No time to Twitter? Try Flutter (or Shttr Dwn)

Feeling a little ambivalent about the world of micro-blogging? Take a look at this...with thanks to SlateV.
(It's ancient now, from April 2009...time flies when you are reading tweets.)

In Praise of Obscurity, and Maureen's Twittered Cookbook

I found Maureen Evans in the current issue of Wired magazine, in a piece by Clive Thompson called "In Praise of Obscurity." It's not online yet, so I'll quote at length:

Consider the case of Maureen Evans. A grad student and poet, Evans got into Twitter at the very beginning – back in 2006 – and soon built up almost 100 followers. Like many users, she enjoyed the conversational nature of the medium. A follower would respond to one of her posts, other followers would chime in, and she'd respond back. Then in 2007 she began a nifty project: tweeting recipes, each condensed to 140 characters. She soon amassed 3000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town: Among the regulars, people knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew and grew, eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to each other and even to her. "It became dead silence," she marvels. 

Why? Because socializing doesn't scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant begins to feel anonymous again, and the person they are following – who once seemed proximal, like a friend – now seems larger than life and remote. "They feel they can't possibly be the person who's going to make the useful contribution," Evans says. So the conversation stops...

The lesson? There's value in obscurity...Maybe we should be designing tools that reward obscurity– that encourage us to remain in the shadows.

It's interesting that Thompson chose Evans as his example: poets are already fairly accustomed to laboring in obscurity. (Lovers of obscurity, even – even when they have readers.) But the issue of social scale is interesting, whether we're talking about social media, wedding guests or a proliferation of "best friends forever." Are we talking? When do we talk anymore? What do conversations look like? Or feel like?

Here are more responses to Maureen's compressed cookbook, including one from by Lawrence Downes at the New York Times, who has dehydrated and tried some of the recipes, attesting to their viability.

Some examples from twitter feed cookbook (18,611 followers, 352 tweets):

Cheese Bread: mix 3c flr/T bkgpdr/~¼t cayenne&pep/c dice cheddar; fold+mixd 2c buttrmilk/btn egg/3T oil. Fill pan; top w parm. h@350°F/175℃

Winter Fruit Salad: mix gr+rd apple&asianpear/T lem; toss w 2mandarin+tangerine/c date&kumquat/~3T GingerSyrup. Chill; dust w cinn. Ylds~8c. 

Almond Soup: simmr c grnd almond/3c Stock/whl onion/clove&bay 30m. Sieve; +½c milk/nutmeg&s+p. Brwn 2T buttr&flr; whisk+soup. Heat; +c crm.

Quick Orange Beets: Shred lb beet; +T butter/t mustard/¼c oj/s+p. Cvr5m@med to tender; uncvr to evaporate liquid.

Turnip Gratin: brwn onion/2T buttr; +c stock/¼c crm. Reduce to ½; s+p. Slice 2turnip&tater; lyr4x w sauce. Top w 2c breadcubes; h@375℉/190℃.

Choco Nut Cookies: cream 5T buttr&nutbuttr&sug; +egg/¼t vanil&salt. Mix+c flr/½t bkgpdr; +¼c choc chip. Form log,chill,cut20. 8m@400°F/200℃.

The latest message from Maureen's poetry twitter feed: It's just me and Jim Hughson, four in the morning, editing chicken. (I like it. I'm there. Too.)

Andrew Lih on "The Wikipedia Revolution"

Andrew Lih, author of The Wikipedia Revolution, appeared on C-Span2 Book TV on March 25, 2009. The broadcast was of a recent public conversation at Harvard University.

Lih created the new media program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he served as adjunct professor and director of technology for their Center for New Media.

This book took two years of research in the social and technical dynamics of collaborative communities. It has made Lih the most widely recognized expert on the Wikipedia project, one of the largest collaborative reference works on the Internet.

Lih is an administrator on the Wikipedia English edition, and has served as proceedings editor for the annual Wikimania conferences. He hosts the Wikipedia Weekly roundtable audio podcast, discussing issues related to Wikipedia, free culture, peer production and crowdsourcing.

I've added his blog to my Ideas and Inspiration list at the left, and will be tuning in regularly to listen and learn as journalism rides the wave of the new media transformation. (I've also found another book I want to give to my son Jack as a high school graduation gift.)

This fascinating discussion, at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with host David Weinberger (author of Everything is Miscellaneous) explored these and other topics:

• Governance of the creative commons: the difference between inclusionists and deletionists.
• Distinctions between English-language and the more tightly controlled German-language
versions of Wikipedia.
• The different natures of the growth community that created Wikipedia, and the maintenance
community it now requires (having at this point over 2 million entries).
• Issues of editorial oversight, technical expertise, and administrative control.
• The eventual merging of information from Wikipedias from various countries.
• Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authenticity (as in the notorious case of "SJ", a contributor
exposed as someone who had created a fraudulent identity).

Lih used a phrase I like: "Sunshine is the best disinfectant." It's a reworking of an earlier theme on this blog: "Transparency is not for the squeamish." Okay, so I now have a reliable new media guide: very cool. Check out Lih on the topic of Kindle DX and newspapers.

Project New Media Literacies

MIT's Comparative Media Studies program has put together a cool site called Project New Media Literacies (NML). It is a research initiative that "explores how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world."

My only problem with that has to do with the modifier "young": this work concerns people of all ages.

A very useful document at NML defines the skills of participatory media culture (from a white paper called Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century). Looking at the list, I'm convinced that many groups of people, such as artists and actors, have been honing these collaborative skills for centuries. Today, we are using new networking technologies to develop them, but they build on traditional skills of literacy, research, critical analysis, and technical expertise. It's a feedback loop: we apply these skills to new technologies, and use the technologies to connect with each other, further developing the skills. What I find interesting is that these capacities emphasize flexibility, imagination, empathy, and the ability to shift and sort through texts and contexts: rigidity, top-down tyranny, and dogmatism don't make the cut.

Here's that excellent provisional list, as well as a video from the site:

Skills for New Media Literacy

Play - the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance - the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation - the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking - the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details

Distributed Cognition - the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence - the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment - the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation - the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking - the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation - the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms

Visualization - the ability to interpret and create data representations for the purposes of expressing ideas, finding patterns, and identifying trends

Cellphones as Plot Destroyers

The topic of the week appears to be social media communications. There was piece in the Sunday New York Times on April 12th that made me think about the ways technologies of speed are changing the stories we tell and the methods we use to disseminate them. The illustration, shown here, is by the remarkable artist Yuko Shimizu.

The article, "If Only Literature Could Be a Cellphone-Free Zone" is by Matt Richtel, author of Hooked, "a Thriller about Love and Other Addictions." (Reviewer Katherine Neville writes: "Hooked is a wild roller-coaster ride through the hidden world where digital and biological cultures meet and clash. The scariest thing about Matt Richtel's astonishing first novel is that it is all possible, it is all probable – and it is all probably happening to us right now.")

Richtel observes: "Technology renders obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone." He talks about writing his book and receiving feedback about the need to factor in the cell phone: contemporary plots can no longer be constructed on the assumption that characters aren't able to get in touch with each other, almost instantly and effortlessly.

Richtel quotes author M.J. Rose, who is setting her next book in 1948 in order to increase her miscommunication plot options: "You miss a train in 1888 or even 1988, and have no way to contact the person waiting at the station on the other end...he thinks you've changed your mind, been captured, weren't able to escape. You miss a train in 2009 and you pull out your cell phone and text that you'll be two hours late." Mystery collapses, logistical problems are easily resolved.

Think of all of the stories in which the exchange of letters or other messages over time stretches our sense of suspense and curiosity. We still feel this, of course: it hasn't gone away. We are just casting messages over broader distances, with electric, elastic response time, to friends and strangers alike. The suspense of waiting by the phone, or by the keyboard, has not gone away.

Plot is understood as a primary sequence of events. With cellphones, plots can be radically compressed; characters are no longer plausibly isolated. For all practical purposes, GPS systems locate them precisely in space and time. And yet, surely, mystery remains, only to be displaced into some other kind of psychic space. What does the literature of that kind of compression look like? Poetry, perhaps? A sequence of tweets? Graphic novels?

There's a nice communication bonus here, thanks to social media: Yuko Shimizu has written a post at her blog about the illustration process, giving a backstage studio glimpse of how she came up with the image (in both web and print versions) under a very tight deadline. This is one of those cases where the existence of the Internet, with its supplemental features, enriches the original newspaper article in an exponential way.