Shortly after I sent the missive, my boss – the CEO of the 80-person-strong startup I was at – called me.  It was strange that he used the phone rather than replying to the email.  It was stranger that he didn’t just walk the three doors that separated our offices; but no… he called me.

“Do you have a minute?” he asked. “Can you come see me in my office?”

I was suddenly nervous and wondered if it had to do with the email I’d just sent out.  I was pretty sure my job was safe, but… one never knows.

When I arrived at his office moments later, his back was to the door while my email was splayed (in very large text) across his screen.

“Adam,” he began timidly, slowly turning in his chair Bond-villain-style. “I know you’ve been a consultant for a long time, and aren’t yet accustomed to working in a group setting.  That’s why this is a really important thing for you to know now… before it becomes a problem.”

I was ashen.  OK – I was ashen-er than I usually appear.  I had really screwed up – big.  Lecture from the CEO big.  Then he made one statement to me – a question, really… almost rhetorical, but somehow pointed.  A dull sort of sharp, like the edge of a letter-opener.

“Before you send an email like this, ask yourself: Would you say this aloud – in person – to the people you’re sending it to?”

I rethought the email in my mind and realized that no… I most certainly wouldn’t ‘have the [guts]‘ (as he would later say to me) to say this in person to any of the recipients of the email.

I think this same rule applies, perhaps more-so, to social media vehicles like Twitter, Facebook and even comments on blogs and YouTube. All the time, it seems, I see short barbs carried across the tubes that would have no place in casual conversation with a group where there are contrary views, or even intimate chat between two individuals who are at odds.  People have no problem, for instance, twittering about politician X’s latest misstep, whereas they would have no ability to speak their displeasure in the presence of that party.

Far too frequently I see Tweets or Facebook Fan Page posts flung indiscriminately as bait that is clearly designed to entice a contrarian response (as with Mr. Clement’s most recent Twitter spars with those for and against the census issue).  Much of the time, the subject of such attacks are derided for “not getting the two-way” of social media when, in fact, such a comment wouldn’t merit a response in TRL.

In one particular circumstance, a Social Media aficionado declared that (paraphrasing) they were going to ‘unfollow’ a particular local politician because they were too one-way: Highlighting the notion that this politician was using social media to broadcast their achievements but bemoaning the fact that they weren’t listening to the other people in the social media space.  To this I say the following:

I would do exactly the same… as the politician.

Social media is not a private conversation; indeed, on the contrary, it’s a super public, archived forum.  I wouldn’t expect a politician to candidly go on record regarding a hot topic in a private conversation with me, and were I a political advisor, I wouldn’t suggest that anyone, ever, express an opinion on a hot issue in < 140 chars that hadn’t been carefully crafted and considered by about 20 politically-minded copywriters (and if you think that Obama is actually writing even 1/140th of any Tweet, well… I’ve got ocean-front property in in Calgary to sell you).

If you take issue with a politician – especially a local one – or even if you take issue with a politician’s party’s policy… make an appointment and go see them.  If you’re a constituent, it’s almost unheard of for them to refuse you an audience.  It may take a week (or five), but they will see you, and they will listen, and they will respond.

If you want more out of a brand… write a letter, or speak to a manager, or stop doing business with them.  Heck, I’ve been seriously guilty of slapping a brand via Twitter (http://twitter.com/adamcaplan/status/18934536560), and I’ve even considered “Liking” an Anti-[Insert hated company here] page on Facebook, but it’s rare that I do something about it (other than boycott Bell and McDonalds – my favourite brand hate-ons), so I’m certainly guilty of using my online persona as a passive-aggressive shield as well…

The argument I often hear back is “These companies/politicians/public figures should communicate with me the way I want to be communicated with”, to which I reply “Horsepucky” (to borrow a phrase from M*A*S*H).  Organizations of any size have finite resources, and can’t respond to every single social media meme that starts getting press.  E-Mail, snail-mail and phone support still work – as does walking into a store or an office and making one’s case.  Just because you send 2000 tweets a day and @yourleastlikedbiz has a Twitter handle doesn’t make them fair game.

And that’s the point.  If you want a two-way conversation – especially one that’s controvercial with ANYONE, politician, your favourite brand, or band, or (again) anyone — don’t hide behind an avatar (even if it is a reasonably well-represented likeness) ask yourself if you’d have the [guts] to say it to their face… the same litmus test you’d use with e-mail.

If you have a problem with this post, give me a call, and we’ll discuss it over a beer or a coffee.  I’ll even buy it for you.

Whenever anyone is scrutinized at high resolution, it seems, all their flaws are revealed. Take, for instance the recent story of the lawsuit plantif who claimed his car accident injuries were so bad that it was dramatically diminishing his lifestyle. An in-court examination of his Facebook page revealed current photos of the very activities (pool playing in his case) that he claimed were lost to him due to whiplash from the accidents.

This story is repeated time and again… I was recently asked to take down some pictures I’d posted on Facebook. The images themselves, while reasonably tame, were taken at a birthday party and consequently generated unwelcome questions and comments for the guest of honour by some co-workers. There are still more stories about lost job opportunities as potential employers find unflattering posts and pics of prospects through routine Googling. In one case of which I have personal knowledge, a job applicant negotiating a salary unknowingly lost thousands of dollars in yearly income when a manager read of the prospective employee’s enthusiasm for the job opportunity… On the applicant’s personal blog, no less.

This high resolution look at our second selves, the images and thoughts expressed of our ‘private’ lives are increasingly being publicized, logged, catalogued and recorded for our digital posterity (blog, by the way, is short for ‘Web log’).

This publicity of our other lives has had an unintended consequence… It is shifting and blurring our sense of what is deemed appropriate behavior. As a rather macro example, the past two and current sitting Presidents of the United States have all been shown to have engaged in some form of drug use, from a President that ‘didn’t inhale‘ a joint, to a President that very much inhaled cocaine, to the current President who reportedly continues to engage in one of today’s most heinous taboos: smoking cigarettes.

The high resolution images of who we are, while at times unflattering, seems to be making us more tolerant of our individual flaws and blemishes as society’s taboos are revealed as more and more common facts of today’s lifestyles.

With a single snap of a web-connected celphone camera, society’s closet-bound skeletons – and we’re all said to have them – are shown the light of day, and we’re being forced to reconcile them against our own, equally exposed pasts under the harsh, indiscriminate lens of today’s pervasive paparazzi.

Celebrities are our new royalty, a broad swath of Dukes and Duchesses, Earls and Ladies, Princes and Princesses, and Kings and Queens that hold their ceremonial positions at the pleasure of their popularity, and whose influence is as powerless as the opinions that swirl around them.

Perhaps first in line for the Hollywood throne are the power-couple known as Brangelina. Their love affair(s) have captured the hearts and minds of many on the planet, and when word came of Angelina’s pregnancy, followed shortly by Jack Black’s Twin slip during a junket for Kung-Fu Panda, the world held its breath for the birth of these ‘divine’ children. And when it came time to sell the rights to the photographs of the royal offspring, an as-yet-unnamed U.S. magazine paid US$11 Million for the privilege of first-run publication.

$11 Million. Let me type that again, numerically this time: $11,000,000.

Is this an egregious sum of money to pay for photographs of two people’s newborn twins? Shall we all suck in our breath, aghast at how insane that number is? Not at all.

These magazine publishing guys aren’t stupid… If someone has agreed to pay that much money for some baby pictures, you can be damned sure that they’re going to make that money back, and then some.

But what does this have to do with a blog on technoculture? A LOT. The pioneers of the early internet long held the belief that the democratizing nature of a virtually free global publishing system was going to fracture our media space so much that anyone with talent and gumption could get their stuff seen by anyone else on the planet. Gone would be the days, they thought, of mega-media empires. The studio system might buckle under its own weight as increased competition for the entertainment mindspace of consumers around the world. Music, movies, news, TV, fiction, commerce, whatever – all would face stiff competition from users all over the world.

While internet video has presented us with a few new ‘stars,’ they have by and large either been either associated with Hollywood (LonleyGirl15) or about Hollywoord (“Leave her Alone” fanboy Chris Cocker). Moreover, they have largely been popularized through traditional media channels which are, for the most part, controlled by the same folks that control Hollywood.

But with new media continuing to fragment our content consumption into smaller and smaller niches, as McLuhan suggested, how does someone expect to make back their 11 Mill? This speaks to Dr. McLuhan’s most famous quote: The medium is the massage. In other words, the same content can be reformatted many times and repurposed into the different niches from the hit-driven popular media, all the way down the long tail.

While many will marvel and gawk at the famous-from-birth twins, and talk about what this will do to Brad & Angela’s marriage, some will sneer at the disgusting consumerist nation that gives light to this sort of thing, while still others will create mocking flash videos with the photos.

No matter what point of view each individual takes, they all have one thing in common: They are all essentially still commoners taking interest in their lords, and the aristocracy knows how to play this game.

The future home will probably be equipped with a number of control centers, from any one of which the homemaker can give her commands to appliances at work in the kitchen and laundry. Electric ranges already are equipped with automatic controls for temperature and cooking time, but there is no practical reason why these operations together with the other appliances cannot be controlled remotely from any room the house.”

- Popular Mechanics “The Electrice Home of the Future,” Aug, 1939

The folks at the Industry Standard have offered up a new predictive look at the home of future, this time projecting ahead to 2013. The “Home Of The Future” is a common thought experiment that allows futurists, engineers, artists and business people to trace a path to the present by looking backwards from the future (hey, that sounds familiar), and the Industry Standard offers an interesting guide.

t’s 2013, and you’ve just come home from work. As you pull into the driveway, you reach into your pocket and swipe the screen of your smartphone with your thumb. Your garage door opens and the lights in your house turn on. The TV queues up the shows you missed while you were working late. Your favorite songs are following you from the living room to the kitchen. Then you stop. The phone blinks and warbles at you. The fridge says you forgot the milk.

Welcome home.

In the following pages, you’ll be treated to a glimpse of the toys and technologies that will grace your home in the not-so-distant future. If you are like most people, you probably have already sampled some of them, but others — such as automated home control and personal applications of cloud computing — haven’t made it into people’s homes … yet.

Check out the full article here

“Mainframes were modernist, but computing slipped into postmodernism when people got personal computers. Computing continues its postmodern odyssey through the Internet to the most dramatic extreme: the creation of online communities containing online personae. With its screen surfaces, its learning by doing instead of learning the rules first, its hypertext (no one pathway through the text is the correct way or the best way), computing now is as postmodernist as it gets.”

“In terms of technologies that have really changed people’s deepest conceptions of self, we’ve had a long run with print,” Turkle says. “Print has been a transparent medium for expressing a unitary self. Our cultural memory really doesn’t go back to the time we felt we were inhabited by divinities, so we treat the sense of unitary self we’ve adapted from print as natural. But we’re in the beginning of a profound shake-up of that sense of what a self is and what you take responsibility for and what you don’t. Computers are central to this. I’m not saying that other technologies haven’t changed us, I’m just saying that when you can embody your ideas in a machine that you can then go up and talk to – this is new. When you can have an instantiation of your body on a computer – this is new.”

Read the Full (astonishingly well-written) article Here

Apparently, there’re plans afoot to blend a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) with a weekly TV show on the Sci-Fi Network in the US. Most of the reaction in the blogosphere have pointed towards this being ill-advised. I agree, but perhaps for different reasons than “It’s gonna suck.”

The thinking behind the plan is fairly obvious: Create so-called appointment viewing, or getting fans to watch a show as it’s being broadcast, rather than on a DVR such as TiVo or from a Bittorrent, so that viewers must watch the advertisements. The MMORPG has the added benefit of providing engagement and continuity so that the show remains top of mind for the viewer base, and they feel particularly involved in the story.

Dave Howe, CEO of the Sci-Fi Channel commented:

“A television show that is on once a week isn’t enough. The fans today want the experience to go beyond that. For example, we can tell them that there will be an alien invasion at a certain place in the game, at a certain time, and to be there with all their friends and be ready. The outcome depends on them. And then that battle will be part of the universe in the show.”

Here’s why it won’t work… Simply put, viewers make bad writers. Part of the great experience of watching TV is to be led through a narrative, being surprised, horrified, and even disappointed. We WANT to talk about it at the watercooler, we WANT to blog about what a great (or crap) choice the writers and producers of the show have made.

The best shows on TV are those that don’t have to listen to their fanbase, and that keep them guessing. It’s also the reason that every choose your own adventure interactive TV show has failed.

For the foreseeable future, narrative TV will remain a lean-back experience, and as such, will require writers and producers to continue to take risks and deliver that ultimately elusive experience: innovation.

Links:
Slashdot | Sci-Fi Channel Merging TV Show with MMO
The original blog posting

In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone. Paul Kedrosky calls it the democratization of headline news.

Link to full blog post