that I considered and rejected ‘tempothy’.)

Tympathetic people can naturally get into a groove with an established group, they find the natural rhythms of cooperation, and seem to sense the right time to ask a question, offer some insight, or shift course. And when this scales up to those connected in some shared activity, coordination feels frictionless, and collaboration seems less strained.

Effective groups will move toward a shared pace, either organically, or by following the tempo of a leader, or because of the explicit actions of some sort of metronome. They are also attuned to the tempo of the larger work context in which their work is embedded.

Work media tools — like Yammer, Chatter, IBM Connections, Podio, and Jive — are being rapidly adopted in the work context for a wide variety of reasons, but one major benefit is that they lay down a beat for people to build their work tempo around: they engender tympathy, which we all want.

My sense is that the very best work media solutions will support a polyrhythmic work environment. They will work at different tempos for different layers of work, ranging from the fast twitch pace of posting updates on today’s to do list, to the slower, deeper cycles in the business, like long-range strategic planning.

I also believe that organizations that are moving toward greater autonomy and distributed leadership will put a high premium on tympathy as an personal attribute. My bet is that tympathy has been important forever, but we just didn’t have a name for it and it has gone unexamined in the workplace.

A Web That Forgets

Megan Garber writes about a new iPhone photo app that will only share pics for a certain period of time — Snapchat — and suggests that the persistence of the web has it’s downside in that it cannot forget, and so we can’t either:

Forget About It: Making the Internet More Like Our Brains - Megan Garber viaThe Atlantic

Anti-archival tools provide a countervailing force to one of the defining features of the Internet: that, with its nearly infinite space, “save all” is its default setting. Without even trying, the Internet remembers. And that doesn’t just mean that the comment you left on that Joss Whedon fan site that one time is still sitting there, emoticon-ed and gif-ed and captured for posterity within the all-knowing neurons of Google. It also means that the web, as a broad space, operates on both an assumption and an architecture of continuity. Within it, and all around it, archive is assumed. Even when we die … there, still, we are. 

So when we talk about the Internet, we talk about feeds and flows and rivers and currents — things determined by their dynamism and their lack of obvious containers.

And: That’s great! It’s what makes the Internet the Internet! The only problem, however, is that constant flux-and-flow is not actually how we humans are programmed to move through the world. We live in fits and starts, in cycles and phases, and we divide our time not just socially, in shared minutes and hours, but physically. We wake. We sleep. We have beginnings. We have endings.

I am intrigued by the poeticism of a time-stamped and eroding web, one that degrades and ages. Of course, unexamined in this piece is the truth that the web we have today *is* emphemeral and is fading all the time. Web sites go down, links get broken, domain names go unrenewed. Perhaps it isn’t happening fast enough for Garber, and its also true that some services on the web go to great lengths to fight entropy. That’s the sales angle of a Flickr Pro account, for example.

The way the web ages, though, is erratic and extremely heterogeneous. It’s like my recent 30 year high school reunion, where some of my compatriots could pass as 40 while others appeared to be septuagenarians. Time wounds all heels, as Groucho observed, but not at the same pace.

Garber mentions another service that is built around the notion on intentional transience, News.me’s new Last Great Thing, which sounds like fun, although the impermanent side of it may be more of an annoyance than high culture:

Last week News.me, Betaworks’ social news service, launched Last Great Thing, a time-limited version of Getting the News that asks participants to share just one worthy thing they’ve found on the web that day — permalinks not included. The product’s point is awesomeness-without-archive. But it’s also ephemerality-as-service. It allows us to do what our minds are, actually, optimized to do: to experience, to forget, to remember, and then forget again.

Not mentioned is the tiny webpage posting app, CheckThis, that formerly defaulted the expiration date to one month. They seem to have amended that to ‘never’ but the option to expire a post still exists. But clicking the button to select ‘one week’ seems like a form of asceticism, rather than accepting the ephemeral.

Might be better if I could simply sign up to a ‘erase.me’ service, with all my logins for all my accounts online, and to stipulate how I would like my web trails to be managed over the weeks, years, and decades.

I certainly would like a tool that would automatically sweep the files on my desktop into a timestamped folder every week, and to delete those folders several weeks later.

Sure, delete old calendar entries after a year (or maybe two?) Shred my email after five years (or maybe ten?). Retire my tweets after a few months? Keep anything I’ve favorited until I unfavorite? Keep all blog posts until I pass on, and convert into some version that is obviously the memoirs of a dead person?

It seems just as sensible as life insurance, and almost as sobering.

The Fall Of Facebook Social Readers

John Herrman dissects the news about the declining popularity of social news readers on Facebook, and points out the key observation:

Sharing isn’t really sharing if you don’t mean to do it.

He also suggests that Facebook’s rejiggering of ‘trending stories’ so they are segregated and pulled to the side of actual posts by actual people could be a devastating blow to companies like the Washington Post. Ryan Kellett, the WashPo engagement producer, agrees.

Social reader “collapse” is b/c of evolving FB modules. Before: “double-double,” 4-5 stories down in a list, w/ friend icon - drove growth.

— Ryan Y. Kellett (@rkellett) May 7, 2012

No surprise that the social platform shapes discourse, but it’s a hard reality for the papers who were holding out their Facebook stats to advertisers as confirmation of a social strategy and now they are collapsing.

Here’s the crash for Washpo: