101 Culture

This is just a quick post to highlight a great post from Katy about the economics of free and the search for real business models online. It's a fantastic post and I won't try and paraphrase it here. But the point which stood out to me, considering digital culture, is the phrase 'bits economy'. We used to sell mostly atoms and now we're trying to sell lots of bits. The post and referenced articles discuss business models online that give away a large number of products to sell a minority of premium ones (eg. Flickr versus Flickr Pro). And so here we again see the fundamental nature of digital information causing change. The portability of digital information means it's now feasible to give away large numbers of samples where it wasn't efficient to before. And so business models change. And so we end up with a phrase like 'bits economy'. Nice. I'll be pinching that. [image from]

I couldn't help but chortle as I read Wired's report of courtroom exchanges from the current Pirate Bay case.

Pirate Bay is the largest site that indexes Bit Torrent links and three people involved in running it are currently on trial in Stockholm accused of breaking copyright law. Its traffic ranks around 109th in the world.

Just picture a hotshot proscecutor interrogating a slightly disheveled, young, geekish defendant with the intent of finding the one mastermind behind the collection of allegedly illicit hyperlinks on the site. His route in, it seems,  is to establish who is the person with ultimate responsibility over the text and images on the site.

But he fails to understand the loose structure of the community that has access to the server. "But someone must ultimately decide whether to put up a certain text or graphic," "No. Why? If someone believes a new text is needed, he just inputs it. Or if a graphic is ugly, someone makes a better one. The one who wants to do something just does it."

A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn't have so perceptively expressed the confusion created at the meeting of those that web and those that don't. And as if the latter point needed making more clearly, in referring to his own motivation for managing the server, he expresses why so much of the web exists, and why it so baffles most of us, "There is no other place I could face these technical challenges except large firms where I would be top-ridden by bosses". He does it for the love of the craft. [image from]

Influx insights published a nice post referencing the recent Christian Bale remix activity and pointing out that real time communication means that brands and agencies need to become more adept at understanding and responding to fast changes in cultural conversation.

Why now? Well it seems that brands have had it easy while TV has been such a powerful medium. Attention can still be bought in a medium well suited for telling emotive stories. It seems likely that the web can be a much more powerful storytelling medium but the tricky part for large, slow organisations is the need to embrace the power of loose collaboration derived from losing control over content and ideas.

While ad agencies have honed the art of crafting concise messages to disrupt and seduce the public, the public might have found a more efficient way of spreading ideas to large audiences: by participating constantly in a mass conversation. Individual producers find it easy to adapt to current trends and garner attention online. Organisations have long employed prominent artists to further their needs. Consider how the Catholic church used the greatest painters, architects and musicians of its boom time. Brands today need to take the same approach with the prominent players who are bathing daily in the massive meme pool. Obviously copyright laws are often a hindrance. But that's a topic for another time. However they do it, the key point is that organisations will benefit from a more digital way of behaving. They need to constantly listen and react rather than planning, doing and waiting until the doing has finished to work out what happened. I still don't know who Christian Bale is though. Maybe I need to watch more telly. [image from fofurasfelinas]

There have been plenty of people comparing Twitter and Facebook lately. And some quite rightly asking for the comparison to stop. My tuppence? I rarely check Facebook anymore. I tweet every day. But let’s face it, the comparisons are drawn because Twitter, after a couple of years of steady tech-world growth, is hitting the front 'cover' of the Guardian and seducing the same VC’s Facebook was two years ago. I don’t want to add to the debate about the role of each service in people’s lives. But I do want to compare the two. I want to talk about openness. Twitter is an open platform which allows great things to be built from it. Twestival and #uksnow map are recent successes. Facebook connectivity has resulted in great things as well, like the HSBC student rebellion. But Facebook, with 100m users, keeps its doors shut. Mashups are few. Twitter feels like it has hardly started. Someone with a deeper understanding of API’s could put this better, but Twitter feels more open. It feels more like the web that I love. And Facebook feels more like a nervous corporate entity protecting its valuable audience from other services. It’s no coincidence that Facebook is trying to buy Twitter at the same time that it is opening status updates to developers. AOL lost the battle because it tried to retain its audience by keeping everything within its proprietary platform. Facebook been described as 'the new AOL' - ouch. Tim Berners-Lee found success over competitors making the web non-proprietary and by persuading CERN to give it away. A more open approach brought success. So, for the sake of a brilliant web, I hope that Twitter finds long-term success and the giant that is Facebook learns to be more open. As for me? If five people comment on this article, I’ll delete my Facebook account. UPDATE: Excellent and recent article on the 'proprietary stack' versus the 'open stack' with regards to the future. Thanks Alex. [image from me]

Today would be Darwin's 200th birthday had he been a little fitter and therefore survived. And since one of the underlying thoughts of this blog draws similarities between genetic code and binary code and so looks at the similarities between the theory of evolution in biology and the spread of ideas through digital technology, it'd be sacrilege (joke!) to miss it. Here's the rub: DNA is a discrete code which classifies it as digital. It's made from four basic building blocks and so is therefore quaternary rather than binary. More detail here. And so, because DNA is digital. Here's to Charles Darwin, one of London's greatest. And if we hadn't learned enough already, here's a quote to consider: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed” For a list of Darwin related events going on today, check out Londonist. Stay fit. [image from kaptainkobold]

This Thursday is Twestival, a global yet local gathering which you probably already know about. @amanda and others published the idea of a global gathering of Twitter users to raise money for charity: water. They put the idea out there in January. In the way only Twitter can, it spread at an incredible rate and now has events in 175+ cities and expects 20 000 participants. And I say participants because that is the key here. Everyone involved has volunteered and contributed beyond just buying a ticket. It's the first event I can think of where every visitor has probably advertised it online as well by tweeting about the fact. Twestival is a perfect example of how a single-minded idea, in the correct format, can spread, evolve and grow almost beyond recognition. The correct combination of idea, platform and network of participants is again proven. Hooray for the success that already is Twestival. If a digital culture is to emerge successfully, then we might have a lot to learn from this story. It's predicted to raise $1m to provide more people with clean drinking water. Congratulations Amanda Rose and the Twitter populous. I'm @benmason and I'll be there in London. Cya.

Russell Davies' post on organisation is rather interesting. Organisation seems to be at the root of so much disruption caused by the internet. The record industry might find a clear in role in music if it considers the organisation of artists, fans and funding as its task.

And Wikipedia found a very powerful structure which produced a great result. But it's not short of its problems.

And GetSatisfaction is a nice way of reorganising customer service. The collaborative nature, the fact it's always available and entirely public all make it feel very modern. So will a single dominant model for funding editorial appear, for instance? Crowdsourcing and 'micropayments' cause much debate. History would indicate that we'll settle on a new structure to cope with all this but then there have never been so many people involved. The Enlightenment is certainly an interesting concept to investigate. It perhaps shares direction with today in the way that individual freedom became an important value contrasting the autocracy and theocracy of the time. Power shifted downward and outward. And self-governance seems such a pertinent topic to today's connected world. So without much to add to Russell's post, it's safe to say that this is a topic will be revisited. Super. [image from esparta]

This is an intro into the documentary Us Now, 'a film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet'. I haven't watched the film yet but I will. It was the website and intro YouTube vid that caught my eye It's a 'film project'. It's more than a film. They've published all the transcripts and rushes. They plan to license all footage under creative commons. And they pull in any YT vids tagged usnowfilm. All this is quite simple behaviour yet it still seems, to many people, madness to publish all transcripts and rushes. It's so nice to come across forward-thinking projects like this that take a measured approach. They've used web practices and openess for the possible benefit of the project, not just because they can. And in the vid Clay Shirky sums up the point of this blog nicely, 'A revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when it adopts new behaviours.' Viva. [image from tsevis]

It's been difficult to be in London and miss this patter. A Guardian journalist wrote an article bemoaning a pro-Christian bus advert which led to a website which threatened readers with eternal damnation if they didn't believe in Jesus. To cut a long story short, she suggested atheists collaborate to pay for a bus campaign to allay peoples fears: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life." Now in the way the web often does, this suggestion gained traction and resulted in an article looking for £5000 to fund a an ad campaign on London buses. Before long there had been over £150 000 pledged and the story had spread all over the web. Now the campaign is on-bus, there is Facebook, website, wikipedia, t-shirt, a lawsuit and plenty more coverage around the world. It's a delicious example of a powerful idea starting small, gaining collaboration and support and resulting in significant action. And to cement it properly into digital culture, there's now an app on b3ta to create your own bus campaign in its image, hence the control of the message has been lost but perhaps made the idea more powerful. Again we see a loss of control bringing unseen benefit.

I spend plenty of time at work and at play considering how people behave online. Over the last couple of years I've been considering the idea of the appearance of a digital culture, a change in mass behaviour triggered by digital technology, in particular communication technology.

And so many ideas got scrawled on so many bits of paper that writing a blog seemed the best way to structure them. So here's the blog.

But what about the thought. Well it starts something like this: Binary code is inherently flexible. And so anything in digital is like lego. It can be broken down into constituent parts (bits) and rebuilt into something different. I'm no technologist. I'm considering behaviour here. But the source of all this change is in the technology. So information became more portable and flexible. Lego structures, or clusters of ideas and information got passed around, deconstructed and rebuilt. And so over time they evolved. And here you see Richard Dawkins' 1976 idea of memes fitting in. Ideas change as they spread, depending on their popularity in context. Natural selection of the most interesting.

The evolution of ideas is not a new concept. But digital technology and the internet made ideas more portable. They put the evolutionary clock into hyperspeed. And suddenly everything started changing very fast. And almost everyone had the chance to play a part in the change. They transported and changed the ideas. We moved from web1.0 to 2.0 as the contribution of information became the behaviour of a majority within each community rather than a minority.

Then we move into ideas such as the hive mind being a sort of information market or the semantic web making the infomation even more flexible than previous formats. And everything is still accelerating.

And these are still minor changes in technology compared to the idea of the world's pockets constantly connected via the internet. What changes in behaviour will that bring?

It feels like we've moved into a world where information alone is worth little but the aggregation of it is very valuable; a world where everything is changing faster than in recent history; a time when many more are collaborating than ever before; a space where maps have suddenly grown in importance. Perhaps this is just the information age. And if so, how should one act in such an age? We surely haven't mastered the etiquette yet.

So it feels like this change in behaviour hasn't really got going yet. And so that's why I'm writing this. I want to watch it gather pace and watch the discovery of everything we know now to be right become wrong. And this site might be a lens to keep the flux in focus.

[image from udronotto]