Month: September 2008

Categories
Conceptual Young people & museums

Siva Vaidhyanathan on the ‘Generational Myth’

In a new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, former NYU professor and Copyright reform activist Siva Vaidhyanathan writes a provocative essay against the notion of ‘digital natives’ arguing the term and any idea of a ‘generational shift’ is ludicrous and masks the very real diversity in skills, knowledge and behaviours amongst users of digital technologies.

As a professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years.

Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can’t deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile phones. Many can’t afford any gizmos and resent assignments that demand digital work. Many use Facebook and MySpace because they are easy and fun, not because they are powerful (which, of course, they are not). And almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life.

College students in America are not as “digital” as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won’t read books are just not true.

At times I’ve been as guilty as anyone of generalising – usually to make a point or support an argument about the need to invest in, and experiment with, new forms of social technologies – but as Vaidyanathan and others like Eszter Hargittai consistently demonstrate, such generalisations often end up ill-serving the very constituents that they are made about – that is, young people.

On my blog, Sivacracy, Elizabeth Losh, writing director of the humanities core course at the University of California at Irvine and author of the forthcoming Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009), kept the online conversation going: “Unlike many in today’s supposed ‘digital generation,’ we learned real programming skills — with punch cards in the beginning — from the time we were in elementary school. What passes for ‘media literacy’ now is often nothing more than teaching kids to make prepackaged PowerPoint presentations.” Losh also pointed out that the supposed existence of a digital generation has had an impact on education, as distance-learning corporations with bells-and-whistles technology get public attention while traditional classroom teaching is ignored.

Once we assume that all young people love certain forms of interaction and hate others, we forge policies and design systems and devices that match those presumptions. By doing so, we either pander to some marketing cliché or force an otherwise diverse group of potential users into a one-size-fits-all system that might not meet their needs. Then, lo and behold, young people rush to adapt to those changes that we assumed all along that they wanted. More precisely, we take actions like rushing to digitize entire state-university library systems with an emphasis on speed and size rather than on quality and utility.

Eszter Hargittai’s work on social network participation (for example in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication) and especially her 2008 paperfor the Web Use Project with Gina Walejeko show that skills are far from universal.

Hargittai explained why we tend to overestimate the digital skills of young people: “I think the assumption is that if [digital technology] was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.”

Now none of this should really be all that new to us.

Instead it is a reminder that we need to be careful in putting the ‘technology’ before our actual users, audiences and communities, however we might like to segment them. We might do well to look at the recent reports of the World Internet Project which are far less optimistic than ‘market research’ reports on internet usage in different countries. For Australia, then whilst internet usage is indeed high amongst most age groups (the exception being the over 65s) it is far from universal, nor are most of the highly technically literate behaviours we often speak about as ‘norms’ amongst younger users all that popular.

There are great opportunities here for museums, especially technology and science museums, to recast their roles as trainers and educators, helping communities build their digital skills and find relevance in digital environments. Likewise there is plenty to support the notion that we need to be continually experimenting with ensuring our ‘findability’ within new communication environments (social networking services), as interest in other communication channels changes. And, as I have been emphasising in my recent workshops, our collections and content needs to be flexible and adaptable, so that it can be taken up and reused in a multitude of different ways by different communities of users.

Categories
Conceptual open content

Bob Stein on ‘networked publishing’

Bob Stein over at the Future of the Book has written some very engaging summative notions around the challenges and opportunities afforded by ‘networked publishing’.

Stein charts the move from the multimedia model of the late 80s through to the mid 90s where CDROMs and closed ‘interactive media’ opened up new opportunities for readers but preserved the traditional borders of authorship and publishing along with their business models. However, now, as we all know, the web has exploded all of this.

Borders dissolve not only between author and reader but also between published works themselves, and with this, a century old business model evaporates. Published works, it should be noted, do not evaporate – they just circulate in a different environment – one in which their value is spread.

Stein gives this anecdote –

A mother in London recently described her ten-year old boy’s reading behavior: “He’ll be reading a (printed) book. He’ll put the book down and go to the book’s website. Then, he’ll check what other readers are writing in the forums, and maybe leave a message himself, then return to the book. He’ll put the book down again and google a query that’s occurred to him.” I’d like to suggest that we change our description of reading to include the full range of these activities, not just time spent looking at the printed page.

I would suggest that our museums need to take this into account when we think about an exhibition, a publication, an interactive kiosk, and our online materials. These behaviours are not just limited to books – and once the mobile web enters the mainstream at an attractive price point (in London right now I could add unlimited internet to my phone for GBP5/month) – this will be as much the pre/post visit experience as the in-gallery experience as well.

Stein notes –

An old-style formulation might be that publishers and editors serve the packaging and distribution of authors’ ideas. A new formulation might be that publishers and editors contribute to building a community that involves an author and a group of readers who are exploring a subject . . . So it turns out that far from becoming obsolete, publishers and editors in the networked era have a crucial role to play. The editor of the future is increasingly a producer, a role that includes signing up projects and overseeing all elements of production and distribution, and that of course includes building and nurturing communities of various demographics, size, and shape. Successful publishers will build brands around curatorial and community building know-how AND be really good at designing and developing the robust technical infrastructures that underlie a complex range of user experiences.

So how do we move to this more to these new roles and resourcing requirements to best be able to make the most of the new affordances of networked publishing?

There is not a ‘one size fits all’ model – we’ve been exploring this in the last few days of workshops here in London – but I think that museums would be well placed to look at the ways in which libraries have reconfigured and reinvented themselves in the age of information abundance; and also take a look at the way that ‘producers’ work in other media industries.

Categories
dConstruct08 User experience

dConstruct ‘Designing the social web’ 5 Sept 2008, Brighton UK

dConstruct in Brighton this year was held in the full glory of an English beachside summer – sleeting rain and gusty winds. Inside the Brighton Dome, 700 web geeks gathered to hear what ended up being quite a mixed bag of presentations from speakers about various aspects of ‘designing the social web’. Light on the technical detail, all but Tantek Çelik, focussed predominantly on the psycho-social aspects of the social web.

The conference opened with Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You) comparing the similarities in the way in which data visualisation combined with hyperlocal amateur knowledge helped prove the source of the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho, London with the new opportunities that are emerging with social mapping and visualisation technologies in the present. Johnson ‘s 2006 book The Ghost Map is a detailed look at the cholera outbreak and the second half of his talk focussed on his own social mapping project Outside.In. Currently US-only, it is very similar in style to Everyblock, bringing a personal hyperlocal focus to news, people and events in local communities. As Johnson says, usually you care most about things that happen within a small radius of where you are right now – 1000 feet/350 metres – and so Outside.In and its services like Radar use geolocation to deliver this information to you as it happens. He contrasted his service, which parses social media like Twitter and place-centric blogs, with the more obvious (and I would add, easily ‘monetized’) geolocation services which already exist around restaurant reviews and local businesses. Johnson was an engaging speaker but his US-centrism/universalism did emerge at times – and his postulating that Brooklyn contains four of the top ten US local blogging neighbourhoods also seemed to colour his perspective (Johnson lives in Brooklyn).

Next up was Guardian columnist and gaming academic Aleks Krotoski. Aleks was very engaging and energetic, pacing up and down the stage, waving her arms animatedly whenever possible as she explored some of the things that web designers could learn from game designers and vice versa. Her social psychology research around gaming has looked at the different models that game designers use to keep players engaged over long periods of time – the ‘stickiness’ that web designers long for. Of course, as she pointed out, game designers can play the niches and their proven publishing-style business model gives them a distinct advantage over the web where most web applications needs to appeal to a far broader audience and have very few proven sustainable business models (advertising and . . . ). In the controlled systems of games players can be given ongoing ‘carrots’ to keep them engaged and willing to move on to the next level/challenge, and even in immersive sandbox environments like Grand Theft Auto the player is made to ‘invest’ significantly in their game experience – enough to keep them playing for long and repeated periods. Games also can operate as ‘enabling systems’ whereby social value is emergent through community building, storybuilding, and even extends to the obvious player communities around World of Warcarft or in simpler terms the creation of game FAQs, walkthroughs etc. Closely related are what Krotoski termed ‘psychological systems’. These operate around relationship building in-game and also frequently leverage the ‘collecting urge’, and increasingly the generation of in-game assets (see Second Life). Krotoski closed by postulating that a lot of what we see in the next generation of games around at the moment – the social gaming of the Wii and NDS, the online/offline mix that Little Big Planet and Spore are going to offer – might have had their genesis in the long-lost Sega Dreamcast and for reasons of platform competitiveness and industry secrecy, many of the opportunities that the web has explored have been late to rise in the gaming world. On the flipside, the web could learn a lot from the engagement models of the gaming world.

Aleks was followd by Joshua Porter. Josh’s recent book Designing for the Social Web is a quick reference set of design patterns that explain some proven methods for building engagement and community when designing social sites and applications. Josh’s presentation was a little disappointing in that although he presented a series of design patterns and techniques to exploit users’ cognitive biases, he was light on evidence, and like Steven Johnson made some terrible US-centric/universalist statements about behaviour. The biases he focussed on were;

– representation bias – making highly visible the behaviour you wish other users to have on your site even if this is not typical of other users. eg. Yelp’s ‘featured reviews’ and Freshbooks’ ‘what our users are saying)
– loss aversion – the couching of desired behaviour in terms that avert loss or risk.
– ownership bias – reminding users that they should care because it is ‘their’ stuff. eg. Flickr’s use of ‘your’ in all their UI

His presentation drew extensively on the June 2006 article Eager Sellers, Stony Buyers by John Gourville, which explores techniques used to convince customers to change their behaviours etc.

As the first question from the audience asked, only half jokingly, “Isn’t this evil?”.

In a similar vein, Daniel Burka from Digg and Pownce, presented a series of slides that explored the methods that Digg and Pownce use to encourage users to firstly sign up to their services, and secondly, participate in positive ways. Whilst visitors to Digg can always use Digg without creating an account (much like the 95%+ of visitors to Amazon who use the site for product research and as an image library for their iPod), Digg’s aim is to sign up as many people as possible. In order to do this it needs to ‘go beyond altruism’ and offer real benefits to those who do sign up, as well as significantly reduce barriers to entry, and in the case of Pownce, allow logins with accounts from other services (cf Opensocial). Burka cited Geni.com as a best practice example of encouraging sign ups – it not only shows users what they can get from the site, it also starts them off in the process of creating their family tree, and makes it very easy for them do complete their signup with a minimum of information.

Encouraging positive behaviour and deterring trolling and gaming of the system is the next challenge. Burka outlined the benefits of using personal profiles with photos to build trust amongst users, as well as tweaking text copy to break through ‘tension points’. He pointed to Get Satisfaction‘s use of emoticons as a good example of conveying mood accompanying messages as a way of reducing the chance of user comments being taken in the ‘wrong spirit’.

Tantek Çelik followed with a detailed presentation on using microformats, specifically hCard to explore social network portability. The presentation and its information about implementing social network portability with hCard is available through the microformats wiki.

The final two sessions were more conceptual and were fun. Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones of Dopplr gave an initially grating but finally witty and funny presentation on, well, Dopplr. It was much more than Dopplr, but they used Dopplr as a case study and set of examples for how it is not only possible but also highly desirable to build web applications that are about slotting into and contributing to the ‘coral reef’ of the web, rather than trying to work as a walled garden or honey pot. They paid special attention to the notion of ‘delighters’ or in their world, ‘data toys’ – surprises that make their service pleasurable and fun to use. The last session was from Jeremy Keith. In a lovely and somewhat laconic presentation, Keith exploded the notion of predictability in scale free networks , drawing on sci-fi and pop-sci respectively. It was a fitting way to end the day.

Then it was back out into the rain to the afterparty – which our party decided was a veritable ‘bbq’.

Categories
Geotagging & mapping Interactive Media Social media

Dan Hill makes a modernism in Australia map for Modern Times (or interesting things clever people do when they have some spare time)

Dan Hill from Arup and the author of the wonderful City of Sound blog wrote a review of the Powerhouse’s Modern Times exhibition. In his criticism of the exhibition he wondered where the extra-exhibition content was – especially given the perfect fit between the content of the exhibition and specific places and sites. He describes the possibilities of architecture walks, downloadable maps, encouragements for museum visitors to go out ‘in the field’.

This approach also doesn’t limit the exhibition to Sydney. It enables the actual museum exhibit to take a more balanced view of the artefacts that don’t relate to the host city – as this distributed exhibition is already reaching out to the host city, by taking it to the streets. So the Powerhouse is experienced outside the Powerhouse, even outside Sydney, and the modernism exhibition likewise (when the exhibition tours, and other institutions host the exhibit, the plaques and exhibits can switch accordingly.)

An accompanying Google Map (or equivalent), detailing modernist places of interest, could be Bluetooth’d/SMS’d to phones and other mobile devices from the exhibition (or the exhibition’s website) as well as from transmitters embedded in the plaques mentioned above. Walk away with the map on your phone (current issues around accessing collaborative maps on mobiles notwithstanding.)

Then, with a group of colleagues he then went off and built a collaborative Google Map pulling together a ‘map of modernism in Australia’. (Zoom in to see the detail . . . )


View larger map in Google

Not only is this a lovely example of mapping exhibition content, it is also indicative of the new participatory environment that museums now find themselves in.

Visitors can now easily go and create their own media for our exhibitions and the walls between the museum and the outside world are becoming far more porous than ever before – and not because of what museums are doing, but because of what ‘the people formerly known as the audience‘ are doing. In part this is the rationale for Hill saying “that the design of the show isn’t simply about mounting a display; it is an exhibit, a cultural artefact, in its own right.” “Mounting a display” is now something that the audience does themselves, recreating their own version of the visit experience through their own digital media – images, videos that they capture during their visit – then sharing these semi-publicly.

Inviting these participatory interactions is no longer optional. And as museums we could be doing a lot more in encouraging, guiding and providing resources to these.

Categories
Conceptual Digitisation

Jace Clayton on afro-funk and digital preservation

One of favourite music and culture bloggers (and DJs), Jace Clayton has a lovely piece in Frieze which explores the issues around how collectors might trawl the digital music of today in forty years time. He starts out looking at the recent craze in African funk reissues – records recovered from master tapes buried in dusty warehouses in Africa – the ephemeral pop music of the time – and wonders how this same activity might occur in the future.

In a world of rock songs sold as ringtones and YouTube-launched singles, there’s something heroic about Redjeb’s travails. Reissues aside, there are no more treasured ‘master tapes’ to be repackaged and sold years later. The music of the early 21st century exists in a digital ecosystem. Songs now travel from a recording studio’s hard drive to CD and beyond in the form of zeros and ones.

[snip]

You can’t help but wonder how a man like Redjeb will dig for off-the-beaten-path music 40 years from now. For future hunter–gatherers of musical greatness, those dusty Benin warehouses filled with scorpions and records whose local relevance has long since evaporated will have been replaced by … what, exactly? Cluttered hard drives? Obsolete iPhones? Some people hoard MP3s, but nobody collects them in the traditional sense. Digital Africa is exemplified by the trio of expat Africans who run New York City’s bootleg CD-r mixtape industry.

Having a foot (an ear?) in both worlds of museums and music, I’ve often heard it said that the role of curators will necessarily grow rather than shrink. Yet the nature of curatorial practice is inevitably changing too as a the materials curators bring together become, increasingly ephemeral, impermanent cultural materials. And now that the social life of these materials is also digital, it is becoming far less about collecting, and documenting ‘objects’ but more about entire cultural ecosystems.

Categories
Copyright/OCL Imaging open content

A new collection in the Commons – Clyde Engineering

We’ve just added the start of a new collection of photographs to the Commons on Flickr.

The Clyde Engineering Photograph collection is full of photographs of heavy machinery. We’ve uploaded the first 50 to give you a feeling for what will be coming in future weeks.

The glass plate negatives in the Clyde photograph collection were taken at the Clyde works in Granville, and depict both the workers and the machinery they manufactured. Subjects covered include: railway locomotives and rolling stock; agricultural equipment; large engineering projects funded by Australian State and Federal governments; airplane maintenance and construction and Clyde’s contribution to the first and second World Wars. Some photographs date back to the 1880s but most were taken between 1898 and 1945 . . . The Clyde Engineering Company photograph collection was acquired by the Powerhouse Museum in December 1987.

Go start tagging them!