blog posting by Todd Matsumoto
Now I’m at the Teldesign office, to hear short summaries about the presentations. The speakers were invited by Teldesign, who are ‘identity creators’ to share their knowledge of doing things using social media.
Not all the presentations are summaries. Amos (Alexander Maximilian Otto Serano) from vm-people (viral-marketing) is presenting a project they did for Pons dictionaries.
The project was to revamp the Pons dictionaries by getting people who make a living using words, to contribute and use the Pons dictionary. The thing that immediately got my attention about the approach was the initial introduction to the potential participants. This came in the form of a letter. The letter was, let’s say, a ‘mockument’. It looks just like a school report card that each German child received when in grade school. So the delivery method is instantly recognizable, and pulls heart strings. From that point on, those who reacted were placed in a carefully crafted environment where the participants were given the necessary tools to contribute to Pons.
Oh yes, something else to add to Darija Medic’s project about H1N1, she also studied paintings from Sienna that depicted gardens, before and after the plague, and says that the design of gardens certainly changed reflecting the effects of the plague. Only she didn’t show any of the paintings.
Again I’m going to throw out interesting subjects that came up.
Reaction is crucial if a company gets into trouble. It is possible with a companies reaction to turn negatives issues around into positives for the company.
Filtering… filtering unwanted profiles, and the presence of profiles you know are companies.
Today, you pay the social media by being open to advertising and marketing. So it really isn’t free.
There should be standards and protocols put in place for owning profiles and allowing profiles to exist across social media platforms.
Education comes up. How should advertising students be taught how to use all of this stuff. There is a complaint that many students still see a television styled commercial as viable. Or, and equally upsetting, many students understand the single social media platform they are using but do not yet understand how other ones should not be used in tandem with each other, rather than exclusive of each other. Meaning they are able to see each platform singularly as it is, but unable to see all the platforms put together.
Another observation made is the disconnect between how a student understands a representation of something in a program versus how the thing is in reality. I’m guessing the observer is talking about CAD programs.
With all this social media swirling around us is it now necessary to be trained in how to manage it?
blog posting by Todd Matsumoto
Okay this was a lot of content to follow. For this discussion I’m going to put out some of the questions and observations I heard.
One question asks, in the end are we simply talking about a new hype. Is it really true that social media is changing our lives?
An observation is made that instead of living in an augmented reality we really live in an argumented reality.
This is cause for thought, if consumers are publishers why do we need communicators?
If you are going to be creative you have to produce. The artist has to own the gallery… I heard that sometime today.
: Web 2.0 Suicide Machine&fs=16&w=505&lc=39)
blog posting by Todd Matsumoto
Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a project that presents a reaction to the social media platforms which help support the inspiration age. The suicide machine will euthanize your social media profile(s) from several different social media sites. The aim is to help people return to the flesh world. Unfortunately many people committed suicide from one social media platform in order to join another.
The project is an excellent example of what Douglas Rushkoff believes will only become more prevalent. A surge of backlash by groups of people with the know how to actively ‘dismantle’ or block the more intrusive social media platforms.
Some of the things that get my attention with this project is not only the ability to put together the code to purge profiles on social media platforms, but it is all of the other details of the project. The website design for instance, which is a rip off of the Firefox website. The tour, testimonials, FAQs. The attention to detail to capture the imagery of this particular point in time. Presenting the material as ‘real’ or in a mockumentary way while at the same time totally ‘taking the piss’. The project has also secured a future for further creative developments as the artists behind the project are riff’ing off of the backlash directed towards the project.
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blog posting by Todd Matsumoto
This is not the information age. This is the inspiration age! Marc points out that information is everywhere. We already heard the term ambient information. He states it is now all about inspiration.
Okay this makes sense… If looked at in terms of phases, the information age was about the infrastructure. We now have the infrastructure and now we are arriving at, very stable platforms built upon the infrastructure that allow for constant and easy content generation often times using the same platform.
Using the tools at our disposal it is now about our personal ambition, our personal inspiration to generate content that shapes not only our lives but the things and people involved in our lives.
One reference to computers is that we no longer live in a read-only world we live in a read/write world. If we are changing the mode of the world we live in, I’d like to change the mode of the world to a read/write/execute world. Because while we can consume and generate, execute is present. Sometimes it is obviously present but often times it is obscured, or extremely difficult to be aware of what is being
executed. Example: the changing meaning of friend is a subtle execution part of the read/write world we live in. To finish, read/write/execute is difficult enough to understand in a cultural context. It is equally difficult to understand in a programmatic context.
blog posting by Todd Matsumoto
This presentation focused on starting a campaign using social media platforms. Or from the beginning using participants to grow and brand a product. This attempt follows the points made in earlier presentations. Drop a product into a social environment, glob potential users to the product, extract meaningful content (for the product) and forge relationships between the producer and the user.
Might I add, that the presenter once was a ‘food designer’ and for some reason this occupation in the context of today’s topic interests me more than the other online vehicles for social interaction. I mean food has got to be best way to get a group of people together and start social interactions. I suppose this precedes the social media devices sited in Eddy’s presentation.
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blog posting by Todd Matsumoto
This is the third talk by a professional and I’m hear a lot about marketing, branding, the consumer is king. The talks have a marked slant towards strategies for advertising/marketing products, albeit not in the old way but the new way. It’s marketing, but on the other hand I get the impression that so far the presenters would like this not only to be about selling things, but about enrichment of our lives as long as that enrichment comes from the wells provided by the product producer. Eddy explains that we are social apes. We love communicating and of course we’ve always communicated, just via different social media channels. He sites the Greek agora, the Roman baths, the medieval guilds, and the Catholic church. Todays Roman baths are the online social media platforms.
But I have a hard time with comparing these past (physical) locations as social media device to our current (on-line, computing) social media devices. The notion of the innocuous social media software application put into place to only facilitate our need for socializing I have a hard time believing. This type of social space comes with many differences than previous physically constructed spaces. After all demonstrated to us in this presentation was a method for using the social media space or ‘container’ to present tidbits of valuable information to the participants, and observe the success of the ‘info-treat’, which is then tacked onto to a product. Crafting the info-treat was the next step, if the participants didn’t shine to it, it was re-crafted and reintroduced till finally a good and digestible info-treat was created and could be safely and in full force put into the social media space. In this space the walls truly do have eyes and ears and powers of connectivity to places and memories difficult to comprehend.
: Social media is a hype and advertising sucks!&fs=16&w=505&lc=39)
blog posting by Todd Matsumoto
Okay first off this is a bold statement. A couple of other statements made went something like this: there are thousands of social media gurus out there. If you meet one turn around and run. And content is not king. This presentation starts with these statements, however as the presentation went on, what I understood was ‘old-style’ advertising sucks. Old-style means the old cluster bomb effect. Find a target, and drop what you have to say, and everyone gets egg on their face. Nicole says no! The old-style is definitely not the way to do things.
As for social media. It’s hype. But this doesn’t mean its ‘flash in the pan’ hype. No my impression from the presentation is social media is absolutely not hype and in order to market something successfully todays a precise strategy using social media is required.
How? Well the first thing to do is basically let the consumer roam free. Roam free in the confines of a social media application of some sort. At this phase these are potential consumers. But leave them be,
so when they encounter the product you want to sell, they can freely shape what they think about the product or even directly shape the product itself. This is the new-style advertising… so the company doing this would take this information and feed it back into their project, thereby letting the potential consumer sculpt what it is they want in the product.
So content still is king, it is only who makes the content is more difficult to figure out. It turns out that both parties, producer and consumer make the content, while the producer must work out the different ways to facilitate the content creation. I suppose what I hear is the important content is actually created by the consumer.
Impeding this process is a death wish in this era of social media. Let’s change the title to ‘Social media is for real and old-style advertising sucks, but new-style advertising is the way of the future!’
: Aunt Therese’s Revenge&fs=16&w=505&lc=39)
blog posting by Todd Matsumoto
Aunt Therese is the aunt of Thomas Knüwer, social media analyst and consultant. His aunt owned a (grocery) store in a small village in Germany. Thomas proclaims that a return to the small store model of consuming and communicating has arrived. He explains that the store his aunt owned functioned more than simply a place to pick up your beans. The store, and more importantly his aunt was a facilitator for many social activities. The store being a hub for communication from other places, or a place to actual place orders for things to be brought into the village from other places. He makes the case that this kind of store functions much like many social media platforms existing at present. However instead of an inventory of products to sell, we have our personal lives, which can be shared in these places and then networked out to others. Each of us representing our own hubs. A slight difference is that what is put into our social media ‘mom and pop’ stores have the ability to target us. Meaning, we can make it so that the content will always find us. It’s ‘ambient information’. Another difference is what is stocked in these stores are continually updated, with new things, new pieces of our lives. People within our network, begin to engage in a ‘long tail’ phenomenon. Long tail, doesn’t spike it keeps going on, and on, and on…
Also presented were some examples of different ways people (consumers) find interesting ways to confront companies. The story of the “Son’s of Maxwell” posting a video on YouTube called “United Breaks Guitars”. This is the result of United Airlines not compensating the band after their guitars were broken when thrown out of the cargo hold of the airplane.
Or the Greenpeace campaign which targeted KitKat for destroying orangutan habitat for cheap palm oil. The campaign hijacks the visual design of KitKat and puts up a website injecting their own message about the wrongs KitKat are committing. This also being accompanied by a KitKat commercial spread on the Internet again hijacking the KitKat branding but replacing the candy bar with orangutan fingers.
The point is that the participant adding to the ambient information aren’t simply adding drivel, but can be rather unfriendly when they want get a bit rowdy. In these two examples a strategy to confront the elusive company at its heart are revealed. These methods are ways to penetrate the seemingly impenetrable and gives me the impression that these tactics should be presented in some sort of ‘how-to’ manual to communicate with a company in the social media environment.
, The ‘us’ in virus H1N1 as social network&fs=16&w=505&lc=39)
blog posting by Todd Matsumoto
The ‘us’ in virus as social network is the project of Piet Zwart student Darija Medic. The project investigates how the ‘energy’ of the media swirling around H1N1 virus also shaped our understanding of the virus itself. The force of the project was contained upon stickers which could be put onto places where potential transmission of the virus could occur. The stickers proclaim ‘H1N1 helps you connect and share with the people in your life’ which is a hack on Facebook’s slogan ‘Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life’. The sticker acts as an ‘interrupter’ (thank you Alexander Maximilian Otto Serano, aka Amos) bringing immediate attention to your actions and the environment within which you carry them out.
As well as interrupter, the stickers act as tags, markers, for observing the potential hot spots of a virus. This part of the project I like, but I find myself wanting anything else but the hacked slogan. With clear hindsight we understand the virus was no more dangerous than a normal flu bug, however, in a different circumstance, if say the virus was more serious how would we be critiquing the media generated in the same way?
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 Douglas Rushkoff via Skype
The second Skype presentation is by Douglas Rushkoff, who wrote the book Media Virus back in the early nineties (it came out in 1995). He still thinks that the idea of media viruses is partly misunderstood. He goes back to the era of faxes, which were used for sending long ridiculous jokes around, and when, end of the 1980s, the media space was slowly becoming interactive. If this space would become more turbulent, emergent characteristics would appear from the chaos. As ideas spread through biological apparatuses, similarly ideas could spread through media spaces. The quintessential media virus being the Rodney King tape, which spread uncontrollable through the media, partly because it was a story about media. It was a story not about a black man being beaten by cop, but a video about what was captured on camera. He makes a longer biological analogy. There’s the shell and the ideas inside the shell. A virus needs both. It needs virulent memetic code inside it that provokes a response that we cannot escape. Describes advertisers and marketeers as people who operate in the mythological space, where social relations are replaced by myths, namely instead of buying cookies from persons, buying them from a mythological company (a brand). Social marketing is therefore an oxymoron. (In fact he rages very much against this, and against companies, and with reason). The question instead is: can we promote memes that are beneficial to the world? Especially in the US this is about putting on a battle against non-beneficial memes, against stupid ideas. (I miss a layer here I think, Rushkoff was presenting this in a more complex way). Also he refers to stories as the way through which we created values. Stories operate in a linear way; memes instead do not operate linearly, they one could say operate in a fractal space, multi-dimensionally (not Euclidean).
What has happened between 1992 and now? According to Rushkoff ‘they’ (the would-be cultural controllers) still do not understand how cultural viruses function. They do not understand the ‘memetic’ landscape and therefore do not even know which memes to create and propagate. Because they do not understand the non-fiction memetic space, culture – and how it functions and could be made better.
There is a pronounced political message ‘behind’ Rushkoff’s talk – the question is to create alternative political ideas and implement them – be they gay marriage, sustainable energy, taking away the stupidity, the rampant commercialism. He does blame the marketeers for a lot of the stupidity.
During the discussion also he emphasizes that USENET and the Well were not real-time environments, that comments would take a day to get in. More playing chess by mail and less immediate. In fact the internet, technologically, is asynchronous. The marketeers instead emphasized the real-time idea and sold this to us, the always on-idea. He hates to admit that literary culture might be coming to an end. He actually connects literary culture to books and the press (mentions Walter Ong). I would like to stress the transformation of literary culture. But yes, that also needs that we steer away from the ‘the constant chasing the moment’, that we learn to concentrate again, that we develop different interfaces, other ways of interaction. HTML was replaced by Facebook, and homepages by the multiple choice identity Facebook give us.
The ‘cultural controllers’ are doing that, says Rushkoff, selling us the ‘real time’ and its interfaces. (He btw. doesn’t use the term real time). A lot he mentions connects directly to the recent criticisms in the first part of Jaron Lanier’s book You are not a gadget, as well as to a couple of things Nicholas Carr on Roughtype has been writing about (from a slightly different perspective).
(And maybe I should mention here that I just finished an article about the transformation of literary culture for the Dutch magazine De Gids which touches on some of these issues. It will, hopefully be in the next issue. It pleads amongst others, for the creation of ‘tools’ which facilitate concentrated reading and reflection, instead of instant response. It’s in Dutch. It’s why I pretty much forget to report on Rushkoff’s use of the terms meme and memetics, and stress these points, which clearly Rushkoff is very passionate about).
The internet Rushkoff got to know was an education space. Our interfaces now instruct us to be users, consumers, experiments in perpetuating consumer culture. It makes producers into the new consumers. That is, indeed, a ‘bad’ thing. Computers have become modeling tools, instead of being machines to create models.
Florian asks of we have arrived at the moment of resignation that media theory reached with Baudrillard in the 1980s? The time of ‘the depressed postmodernists’ as Rushkoff terms them. The difference is, says Rushkoff, is that we now can create ourselves, which is a reason for hope, as well as the fact that we are actually connected to people across the internet. rather than just deconstruct for ourselves, we can deconstructed for the others as well, and can be done in real time, on the networks and interfaces that are looking to monetize the networks. So there is… hope… beyond the LOLCATs.
17:00. The call with Rushkoff is ended, the conference too. And without correcting I’ll upload this text.
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