Will the ABC be all spikes and no hub, or will virtual hubs rule?

Last month I blogged about innovation in media, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) move to develop widgets for users to aggregate ABC content on their social network sites. As I’ve said before, this is a smart move by the ABC. In taking this initiative, the ABC appears to have recognised the reality that social networks are the new hub for news and entertainment.

So it is interesting to contrast this strategy with the ABC’s primary vision to become Australia’s “virtual town square” – a hub for user-generated content. In May 2009, Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, described the virtual town square as “a place where Australians can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from one another”. By November 2009, planning had advanced to the point where the ABC is to employ digital media trainers around the country to teach Australians how to upload their own content to the ABC’s website.

What strikes me about the virtual town square idea is that conceptually it is not  a new. Local radio chat shows are a long-standing example of user-generated content in media. The town square idea also rests on media institutions continuing to provide the hub or the space for people to use.  I just wonder how congruent the strategy is with social media has it continues to grow in importance in the everyday lives of Australians.

For when it comes to creating and uploading content, people are already doing this for themselves. The emerging social media hub is a personalised place, one that is open to friends, family, coworkers and other associates in the work place and in the community. The social media hub has user-generated photos and videos, status updates and wall posts for expressing views about whatever is of interest.  It’s a place to join groups of interest and for political activism. It’s a place where users aggregate  news feeds, music and videos from third parties, updates from their other social media sites, and feeds from people they connect with. It’s a place that links data from all over the web. In Australia, that could well mean some content from the ABC. It may well mean that data is collated and shared within user-created and run virtual communities. Users doing it for themselves.

Where might social network site aggregation and sharing go? Steve Rubel has suggested that user preferences for personalised social network sites may mean that the next great media company will not have a website, they will be “all spokes and no hub”. I’d say that is a good call.  With the widget initiative, the ABC is positioning to play in the user-defined media hub space. The corporation is doing that as well as playing host to virtual town squares on its own website. It will be interesting to see how these two plays pan out over the next couple of years.

Future of Social Media…and Media

The online media platforms of broadcasters and newspaper publishers have been integrating social media into their channels for some time now. Integration takes on many forms including offering space for comments, providing web widgets to share articles on the likes of Facebook, Twitter or del.icio.us. Recognising that people carry with them devices that can capture and distribute media in real-time, broadcasters and newspapers encourage people to send them information about events. Professional journalists have blogs and Twitter accounts. Indeed the inter-dependency between media and social media has evolved to the point that some say it is impossible to separate the two.

Media Futurist,Gerd Leonhard, describes the outlook for social networks and social media as an online operating system for individuals, for business and for government – for society generally. Whether you are communicating with people, looking for information or looking for other people or points of interest nearby, whether you are on the mobile web doing some purchasing or banking online, or some citizen journalism, whether your location enables information or advertisements about things of relevance to you to be pushed to your mobile device…you get the picture.

Portable identity tools such as Open ID, Facebook’s Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect allow users to share and aggregate news and information from one web site to another. These developments are regarded as forerunners to technologies that enable portable identities creating (according to a Forrester analysis on the social web) shared social experiences – where socially connected people take their digital identities with them and interact with their social networks over the Web. Those shared experiences are more likely to be contextual situations where their reality is augmented and/or mixed through digital online technologies.

For people entering this space – possibly up to a third of the population over the next five years – content will not be king, nor will their voice calls be mainstays for the telecommunications industry. Content will remain important, but its placement will be contextualised and personalised. It will be relevant to and timely for individuals and their social networks. As Gerd Leonhard says, content will be embodied, packaged and curated in ways that offer value to people. That’s the rationale behind Google’s Social Search – this posting by Mahendra Pasule explains why. I like the terms used by Mahendra too, particularly social relevancy. I feel we will see that term becoming a mantra for social media value-adding strategies.

For more information on value generators see media Futurist Gerd Leonhard’s Future of Social Media presentation delivered at PICNIC ‘09 in Amsterdam back in September 2009. I found the 30 minute video to be time well spent.

The direction that social media/media is heading in is not cross-platform. The operating framework is as a social platform, a shared digital media space. The ‘community hub’ will not be a physical location as such, it will be a socially networked space, where content and services are socially relevant in terms of who and what people are connected to, and their context at the time.

What teenagers know that corporations do not

Well, hasn’t it been fascinating just how widely distributed the views of 15 yo Morgan Stanley intern, Matthew Robson have been. Looking at what Matthew had to say, I am not at all surprised. The messages were clearly stated and I found them hard to disagree with. What’s more, the concise nature of the report is in line with what Matthew said about newspapers in that no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper [print] since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text”. I would add: no video, no audio, no interaction, no links, no free content = no teenage readers. It makes you wonder about the form and format of other research reports. Oh, and in another report on Matthew’s comment I learned that no teenager looks at telephone directories.

Clearly, with so much to attract their attention, many people (not just teenagers) really do value a good summary of something or have a really good search engine on hand rather than pages of text. I just wonder how influential Matthew’s comments have been relative to say other analyst and research institute reports.

As to the sceptical view of 20th Century media moguls, I do wonder whether they have much insight about the way things are going. To my mind, Howard Stringer (CEO of Sony) gives the game away by describing social media as a “club”. It’s not actually a club – particularly not in the walled-garden, proprietary systems view of the world. Social media is an ecosystem in  constant emergence. No one is in control and things change fast. That is not what the moguls and big corporate institutions are used to.

Fred Wilson (a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures) had this to say about what teenagers are up to. While Fred sounded a note of caution in reading too much into what Matthew Robson had to say, based on his own kids behaviour, he went on to say that “My kids have moved from the set top box to iTunes to Netflix in less than a couple of years and are now watching much of their TV streamed over the Internet.” It is obviously a big challenge for media moguls and their international corporations to be agile and responsive to that  kind of change, especially when that don’t get the fundamentals of what is driving change.

Fred had a few things to say about profitability in internet ventures too. There are a few internet companies doing nicely thank you (including Facebook now it seems). Yeah, I know. You would expect him to have that view. But one of the things Fred Wilson gets is that the internet is transformative. He said that the internet …”is a huge game changer. The internet has been a commercial technology for about fifteen years now. And we are beginning to see the impact of it on everything around us. The industrial revolution and the Renaissance before it lasted a century or more. It takes a long time for such fundamental changes to work their way through the system and produce a new ‘normal’”. That is not a case for deferring strategies to adapt to change I should hasten to add! It is a case for building in agility and flexibility.

Frustration Media

I’ve been an avid reader of newspapers since I was a kid…that’s a long time now. I’ve got to say that print media is losing out to social media in terms of my attention now.

Sure, I’m finding that blogging, commenting on other blogs, subscribing to news feeds and participating in microblogging and social networking is seductive. It’s interactive. It’s social. It’s creative. The knowledge networks that I can tap into seem limitless at times.

In comparison, I’ve got to the point now that I get frustrated when reading a print article that either gets things wrong or presents a view that I want to challenge…there and then… but of course, I’m not able to.  

On Monday, 29 September there was a critque by Matthew Mclean in The Age on social media. Just the print version. The article was on page 11, somewhat ironically headed the ‘Comment & Debate’ section. 

The article starts with “In the near future the worlds of Facebook and MySpace will suddently implode”. Why? McClean states that “Trying to entwine personality, and perhaps even one’s self-esteem , to something that does not actually exist [it's a virtual world] is a depressing and dangerous thing to do”. Mclean refers to unspecified ‘cyber-space’ critics claiming social network users are “subsuming their own reality as a consequence [of spending time in a virtual world]“. 

Mclean goes on to site some ’status updates’ of his former Facebook friends as evidence of “…a lack of orginality and serious contemplation”. One example used was ‘(Name) is full after a fairly nice tuna sandwich’. So what?

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Fair enough. But McClean’s article takes just one element of the Facebook experience and condems the future of social networking. That is not balanced journalism. There was no reference to other elements such as news feeds, group action (that can be social, professional, educational or political) knowledge sharing or co-creation. At a basic social level, people like being able to make connections with others. Social networking provides many opportunities for connecting with others.

According to comScore, Facebook is now the most popular social network globally. But the storey is not all about Facebook or MySpace. The data also showed that social networking activity is popular globally, attracting 580 million visitors (an increase of 25% from the year before) out of a total internet audience of 860 million in June 2008. 

Social networking has come a long way (in terms of use) very quickly. Much of it is still experimental, and still at the early stages of development. According to a survey by Synovate, some people do seem to be losing interest in social networking. Apparently, 58% of the people surveyed did not know what social networking is. These are indicators of a nascent service – Facebook only went public about two years ago.

Here is what Steve Garton, global head of media research for Synovate, had to say about users having a balanced on- and offline existence. “Most people online, regardless of culture, have a very strong appreciation of being in the real world. Their attitudes and behaviour show us that the virtual world of social networking can complement relationships, but not replace them.  There is no substitute for real life, real friends and real relationships”.  That is a far cry from users subsuming their own reality. What’s more, forty percent of survey participants agreed that online communication can be just as meaningful as face-to-face communication.

So McClean’s perspective does have some validity, but no blance. To cast down social networking on such slim evidence and virtually no analysis – under a page header of comment and debate – and with no opportunity to interact, just leaves me feeling very cool about the experience and cool toward print media. 

That kind of experience is happening to me quite often with print media. So I’ve labelled it ‘Frustration Media’. No wonder it’ s in decline.

Mind over Matter

On 26 August I had the great good fortune to attend the Mind over Matter – How Technology Matters seminar hosted by education.au.

Professor Martin Westell’s topic was how technology is impacting on attention, motivation, multi-tasking, learning and work. This posting is to share my notes on multi-tasking, media consumption, evidence-based decision-making, the pace of change looking forward and ways to deal with that. The speech marks are quotes from Prof. Westell.

Multi-tasking

One surprise for me was to learn that young people are not so good at multi-tasking (e.g. consuming multiple media at the same time). It was surprising in that, a not unusual comment at media conferences  is for one of the speakers to talk about their son or daughter’s ability to watch TV, txt friends and update their MySpace/Bebo or Facebook profile all at the same time. As it turns out, that all seems to be something of a myth. Adults in are not so adept at multi-tasking either,but they are better at it than young people. It seems that what people do is to shift their attention from one task to another. So a young person would send an SMS, then check out YouTube, then turn to whatever is on TV – sequentially, not simultaneously. Media consumption is episodic. Check out the research referred to by Prof. Westell here.

The relationship between multi-tasking and media consumption appears at first to be at odds with recent data about people consuming more media at the same time. The point to note however, as Ross Dawson as observed, the implications are that “Most media will be consumed with partial attention. Advertising impact will decrease”.

The point about ‘partial attention’ is consistent with the ’scarcity of attention’ phenomenon as observed by Brian Solis.

Adults are better at multi-tasking because they have more highly developed ‘executive functions’ (such as inhibiting impulses and paying attention). Younger people do not have the same attention-holding ability as adults – that probably explains why kids appear to be consuming multiple media at the same time. They just flip quickly from one to another.

On the Impact of ICT

It is important for the ’system’ (i.e educational institutions, service providers, regulators) to understand – at a reasonably deep, rather than surface level – what ICT experiences students have. Where there is a lack of understanding “the system retreats” (eg. where schools ban access to YouTube and social networking sites).

Young people are better at discerning authentic & synthetic messages (eg. after MySpace introduced advertising, some young people left the service).

Socialisation (not information) is now the primary use of the Internet. “It’s not the technology that changes the way you think, it’s about you and what you do with it”.

Young people experience violence online in a similar way to real violence (ie. their brain reactions are similar).  A young person experiencing a lot of violence online becomes more violent in the real world. Their online experience changes their worldview and interaction with others in the real-world. This can have positive effects as well, depending on the virtual experience. Online video game players apparently make better laproscopic surgeons. Learning how to take-in massive amounts of information during video games develops a high capacity for attention.

ICT is process-focused rather than product-focused. Demonstratively high processing skills is a key indicator of future success – more so than numeracy skills. The best time to learn processing skills is between 7 – 15 years of age. Happily, learning changes brain connectivity through-out life (ie. it is possible to learn no matter what age you are).

Highly structured learning environments that focus on content inhibits skills-building to an extent (skills such as planning, strategising and prioritisation). More effective learning environments incorporate multi-sensory activity, emotional content and interpersonal interaction. ICT collaborative tools are good for building self-regulatory or ‘executive’ functions. Giving more control to young people over their education would help to develop their self-regulatory skills.

Evidence

We can only use evidence to inform decision-making (ie. evidence is not the sole basis on which to make decisions). Each decision-maker has their own beliefs, experiences and values that come into play.

Forward-looking

Prof Westell referred to Kurzweil’s Singularity is Near to suggest that, at the current rate of progress, the next 25 years will be the equivalent of progress made over the last 100 years. In such an environment – with so much change, so much diversity – a distinctive ‘Generation Z’ (i.e the generation after Gen Y) is not likely to happen. In an environment of rapid change, ‘future-proofing skills’ such as creativity and innovation will be of strategic advantage.

Decision-making will involve ambiguity – making decisions with unknown probabilities or unknown outcomes. This means that decision-making would need to be open to possibilities. This is different to making decisions through risk-assessments (evaluating varying levels of probability).

The problem is that people prefer knowns to unknowns, going so far as to sacrifice potential rewards for the sake of surety. Our natural response to ambiguity inhibits innovation and leadership. Apparently ‘neuro-economics’ goes into this kind of thing (ie. ways of getting around this problem).

Professor Westell referred us to a presentation by Ken Robinson on creativity  – one of the messages being that creativity is just as important as literacy skills. Creativity means being open to possibilities, doing new things. According to Sir Ken, “if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come-up with anything original”.

On top of the need for ‘the system’ to understand young people’s use of ICT, other challenges are to cope with complexity (fast pace of change), ambiguity and to embrace creativity.