Hemmed in by signposts: Metaphors limit the scope of social media innovation

By Ruben Kenig | Published: 24 August, 2010
Long exposure of car tail lights

It can all become a blur very quickly

Metaphors are a crucial part of how we relate to the digital world. They are crucial in one sense as the low-level languages that computers use are incomprehensible to humans. All our spangly, shiny Powerpoint presentations and music libraries are streams of hexidecimal or binary digits to our processors and disk drives. Unless you’re very special these low-level digital streams are gobbledygook and even if you are special enough to make sense of them they’re certainly not anything like the files most of us expect to see or listen to.

With the invention of the graphical user interface (GUI) metaphor became a much more explicit part of our computing experience. A host of analogies were launched upon us in a rush, windows, scrolling, dragging, trash and even document. These terms were needed to help us cope with this new world and GUIs were crucial in the spread of computing from the lab to the wider world.

While these metaphors were initially liberating they have become limiting particularly as digital information weaves itself into increasingly intricate patterns in our lives. Venkatesh Rao from the Xerox Innovation Group has written an interesting post on Mashable on this issue, specifically how the metaphors that served us well in the past now limit us. Read More »

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It’s not about the tools

By Ruben Kenig | Published: 19 August, 2010
rusty spanner (or wrench if you're American)

It still works

There is an easy tendency in most disciplines to fetishise the state of the art tools, endowing them with the magical power to make your work (whatever it is) wonderful. Tools are important. If you create things with them and spend a lot of time using them the minutiae of their good and bad points magnify in your mind, but the quality of your work has little to do with the quality of the tools you use.

There is an obvious caveat that the technical quality is defined by the limits of the tool. You can’t shoot HD video on a 1.2 megapixel kids camera, but you can make a good video with one.

There’s a video of Dave Grohl playing on a child’s drum kit after signing it for some promo shindig and the drum kit is a toy but he makes music with it. Sure if he was playing a Drum Workshop custom shiny wonderkit it would sound better, but you can make music on a child’s toy.

Of course it helps if you’re great at your discipline and there is a threshold of quality that helps in learning a skill. It is a lot easier to learn to play guitar on an instrument that stays in tune and you’re not going to play Mendelssohn’s Spinning Song at much of a tempo on a piano with sticking keys but you can make music on poor instruments.

Moaning about the tools seems to get louder the better the tools get. Well, perhaps until you have the absolute state of the art and there really is nowhere to go, but that might be an imaginary land as there’s always something to improve even if it’s your chair or the paint on the walls. Yearning for, faster computers, bigger monitors, more plugins, better lenses, or whatever it is that sticks in your craw that you don’t have is just getting in the way of doing whatever it is you do. Read More »

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Give Twitter a go: It’s quite good really

By Ruben Kenig | Published: 19 August, 2010
ugly chick

Not all birds are pretty

From within the bubble of Twitter enthusiasm the worth of the platform seems self-evident, but there are people out there who aren’t convinced, don’t see the point of the medium and aren’t sure how to approach it. Twitter is a powerful tool and that power is the flexibility contained within the broadcast of 140 characters.

The premise is incredibly simple, but there are many ways to use the platform. DoshDosh has a pretty decent list of 17 ways to use Twitter. Interestingly, communicating with people you know isn’t on that list. This is the way that Andrew Dubber uses it and he explains how he keeps in touch with his personal tribe on Twitter.

Both these posts leave out, at least largely, my favourite benefit of being on Twitter, listening. There are lots of interesting people on Twitter who are leaders in their fields and being interesting people they tend to have interesting things to say either directly through Twitter or posting links to their work or just what they are reading.

Twitter is also highly flexible. You can follow people but you can also follow topics through keyword searches. You can even do this persistently through using third-party client programs like Tweetdeck or Seesmic. I love this method because it removes the emphasis on the personality and the rise of the Twitter Star is a stumbling block at the moment. There are lots of people out there clamouring for attention.

The rise of the marketers and the popularity game

There are two big problems with Twitter at the moment for me. The first is the number of people marketing on the platform. There are lots of profiles of folks pushing out affiliate links, links to coupon sites or even links to sites selling courses on how to use Twitter to become rich beyond avarice. It is fine to ignore these people. They’re not really interested in you they are following you in the hope that you’ll follow them back. Which brings us to the other part of the problem.

The second problem is that it is hard to resist seeing Twitter as a hierarchy or even a game. The currency of this game is, usually, followers. How many people listen to what you have to say. There are celebrities using Twitter with several million followers and perhaps more interestingly there are people whose field of expertise is using Twitter (and other social networks) who have hundreds of thousands of followers.

It is all too easy to feel inadequate with a measly hundred, twenty or five followers, but it’s not the size that matters (insert fnar-fnar joke here, after this meta fnar-fnar one). There are lots of ways to use Twitter. It is useful to stay focused on why you are using it though so as not to be sucked in by the gravity of convention.

Keeping your head above the stream

The primary metaphor of Twitter is that it presents you with streams of information. I think this is a useful metaphor as the information that passes through Twitter is ephemeral and in sufficient quantity it can feel like you’re drowning.

You don’t have to read everything. It’s OK to hop in and out. These aren’t messages targeted at you personally so no-one will be offended if you don’t remember what they tweeted about odd socks last Tuesday. If you start following a lot of people you probably won’t be able to read everything.

Andrew Dubber keeps in touch with about 150 people most of whom he knows personally. I’m not as social as him so I do use Twitter to keep in touch with a few people I know who use the platform, but mostly I use it to learn by following some brilliant people who tweet. In order to keep myself sane I have created lists of people by category, music, webdesign, science, Devon, etc. I can dip into these streams any time to see what the web folks are up to for instance. It’s a bit like wandering from group to group at a party.

I also have one main list that I pay particular attention to. This is fairly dynamic, I move people on and off frequently depending on what I’m most interested in at the time. This list usually has about 30 people on it and almost never more than 50. There is a limit to how many people you can really pay attention too.

In a comment to his post Andrew Dubber mentions Dunbar’s number which is a theoretical limit to the number of people you can maintain stable social relationships with. There’s no precise number but it’s commonly around 150 people. That’s how many he follows.

Why I would like you to use Twitter

The wonder of Twitter for me are brilliant, interesting and provocative people who share 140 character slices of their thoughts. Like the internet in general, there is a wave of commercial interest in the platform. People are trying to figure out how to make money out of the medium. There are lots of business uses, customer service is one of the best, but Twitter’s currency is the individuals who use it.

Twitter’s interest is directly proportional to the number of people who use it. The more folks out there the better chance everyone has of building a community to listen to that fulfils them in some way. There are lots of interesting folks here already but there’s room for more.

The ugly bird catches no worm by Hinderik de Keijzer is used under a Creative Commons License

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