commentary | Ian M Rountree

The “Heat Death” of Design and Technology

June 10, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

The universe passes around an awful lot of information – an awful lot of energy – all the time.

Go for a run? Bleed calories as heat into the air. Sun’s warm today! It’s shedding its worth into the ambient area at quite literally the speed of light. Atomic bombs? Self-explanatory.

The mechanics are all the same – physics is wonderfully complex but it’s not complicated. Which brings us to tech and design, weirdly.

It feels like every site on the web (including mine, for which I make little apology) features the same elements – because they’re popular and effective – all at the same time. Hero sliders, big images, stunning typography, literally the entire Material Design playbook in action – on every website it can be – 24/7 this year. Homogeneity at its best.

Why? It’s effective. We know what to expect. We know what a clickable link looks like on a desktop, and we can make simple guesses on mobile as to which regions are touch ready. It’s not bad in and of itself, but it will cause exhaustion, and go out of fashion.

Now tech is doing it too! This should not be a surprise.

This morning, Wired had a piece about everyone having the same plans for tech that’s damned accurate – and damning by way of its accuracy. From the article;

You can prefer one design or another, but that will be the only thing separating iOS from Android and Android from Windows. They’re just skins at this point. You’ll have access to all the same apps, all the same services.

Sounds great, right? And we can admit there’s less animosity between Mac users and PC users lately, just as there’s less ague in consumers over which phone to pick. As Wired says, “There are a few differentiators left, sure […] but they don’t matter to most users. A phone is a phone is a phone.”

Heat Death is at hand.

This is where we get back to physics. The idea of heat death centers on the passing of energies – that, and I’m paraphrasing a really large number of ideas here for the sake of demonstration – eventually, given enough passing, all of that energy will become homogenized. It’ll become the same. Momentum will be lost, among the many processes involved, and we’ll suffer the final doom of the universe; a lack of differentiation across all matter and energy, because there’s nowhere to go that hasn’t been gone before.

I feel like design, and tech, might spiral into a premature heat death situation by way of the hegemony of homogeneity.

Or I could be over thinking it. Maybe, as Wired says, this is what we need. Adoption is hard, and getting people on board with new systems is a challenge. Perhaps – going back to Clay Shirky – all of this stuff will become socially interesting as it becomes technologically boring.

Still, who wants to be bored by design items? Not me. How about you?

Education and Social Media

May 19, 2011 by Ian 3 Comments

There’s a lot of discussion in professional social media circles – from publishers, to consultants, to agencies – about education. Clients need it, businesses need it, the public needs it – but so do the professionals working in these very complex, highly unorganized fields.

There’s now very little stringent education directly related to social networking as a business communication tool; while there are plenty of dyed in the wool professionals, the building of a knowledge base accessible through higher education seems slow in catching up. This isn’t even a theory versus practice problem – I think it’s an educational system problem.

How can we create education for new kinds of professionals, when education itself is failing?

This article from MENG Blend on May 17th tells a strong story about the state of education in general:

[…] even though the real ROI of college over time is well-documented, college completion rates are falling rapidly. On average, four year public schools graduate only 37% of their students within four years. The story at community colleges, which account for 46% of all undergraduates, is even worse: just 25% of those at 2-year colleges graduate within three years of the time they start.

Damning, isn’t it? [Read more…]

Facebook’s Automated Censorship Kerfuffle

April 17, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

If you’ve been anywhere near where I’ve been over the weekend, you’ll have seen this article on Dangerous Minds about Facebook removing a photo of two men kissing.

From the article:

[…] it seems that the sight of two fully-clothed men kissing was too much for Facebook, or too much for some ~~redacted~~ […] who complained about it.

This is an issue a lot of networks need to face and be willing to take their place on; if a user flags an image as inappropriate on Facebook, it’s up to Facebook’s policymakers to either remove the image for the same of propriety, or leave it up and face action from the person flagging the image.

Facebook likely removed the image for reasons it will never explain – the trouble will come, however, not when it’s a picture of two men kissing, but when it’s a photograph of a couple’s wedding kiss that’s removed for inappropriate suggestive content. Or a parent giving their child a smooch.

This doesn’t just apply to Facebook – all information-storing networks suffer the same trouble. Offending a loud minority with anything means normative action by the network. It’s the only way to go.

Without this, there are two options;

an incredibly strict EULA forcing people to acknowledge that they can’t do anything about things that offend them other than leave the network, or
zero memory on the site itself, to go along with the lack of moderation; this way lies 4chan.

Not every network can handle either kind of strain on it’s social contract, because online networks need to remain an extension of real networks. The unfortunate problem is that, while free speech exists as law in the United States, almost all social networks are now (or have the potential to be) global, and need to allow for the strictest common denominator.

We’re going to see more of this kind of thing in the future, and we’d best be ready for it. More than any other governing force in our lives, our social networks are the best equipped to dole out equality as a commodity; even equality of objection to things we consider of no consequence.

Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?

Make sure you read the full article on Dangerous Minds.

Your Klout Score Means Nothing

February 19, 2011 by Ian 8 Comments

It’s not that it doesn’t mean anything – it’s that it actively means “nothing”.

For something to have meaning, you’ve got to be able to use it. Meaning, strictly speaking, applies to what’s done with a thing, or a piece of knowledge. Anything with ‘meaning’ must directly apply to something else. So; a score, made by an algorithm, has no strict meaning until applied. This is as true of Klout as it is of your Twitter follow count, the number of Friends you have on Facebook, or the number of recommendations you get on LinkedIn. Meaning requires application.

Sure, according to my Klout profile, I’m a 58. That’s nothing to sneeze at… Or is it? Could it be that, even in this semi-limited, pseudo-meaningless platform, there are some indicators of how a person behaves, how they prefer to communicate, and how you can learn how they do their work so you can better yours?

Now, this week’s #usblogs topic is supposed to be about online and offline klout, but I want to focus on a few meaningful uses for the Klout score and it’s associated meta-data first, before we talk at all about offline klout (which is far less well documented, and thus harder to quantify). Offline clout may come later, or may not. Partly because real-space communities have far different parameters to online ones.

When I look at a Klout score, I see an aggregate that equates to the curtain behind which hid the Wizard of Oz.

When I look at a Klout profile, like my own for example, I see:

Klout displays a graph of activity to go along with the Score metrics it displays.

This is the base range of information that comes beside a Klout score. Most people pay attention to the three numbers beside the Score itself – I almost never do. Under these, the badges, are much more informative regarding a person’s real activity. Number of list memberships, unique retweet count, total retweets, total comments – these show not only the wattage of a person’s activity online, they show the depth and consistency of that activity over time.

Yes, these numbers contribute to the aggregate of the Klout score, but the mix of badges you see matches strongly the kind of person you’re looking at. For example, this graph shows an even level of “Total Retweets” and “Unique Retweeters” – this tells me that the individual messages I’m sending are getting some traction among a broad range of people, but that traction has little depth.

Based on this graph, and the information relationships within it, I can adjust my actions in the future, if I want to (for example) learn how to create messages that gain depth as well as width of interaction. In this way, my score means nothing, but my profile is a learning tool.

In addition to the activity graph, Klout displays an Influence chart.

Take a look at the people on this chart. Do they match who you’d expect to be influencing me? Better still, do they match who you’d expect me to have influenced? I mean – yes, Mark, Chris, Amber and Matt have an effect on me. They legitimately influence me. But David McGraw? Really? An outlier, clearly.

Klout believes I’ve influenced my web host, MediaTemple. That interests me. In part because it’s an outlier, like David is. In part, because it’s amusing.

It also tells me where on the social chart I fit against my peers. The little orange dot on the graph is me. I’m a socializer. If I got a little more broad in my topics, I’d be a thought leader. I take issue to the idea that thought leadership is measurable on a chart, but these are the terms they’ve chosen to represent people – and by and large, they’re accurate.

The Influence chart can be used to give you a sense of what kinds of relationships the person whose profile you’re reading has. Do they interact with highly professional people, or highly social ones? Is there a broad mix of specialties represented, or a wide mix of opinion? Is there a tendency to focus solely on their own area of expertise, and disregard anything else coming into the mix?

At the end of the day, what you do with any of this data is what gives it meaning. A 60 Klout twitterati is not automatically more influencial than a 45 Klout socializer – unless pure wattage is all you care about. And, honestly, if all you care about is a bigger megaphone, you’ve lost the social media game already.

Keeping focus on what’s important is a good idea when conducting research and analysis, whether you’re doing so before, in the midst of, or after any marketing or business activity. Focusing on the wrong data, like a Klout score alone, can lead to terminal myopia.

No matter the numbers you’re looking at, making sure the numbers match the need is important. Do yourself a favour and look beyond that big orange number at the top of the screen.