thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Until very recently the trade-off between richness and reach with media and communications tools on the internet has seen mixed results but we are very close to some exciting breakthroughs.

This means news is old when it gets through the media process as savvy consumers have already engaged to some extent in a myriad of ways (mostly online) and this alters the secondary ripples and impacts as well.

The difference between a one to many message and a conversation will continue to be endlessly debated across a range of media and platforms.  It has become much clearer that the overlap between micro-blogging (clogging ?) tools, mobile phones, other user generated content and mainstream media is now producing social dividends and all kinds of unintended and positive consequences.

Social capital has its own momentum and we see everything from instant tweets on earthquakes and elections to a scary washing machine with 15 thousand fans on facebook. Most mainstream media is filtered by the editorial process to become more of a news product. This is good for manicured medium but for a real-time news ticker social media tools are raising the stakes and in a very good way.

Twitter, Facebook blogs and other instant commentary now allows real time crowdsourcing for the equivalent of a live cross on camera – only better online for the most part. I was reminded of some of this when I heard a news item on radio about how Twitter had delayed a crucial update so as not to interrupt the flow of news from Iran.

That this was a news item is interesting in itself but ironically the Twitter maintenance had been and gone by the time the news got on the radio and that was very stale news to the Twitterati who had all moved on hours before.

There were three insightful perspectives I took notice of this week regarding the rise of social capital in these ways.

David MacGregor captured some of these dimensions reproduced below: (Thanks David)

“The social media phenomenon really does change my perception of the way forward. I have less and less regard for brand messages that are virtuoso – you know the kind I mean – the spectacular set pieces of yesteryear, film making fetishism in microcosm. Today I am more like to be receptive to messages that have far greater relevance and, oftentimes, utility – which might be expressed by the facility for me to understand more or engage more with the message personally.

The scale of my engagement is relative. The simple facility to comment or offer and opinion is sometimes sufficient and demonstrates the thought that I, like other people, want to be heard and acknowledged, rather than simply being yelled at or sung a silky siren song by spruikers.”

David writes very well on this an many other related topics. He also notes that all of this discussion is much less compartmentalized than it used to be. And that is a good thing in my view.

“I find it difficult to separate marketing, advertising and brands from society as whole. A challenge for business is surely to overcome the ‘them and us’ model of mass communications to really open the way for more inclusive dialogues.”

Nat Torkington on National Radio caught my ears with his comments on the role of Twitter and other micro-blogging formats in Iran. What was particularly good was the way he managed to make “secure open web proxies” sound interesting and also kept the listeners from being distracted by the mechanics in that wonderful mellifluous mode of his.

Less mediation is also highly attractive to celebrities. Micro blogging of tweets via re-tweeting has helped make a difference and we will continue to hear about the ramifications of all this.

TN: Technology with Nat Torkington from Thursday Technology expert and  Nat Torkington discusses online dating scams as well as Twitter’s role in the Iranian election protests.(duration:14mins 28secs)

The impact of these new technologies on groups and individuals is sounding a bit more like the second wave of alternative media as foreshadowed all those years ago by Noam Chomsky. In a sense we have now the tools to manufacture dissent.

Clay Shirky manages to summarise many of these key points about the rise of social capital and media activism over at TED Talks.

Clay says:

“New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting.

In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.”
Shirky is author of Here Comes Everybody.

One point Clay makes is the increase in professional amateurs – something we wrote about some time back and was a topic for another great TED talk by Charles Leadbeater which was  called “The rise of the amateur professional” see the 19minute video on TED. Charles said

“Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can’t.”

If the video embed doesn’t display on your device try this TED link for Clay Shirky.

As Clay notes we are watching “The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.” How to cross pollinate conversations and mass media in real time. We now have a “many to many”  communications channel.

Note: Local TV stations has all improved their websites recently as they finally begin to understand they are less TV and multi-channel amplicasting is bigger ironically just as viewership on their broadcasts drop – their website traffic is going up and changing the business.

Amplification of tweets gives rise to far more authentic news sources than we have seen – ever!  Citizen reporting has flow on effects and when those stories follow the news we begin to see social transformation.

Asynchronous media and the amplification of all the surrounding content eco-systems is a big deal and we should be using this for good connections. Consumers are producers are consumers. The network itself is ubiquitous and omnipresent.

There are no single messages any more and media participation is higher than ever. Media revolution is here.

What do you think ? My twitter ID is @dialogCRM feel free to tweetback.

As always you can tweet this below and leave a comment or reply to the tweet for this post on Twitter. You can also engage directly with the three / four sources I have used today.

• To follow and engage with David on Twitter go to @joegreenz
• To follow and engage with Nat on Twitter go to @gnat
• To follow and engage Nat on Twitter go to @CShirky
• To follow and engage withTED on Twitter @TEDchris

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As beings it seems to me that  - we are all wired to look for patterns partly to decipher meaning but also because the sheer amount of information we get can be so overwhelming.

We are also constantly comparing the “news” to our own reference points and expectations to  weight the content and relevance to our own situations.

Now the media stories seems to overshoot much of these expectations with so much coverage splashing over the metaphorical sides of the tea cup that we actively discount “news” when it gets too saturated.

One example is swine flu coverage. It is definitely an important story but the way in which it is being covered paradoxically switches many of us off the full significance of the event. There are two key facts about previous pandemics we should be picking up on (key patterns?.)

1. In 1918 and other pandemics it was the second and repeat waves that were more lethal once the virus has been through larger numbers of humans and mutated a bit more.
2. The secondary story on swine flu is how disorganised we have been  with group planning on previous disasters with very fragmented responses.

In 2007 Laurie Garrett: What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic? presented this talk at TED based on real analysis of earlier pandemics and global health planning.  Most of use can point to more local health issues to see that not much has changed.

Moving right along – Does this thinking apply to other “news” stories and events like the global financial crisis for example?

In recent weeks I have been fascinated to see surveys of business confidence go lower and lower and last week they have suddenly topped out at the highest for some time.

“(NZ) Business sentiment has perked up this month – the National Bank’s survey has recorded its biggest monthly gain since December 2000.“

We want to see better news after months of coverage fatigue about the global financial crisis and so expectations appear to be over shooting again.

Two weeks earlier we had Aust economic index at 26-year low New Zealand is not more resilient than Australia although I’m beginning to think that we all have outrageous optimism partly because most local business markets are shallow and tough.

We could argue that Australia’s commodity boom has slowed them into the slide andc so NZ is ahead of the cycle and our primary commodities and huge fall in exchange rates has provided an early upswing of confidence that differentiates the NZ economy.

Translation NZ business sectors and local markets are small, highly developed and very demanding and so any glimmer of hope from export markets or the “weighless economy” has us revving our economic engines.

Central banks are aware of this tendency and so the Reserve Bank Governor Bollard was at pains to signal interest rates should stay low for at least a year to 18 month longer.

The lag between recovery of some market segments / indicators and actual local recovery can still be long enough to cause serious medium term issues for many of us.

The March exports number was way higher than the imports number and that has boosted confidence as have changes to housing and employment markets. (Trade deficit melts as imports shrink)

“In the same article economist Bagrie notes Structural imbalances, like negative household savings rates and a large current account deficit, needed to be corrected and that would not be quick or easy..” and we know rationally that is true but still the survey overshoots the hope index.

In today’s TED talk videos is a new 7 minute  presentation by Sean Gourley: The mathematics of war

“By pulling raw data from the news and plotting it onto a graph, Sean Gourley and his team have come up with a stunning conclusion about the nature of modern war — and perhaps a model for resolving conflicts.”

I won’t pretend to understand what Sean is saying in this 7 minute clip but I know the patterns he is discovering appear everywhere and deciphering the economic news is every bit as mathmatical as it is for any major human induced crisis.

The group dynamic does plot patterns and we can use some of that to make sense of the overall trendlines.

Sean does a good job of explaining the “so what” part of this analysis but at 7 minutes this is really a teaser and we need to go deeper.

For example I’d like to see the analysis of Iraq right as the end compared with  Irelands history and the transformation of the IRA into a more credible polticla rather than military force.

I think with maths the risk is that we can describe events much better but unless we go compare with other histories we can still miss the underlying out takes.

In the “Fog of War” did a much more personal analysis which we seem to have forgotten.

Now I’d like to see Robert (b 1916) make some personal sense of Sean’s math but for now I’m pleased that we have a chance to think about clustering information and media through some new filters.

I also caught part of a radio dicussion yesterday which described “belief” as a recessive gene. The idea being that as a society we have become much more evidence based but that is not something we see on the actual regular news.

For me Jon Stewarts satirical Daily show makes far more sense of the news than regular media as it acknowledges the bizarreness of the human condition.

So a recap formula might look like this

Sean Gourley + Robert McNamara – Jon Stewart  = many a true word is spoken in jest – we just need to know which ones and if our math/model makes sense.