Tag Archives: trends

The perils of context collapse

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Social scientists call this “context collapse.” A joke that you make among friends would not be understood if you made the same joke among, well, everyone else. And even when you say things to a group of like-minded people — say, at an obscure conference where attendees might be tweeting or taking video — you can no longer assume that the thought will stay in that context.

– Mike Rosenwald in an interesting Washington Post opinion piece, Will the Twitter Police make Twitter boring? This article garnered some backlash as well as thoughtful dissent from Alex Howard on the value of Twitter as social media watchdog.

free speech area

It can be easier to spot relevant context in the physical world

It’s worth pausing on this idea of context collapse, especially as we interact online in more decontextualized, default-public settings. It’s not only the distant nature of all internet interaction, but the way social networks have over the past decade have created quasi-intimate settings (Look! Another baby picture!) while simultaneously removing physical context of your current social sphere (I’m wearing a suit, in an office.). Today, social networks are places where you can interact from the palm of your hand with your boss, your brother, and your barista — all at once, 24 hours a day. It’s a new normal for both communications and context.

While Facebook  privacy settings and Google+ circles exist, the reality is that few use them to a significant level of granularity, and Twitter defaults to public. As content creators we’re charged with figuring out the new social norms that apply — and as consumers we’re learning to strike the balance between appropriate call-outs for bad behavior and online vigilantism.

Photo credit: arbyreed

Friday Five
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Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

  1. If you click one link this week, let it be the Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends slides. It’s a terrific state of the internet summary, with insights into mobile upside (still!), wearables, and the hockeystick rise of digital, tagged content like photos, video, sound, and data.
  2. Security’s not sexy, but it’s essential as we store more and more info online. Kudos to Evernote for their recent adds of two-step verification, authorized apps, and access history.
  3. Speaking of verification, Facebook finally offers verified pages for brands so users know the pages are legitimate. It’s a gradual rollout — more info here.
  4. If you manage a content management system as an admin, work as a content strategist, or just post information to the internet, check out Karen McGrane’s terrific DrupalCon keynote. It’s a great balance of evangelism and understanding the messy content world we live in.
  5. Do women and men use social media differently? RWW reports on some Microsoft-sponsored research with some interesting observations about gender. Women report more social media use for collaboration on work products, and men report more use for professional networking.

Teens as mobile challenge to enterprise IT

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mobile-teerAnyone who’s spent time in a high school or college campus recently won’t be wholly surprised by Pew Internet’s recent study on U.S. teens and technology. 78% of teens have a mobile phone, and 47% have smartphones — meaning that a whopping 37% of all teenagers have a smartphone.

More surprising may be the number of mobile-mostly users, people who access the internet mostly through their mobile device. About 15% of adults mostly use the internet via mobile, but there’s a big leap to 25% of mobile-mostly teens — and a full 50% of teens with smartphones.

What does this mean as older teens entering college campuses and the workforce? The communications and ecommerce worlds have been living mobile-first for a while. Jonah Peretti reminded us at SXSW that mobile used to be where content stopped, but today mobile is instrumental in content spread. Black Friday 2012 was a wake-up call for any remaining retailers who didn’t see the opportunity for mobile transactions.

The seismic shift will occur for enterprise IT when these teen mobile-everything users expect to be able to perform tasks from registering for class to entering time in PeopleSoft to submitting expense receipts. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has been an IT practice for a number of years, with non-trivial concerns about support and security. Make no mistake: this teen mobile usage data shows there’s a tsunami of application development work awaiting organizations for this rising generation of mobile internet users.

Facebook intent by age cohort

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Many commented on a recent Pew report finding that 61% of all Facebook users admitted to taking a break from the popular and addictive social networking site at some time in the past. Reasons included everything from avoiding too much drama and gossip to fasting or observing Lent. The chart below from the same report caught my attention:

Pew on plans for spending time on Facebook

According to Pew, 1% or fewer of 18-29 year olds see themselves spending more time on Facebook in the coming year. Is this accurately depicting a trend borne of the frustration with issues like privacy concerns and monetization plans (like dreaded autoplay video in the news feed) for the site? Or is it, like the 2010 media hype over the anti-Facebook Diaspora project, more wishful thinking about the behavior we would like to show versus what is likely? Either way, the prediction of declining usage by age above tells a story.

“I don’t believe in futurists that much anymore – they are usually wrong,” he [Ito] says, responding to a label that is often applied to him. “I’m calling myself a ‘nowist,’ and I’m trying to figure out how to build up the ability to react to anything. In other words, I want to create a certain agility. The biggest liability for companies now is having too many assets; you need to learn how to be fluid and agile.

 

‘It’s kind of a spiritual thing,” he continues. “You want to have your peripherals wide open and adapt as quickly as you can. I think that will be an important survival trait of people and companies in the future.”

– Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab on trends to watch in 2013.

I couldn’t agree more. Your organizational goals and digital strategy need to be declarative and not reactive – but peripheral vision, fluidity, and agility are vital for success in a rapidly changing digital environment. Without understanding the speed and direction of the changes around you, it’s easy to bury yourself in a five-year-plan to nowhere.

Death in the social era

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Today marks the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Antietam, whose 23,000 casualties marked the bloodiest single day in American military history. The American Experience film on Death and the Civil War (based on Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering) focuses on the scale of the death, and the corresponding lack of societal structures to manage death logistics and communications. It seems hard to believe but before the Civil War, there was no national cemetery system, no federally recognized system for identifying the dead, and no means of informing family members. The federal government would, by the end of the war, have constructed “a new bureaucracy of death.”

A then-emerging new technology played a part in people’s perception of death. Mathew Brady’s October 1862 photography exposition in New York shocked viewers with what was for many the first graphic photography of death. While it’s unlikely viewers in New York would have known the subjects, it brought home an understanding of the loss in a way that both augmented and circumvented newspaper accounts.

The public photography in the Brady show marked a paradigmatic change. Over the next century and a half the death business gets routinized and bureaucratized, with funeral homes, death notices, $25 caskets, and online guest books. In the late 2000s, widespread adoption of social media immeasurably quickens and widens the notification process. Like its disruptive effects in other industries, social media “debureaucratizes” death communications in a new and interesting way.

The public nature of the way we broadcast our lives through social networks today necessarily transforms how we communicate death. New technology enables us to share the mundane to an astonishing level, with applications like Instagram transforming the way we experience the mid-day meals of others. Documenting the birth and times of our babies is so ubiquitous that if you want to block those images, there’s an app for that. But there are few apps, and no established social protocols for announcing death through social media. Twitter is rife with death rumors for public figures, but what are the rights and responsibilities of next-of-kin of a regular person, suddenly deceased?

A terse Wikipedia entry of “death and the Internet” tells you the facts: Gmail will pass on your email to next of kin while Yahoo declines; Facebook will, with proper documentation, allow you to create a memorial for the deceased. Last month an app called If I die launched aimed at the pre-dead — it allows people to leave video and text messages in the event of their own sudden demise. There’s a growing need, but the both the structures (what happens to email accounts?) and the practices (how do I announce a death on Facebook?) are not yet mature.

150 years after Antietam, the military’s notification teams are skilled in the delivery of bad news and corresponding support structures — but now struggle to stay ahead of social networks to inform families. Even without a sudden catalytic event of a war destroying 2% of the population to prompt the shift, social norms around online communication are forced to adapt for death as they have for life.