Following the 5 Things I’m Thinking about meme has been fun and instructive. It’s a clever, intriguing and accessible format. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon, already buckling under the weight of so many brilliant ideas, I thought I would try something else and mention five writers that I have been thinking about recently. And I mean recently, in the sense of the past couple of weeks, and I mean thinking not as in read, but as in deeply hanging around.
Ian McDonald - Author of sf novels set in the near future of the developing world, e.g. in the developed world, recently India, Brazil and Turkey. Ian McDonald quite simply has the most interesting and most appreciably foreseeable view on the future of anyone I have read. Forget futurology, this is it. He also creates ensemble castes and multiple plotlines with a skill that defies belief and opens the narrow world of Anglo-American sf writing to vistas and cultures it has never before explored. McDonald is a prophet of the 21st century.
Neal Stephenson - The Baroque Cycle are probably my favourite novels of the past decade. Vast, omniscient, gargantuan caricatures, these books combine synapse overloading intellectual prowess with all action, adventure, edge of the seat read-on-ness you could hope. It is unprecedented on almost every level. And now he will probably redefine the novel, and the idea of a writer, with the online storytelling project The Mongoliad. We may look back on Stephenson as the person who pushed the novel to the edge, and the went beyond it.
Roy Bhaskar - My uncle, admittedly, but recently introduced to my life, which has prompted me to read and reread many of his books. He is the founder of critical realism, a philosophical school that attempts to re-vindicate ontology in the philosophy of science and social science - in essence to argue that science and social science can say meaningful things about the world and contribute to a genuine understanding of it. Critical realism is the antidote to the post-structuralist/post-modern theoretical hegemony we have all been wanting to do away with.
Marshall McLuhan vs. Raymond Williams - Cultural thinkers who argued about technological determinism. McLuhan being the determinist, a writer whose ideas can be flawed and stupid yet still so inventive and new and intriguing as to be entirely valuable. Williams brings out the best of leftist thinking, bringing a critiquing, analytically, pleasingly flexible Marxism to bear on technology. Technology is not a determiner as such, but is itself determined in complex arrays of human relations. These two still pretty much define the debates about culture and technology fifty years on.
Shakespeare - This may seem cheesy and pretentious but the other week I went to the Globe for the first time. We were standing, in the endlessly pouring rain, soaked and chilled, watching Henry IV Part One. It was awe inspiringly good, the best Shakespeare I have seen. It reminded me of the importance of context, of performance, of why Shakespeare is still the don, of the uniqueness of Britain and British art at its best. It set me alight on so many levels and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.
It’s time to review the social media I use. When I started this tumblelog a few years ago the name was designed to reflect the way social media platforms create a kind of virtual membranous layer around the self; they are, to go a bit cyberpunk, a digital extension of one’s person, a projection of the individual. The more platforms you are on the more digital skins you are enveloped by. Having a tumblelog would be a convenient way of drawing them together into some kind of whole, creating a single epidermic wrapping or less pretentiously, a one stop shop outside the pirvacy safeguards and passwords of walled garden networks.
The social web is a cruel and Darwinian world where fads and sites explode and implode with the fleeting regulatory of a well orchestrated firework display. Where does it leave my original selection on the footer? What should stay, what should go? There seems to a wave (but not of course a Google Wave, hoho) of social media culling at the moment, and by the unspoken, unthinking rules of the internet I, and everyone else, therefore have to automatically follow that wave. Thus:
Twitter - I remain completely hypnotised by Twitter, surely the web phenomenon par excellence in it’s simplicity, self referentiality, twilight zone character inbetween work and casual selves, new Twitter native networks, flippant content, link streaming, somehow crossing the status update with the RSS feed, API centre to a thousand apps, mixing memes and business, jokes, debate and real time news. While I have had off times with Twitter I now use it more than ever, and it has definitely overtaken RSS and email lists as my principle way of staying on top of the professional tumult of digital publishing.
Facebook - While the global growth trajectory has made Facebook the third largest “country” on the planet, like many in the initial university wave I’ve basically stopped using Facebook as a social instrument and now use it as a photo-repository and address book. There was a phase of messaging people via Facebook rather than emailing, texting or hell, even meeting, but this seems to have waned as Facebook’s myspace-ification bubbled and the unnecessariness of an extraintermediary factor became apparent. Still without doubt essential, fun and diverting the lustre went years ago. But we all knew that. Clearly, it stays (and social gaming my save it yet).
Bookbrunch blog - Replaces The Digitalist, current thoughts fit, one hopes, for public consumption on work related matters.
Del.icio.us - Now, I can’t help but feel that there is something terribly unfashionable and 2006 about Delicious these days, that it is somehow a little embarrassing, a bit shameful, part of the 2.0 bubble, something a bit jejune and forgotten about it, tainted by the ever-present whiff of Yahoo. There is a palpable lack of buzz around Delicious; you feel it immediately on even looking at that then trendy now passe URL. Despite all that I still use delicious, still like it, especially the reskin they did a while ago, and will no doubt continue to use it. Folksonomies are useful and here for the long haul and there is still an urgent need for the ordered storing of interesting websites, especially for research purposes. It may be the case that an academic resource (along the lines of academia.edu or mendeley) will supercede this, but not yet.
Friend Feed - Social media dodo. It is a) a graveyard, b) was rendered pointless when Facebook bought it, or rather, bought it out and made it irrelevant and c) probably would have been rendered irrelevant by Buzz and d) was actually one social network too many - it was meant to make things easier via aggregation but actually became just one aggregator amongst many. Everything is aggregated everywhere already, so what is the point? I once had high hopes for friend feed but in 2010 this ones goes. Oh, and I always thought the redesign sucked.
LinkedIn - Keeps getting more useful, a definite keeper with a simple idea that will always be needed e.g. a career based shop front and rollerdeck of business contacts. The interesting thing about LinkedIn is that despite what it claims it’s much more useful for connecting with people you don’t already know than people you do. At least, that is the way I often use it, and doing so as lead to many interesting encounters and conversations. If I am connected on LinkedIn with you and we haven’t met - let’s do lunch.
Dopplr - Ah, Dopplr. You were so beautiful, clever and sexy and, whatsmore, you were a storming web 2.0 start up based in London. Your clean minimalist design; your colourful, crisp and contemporary logo; the way your plugged into Google Maps and Flickr photos; the reports you sent out, detailed, endlessly fascinating PDFs of a year’s worth of travel; yes Dopplr you were great, the start up of start ups with cool users and even cooler founders. But then you got bought by Nokia. Then you lost all your people. Then we started to wonder why we were sharing our trips with only a couple of people. Then we started to realise there wasn’t much point, that it was more trouble than it was worth, that it was just so much social media masturbation/peacock travllier-than-thouing. With Trip.it, with other networks, with geo-locative functionality the death knell for Dopplr has, I fear, been wrung.
Last.fm - Like Dopplr I used to love last.fm, not least because it is London based. Unlike Dopplr I also used to find it genuinely useful and fun. Listening to last.fm I discovered so many new bands, songs, found a whole new way of listening to music. For me last.fm wasn’t just a website but a new aural universe, a new relationship to songs and of course a new business model for the beleaguered record industry. I still find that of all the music services last.fm is the best for discovering new music services and tag based radio stations can be revelatory in their electicism and pin point brilliance. Listen to a tag like, say, Berlin, and you will find a world of music. But, but, but….but Spotify. Even with the eye ball drilling annoyingness of the adverts the control, the marvellous control is unbeatable. Now it has the artists playlist and playlists generally then it really does have everything and I constantly teeter on the edge of buying a subscription. Unlike with last.fm though I have no desire to make my Spotify social. I have way to many guilty pleasures on there and don’t want to have to listen to things just so people don’t realise how much I like ———- so it makes the choice hard. Given though that last.fm is probably used only about 5% of the web music time, then it may have to go.
Daytum - Stupid really, I was never going to keep this up and despite the patent attractions of the software this isn’t a major enough platform to register below and requires too much self discipline for too little payback to maintain. I’ll stay satisfied with the Feltron Reports.
So, what has emerged? I never had a Flickr account up here as I don’t take many pictures, likewise I never had a Vimeo channel as I don’t really make videos (and not of course a Youtube channel, Youtube having the same relationship to Vimeo as The Sun to the Guardian- a more popular, commercial and trashy version of essentially the same thing). Neither are needed now.
Two things have popped up that could get included. Firstly are the check in meister geo-locative networks. I tried both Gowalla and Foursquare but Gowalla won, largely on account of my phone running Android and the Foursquare app repeatedly failing. So far though two things have held me back from getting fully involved. Firstly I have residual doubts about sharing my location; yes, these antediluvian and fogeyish misunderstanding of the brave new world maybe mark me out as a bonehead living in, like, 2006 (using delicious for crying out loud), but still, there are times when one doesn’t want to run into people or certain people, when the great clouk of anonymity bestowed by London is a shield and a benefit and the utility of locative functionality shrinks to zero. By that I guess I mean those times exist more than when they don’t. Secondly this is pro-active social media. When you walk into a theatre or a restaurant you actually have to consciously think about checking in. I just don’t do this. I think about the play or the meal. It intrudes on life in a way that other media doesn’t, without a huge amount of pay back. It maybe that I will seriously get into Gowalla or Facebook Places, but maybe not. Still, they are cool right now, and pathetic media airhead that I am that counts for something and may mean they get a slot.
Secondly, and relatedly, are the games that have grown up - the games that sit in your browser, that infiltrate your Twitter account or that, even better, permeate your day to day life (e.g. Chromaroma). Yes this is pro-active but this is fun. And no, I don’t think Foursquare is a game. If it is a game, then it’s the lamest, most boring and hopelessly crap game of them all. Indeed, you win by leading a boring life, by going to the same place over and over again. This is not a game; this is the crushing/comforting reality of affluent but nonetheless brain numbing post-industrial capitalism. Interesting games subvert and distort that turning the office space or the commute into arenas of hidden narrative and play. A game that becomes more real than the real, now that is something I will put on the footer.
There were are, a social media audit in full, and quite enough of it I should think.
Quite a few people have been either getting worked up over Seth Godin, or protesting how they are totally not worried about Seth Godin. The reason it’s interesting is that it is another instance of the concept that, from an academic view, is the most fascinating in digital publishing: disintermediation, e.g. the creation of genuinely new and revolutionary business models that start from the ground up. For obvious reasons this is less fascinating to established publishers, more panic inducing.
Here is my prediction: Seth Godin will be back to publishing. There are so many arguments about what the nature, benefits, downsides etc of his play, but really I think he has underestimated the importance of the books in “brand Seth” and will publish again in about five years. Books are the anchor point around which the blog swirls. Arguably if Kevin Kelly for example wrote more books, “brand Kevin” would be much bigger. Ditto “brand Cory” would be much smaller sans science fiction dead tree volumes. Books represent an end product; blogs, speeches etc represent an ongoing process. Books represent fixity and statement; blogs and speeches generally do not act as a record but as argument. No one reads last year’s blog posts or leader columns. Ultimately that is why books and brands go together, and why Godin will eventually come back.
One thing - he is right on the lead times.
1 Text prepared for the Inaugural Speech, Chair, New Media & Digital ...
Inkling - Flipboard for TextBooks -
Have just been checking out Inkling, a new start up that provides an interactive, web native sort of platform type thing for textbooks and other learning materials. I’m still not quite sure how it works and how the model will work but the web site and the execution are slick, the idea good and in general I can see this working. Blio will need to think about producing an app.
My main thought was - already? The speed of change is actually accelerating. I had anticipated that this kind of content would only really start to be seen about a year after the iPad launched. Yet within six months we are seeing hefty amounts, and on the grapevine I keep hearing about yet more in the wings, not to mention the huge announcement from the iBookstore dev team that it can now handle multimedia elements within ebooks. Piled on top of that is Penguin’s chart success with Spot and suddenly the landscape of digital publishing is looking ferociously competitive, an “innovation” fest working on hyperspeed to launch new products each more webby than the last.
This makes it harder to have impact. Safe to say the days of a quick app and a cheeky press release and hey presto, a publicity win, are over. It also raises the stakes. We may hit some kind of design/feature set arms race where publishers out do each other to produce the coolest enhanced ebooks. We could then see fatigue for this kind of thing among consumers.
The question(s) for me: which functionality/features do readers really want in the long term gimickry aside? What will be seen as standard? And to what extent does convergence of media create convergence of companies? Will media companies that are today horizontally organised actually be able to transition this into verticality to produce new cross and trans media workflows? The trouble is, there is no time to think, only time for everyone to keep up.