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Here Comes The Lunatic Fringe!

January 13, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

The landscape of language is changing. As political correctness makes its ever-quickening attacks on etymology, we’re seeing a lot of phrases we could trust to mean certain things replaced with what seem to be much less demanding, or much less threatening ones. Sometimes this can mean good things for certain groups – “blacks” are now African Americans, which is good, and “retards” are now broken into many diverse groups which accurately reflect whatever integrated dysfunction they’re affected by. These are very good reasons for political correctness.

There are a number of bad reasons to become over-specific of our language. Mostly these boil down to either panic, sense of threat, or a need for control. I get this – you do too, right? No need to overdo it.

What concerns me lately though is how often we throw euphemisms aside, and just flat out replace one word with another, or change the use of a phrase, without letting anyone else know. Sometimes this is slang, other times its buzzwords. Sometimes…

When was the last time you heard the term “lunatic fringe?” Do you remember? Did you read it somewhere? I’m reading Six Pixels fo Separation by Mitch Joel, and he mentions on page 90 during an examination of the history of the acceptance of blogging, that in 2004, bloggers were seen as “… people living in their basements, typing about their cats. It was only being done by the lunatic fringe.” This is a totally valid point, but it made me realize I haven’t heard the term lunatic fringe since, yep, probably about six years ago.

What do we hear now? Early adopter. Insidious, isn’t it?

In 2004, bloggers were unaccepted, the weirdos known for having girlfriends in the US – or in Canada, if you’re from the US instead, whatever, right? – with bad haircuts.

Find a picture of Steve Wozniak from 2004- ok, Woz hasn’t changed much. But he’s much better accepted as a rockstar in wider circles, recently. Go find a picture of Matt Cutts, or Robert Scoble from 2004. Here’s a Google Image search if you feel so inclined. Scoble is the quintessential early adopter. Would he have been called lunatic fringe in 2004? I suppose we’d need some of his friends to speak up, but I doubt it. And yet, the term early adopter is being employed to describe the very same behaviours we attributed to bloggers less than ten years ago.

What happened in 2004 when the bloggers attacked? We circled the wagons, knuckled in and prepared lacklustre legal defence against poorly informed miscreants. Now? Businesses have shifted from the defensive to courtship, there’s even a bloggers’ lounge at CES this year (can you tell I’m bitter I didn’t get to go?). And it’s not that the ecosystem has changed. Yes, blogging has become accepted, even encouraged, if we go back to SPoS and just about every other marketing book coming out in the last two years.

But what’s changed about our portrayal of the blogging culture itself?

Once, the lunatic fringe attacked, and drove us back into a huddled circle, a bastion of right and good and true. Now, we’ve become the supplicants, praying for the Gods of the Blogosphere to bless us with yet more linkbait (read as ambrosia) and say nice things about is. SO much so that the FTC in the United States just had to issue a papal bull demanding that bloggers fess up to sponsorship.

What changed? New media used to be the Lunatic Fringe, encroaching on all that was tradition and margin and blue chip. Now, the Early Adopters are leading the way, having discovered a path toward enlightenment, community and equity.

Damned etymology.

Photo by tibchris.

Is Google The First Domino Falling Against China?

January 12, 2010 by Ian 16 Comments

News hit the techiverse today that Google may be shutting down Google.cn in response to a “massive infrastructure attack” on its servers in December. Within a half hour of the news breaking on the Google Blog, the tech community rallied. So far Mashable, Search Engine Land and other blogs have the biggest stories – but admirably, the New York Times and USA Today also have good stories up.

All of them focus on one thing; because of these attacks, Google is no longer willing to censor its Google.cn search results and, because of the way law works in that country, might be forced to shut down its operations in China, including Google.cn and its Chinese offices [from the Googleblog]. This is a perfectly valid thing to worry over; Google is big business on its own, and the shift in power creates a vacuum that its Chinese competitor, Baidu, is already moving into – according to Reuters, Baidu’s stock is rising while Google’s is fallig, just because of the announcement of the possibility of El Goog’s moving out [from Reuters]. Of course, the New York Times story about this “Google e-Mail breach” and Mashable echo these trajectories. The USA Today story being tossed about is actually about Google’s apology to Chinese authors regarding its book digitizing, and actually focuses on French President Satrkosy’s insular attitude and protection of its culture.

Again, all valid angles, but there’s something bigger going on here. Here are a few sentiments from Twitter within minutes of the story breaking:

@eston – Friend in Shanghai: “Wow, did the Chinese govt just block access to Google? I’m getting GFW’d.” ( @scobleizer, know ne1 that can conf/deny?)
@scobleizer – I am meeting with @sagiraju & @prabhe Their reaction to Google news? “Google always does what is right.” “They still act like a startup.”
@marshallk – if Google is just using censorship as excuse to fight corp espionage, that’s super cynical & they’d deserve no praise but effect same
@stevenjayl – After GOOG, will US gov stand up for US biz against Chinese IP attacks and thefts? How about some “21st Century Statecraft”?

Can you see it? There’s not just business sentiment here. There’s cultural sentiment. And it’s a big, big deal.

Google, like any business dealing in the grey area of international culturally affecting commerce, has no choice but to stay out of human rights debates until they directly affect its business. This did. For whatever reason, someone hit Google, and these other businesses, looking for information about Chinese human rights activists. Regardless of how much or little information they actually gleaned, Google has no recourse but to take drastic action. This much is a given. What isn’t is how much impact this will have elsewhere in the technology sphere.

What Google is doing is necessary, but it’s also getting some press for appearing to be a humanitarian action. Regardless of their previous cooperation with Chinese censors, and their continued cooperation with censorship in other locales, this visible blow struck against the proliferation of cultural insulation looks really good on El Goog. It’s natural – we see a bully knock over the little kids, and when someone – anyone – steps up and says “I’m not putting up with this any more” even if the display amounts to taking their ball and going home, we applaud.

But what if no one else does it?

This is a potentially huge place to gain ground. What if Microsoft steps up and has Bing remove all censoring leans globally? What if Yahoo! shuts down everywhere that refuses total egalitarianism of information? Take it the other way: What if Google turns this into a massive initiative, and everyone else… Just fails to.

Who are we going to back? Certainly not China, with its massive record of oppression. Google? Sure, if this is anything more than just an espionage reaction. Anyone else? Maybe. If they step up.

When you don’t control your PR, you can’t make the play companies have in the past and say you’re “looking into” something for months on end, and expect people to take the pill lying down. You need to react, and react fast. If not, the research geeks activate, and your thinly veiled attempts at grey-speech are whipped off like the curtain from the Wizard of Oz.

So is Google making a play against censorship, or defending its property?

Will other information giants step up and mimic the action?

And, moreover, aside from the human rights issues, does it matter here in North America?

Photo by Bernt Rostad.

Relating By Narcissism

January 11, 2010 by Ian 3 Comments

Gosh, that looks like someone we know.

I retooled my Google Profile recently because it felt barren and devoid of any purpose other than being a placeholder. I’ve gotten a bit wary of leaving accounts this way. Outposts are one thing, but building my own ghost town? No, thanks.

The experience was a bit weird, and it’s not really finished. I need to write a better self-bio, but it’s slow going because I don’t write much copy. Also because I’m very unused to writing about myself (hello, meta) as much as I do self-reference here. It’s a totally different feel, doing something from a purely outside view, rather than telling a story like I would on my blog, or just about anywhere else. It feels empty, unemotional and, above all, narcissistic. But then, I thought, isn’t all sharing this way?

We can bash all we want on the idea of people using social media and social networking to get themselves out there, but it’s one of the most common, misunderstood behaviours we have. If you tell me you broke a finger, I’ll tell you I stabbed myself with a screwdriver. It’s not being self-centered (unless it is, which is less common), rather it’s a great way to make sure you understand that I’m not just spouting platitudes. It shows, if not a common experience, at least that I understand what you’re saying and have been through a similar trial.

It really sounds like I’m making it about me. But I’m not. I’m proving to you that I know what you’re getting at. Where it falls down is if I fail to stop at the end of the example, and continue with the whole story, totally derailing yours. That’s narcissism for you. If I’ve been good enough to relate and stop, and let you get on with it – trust me, I’m using relational proof, not turning the tide of conversation.

I’ve decided to be a bit more sharing, despite the obvious “Go Me” undertones. I don’t really do Delicious or Digg, but if you use Google Reader, go ahead and follow my shared items. I made them public during the writing of this post, and they’re going to stay that way. I’m very picky about what I share, so expect scarcity for a while as I build up my list. I promise I’ll try not to annoy you.

I’d also like your advice (because we’re in this together, and I just told you a story – it’s your turn to tell me one of yours). In addition to social bookmarking, are there any tools you use for not just getting yourself out there, but for getting the things you think are worthwhile and interesting out to the people who follow you?

We can’t talk about ourselves all the time. But we can’t talk about other people all the time either. There’s a happy medium. Have you found yours yet?

Children's Games and Social Media

January 8, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

I was always crap at Simon Says. I was the kid who could only ever think of three things to have people do – stand up, sit down, run in place – and I’ve learned to mark this down to both an inability to develop internal go-to lists, and a dislike of having to issue mindless rapid-fire commands. Yet as I watch people tweet their lives away sometimes I wonder exactly how useful these skills are in real life? Like learning trigonometry, I had always figured it was something to get good at or avoid, but now I’m not so sure.

Like it or not, Social Media is here to stay. I hope someone comes up with a better, permanent term for what’s going on, because I dislike that buzzword, but there you are. I’m fortuitous to be getting into networking just now, because I have a nearly three year old son, and while considering the things we need to make sure he learns, at the same time I’m watching the foibles of high-powered people online, and seeing a lot of parallel.

One of the many things I dislike about Twitter’s ecosphere is the MLM phenomenon. It sounds like a pyramid scheme on the outside (and runs like one) but the behavior of the people involved, or at least the visible output of the bots, looks an awful lot like Simon Says. Rapid fire information with little available content driving people who are unlucky enough to get sucked in to useless products or a hookup to the scheme. It’s a social failing, but it’s one of those pendulum behaviors – those who understand just enough are exploiting those who don’t yet know.

How many pundit blogs do you read? I don’t specifically mean political pundits, I mean Apple and Google and Microsoft fanboy blogs as well. Notice anything about their habits? Suggesting certain new products, dropping bombs on others. For some reason this always reminds me of Red Light, Green Light.

The less said about Michael Arrington’s apparent tabloidism the better – but the entire leak culture feels like one big game of telephone.

Corporate recruiting feels a bit like Red Rover.

It’s amazing how often this kind of thing happens. Perhaps it’s early training, rearing it’s head on our adult lives. On the other hand, like just about anything, when you know just enough about how these habits form, you can exploit them. And when that gets old, you can become a benefactor and teach others either to exploit the habits, or how to avoid having these habits exploited.

Until you know where your habits come from, and what the tells are, how are you going to ensure you’re not being taken advantage of?

Otherwise, it’s duck-duck goose, and someone’s got their eye on turning you into the next goose.

Photo by Mykl Roventine

Personality Thieves – The War for the Identities of the Internet

December 23, 2009 by Ian 4 Comments

Big Ass Feed Icon — photo by Danny Sullivan

Robert Scoble posted an interesting discussion topic on his Facebook wall, asking the deceptively simple question: Who will win the Identity war in 2010?

The question was asked with specificity towards tech platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Google and so on, but it’s an important question to ask of ourselves: to whom are we giving the leverage of our primary identification on the web?

Like a lot of others who are best suited to interface, I’m an adaptable person. This is both a great help in my work, and a hindrance with my friends for one simple reason; when I spend time with you, I’m going to start to sound like you. If I spend an evening watching QI, I have a flare-up of British in my speech. If I spend too much time reading Justin Kownacki, I get ornery. Too much Seth Godin and I fall afoul of sweeping inspirational pessimism. I’ve been accused of having a weak identity, but I don’t think that’s it, primarily because I’m not alone in this behaviour; I just happen to display it as a very visible means of communication. I’m in the habit not only of speaking your language, but speaking your accent as well.

Identity is a touchy subject for a lot of people. We like to be ourselves, but easily fall afoul of pop culture epidemics. Every teenager falls into a category during high school – those who try not to get branded as “outsiders” by their peers, which makes demarcation an impossible process to avoid; it only goes away when everyone stops participating, and it’s not human nature to remain intentionally ambiguous. Social networks make this even more difficult to avoid – Twitter has lists, Facebook has the friend system, as do so many other networks. It’s not a bad thing, but as with so much else, awareness is the key to safe navigation.

The idea of identity, of finding peers to connect with, is so easy to reconcile with our daily lives that technology has adapted it as a mode of operation – we can’t ignore this. Peer to Peer filesharing. Friends lists. Contact lists, address books, RSS feeds, folders, libraries, right down to the DLLs that run your computer programs. Grouping is everywhere. And because it’s everywhere, it’s possible to manipulate.

I recently read an article on Brad J Ward’s blog from last year about “FacebookGate” where a group had severely infiltrated student-run graduation groups for various schools – for who knows what purpose. Perhaps data mining. Maybe stalking. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this event as a demonstration of the very demarcation we use to identify ourselves being used for purposes we did not choose when we claimed the label in the first place.

It gets worse: Over the last month I’ve seen both Chris Brogan and Amber Naslund suffer outright plagiarism. Brogan’s world saw a hack marketing an eBook made out of a collection of Chris’ blog posts. Naslund had a blog post ripped right from her site and posted, no claim of attribution whatsoever, on another site. This goes beyond casual emulation for the sake of communication; this is outright personality theft.

So how does this apply to technology as a communicative and cultural force? In practice. I make a habit of signing up for every social networking site I can lay my greedy hands on, whether I’m aiming to use it or not. I’ve been trying to snap up my own names as a username for the last three months as well, for branding purposes, it just makes sense. Now, think about that for a second. Think about what I just said.

Branding purposes.

Sounds funny, doesn’t it? We talk about personal branding all the time, but it’s always as an external force, information we’re carefully aligning outside ourselves on networks, website after website, trying to make a name for ourselves. We get annoyed if our names are already taken, but how do we fight back? Not by making a mass acceptance of the fact that our personal brands are facets of our identity – that would be silly, applying a business term to ourselves – but rather by setting up “Verified Accounts” and other measures to make sure the people represented by certain usernames really are themselves. It’s a good thing, but it’s still external.

Scoble’s question about who will win the identity war this year – and it will be this year, it has to be, or it will never come – is a big one. I answered by asserting that it won’t be the creation of utility that wins. If we’re looking for utility we already have a mesh of social networks for that. Facebook for friend gathering Twitter for grapeshot conversation, LiveFyre for in-depth enquiry. FourSquare and Gowalla for relational location. We build our online identities out of these things, among many others (personally branded websites, I’m aware, are a big deal as well. I’ve got mine, did you get yours?) and often forget that the idea of identity is more about accessibility than it is about utility. We use these networks to get our words out to others, to track interest in what we say based on how, when, and how loud we say it.

Whatever wins the identity war will provide the greatest power of accessibility and cross-feeding to the largest number of people with the least amount of hassle. Google’s profiles are a great start, but it’s not quite enough. If I know El Goog half as well as I hallucinate that I do, they’ll improve it; I can see the potential there for the perfect outward-facing home base meshed with the ultimate inward-facing dashboard. I wonder if they do, too.

Maybe it won’t be Google. Maybe it’ll be something, or someone else that brings up that killer app.

I just can’t wait to use it once it’s there.