Digital to what?

I just recieved a Google Wave invite and am currently exploring. Does anyone else have Google Wave? Connect with me at Devin1682[at]gmail.com

Will update this post as I learn more.

Just something to check out for those who might be interested. A comparative analysis of six social networking sites privacy policies from Canada. See it here.

This is a reaction to ’5 Social Media Disasters’ by Sebastian Barros.

As Lister et al. have noted in the section about online community, the Internet has become an increasingly commercially driven place.  With social media we see companies blurring the lines between marketing to and becoming part of the community by using tools like Facebook and Twitter for relationship and trust building.

While this is in many cases effective (see the Mashable post: ’10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media’), when you’re building trust with the sole intent for commercial gain, it is very easy to misstep. Transparency is key in this building of relationships with consumers and you’re engaging them on a global scale when it comes to social media tools. What many fail to realize is that when you misstep you’ve done so on the same global scale.  This has led many organizations to go to quick and decisive measures to silence those who speak out against them, usually taking the form of blocking access to forums.

This is usually a knee-jerk reaction due to poor social media strategy planning.  In my opinion, for all the time spent planning promotion of social media integration substantial time must also be spent planning a strategy for dealing with things that are unforeseen or negative. Denying your community a forum to voice their disdain is not an answer. It contributes to the problem. As in any trusting relationship, an apology can go a long way, and finding a way to make things up to your community can have an even greater impact.  Unfortunately, most companies tend to not look at the long tail effects of their actions instead focusing on how they can make money now. When people are saying negative things, the most attractive way to curb this is to take away their forum for doing so if you have the ability.

Take Coke for example.  About a month ago the government told them they had to disclose the origin of their Dasani bottled water (its treated tap water).  For a time they resisted releasing the information which led to an outcry from their Facebook fans who went on their page and posted, pleading with them to reveal the water’s origin.  To combat the negativity Coke began deleting comments and at times during the day shut off their Facebook wall completely.  This, in turn, made the fans turn to other sources to not only continue to push the Dasani message, but also to let others know that Coke was attempting to silence them.

It was a bad situation that other companies should have taken note of. But they didn’t. A week later the CEO of Whole Foods was lambasted for writing a controversial article on President Obama’s health care plan.  When the online community turned to their forum to express their disdain with the CEO’s actions, it was met with the company shutting down the forum and deleting all the comments. Like the Coke example, this turned an already bad situation into an even worse one because the people who were using the forum then turned to other social media tools to express their opinions where they became viral within the users network creating even more negativity toward the company.

I have seen this happen more and more over the past six months in companies from huge corporations to small newspapers.  Has anyone else seen or documented this happening? I’d love to hear about it.

How we determine who is qualified to be a professor may well be changing with the speed of new media change. Read more here:

http://www.brandingsoapbox.com/2009/09/at-the-speed-of-academia-.html

What I found most interesting about this post is that, as we have been reading about the fact that there is no generally agreed upon understanding of what new media is due to the quickness with which media is changing, traditions within academia that have been agreed upon for years and years will have to be reconsidered if we are going to be able to prepare our students for the new media world.

What are your thoughts?

As this assignment was a learning experience in that it gave a clearer picture of what the course will be about, and also what will be expected of us in our assignments, I wanted to address the questions presented by Professor Jankowski to my assignment. These questions made me realize I was being unclear in some of my assessment so hopefully I can clear some things up here.

1. When I stated: “It has, for a long time, bothered me that the term “new media” seems to have no clear definition the way traditional media does,” it was questioned whether Lister and colleagues give what I would call a ‘clear definition’?

In answer to this question, no, I don’t feel that they do. In further review of my phrasing, I feel that perhaps my use of  “definition” was a poor choice for what I was trying to imply.  What I meant by “definition” is highlighted by this quote from page 9 of Lister and colleagues’ New Media: A Critical Introduction:

First, we should remember that for some fifty years the word ‘media’, the plural of ‘medium’, has been used as a singular collective term, as in ‘the media’ (Williams 1976: 169). So, if we can speak of ‘the media’ surely we can speak of ‘the new media’ by simply giving the solidity and familiarity of established media as a prefix. Even here, however, it is worth noting how, by doing this, we immediately imply a kind of social agency and coherence to ‘new media’ that they do not yet possess.

Where we, as a society, have a coherence to the collective understanding of what traditional media is, we have not come to the same collective understanding of what we are talking about when we reference “new media.”

2. When I stated: “We are a fickle society by nature and in our world of decentralized media where we are faced with multiple media that operate in similar ways we tend to adhere to one and try to centralize it,” it was questioned what I was referring to.

This could have been more clear if phrased differently. What I should have said is that due to the proliferation of media sources and tools we have to choose from for communication, we have become a very fickle society with little continued adherence or loyalty to one tool or source.  Instead we tend to rely on a number of tools working together for push and pull communication. Push, being the information we put out, and pull, the information we take in.  With so many tools to choose from that do similar things, a centralized media tool like television, radio or newspaper becomes less dominant because we can turn to other media sources to get what we need.

Despite the fact that we turn to decentralized media more and more, in reading Lister I realized that though we do use multiple media for communication, we still seem to at least try to adhere to a few to make them centralized. Take social networks for example. For a number of years MySpace was dominant, then Facebook took over.  While there are many tools just like MySpace and Facebook out there, we seem to adhere to one, at least for a short while. Competition for dominance is fierce in new media where traditional media had very little competition for a very long time. It took decades for television, radio and newspapers to lose enough market share to allow another player in the media mix while it took only a few short years for MySpace to lose its market share to Facebook.

This lack of competition for widespread acceptance and use is one of the reasons why we have a collective understanding of what traditional media is, and is also the reason why we have such a hard time with a collective understanding of new media.  There are new tools coming out every day that redefine what we understand to be new media.  Given this fact, I question if we ever have a collective understand of what new media is.

3. One of more thought provoking points brought up in the Lister reading was highlighted on page 27:

If the existing structures of knowledge are built upon the book what happens when the book is replaced by the computer memory and hypertextual linking?

This brings about the very important issue of archiving the material that we create digitally.  Until the advent of new media we relied solely on analogue media for documentation and archiving. Since then we have moved more and more toward digital documentation.  This Lister quote begs the question of what happens to digital documentation when computer memory fails or the tools we have used for archiving digitally have become obsolete?

The response to this question was that libraries have been making strides to remedy this potential situation by archiving digitally.  I believe the issue is much greater than what libraries can archive however.  Some of our most prized works of literature and research were done by private individuals and not found, made public or put into use until long after their author’s deaths.  If a private individual’s work is only documented in their personal computer’s memory, we stand to lose it if that computer fails or becomes obsolete because it has no physical, tangible component.

What are your thoughts on these topics?

The Lister reading deals with a subject that I have grappled with since I started using the multitude of tools that fall under the broad and vague category of new media; it begins to define why we have deemed new media “new.”  It has, for a long time, bothered me that the term “new media” seems to have no clear definition the way traditional media does. There is no clear solution to this issue unfortunately. New media is constantly changing and has no real boundaries due to the interpretations of its meaning by different people. New media is decentralized by nature making its definition even harder to define because anything that falls into the category of “new media” is totally reliant on mass acceptance by society before it will be widely known to the public. In this respect, I believe the popularity of some new media tools and channels over others shows the human tendency to try and create order from chaos.  We are a fickle society by nature and in our world of decentralized media where we are faced with multiple media that operate in similar ways we tend to adhere to one and try to centralize it.  We instituted this method with analogue media through use of books, carried it over into digital media through the advent of systems we choose to run on our computers, and are carrying it over into new media by adhering to tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

At many different points in the reading I was struck by the ever-present theme that was presented early on in the reading that while our culture and society changes the use of technology, technology in turn changes culture and society (p. 4). It is a cycle that has been present in mankind since we first started documenting our presence and activities in cave drawings. These representations have instructed who we are as a culture for as long as we have been documenting them, and conversely, we continue to document them to instruct further culture.

One thing disturbed me greatly in my reading of this material. It is something I have thought about in the past in regard to the vast use of computers for data collection, that was brought up in the definitions of fixity and flux. Where analogue media is defined as existing as fixed, tangible, physical objects that actually exist, flux takes digital form that actual only exists in a computers memory.  Page 27 asks the most provocative question of the reading when it asks “if existing knowledge is based on the book, what happens when the book is replaced by computer memory and hypertextual linking?” Our move toward total digital documentation could have very grave implications if we don’t stop to figure out how to archive our material, and if media production is becoming more and more decentralized, how can we ever hope to document it all?  This is a problem we have yet to find an answer to.

This is my first post. Excited to get to work.