Tag Archives: mumbrella

if language were liquid: on new words and ways of writing

13 Oct

The keen eyed amongst you may have observed that it’s been a while since I regularly updated this site.

I can’t pretend anyone’s been begging me to get back on the horse, but by way of an unasked-for explanation, I’d been trying to focus on writing my novel, as though I had a small allocation of words per day, and what remained after the day job must be hoarded.

A last-minute request from Mumbrella (write a piece on Steve Jobs’ contribution to marketing in less than two hours) coincided with another bit of parry and thrust with strategy whiz and occasional internet sparring partner Mark Pollard, and made me realise I’m not taking my own advice.

To become a better writer, one must write. More, and often, in different forms.  So I’m here again with a new approach. Less polish, more speed, more open to discussion. Bang out a post, see what you think.

Let’s dance…

Words. An easy fallback, maybe. I’ve written about this before, but it’s still a rich seam to me. I love the mutability of language and the egalitarian fact that it can be re-imagined and reworked by anyone. Mark Pollard reminded me that Shakespeare invented nearly 2000 words in his lifetime (in a frankly half-hearted attempt to justify his use of “perspectful”) – coining “dictionarians” to imply, I think, fussy rule-makers who seek to collect and legislate language. Language is a shark – it needs to be in motion to stay alive. The OED added 400 words to its last edition, but they tended to be fairly basic, describing simple acts or adjectives, not abstract concepts. And it’s these that I think we’re lacking.

This is definitely a moment in time where our language can’t always cope with the task of describing the world.

There’s a famous story of three learned European theorists who visited the U.S in the thirties. I like to think of them as whitebearded and clad in three piece woollen suits, anachronistic in the land of nylon. They became lost in the endless identically featureless corridors of a brand new skyscraper, and, distressed, remarked that no words in any of the many European or ancient languages they knew could describe this uniquely modern experience.

We are at a similar point of tension between old and new, and this moment cries out for another Shakespeare to help us navigate it. But while Shakespeare’s additions were crisp, juicy and often playful, we’re being swamped with ugly portmanteaus like “phygital”, “wantrepreneur” and “futuretainment’*.

This is a plea for linguists, scholars, people cleverer than I: help us fill these gaps with beautiful and useful neologisms, or the crude and tedious will take over by default.

Where are the needful spaces? Of course, there are ton of gaps around the shifts between on- and offline experience.

In True Blood, (good ideas can come from anywhere, ok?) Eric muses on,

“the strange sensation when reality matches what you pictured in your mind so precisely”.

This could describe meeting someone you’ve formed an online relationship with IRL for the first time, but what would that word be? And its inverse…?

Anyone who’s had dealings with, say, Telstra, or certain government departments may agree that we need a word for the experience of being trapped within the mechanism of a seemingly limitless corporate machine, the rules and logic of which are unknowable and arcane. Kafka-esque feels a tad elitist.

It’s not just the mechanical or virtual; our relationships are changing – the sheer places and number of people we encounter have probably increased a hundredfold compared to a century ago. We’re waiting for language to catch up.

How do we describe, for example, that feeling of intense tenderness and love one has for a person or place moments before leaving it, or them, forever?

If you’re over thirty, you may find the term boy- or girlfriend an unacceptably trivial way of referring to your significant other, while “partner” is too stuffy and businesslike, and “lover” smacks of sexual boasting. Paramour? Mate?

And what about the love of devices we seem to be developing – a friend recently put her iPhone at the top of the list things she’d save from a house fire, and I don’t think she’s alone.  Have humans ever fetishised objects to this extent before? What should we call it? Mobilophila? Objectsession?

Some strong contenders: Forbes offered “Millibillitrilli,” to define the incomprehensibly large numbers touted by governments and in bailout plans.  Edward de Bono suggests there’s a need for the word  ”ebne” which means ‘Excellent But Not Enough‘.

But my favourite neologism belongs to Señor Richardson: “hippopotaneuse”- the fattest person in a threesome.

What do you think language is lacking?

*For more of this atrociousness, visit Words Douchebags Say.

naked and famous: call for documentary participants

2 Oct

I’m making a documentary about identity and the internet. If you’re articulate, passionate and would like to be interviewed, I’d love to hear from you.

It’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for a while. The ideas have been shaped by working in a space where authenticity seems at risk of becoming merely a buzzword, experiences like the Spencer Tunick installation, debates like Mark Pollard’s views on self-disclosure and Tim Burrowes’ argument on Mumbrella that there is no separation between personal and professional identity online.

With a little help from the wonderful Tim Noonan, it’s coalescing into something I think is absolutely fascinating, and I very much hope you will think so too.

The Naked Documentary (working title): nudity, identity and the self in physical and virtual spaces.

It’s exploring what happens to our sense of self online, (where nobody knows you’re a dog), and what changes when we’re naked.

Is identity a fluid construct which shifts and changes according to one’s environment? This documentary seeks to explore whether there is a core identity and if so, where it resides. Does cyberspace give us a place to be an idealised version of ourselves, free from our physical bodies, or conversely, are we most truly, honestly, ourselves when stripped of outward trappings – when we’re naked?
One idea is that  the identity you inhabit online is one constructed purely of thought, expressed through language, unrestricted by arbitrary biology. Or is it the case that the way one experiences the world in a physical sense is what shapes one’s character, and the self can never be separated? Can we then infer that the naked form is the simplest and most authentic?
Tim has a theory that the human voice is at its most honest, resonant and beautiful when the speaker is naked, so we’ll be exploring that too.

The format will be a series of interviews with a variety of people who use the online space in different ways, sharing their views and experience on aspects of identity, authenticity online and offline.
Each interviewee can choose to be interviewed naked or clothed during their interview, and reveal as much or as little of their souls or their skin as they feel comfortable with.

Drop me a line here if you’d like to discuss taking part.

Owing your soul to the company store: does your employer own your Twitter account?

29 Jan

As I’ve discussed in the past, new social spaces and interactions are changing so fast that they force us to adapt and develop new protocols on the fly. One issue that has been hotly contested, and which has yet to be satisfactorily resolved is how we clearly delineate  between our personal and professional online personas, particularly those of us who both live and work on the web.

We still don’t have this anywhere near to being sorted. A recent post by Malkuth Damkar about the way in which Twitter makes celebrities of us all makes the point that people who would otherwise escape notice are often judged and gossiped about on Twitter in a way that’s disproportionate; as though by conversing publically, we’ve abandoned our right to privacy and respect. Not to mention the recent furore concering hapless British Twitterer Paul Chambers who jokingly threatened to blow up an airport ,then found himself jobless and facing criminal charges, which is an entirely separate can of worms.

Media and marketing website Mumbrella recently covered an exchange on Twitter between a journalist (of sorts) and the personal account of someone working in PR, as evidence of a sometimes tricky relationship between the two disciplines.

While naturally journalists often choose to ignore context and nuance for the sake of a good headline, this seemed a particularly unfair conflation of public domain and public interest.  The journalist has a relatively large public profile and is employed by a media organisation, arguably making her tweets our business; the other person is not – and public or no, her personal Twitter account exists independently of her employer.

It served as an excellent example of this rather messy grey area. I’ve personally hired people because of their significant digital presence – people who came to my attention because of the way in which they communicated online and their degree of influence. And I’ve been more than happy for these people to use their talents for the good of the company, for example by sharing content to their personal networks, using data gathered from their accounts etc.

By creating a social media usage policy that, reasonably enough, prohibited any mention of confidential or sensitive information, I could, as a boss, be reasonably sure my team were clear about what would be appropriate to share via both the corporate and personal accounts and allowed common sense to guide their behaviour in the grey areas on an ad-hoc basis.

But I think with hindsight I sometimes got it wrong. On one occasion I effectively muzzled a team member who had a long standing online stoush with another public figure, arguing that as he linked to the company website from his Twitter bio, this feud would reflect poorly on the company.  I now think that I should have suggested he remove the link, and made clear he was operating under his own auspices and his views were not shared by his employer.

Non-celebrities with large Twitter followings and extensive personal networks have generally developed them through communicating interesting content in an expressive manner, with a distinct voice and point of view.  Crucially, this influence is built up over time, not on the company dime.

By allowing employees to use their personal influence to share content, engage communities and achieve corporate objectives while simultaneously restricting the individual’s right to express a contentious view or enter into critical discourse, the company is attempting to have its cake and eat it.   Not only is this problematic from an ethical standpoint, but it’s also ultimately illogical: a toothless tiger can only maintain its edge for so long before the social network begins to sense inauthenticity and drift away.  I for one choose not to follow people I feel to be little more than an RSS yes-machine.

Drawing the line is essential. My suggestions – and this is a work in progress, subject to review and evolution – is that professional and personal accounts need to be separate. If you refer to your employer in your bio, your account is going to be inextricably linked to their profile, at least in public perception.  So don’t risk it.  Unless there’s a scenario in which your boss will compensate you for allowing the company to bask in your reflected glory – which could mean attributing a dollar value to influence, or specifically stating in your contract that your network is an asset the company will be able to use during the life of your contract with them – then be very wary of using your own account as another channel for sharing corporate content – whether on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else. A profile that’s specifically you @your company might be one way of resolving this, or by using shared corporate accounts.

Because nobody wants to end up like Tennessee Ernie…

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go;
I owe my soul to the company store…

All the #Media140 that’s fit to print

6 Nov

One of the recurring themes at the Media 140 conference in Sydney has been redefining the function of the journalist.

One perspective is journalist as curator – providing context, sifting and interpreting data to allow information to travel beyond our immediate horizons.

As I’m generally a helpful, kind and conscientious human being, not satisfied with merely providing the Twitterverse with peerless live reportage of the Media140 event, I have put together a list of the most interesting coverage of the two day conference for your edification and delight…

(N.B this is a starting point – I’ll be adding to the list as I find new content.  Please feel free to make suggestions, and apologies for any glaring omissions)

The chatter on Twitter…

Laurel Papworth says journalists need to tear up their press cards -”it was always our content and we’re taking it back”.  It’s about the human narrative…

Linen Suave on why the blogger  / journalism polarisation is a little like fighting bears.

Kate Taylor wants to see some innovation based love-ins…

Barry Saunders looks at Turnbull’s mode of engagement with his constituents

Valerio Veo is the bastard child of new and old media

Jay Rosen tells journalists to grok it before you rock it.

Crikey on the News journalist’s oversharing

The ABC coverage of Turnbull’s ghost tweets.

Kate Carruther’s pithy summary of the first day’s discussions

The Twitter usage during the Iranian elections case study from @riy

Using Google Wave rather than Twitter for the conference backchannel

Derek Barry on the ABC’s Mark Scott on the importance of new media and the ABC’s social media policy

Duncan Riley is enraged at the idea he’s not earning his clams online.

Jude Mathurine’s presentation on why the future of journalism is in mobile social networks in Africa.

Bernard Keane on Ghettos of agreement.

Margaret Simon’s coverage and roundup of Media140 on The Content Makers (HT Kate Taylor)

Stilgherrian’s Media 140 bookmarks on Delicious. (edit: Stil has also added what can only be described as the motherlode of Media 140 links to his blog.)

….and my guest post about authenticity over objectivity on Mumbrella.

The defining photo of the conference taken by Neerav Bhatt – Mark Scott.

ABC's Mark Scott- Neerav's Media140 photos

Growing up online: why the days of our digital adolescence are numbered

29 Sep

The internet is still in its infancy, and our use of it is still developing.  It’s an exciting time to be alive; I’d argue that no single technological advance since the printing press has transformed our culture, normative behaviours and society as profoundly.  New possibilities and new ways of interacting are opening up every day.

However, this cuts both ways, and it’s depressing to see that one consequence of the new is a marked increase in the amount of genuinely awful behaviour performed by otherwise functional adults.  Seeing ill-advised tweets, oversharing via Facebook updates and emotive personal posts, I’m reminded of the giddy immediacy of my teenage years, in which I existed in a state of selfish isolation, immersed in the frenzy of the Now.

Nothing was more important than my feelings that very second; I had no sense of, or interest in a broader context or that my actions could have consequences of any significance.  And this seems to be the case for many people online; the fact one feels this way at this moment is justification enough for broadcasting that information to the planet.

I feel, therefore I post.

Hal Niedzviecki refers to this phenomenon as “Peep Culture,” suggesting that we’re witnessing the tabloidization of everyday life.

Perhaps the logical progression of our paparazzi-fuelled, celebrity-obsessed culture is to have us believing that revelations of a wincingly personal nature are everyone’s business.

There again, we’re not taking out one page ads in the Times or employing a town crier to announce our break-ups or our shitty days at work.  This behaviour is only occurring online.

I’d argue that it’s due to a combination of factors:

1) the false sense that these online spaces aren’t ‘serious’ and don’t have real life impact: the value of communication online is somehow seen as less than offline interaction

2) the ease, speed and accessibility with which one can post anything from anywhere. An emotion that probably would have dissipated by the time you’d put pen to paper and started looking for a stamp is shared, out there and un-retractable in three seconds flat.

3) an erroneous belief that these spaces are somehow lawless, frontier territory where all bets are off, crimes go unpunished and an outlaw-esque anonymity can be preserved

A post on the Social Media Law Student blog makes the point that

People will express themselves, albeit to their own detriment, through numerous mediums whether by electronic communication, acts of aggression, verbal comments, physical actions, written letters, and more.  Social media networks such as Facebook and MySpace are not to blame for sheer stupidity…

…but they do make stupid actions harder to retract and easier to prove.

Our actions have implications, consequences; the spaces may be virtual, but this is very real.

Thirty-five percent of employers reported finding content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire the candidate; Facebook evidence was used to convict gang members in Britain who posted photos of themselves posing with guns; Australian courts allow legal documents to be served via Facebook; lawyers have begun to use social profiles in divorce cases.  Four Awkward Moments on Facebook is hilarious, unless you’re one of the people involved: I can only imagine the lacerating sense of shame and hurt they must have experienced.

Part Two: Imagining the future ( a proto-post)

I’m confident that the next generation will view our bumbling online interactions with humour and, I hope, some pity, much in the way that I view photographs of my parents in their heyday; fondly and with affectionate mockery.  I can’t predict what these new models of behaviour will look like but I wonder whether our notions of public and private space will be fundamentally redefined; will a new set of boundaries be created or will these constructs simply have drifted into irrelevance?

Will the citizens of the future live in digital glass houses?
When everything is on display and there’s no separation between your inside voice and outside voice, will people’s personal (increasingly public lives) cease to have any interest or relevance – is the sense of intimacy we use to build social cohesion in part derived from the sense one is holding privileged information?  In this landscape, our perceptions of each other would be based on new criteria and new values not related to how much we earn or who we’re screwing.  Although I find this a faintly terrifying prospect, I can’t help but feel this re-imagining of our future is the most exciting, the most radical (and the least likely to occur).

Alternatively, will this new generation, kids who’ll take in the digital space with their mother’s milk become the New New Puritans? There is surely a possibility they will enact a backlash against the over-availability and over-sharing of information, images and personal data.  With public figures as influential as Obama warning schoolkids to think about the long term consequences of the stuff they share on Facebook, will we see a generation of locked down profiles, gated social spaces and private Twitter streams.  Will we become paranoiac data-hoarders, carefully considering every piece of information dispersed through the web?

Or – returning to Planet Reality – will we just have to grow up, embrace the new and reign in some of the worst excesses of overly disclosive behaviour in favour of a more reasoned approach?  Being a teenager is fun, but we can’t remain in a virtual NeverNeverland forever.
It may be more staid and a little less compelling than the ambulance-chasing, Schadenfreudian thrill of watching someone crash and burn online, but perhaps fewer hearts and reputations damaged beyond repair is worth losing out on a little second-hand salaciousness for….

taming the twitterstream: online etiquette

1 Sep

Last night was the fourth Social Media Club Sydney event; excellent presentations by David Meerman Scott and Steven Noble on understanding social personas were followed by a lively debate touching on the topical issues of fake personas, public relations versus media relations and that hoary old chestnut, authenticity.

I think it was certainly the best event yet, but one issue that arose – and has been cited time and again in conferences, panel discussions and social media events – is the practice and etiquette around using and displaying the Twitter backchannel.

The ability to post ‘as it happens’ reportage is one of the main reasons Twitter is so wonderful; it gives people who aren’t present at a conference insight into the discussion, content and a sense of the room, and adds a conversational dimension to a space which, if well managed, can only enrich it.

Fixing the Twittersteam for conferencing is not the knotty problem that some people seem to think – here are my thoughts on how to solve it simply and without bloodshed…

First, block the spammers.  Any trending topic is immediately leapt upon by the army of bots who seize upon the hashtag in question with alacrity in the (surely) forlorn hope that someone will accidentally click their link. It’s annoying, it’s disruptive and drowns out event coverage from humans. Use Tweetdeck to create a group that registrants must apply to join in advance – this immediately cuts out the spamtards and potentially adds a sense of responsibility, diminishing the ability of people to lurk and post anonymously.  Then assign all API calls to that group to enable real time streaming.

Preventing people giving real time feedback and thoughts on a debate as it unfolds is not the answer, but rather, simply creating a better set-up: having a Twitterstream displayed behind a panel would not be a problem, were the panel also involved in what’s going on.

Having tweets unfurl across a screen behind the subjects of those tweets is a little akin to slapping a ‘kick me’ sign on someone’s back; it encourages irreverence and perhaps a lack of respect, resulting in a schoolyard dynamic.  Placing a monitor in front of the panelists neatly removes the ‘us and them’  barrier, becomes conversational, informative and engaging, giving panelists a barometer for the room’s atmosphere to potentially shape the direction of the debate.  It’s ok to make jokes; it’s acceptable to engage in banter – we’re social creatures in a social space after all – but spraying a kind of disrespectful virtual graffiti at the expense of people who aren’t able to respond is obviously poor form.

The other issue, of course, is that if you can’t rely on your wifi connection to provide real time tweets, then perhaps you shouldn’t use it at all – scrolling tweets that refer to events that occurred even minutes ago is disruptive, irrelevant and creates a disconnect between audience and panel.

It’s not the medium, it’s the mode.

Steven Noble, David Meerman Scott and Tim Burrowes onstage at SMCSyd IV

Steven Noble, David Meerman Scott and Tim Burrowes onstage at SMCSyd IV in front of the offending screen

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