Below the Fold

Social Media Won't Kill Listening, But It’s Getting Harder to Hear

Not all that long ago – albeit longer than we may care to admit – families gathered around large living room radios and listened to news, dramas, comedies and live music. People read newspapers and heard the words spring to life in their heads.

We watched and listened to television. Along came the Internet and we listened, the words and pictures and videos grafting onto our collective consciousness with immutable force.

We consumed, we thought, we learned and kept listening, listening, listening.

Then, one day, we found a voice. We always had one, of course, but now with social media, our voice could be heard.

So we talked. A comment here, a blog post there – a video, a photo, a review, a status update, a tweet, a pin, a question, a commentary, a discussion; an argument.

Everybody talking, everybody “engaging in conversation” and “creating content.” It sounds wonderful, and by and large it is – in fact it’s one of the greatest advances in human culture since moveable type.

But now that we all have printing presses, we all believe we can be writers. Now that we all have a radio and a TV network, we feel the need to develop and distribute “programming” (or re-distribute others’ programming as is more often the case.)

We are talking so much that we have stopped listening – or at very least it’s getting harder to hear, so we compensate by talking louder and more often, hoping some of us will get the message between rushed breaths.

The more scarce and precious something is, the more valuable and important it becomes. But there is so much talking, so much “content,” so many aggregated and curated echoes that there’s no longer any value or meaning. Ideas get lost in the binary fog, swallowed whole by the cacophony of endless creation.

The truth is, the less you contribute the more value you add.

So contribute less. Create less. Talk less.

Listen, once more.

From Interest to Identity: Social Media and Local Journalism Will Lead Us Back

Pinterest is the latest but not the first.

For that title you need to go back to Compuserve and AOL 1.0, back even to the Usenet and BBS systems. You need to add blogs and communities like iVillage to the list, and countless groups, services and platforms dedicated to one thing: Creating Communities of Interest.

They are everywhere now, in places like Facebook and Google Plus, and more recently in Pinterest, which uses visual storytelling to connect people by interest and passion. People are more comfortable in their similarities than in their differences, making Communities of Interest like Pinterest the natural order of things rather than another social media trend.

But while Communities of Interest are like us, they are not “Us.” They are places but not Our Places. They are what we do, what we love – but they are not who we are.

They are not Identity.

This, too, is changing. Communities of Identity are coming. These are the permanent, personal connections – and for many, they are the way back from social media overload, from Communities of Interest that create more distance even as they pull more people together.

Newspapers: The First Communities of Identity

Communities of Identity are already here – in fact they were here long before the electronic media age. We called them local newspapers.

There was a time when all newspapers were local, when “the paper” was both progenitor and steward of a community’s identity. If you wanted to know what a town was like, what made that geography different or special from others, you didn’t need to look any further than the newspaper.

As mass media proliferated, however, newspapers moved away from connecting to their communities by geographic, ethnic or historical roots. Suburban flight, competition and technology forced a homogenization of the news. Papers had to look regionally and nationally, and in doing so they got away from identity and rallied around interest, focusing on broader connections and looser ties.

News became sensationalized. Talking (or yelling) at the audience became more commonplace than listening to people or representing them. Value was placed on sharing common interests, the more “common” the better.

In this environment, news in one paper became indistinguishable from news in another paper thousands of miles away. Identity was gone, replaced by the more treasured metric of “impressions” and “views.”

Journalism Leads the Way Back

This worked for a while – in fact it still works for most, with the emphasis now on aggregating and curating news for Communities of Interest. But the future of news will come more from its past than its present.

News, especially in today’s highly social environments, thrives best when it’s small. Personal connections are emotional, and I’d argue that emotions run deeper when connected to a hometown vs. a hobby.

As the world gets bigger we look for ways to make it smaller and feel a connection to the places and people that define us. “Content” can’t do this but “stories” can. Journalism can lead the way forward by focusing inward.

Community newspapers are not in retreat but rather experiencing a sort of renaissance. According the to the National Newspaper Association, 86 million Americans read community newspapers (papers with 15,000 circulation or less – in other words, 80 percent of all U.S. papers.) The paper is the primary source of news for small communities, 10 times higher than the Internet. And advertising revenues are increasing.

The same can be seen online – digital-only operations such as the Texas Tribune and the St. Louis Beacon are breaking headlines and making money. And beyond news we are seeing growth in Communities of Identity like Ancestry.com, which allow people to connect pan-geographically as well as by common heritage.

Communities of Interest aren’t going anywhere, either – you don’t need to look any further than Pinterest to see that. But even those communities will ebb back toward identity, for the true power of social media is not in how we see others, but in how we see ourselves.

Digital is a Platform

Digital is not a “publication.” Digital is a “platform.”

Publications are static, one-way, monotone. They live in comfort. Publishing is an act of control, and in that sense, it is little more than anachronism.

You can publish via digital, but digital is not a publication.

Digital is a platform.

Digital is a relationship reset, an invitation for community involvement. It is a place, an environment, a vessel for people to share knowledge and perspective. Digital is a process, and in that sense, it forces brands, journalists and others to add value rather than merely “create content.”

Publications don’t need journalists, don’t need artists, they don’t need anyone except autonomic content creators. Platforms, however, can’t exist without people to both contribute and curate, to share data and analyze data, to educate and be educated. Digital needs storytellers.

With digital, the platform comes first, not the publication.

From Search Engine to Super App: Getting Stuck in Google’s Web

Google’s mission is simple, bold, and in the annals of silicon culture, tantamount to sacred gospel: “Organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Today, however, there is a New Testament being written: “Organize Google’s information about the world and make it selectively accessible and mostly useful.”

Okay, not as sexy. But in light of Google’s new focus on social results born from its own Google Plus product, this New Testament is arguably more accurate.

No longer Google Search, but Google’s Search. Not Google results, but Google’s Results. No longer the Web, but Google’s Web.

Google used to be a Web search site. Now it’s becoming an App. And not just any App, but a Super App that pulls you into Google’s Web with an insistent gravity.

Google calls its New Testament “Search Plus Your World,” delivering results from Google Plus pages and profiles more prominently than other Web properties like Wikipedia. This is supposed to make search more personal and relevant – who you know and what your friends like, or share, or do, will have a greater influence on what you see in your search results.

Personalization is hardly new (neither are the inevitable privacy concerns, which go hand in hand.) A personal Web is generally good, faster and easier to use. The “Semantic Web” envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee is today ever more possible, that dream of search delivered according to each person’s interests and desires, by computers that “learn” from us, understand us and make choices on our behalf.

But Google the App -- far more so that Google the Web site -- also runs the risk of making Search more exclusive and incomplete. One person’s customization is another’s exclusivity. Choices made for us, however well intentioned, are not always the best choices for us.

Google’s search gambit is much broader than Google of course – “aggregation” or “curation” or whatever the ridiculous made-up-name it’s called these days is all over the place, most notably on social platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

The difference is, when I’m using Twitter, I’m making the choice to curate content. I know that searching on Twitter gives me results from and favored by Twitter.

But for now at least, I can’t get results from Facebook or Twitter via Google (although the latter has been true for months.) And as mentioned earlier, results from the rest of the open Web are favored less than results from Google properties.

This is Google’s right. It’s a for-profit company and can do whatever the hell it wants, and what it wants is to secure more ad revenue and expand its own social network and services.

The rub is that Google changed the game first and then told everyone the new rules. Google went from giving us information about the world to giving us information about “our” world, provided our world includes a Google Plus account.

It’s too early to say whether this is bad, but it’s certainly different and should not be automatically assumed to be better. Search is done best with your eyes wide open, and the commercial aspects of Google’s New Web Order should be taken into account when deciding what to click.

For companies like Google, data is a conceit; but humans are far more complex than the data they create. This is why a Semantic Web is the Internet’s Holy Grail – we want and believe it to exist, despite the fact that we may never find it.

Whether Google’s Web is another step toward that discovery remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: The Web of Apps is here.