Category Archives: Online Trends

Two Views of the Promise of Technology

technologybrainIn the last two columns, I’ve looked at how technology may be making us intellectually lazy. The human brain tends to follow the path of least resistance and technology’s goal is to eliminate resistance. Last week, I cautioned that this may end up making us both more shallow in our thinking and more fickle in our social ties. We may become an attention deficit society, skipping across the surface of the world. But, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.

The debate is not a new one. Momentous technologies generally come complete with their own chorus of naysayers. Whether it’s the invention of writing, the printing press, electronic communication or digital media, the refrain is the same – this will be the end of the world as we know it. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that new technologies are seldom completely beneficial or harmful. Their lasting impact lies somewhere in the middle. With the good comes some bad.

The same will be true for the current digital technologies. The world will change, both for the positive and for the negative. The difference will come in how individuals use the technology. This will spread out along the inevitable bell curve.

watchingTVLook at television, for instance. A sociologist could make a pretty convincing case for the benefits of TV. A better understanding of the global community helped ease our xenophobic biases. Public demand lead to increased international pressure on repressive regimes. There was a sociological leveling that is still happening across cultures. Civil rights and sexual equality were propelled by the coverage they received. Atrocities still happen with far too much regularity, but I personally believe the world is a less savage and brutal place than it was 100 years ago, partially due to the spread of TV.

On the flip side, we have developed a certain laziness of spirit that is fed by TV’s never ending parade of entertainment to be passively consumed. We spend less time visiting our neighbors. We volunteer less. We’re less involved in our communities. Ironically, we’re  a more idealistic society but we make poorer neighbors.

The type of programming to be found on TV also shows that despite the passive nature of the medium, we didn’t become stupider en masse. Some of us use TV for enlightenment, and some of us use it to induce ourselves into a coma. At the end of the day, I think the positives and negatives of TV as a technology probably net out a little better than neutral.

I suspect the same thing is happening with digital media. Some of us are diving deeper and learning more than ever. Others are clicking their way through site after site of brain-porn. Perhaps there are universal effects that will show up over generations that will type the scale one way or the other, but we’re too early in the trend to see those yet. The fact is, digital technologies are not changing our brains in a vacuum. Our environment is also changing and perhaps our brains are just keeping up. The 13 year old who is frustrating the hell out of us today may be a much better match for the world 20 years from now.

I’ll wrap up by leaving three pieces of advice that seem to provide useful guides for getting the best out of new technologies.

First: A healthy curiosity is something we should never stop nurturing. In particular, I find it helpful to constantly ask “how” and “why.”

Second: Practice mindfulness. Be aware of your emotions and cognitive biases and recognize them for what they are. This will help you steer things back on track when they’re leading down an unhealthy path

Third: Move from consuming content to contributing something meaningful. The discipline of publishing tends to push you beyond the shallows.

If you embrace the potential of technology, you may still find yourself as an outlier, but technology has done much to allow a few outliers to make a huge difference.

Are Our Brains Trading Breadth for Depth?

ebrain1In last week’s column, I looked at how efficient our brains are. Essentially, if there’s a short cut to an end goal identified by the brain, it will find it. I explained how Google is eliminating the need for us to remember easily retrievable information. I also speculated about how our brains may be defaulting to an easier form of communication, such as texting rather than face-to-face communication.

Personally, I am not entirely pessimistic about the “Google Effect,” where we put less effort into memorizing information that can be easily retrieved on demand. This is an extension of Daniel Wegner’s “transactive memory”, and I would put it in the category of coping mechanisms. It makes no sense to expend brainpower on something that technology can do easier, faster and more reliably. As John Mallin commented, this is like using a calculator rather than memorizing times tables.

Reams of research has shown that our memories can be notoriously inaccurate. In this case, I partially disagree with Nicholas Carr. I don’t think Google is necessarily making us stupid. It may be freeing up the incredibly flexible power of our minds, giving us the opportunity to redefine what it means to be knowledgeable. Rather than a storehouse of random information, our minds may have the opportunity to become more creative integrators of available information. We may be able to expand our “meta-memory”, Wegner’s term for the layer of memory that keeps track of where to turn for certain kinds of knowledge. Our memory could become index of interesting concepts and useful resources, rather than ad-hoc scraps of knowledge.

Of course, this positive evolution of our brains is far from a given. And here Carr may have a point. There is a difference between “lazy” and “efficient.” Technology’s freeing up of the processing power of our brain is only a good thing if that power is then put to a higher purpose. Carr’s title, “The Shallows” is a warning that rather than freeing up our brains to dive deeper into new territory, technology may just give us the ability to skip across the surface of the titillating. Will we waste our extra time and cognitive power going from one piece of brain candy to the other, or will we invest it by sinking our teeth into something important and meaningful?

A historical perspective gives us little reason to be optimistic. We evolved to balance the efforts required to find food with the nutritional value we got from that food. It used to be damned hard to feed ourselves, so we developed preferences for high calorie, high fat foods that would go a long way once we found them. Thanks to technology, the only effort required today to get these foods is to pick them off the shelf and pay for them. We could have used technology to produce healthier and more nutritious foods, but market demands determined that we’d become an obese nation of junk food eaters. Will the same thing happen to our brains?

I am even more concerned with the short cuts that seem to be developing in our social networking activities. Typically, our social networks are built both from strong ties and weak ties. Mark Granovetter identified these two types of social ties in the 70’s. Strong ties bind us to family and close friends. Weak ties connect us with acquaintances. When we hit rough patches, as we inevitably do, we treat those ties very differently. Strong ties are typically much more resilient to adversity. When we hit the lowest points in our lives, it’s the strong ties we depend on to pull us through. Our lifelines are made up of strong ties. If we have a disagreement with someone with whom we have a strong tie, we work harder to resolve it. We have made large investments in these relationships, so we are reluctant to let them go. When there are disruptions in our strong tie network, there is a strong motivation to eliminate the disruption, rather than sacrifice the network.

Weak ties are a whole different matter. We have minimal emotional investments in these relationships. Typically, we connect with these either through serendipity or when we need something that only they can offer. For example, we typically reinstate our weak tie network when we’re on the hunt for a job. LinkedIn is the virtual embodiment of a weak tie network. And if we have a difference of opinion with someone to whom we’re weakly tied, we just shut down the connection. We have plenty of them so one more or less won’t make that much of a difference. When there are disruptions in our weak tie network, we just change the network, deactivating parts of it and reactivating others.

Weak ties are easily built. All we need is just one thing in common at one point in our lives. It could be working in the same company, serving on the same committee, living in the same neighborhood or attending the same convention. Then, we just need some way to remember them in the future. Strong ties are different. Strong ties develop over time, which means they evolve through shared experiences, both positive and negative. They also demand consistent communication, including painful communication that sometimes requires us to say we were wrong and we’re sorry. It’s the type of conversation that leaves you either emotionally drained or supercharged that is the stuff of strong ties. And a healthy percentage of these conversations should happen face-to-face. Could you build a strong tie relationship without ever meeting face-to-face? We’ve all heard examples, but I’d always place my bets on face-to-face – every time.

It’s the hard work of building strong ties that I fear we may miss as we build our relationships through online channels. I worry that the brain, given an easy choice and a hard choice, will naturally opt for the easy one. Online, our network of weak ties can grow beyond the inherent limits of our social inventory, known as Dunbar’s Number (which is 150, by the way). We could always find someone with which to spend a few minutes texting or chatting online. Then we can run off to the next one. We will skip across the surface of our social network, rather than invest the effort and time required to build strong ties. Just like our brains, our social connections may trade breadth for depth.

The Pros and Cons of a Fuel Efficient Brain

Transactive dyadic memory Candice Condon3Your brain will only work as hard as it has to. And if it makes you feel any better, my brain is exactly the same. That’s the way brains work. They conserve horsepower until when it’s absolutely needed. In the background, the brain is doing a constant calculation: “What do I want to achieve and based on everything I know, what is the easiest way to get there?” You could call it lazy, but I prefer the term “efficient.”

The brain has a number of tricks to do this that involve relatively little thinking. In most cases, they involve swapping something that’s easy for your brain to do in place of something difficult. For instance, consider when you vote. It would be extraordinarily difficult to weigh all the factors involved to truly make an informed vote. It would require a ton of brainpower. But it’s very easy to vote for whom you like. We have a number of tricks we use to immediately assess whether we like and trust another individual. They require next to no brainpower. Guess how most people vote? Even those of us who pride ourselves on being informed voters rely on these brain short cuts more than we would like to admit.

Here’s another example that’s just emerging, thanks to search engines. It’s called the Google Effect and it’s an extension of a concept called Transactive Memory. Researchers Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel Wegner identified the Google Effect in 2011. Wegner first explained transactive memory back in the 80’s. Essentially, it means that we won’t both to remember something that we can easily reference when we need it. When Wegner first talked about transactive memory in the 80’s, he used the example of a husband and wife. The wife was good at remembering important dates, such as anniversaries and birthdays. The husband was good at remembering financial information, such as bank balances and when bills were due. The wife didn’t have to remember financial details and the husband didn’t have to worry about dates. All they had to remember was what each other was good at memorizing. Wegner called this “chunking” of our memory requirements “metamemory.”

If we fast-forward 30 years from Wegner’s original paper, we find a whole new relevance for transactive memory, because we now have the mother of all “metamemories”, called Google. If we hear a fact but know that this is something that can easily be looked up on Google, our brains automatically decide to expend little to no effort in trying to memorize it. Subconsciously, the brain goes into power-saver mode. All we remember is that when we do need to retrieve the fact, it will be a few clicks away on Google. Nicholar Carr fretted about whether this and other cognitive short cuts were making us stupid in his book “The Shallows.”

But there are other side effects that come from the brain’s tendency to look for short cuts without our awareness. I suspect the same thing is happening with social connections. Which would you think required more cognitive effort: a face-to-face conversation with someone or texting them on a smartphone?

Face-to-face conversation can put a huge cognitive load on our brains. We’re receiving communication at a much greater bandwidth than with text.   When we’re across from a person, we not only hear what they’re saying, we’re reading emotional cues, watching facial expressions, interpreting body language and monitoring vocal tones. It’s a much richer communication experience, but it’s also much more work. It demands our full attention. Texting, on the other hand, can easily be done along with other tasks. It’s asynchronous – we can pause and pick up when ever we want. I suspect its no coincidence that younger generations are moving more and more to text based digital communication. Their brains are pushing them in that direction because it’s less work.

One of the great things about technology is that it makes our life easier. But is that also a bad thing? If we know that our brains will always opt for the easiest path, are we putting ourselves in a long, technology aided death spiral? That was Nicholas Carr’s contention. Or, are we freeing up our brains for more important work?

More on this to come next week.

The Era of Amplification

First published in Mediapost’s Search Insider, May 1, 2014

AmandaToddVideoMediapost columnist Joseph Jaffe wrote a great piece Tuesday on the Death of Anonymity. He shows how anonymity in the era of digital has become both a blessing and a curse, leading to an explosion of cowardly, bone-headed comments and cyber-bullying.  This reinforces something I’ve said repeated: technology doesn’t change human behavior; it just enables it in new ways. Heroes will find new ways to be heroes, and idiots will find new ways to be idiots.

But there is something important happening here. It’s not that technology is making us meaner, more cowardly or more stupid. I grew up with bullies, my father grew up with bullies and his father grew up with bullies. You could trace a direct line of bullies going back to the first time our ancestors walked erect, and probably further than that. So what’s different today? Why do we now need laws against cyber-bullying?

It’s because we now live in a time of increased amplification. The waves that spread from an individual’s actions go farther than ever before.  Technology increases the consequences of those actions.  A heroic act can spread through a network and activate other heroes, creating a groundswell of heroism. Unfortunately, the flip side is also true – bullying can begat more bullying. The viral spread of bullying that technology enables can make the situation hopeless for the victim.

Consider the case of Amanda Todd, a grade 10 student from Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada. Todd had been bullied for over a year by a guy who wanted “a show”. She finally relented and flashed her breasts. While not advisable, Todd’s actions were not that unusual. She wasn’t the first 15 year-old to experiment with a little sexual promiscuity after prolonged male pleading. It certainly shouldn’t have turned into a death sentence for Todd. But it did – because of amplification.

First of all, Todd’s tormentor was a man who lived thousands of miles away, in Holland. They never met. Secondly, Todd’s indiscretion was captured in a digital picture and was soon circulated worldwide. As teen-agers have been since time began, Todd was mercilessly teased. But it wasn’t just at the hands of a small circle of bullies at her high school. Taunts from around the world came from jerks who jumped on the bandwagon. A teen-ager’s psyche is typically a fragile thing, and the amplitude of that teasing was psychologically crushing for Todd. Desperate for escape, she first recorded a plea for understanding that she posted online, and then took her own life. The act that started all this should have been added to that pile of minor regrets we all assemble in our adolescence. It should not have ended the way it did. Unfortunately, Todd was a victim of amplification.

My wife and I have two daughters, one of which is about the same age as Todd. Because they grew up in the era of Amplification, we pounded home the fact that anything captured online can end up anywhere. You just can’t be careless, not even for the briefest of moments. But, of course, teenagers are occasionally careless. It’s part of the job description. They’re testing the world as a place to live in – experimenting with what it means to be an adult –  and mistakes are inevitable. Unfortunately, the potential price to be paid for those mistakes has been raised astronomically.

Here’s perhaps the most frightening thing about this. Todd’s Youtube video has been seen over 17 million times, so it too has been amplified by technology. Amanda’s story has spread through the world online. The vast majority of comments are those you would hope to see – expressions of sympathy, support, understanding and caring. But there are a handful of hateful comments of the sort that drove Todd to suicide. Technology allows us to sort and filter for negativity. In other words, technology allows bullies to connect to bullies.

In social networks, there is something called “threshold-limited spreading.” Essentially, it means that for something to spread through a network, the number of incidences needs to reach a certain threshold. In the case of bullying, as in the case of rioting or social movements, the threshold depends on the connections between like-minded individuals. If bullies can connect in a cluster, they draw courage from each other. This can then trigger a cascade effect, encouraging those “on the margin” to also engage in bullying. Technology, because of its unique ability to enable connections between those who think alike, can trigger these cascades of bullying. It doesn’t matter if the ratio of positive to negative is ten to one or even one hundred to one. All that matters is there are a sufficient number of negative comments for the would-be bully to feel that he or she has support.

I don’t know what the lasting impact of the Era of Amplification will be.  I do know that Technology has made the world a much more promising place than it was when I was born. I also know it’s made it much crueler and more frightening.  And it’s not because of any changes in who we are. It’s because the ripples of our actions now can spread further than we can even imagine.

The Psychology of Social: Are We Hardwired to Use Social Media?

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. 

Aristotle

I’ve looked at online entertainment and I’ve looked at online tools, both in a quest to see where loyal and stable audiences might be found. But that leaves one huge part of the online landscape unexplored – online social media. In both my previous explorations, the scope of the quest quickly exploded into several posts. I think social media will be as difficult to restrict to a few posts, if not more so.

One thing that both entertainment and usefulness had in common was their foundation – our human drives. In any area I’ve explored up to now, I’ve always found our interactions with technology, as fickle as they may be, are layered over innate human drives with origins reaching back several thousands of generations. In entertainment, although the channels may have changed drastically in the past few decades (digital media, video games, virtual environments), our responses are predictably human. The things that make us cry, jump in our seats or laugh out loud really haven’t changed that much in many thousands of years. Humans adapt quickly to new technology, but our tastes remain reliably consistent.

Usefulness is a little different. In this case, our expectations of utility and the ever-rising bar of technology form somewhat of an arms race, with each upping the ante for the other. New tools allow us to do new things, which reset our expectations. These reset expectations cause us to periodically review the tools we use, and if they no longer match our expectations, we go looking for new tools. But even if we’re on the hunt for increased usefulness, we still use strategies that appear to have evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago on the savannah. I believe we forage for and evaluate useful technologies the same way we forage for food. This means that while technologies may change quickly, our behaviors towards them are remarkably predictable.

20090921_social_connectionsSo, what should we expect as we explore how the human need for society plays out in new online arenas? Again, I think it’s safe to say that our behaviors will be driven by innate human needs and strategies. So that seems to be as good a place as any to start.

In their book “Driven, How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices,” Harvard professors Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria tried to reduce human nature down to the lowest possible number of non-redundant factors. They came up with four irreducible drives:

  • The Need to Acquire
  • The Need to Bond
  • The Need to Learn
  • The Need to Defend

All human actions, all cultural trends, all societal behaviors will be driven by one or a combination of these factors. If Lawrence and Nohria are right, then the usage of social media should be no exception. Let’s look at the four to see how they might map onto social media usage.

The Need to Bond

I’ll start with the most obvious one – the need to Bond. Social media is all about bonding. This hits squarely at the heart of our social nature. As Aristotle said, we’re not built to be alone. Humans thrive in herds. And social media provides us a digitally mediated way to bond.

The complexity of our social bonds are staggering. It’s amazing to think of all the dimensions we impose on our social relationships. Things like status, gossip, empathy, reciprocity, jealousy, xenophobia, admiration, loyalty, love, hate and so many other emotionally charged factors constantly occupy our mind as we try to navigate the stormy waters of our social connections. One might be tempted to throw up our hands in frustration and live in social isolation, but we don’t. Why? Because evolution has proven conclusively that we’re better together than apart. That strategy has been hardwired into our genes. As much as maintaining a social network is a complete pain in the ass sometimes, it’s a necessary part of the human experience. Most times, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

The challenge, however, is that all this baggage will be hauled over to whatever new platforms we use to connect with others. This includes online social media. To be effective and engaging, a social media tool has to allow us to do the things we have always done to survive and thrive in our respective herd – whether it’s to increase the frequency of connection with family, gossip in real-time, brag more effectively to all of our acquaintances at once or reconnect with those that lie in the more out flung regions of our networks. While they’re all very human, these activities, when brought on to a publishing platform (which is a major feature of all social media) introduces a significant signal to noise issue.

The Need to Acquire

While we don’t usually acquire physical things through social media, we sure as hell use it to brag about the things we do acquire in the real world. A unhealthy proportion of social media activity is devoted to the acquisition of new cars, clothes, jewelry, trips, houses, boats – you name it, we tweet (or Facebook, or Instagram) about it. The arms race of social status is being waged daily on social media.

The Need to Learn

One of the biggest reasons why humans became social animals is that it was a much more efficient way to learn. In a herd, we don’t have to learn every lesson ourselves – we can learn from the experiences of other. Of course, that requires a way for lessons to spread throughout our networks. Stories, gossip, rumors – these are all social forms of information transmission. And they have all migrated onto our digital social media platforms.

The Need to Defend

This is probably the least social of Nohria and Lawrence’s Four Drives, at least as it might apply to use of social media. Humans need to defend ourselves, our kin, our community (or tribe, or nation) our possessions, our reputation, our status, our beliefs and our security. But, like all the drives, the need to defend, especially the defense of our beliefs, status or reputation, does play out in the online forum as well.

When looked at in the context of these four innate drives, it’s clear that the use of social media aligns well with our evolved requirements. It is just another channel we can use to let our pre-wired social tendencies play out. So, it passes the first gut-test. This is something we would do naturally, with or without the tools of social media. The next question is, how might our social activities change, for the good and the bad, when they’re mediated through digital channels? I’ll come back here in the next post.

 

#Meaningless #Crap

First published April 10, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

hashtagEverybody should have a voice – I get that. Thank goodness that the web and social media have democratized publication. Because of that, the power to say what’s on our mind is just a click away. From this power, great things have and will continue to come – the overthrow of tyrants, the quest for truth, freedom from oppression. I’m pretty sure those are all good things. Important things.

But I’m also pretty sure the signal to noise ratio in social media content is infinitesimal – verging on undetectable. For every post that moves humanity incrementally forward, there are thousands that drive us over the brink into mind numbing mediocrity.

For example, Justin Bieber has 51 million followers, and has tweeted 26,508 times. That, in case you’re wondering, has produced 1.35 trillion “Bieberisms,” or 193 little Bieber-tweets for every man, woman and child on planet Earth. Here’s one of his finest: “Put your heart into everything you do”. Perhaps the Biebs would be better served by using his head a little bit too. But no matter, he tweets on, sharing his special brand of wisdom. No wonder over 70% of all tweets never get read.

And, for God’s sake – stop hashtagging everything! First of all, it only belongs on Twitter and Instagram. It’s not a universal punctuation mark. And it doesn’t belong in front of every word of your post! If you’re writing about something that falls under a topic category that people actually care about – then by all means slip a hashtag in there. For example:

“Witnessing special forces retaking capital building in Kiev – #ukrainecrisis”

Or:

“Just discovered key gene in early detection of Alzheimer’s – #alzheimerresearch”

See how it works? You’re adding key content to a topic that people care about and may actually be searching for on Twitter. This is how not to use hashtags:

“Off to a funeral #selfie #zebra #sunglasses #bling #hairdown #polo #countrygirl #aero #dodge #ram #cute”

All I can say is #shoot #me.

The other problem is that with this diarrheic explosion of content flooding online, it becomes impossible to sift through all of it to find things that are truly important. Generally, most content filters use one of two criteria – recency or popularity. Recency is fine if you’re looking for breaking news. It’s a clearly understood parameter. Popularity, however, has some issues. The theory here is that the wisdom of crowds can be relied on to push the best content to the top. But that’s not really how the wisdom of crowds works. Just because something is popular doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. And it certainly doesn’t mean it’s important. All too often, it just means that it panders to the lowest common denominator. Do we really want that to be our filtering criteria? Should Kanye West and Keeping Up with the Kardashians mark our cultural high water mark?

One last rant. “Epic” is not the right adjective to apply to concert tickets, Saturday nights at the club, bowls of chili or, when incorrectly combined with the verb “fail”, your company’s Christmas party. According to this post,

“the word epic should only be used to describe two or three things, ever. In fact, here’s a comprehensive list of all things epic: 1. Oceans 2. Lengthy Narratives 3. The Cosmos.”

That’s it.

Feel free to retweet if you wish. Or not. No one will read it anyway.

Five Years Later – An Answer to Lance’s Question (kind of)

112309-woman-internetIt never ceases to amaze me how writing can take you down the most unexpected paths, if you let it. Over 5 years ago now, I wrote a post called “Chasing Digital Fluff – Who Cares about What’s Hot?” It was a rant, and it was aimed at marketer’s preoccupation with what the latest bright shiny object was. At the time, it was social. My point was that true loyalty needs stabilization in habits to emerge. If you’re constantly chasing the latest thing, your audience will be in a constant state of churn. You’d be practicing “drive-by” marketing. If you want to find stability, target what your audience finds useful.

This post caused my friend Lance Loveday to ask a very valid question…”What about entertainment?” Do we develop loyalty to things that are entertaining? So, I started with a series of posts on the Psychology of Entertainment. What types of things do we find entertaining? How do we react to stories, or humor, or violence? And how do audiences build around entertainment? As I explored the research on the topic, I came to the conclusion that entertainment is a by-product of several human needs – the need to bond socially, the need to be special, our appreciation for others whom we believe to be special, a quest for social status and artificially stimulated tweaks to our oldest instincts – to survive and to procreate. In other words, after a long and exhausting journey, I concluded that entertainment lives in our phenotype, not our genotype. Entertainment serves no direct evolutionary purpose, but it lives in the shadows of many things that do.

So, what does this mean for stability of an audience for entertainment? Here, there is good news, and bad news. The good news is that the raw elements of entertainment haven’t really changed that much in the last several thousand years. We can still be entertained by a story that the ancient Romans might have told. Shakespeare still plays well to a modern audience. Dickens is my favorite author and it’s been 144 years since his last novel was published. We haven’t lost our evolved tastes for the basic building blocks of entertainment. But, on the bad news side, we do have a pretty fickle history when it comes to the platforms we use to consume our entertainment.

This then introduces a conundrum for the marketer. Typically, our marketing channels are linked to platforms, not content. And technology has made this an increasingly difficult challenge. While we may connect to, and develop a loyalty for, specific entertainment content, it’s hard for marketers to know which platform we may consume that content on. Take Dickens for example. Even if you, the marketer, knows there’s a high likelihood that I may enjoy something by Dickens in the next year, you won’t know if I’ll read a book on my iPad, pick up an actual book or watch a movie on any one of several screens. I’m loyal to Dickens, but I’m agnostic as to which platform I use to connect with his work. As long as marketing is tied to entertainment channels, and not entertainment content, we are restricted to targeting our audience in an ad hoc and transitory manner. This is one reason why brands have rushed to use product placement and other types of embedded advertising, where the message is set free from the fickleness of platform delivery challenges. If you happen to be a fan of American Idol, you’re going to see the Coke and Ford brands displayed prominently whether you watch on TV, your laptop, your tablet or your smartphone.

It’s interesting to reflect on the evolution of electronic media advertising and how it’s come full circle in this one regard. In the beginning, brands sponsored specific shows. Advertising messages were embedded in the content. Soon, however, networks, which controlled the only consumption choice available, realized it was far more profitable to decouple advertising from the content and run it in freestanding blocks during breaks in their programming. This decoupling was fine as long as there was no fragmentation in the channels available to consume the content, but obviously this is no longer the case. We now watch TV on our schedule, at our convenience, through the device of our choice. Content has been decoupled from the platform, leaving the owners of those platforms scrambling to evolve their revenue models.

So – we’re back to the beginning. If we want to stabilize our audience to allow for longer-term relationship building, what are our options? Obviously, entertainment offers some significant challenges in this regard, due mainly to the fragmentation of platforms we use to consume that content. If we use usefulness as a measure, the main factor in determining loyalty is frequency and stability. If you provide a platform that becomes a habit, as Google has, then you’ll have a fairly stable audience. It won’t destabilize until there is a significant enough resetting of user expectations, forcing the audience to abandon habits (always very tough to do) and start searching for another useful tool that is a better match for the reset expectations. If this happens, you’ll be continually following your audience through multiple technology adoption curves. Still, it seems that usefulness offers a better shot at a stable audience than entertainment.

But there’s still one factor we haven’t explored – what part does social connection play? Obviously, this is a huge question that the revenue models of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and others will depend on. So, with entertainment and usefulness explored ad nauseum, in the series of posts, I’ll start tracking down the Psychology of Social connection.

Letting the Foxes into Journalism’s Hen(Hedgehog) House

First published March 27, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

fanhI am rooting for Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight.com, his latest attempt to introduce a little data-driven veracity into the murky and anecdotal world of journalism. But I may be one of the few, at least if we take the current backlash as a non-scientific, non-quantitative sample:

I have long been a fan of Nate Silver, but so far I don’t think this is working. – Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

Nate Silver’s new venture may become yet another outlet for misinformation when it comes to the issue of human-caused climate change, Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

Here’s hoping that Nate Silver and company up their game, soon. – Paul Krugman, NY Times

Krugman also states:

You can’t be an effective fox just by letting the data speak for itself — because it never does. You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking.

Now..Nate Silver doesn’t disagree with this. In fact, he says pretty much the same thing in his book, The Signal and the Noise:

The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.

But he goes on,

Like Caesar, we may construe them in self-serving ways that are detached from their objective reality.

And it’s this construal that Silver is hoping to nip in the bud with FiveThirtyEight. In essence, he wants to do it by being a Fox, to borrow from Isaiah Berlin’s analogy.

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ We take a pluralistic approach and we hope to contribute to your understanding of the news in a variety of ways.

Silver thinks the media’s preoccupation with punditry is a dangerous thing. Pundits, whether they’re coming from the right or left, are Hedgehogs. They get paid for their expertise on “one big thing.” And the more controversial their stand, the more attention they get. This can lead to a dangerous spiral, as researcher Philip Tetlock found out:

What experts think matters far less than how they think. If we want realistic odds on what will happen next, coupled to a willingness to admit mistakes, we are better off turning to experts who embody the intellectual traits of Isaiah Berlin’s prototypical fox—those who “know many little things,” draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction as inevitable features of life.

Tetlock was researching how expertise correlated with the ability to make good predictions. What he found was that it was actually an inverse relationship. The higher the degree of expertise, the more likely the person in question was a hedgehog. Media pundits are usually extreme versions of hedgehogs, which not only have one worldview, but also love to talk about it. Nate Silver believes that to get an objective view of world events, you need to be a fox, first, but secondly; you should be a fox that’s good at sifting through data:

Conventional news organizations on the whole are lacking in data journalism skills, in my view. Some of this is a matter of self-selection. Students who enter college with the intent to major in journalism or communications have above-average test scores in reading and writing, but below-average scores in mathematics.

So, all this makes sense. The problem in Silver’s approach is that journalism is the way it is because that’s the way humans want it. While I applaud Silver’s determination to change it, he may be trying to push water up hill. Pundits exist not just because the media keeps pushing them in front of us – they exist because we keep listening. Humans like opinions and anecdotes. We’re not hardwired to process data and objectively rationalize. We connect with stories and we’re drawn to decisive opinion leaders. Silver will have to find some middle ground here, and that seems to be where the problems arise. The minute writers add commentary to data; they have to impose an ideological viewpoint. It’s impossible not to. And when you do that, you introduce a degree of abstraction.

The backlash against Fivethirtyeight.com generally falls into two camps: Foxes like Silver that have no problem with the approach but disagree with the specific data put forward and Hedgehogs that just don’t like the entire concept. The first camp may come onside as Silver and his team work out the inevitable hiccups in their approach. The second, which, it should be noted, have a large number of pundits in their midst, will never become fans of Silver and his foxlike approach.

In the end though, it really doesn’t matter what columnists and journalists think. It’s up to the consumers of news media. We’ll decide what we like better – hedgehogs or foxes.

Can Facebook Maintain High Ground?

 First published March 13, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

SnapchatPicAs I said in my last column, Facebook’s recent acquisition spree seems to indicate that they’re trying to evolve from being our Social Landmark to being a virtual map that guides us through our social activity. But, as Facebook rolls out new features or acquires one-time competitors in order to complete this map of the social landscape, will we use it?  Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel apparently doesn’t think so. That’s part of the reason he turned down $3 billion from Facebook.

At the end of 2012, Mark Zuckerberg paid Spiegel and his team a visit. The purpose of the visit was to scare the bejeezus out of Snapchat by threatening to crush them with the roll out of Poke.  Of course, we now know that Poke was a monumental flop while Snapchat rolled along quite nicely, thank you.  Several months later, Zuck flew out to meet with the Snapchat team again, taking a decidedly different tone this time. He also brought along a very big checkbook.  Snapchat said thanks, but no thanks.

So, how can a brash start up like Snapchat beat the 800 lb Gorilla in it’s own back yard? Why was Poke DOA? Was it a one-of-a-kind miscue on the part of Facebook – or part of a trend?

Part of the answer may lie in how we feel about novelty vs familiarity in the things we deal with. As I said in the last column, we go through 3 stages when we explore new landscapes. We move from navigating by landmarks to memorizing routes and finally, we create our own mental maps of the space, allowing us to plot our own routes as needed. It we apply this to navigating a virtual space like the online social sphere, we should move from relying on landmarks (like Facebook) to using routes (single purpose apps like Snapchat) and finally, to creating our own map that allows us to switch back and forth between apps as required.  Facebook wants to jump from the first stage to the last in order to remain dominant in the social market maintaining our map for us by becoming a hub for all required social functionality. But if the Poke story is any indication, we may not be willing to go along for the ride.

But there’s a subtle psychological point to how we learn to navigate new landscapes – we gain mastery over our environment. With this increased confidence comes a reluctance to feel we’re moving backward. We tend to discard the familiar and embrace novelty as we gain confidence. This squares with research done in the familiarity and novelty seeking in humans. We look for familiarity in things that have high degrees of risk, in the faces of others around us or when we’re operating on autopilot. But when we’re actively considering and judging options and looking for new opportunities, we are drawn to new things.

Humans are natural foragers. We have built in rules of conduct when we go out seeking things that will improve our lot, whether it be food, shelter or tools. Ideally, we look for things that will offer us a distinct advantage over the status quo with a reasonable investment of effort. We balance the two – advantage against effort. If the new options come from a overly familiar place, we tend to mentally discount the potential advantage because we no longer feel we’re moving forward. Over time, this builds into a general feeling of malaise towards the overly familiar.

Time will tell if Evan Spiegel was prescient or just plain stupid in turning down Facebook’s offer. The question is not so much will Facebook prevail, but rather will Snapchat end up emerging as a key part of the social landscape on a continuing basis? That particular landscape is notoriously unstable and it’s been known to swallow up many, many other companies with nary a burp.  Perhaps Spiegel should have taken the money and ran.

But then I wouldn’t be betting the farm on Facebook’s chances of permanence either.

Finding Our Way in the Social Landscape

First published March 6, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

social-mediaLast month, Om Malik (of GigaOM fame) wrote an article in Fast Company about the user backlash against Facebook.  To be fair, It seems that what’s happening to Facebook is not so much a backlash as apathy. You have to care to lash back. This is more of a wholesale abandonment, as millions of users are going elsewhere – using single purpose apps to get their social media fix. According to the article,

“we cycle between periods in which we want all of our Internet activity consolidated and other times in which we want a bunch of elegant monotaskers. Clearly we have reentered a simplification phase.”

There’s a reason why Facebook has been desperately trying to acquire Snapchat for a reported $3 Billion. There’s also a reason why they picked up Instagram for a billion last year.  It’s because these simple little apps are leaving the home grown Facebook alternatives in the dust. Snapchat is killing Facebook’s Poke – as Mashable pointed out in this comparison.  Snapchat has consistently stayed near the top of App Annie’s most popular download chart for the past 18 months. This coincides exactly with Facebook’s release of Poke.

Screen-Shot-2013-11-14-at-11.29.55-AM

Download rates of Facebook Poke

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Download rates of Snapchat

Malik indicates it’s because we want a simpler, streamlined experience. A recent article in Business Insider goes one step further – Facebook is just not cool anymore. The mere name induces extended eye rolling in teenagers. It’s like parking the family mini-van in the high school parking lot.  “I hate Facebook. It’s just so boring,” said one of the teens interviewed. Hate! That’s a pretty strong word. What did the Zuck ever do to garner such contempt? Maybe it’s because he’s turning 30 in a few months. Maybe it’s because he’s an old married man.

Or maybe it’s just that we have a better alternative. Malik has a good point. He indicates that we tend to oscillate between consolidation and specialization. I take a bit different view. What’s happening in social media is that we’re getting to know the landscape better. We’re finding our way. This isn’t so much about changing tastes as it is about increased familiarity and a resetting of expectations.

If you look at how humans navigate new environments, you’ll notice some striking similarities. When we encounter a new landscape, we go through three phases of way finding. We begin with relying on landmarks. These are the “highest ground” in a new, unfamiliar landscape and we navigate relative to them. They become our reference points and we don’t stray far from them. Facebook is, you guessed it, a landmark.

The next phase is called “Route Knowledge.” Here, we memorize the routes we use to get from landmark to landmark. We become to recognize the paths we take all the time. In the world of online landscapes, you could substitute the word “app” for “route.” Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and the rest are routes we use to get where we need to go quickly and easily. They’re our virtual “short cuts.”

The last stage of way finding is “Survey Knowledge.”  Here, we are familiar enough with a landscape that we’ve acquired a mental “map” of it and can mentally calculate alternative routes to get to our destination. This is how you navigate in your hometown.

What’s happening to Facebook is not so much that our tastes are swinging. It’s just that we’re confident enough in our routes/apps that we’re no longer solely reliant on landmarks.  We know what we want to do and we know the right tool to use. The next stage of wayfinding, Survey Knowledge, will require some help, however. I’ve talked in the past about the eventual emergence of meta-apps. These will sit between us and the dynamic universe of tools available. They may be largely or even completely transparent to us. What they will do is learn about us and our requirements while maintaining an inventory of all the apps at our disposal. Then, as our needs arise, it will serve up the right app for the job. These meta-apps will maintain our survey knowledge for us, keeping a virtual map of the online landscape to allow us to navigate at will.

As Facebook tries to gobble up the Instagrams and Snapchats of the world, they’re trying to become both a landmark and a meta-app. Will they succeed? I have my thoughts, but those will have to wait until a future column.