Well, it's not Twitter and Facebook but the cunning means through which over 10,000 young Moldovans managed to reach out to each other through the services.
By harnessing a unique tag for their protests it was easy for the mass to get together at the same place, same time, for the same purpose. My question: how many of Britain's young people would a) know about the existence of Twitter, b) know what a tag is and c) how they could use a tag to convene a protest or campaign?
It kind of puts into startk context the English Government's plans to 'teach Twitter' and the perhaps better-formed plans of the Scottish Government to include text messaging and social networks language in the fabric of language teaching and learning [pdf]. Read more on the NYTimes. Pic from Flickr's own blog post on the photos captured.
edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: WebCT update on 15th April. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Over on 38minutes, the creative community I helped create for Scottish and Northern Irish webpreneurs, I've been blogging a lot about what makes online services, communities, apps and APIs attract, retain and turn into some kind of value the interactions of the people out there.
The last post I wrote was a summary of some gems of wisdom in the two Matts (Biddulph and Jones) behind travellers' site Dopplr.com, lifted from the transcript of their talk at last year's dConstruct conference (you can listen along, too). Here are my own highlights that potential 4iP developers and those working on web-based services for young people might bear in mind as they develop their ideas and products:
Really. Seriously. If you're making any kind of online platform in the coming months go and read/listen to it all. I'll be asking questions later... ;-)
Other posts you might like:
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: today's favourite word: luminescence
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: today's favourite word: subterfuge
edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: Seems to work, doesn't it?
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: right then....third go!
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: drinking wine and checking email....
edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: Wrong - the message was from Jen *to* Sian. I'll get the idea eventually! :-
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: is this working?!
edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: Message received from Sian to the group
edinburghmsc: @sbayne not yet! - you need to write a message that starts with "d edinburghmsc", if you want it to be picked up here. j
edinburghmsc: via @jar: you can buy unlocked iphones now, but they're about £600!
edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: Does anyone know whether one could use the GroupTweet trick to Twitter from a Diigo description field?
edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: This is the point at which I have to think of something sensible to say in case this doesn't work. Sorry - can't manage it.
edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: OK - so that got to me as a direct message - so far so good.
edinburghmsc: via @jar: trying out grouptweet
edinburghmsc: mucking about on twitter
Closing speeches are an opportunity to look forward to what we do next, and at the EU Commission's conference on media literacy and copyright I, for one, was relieved that our Chairman and film legend Lord Puttnam reiterated, albeit far more eloquently, what I had been proposing yesterday: that copyright in a digital age is worth less than ever before. Content producers had to be prepared to look at fresh ways of getting their stuff to as many people as possible, but finding new ways to pay for it. It was all going so well.
Then the European Newspaper Publishers' Association's Vice-Chairwoman Margaret Boribon took the stage. No wonder Europe's newspaper industry is screwed.
Three points stood out as showing that the European's press's stewards are stuck well behind the digital divide, Boribon neither being prepared to look at fresh models of publishing and content production, nor having any understanding of what opportunity digital media has opened up since the Cluetrain Manifesto.
Firstly she proclaimed that the press only have a window of a few hours a day to maximise monetisation. This reveals that at a systemic level within the European press lobby, "online" is something you add on because you feel you have to, not the core of your news operations. It's worrying if such a lobby is squeezing any cash or time out of taxpayer's money through an entangled and complex EU bureaucracy, as they're quite clearly spending it on the wrong part of the newspaper business: paper. Newspapers now should be about providing wholly free-to-the-user, full feed content on the web, not stuck behind a subscription service (one exception could be the FT and WSJ's financial news subscriptions, paid for out of expense accounts rather than individuals' pockets). More than that, though, they're about providing web-first news - don't make me wait to see your stuff when you finally get around to publishing on paper. It doesn't matter if you don't want to do it that way - your competitor(s) already are and your stubbornness will simply destroy what little chance you have to catch up. When you're producing paper, it's increasingly for those of us who want the colour features, the photography and for those who aren't on the web (yet).
Google News and aggregators are 'thieves'?
She also branded Google News as 'thieves'. Extraordinary. They "steal" her newspapers' content and surround it with their own Google Adsense ads (she made a point of highlighting this evildoing). European newspapers should be thanking Google and sending them an annual Christmas card for the traffic they shove their way. They should also be using Google's unbeatably personalised ads on their own sites, paying a small cut to Google for managing their ad sales department (allowing you to get rid of a few of those employees in the process) and, along with bloggers who cite your stories and link back, you might want to thank them for taking on part of the cost of distributing as well as marketing your content.
The final element of her tirade of falsehoods was that EU structures could and perhaps should be used to reinforce (i.e. give subsidies to support) the trade of journalism and its broken business models, for journalists she represents and who I can only presume agree with her view that the craft they were happily doing last century hasn't changed, and that the public still want their 'expertise' more than some phony blogger or community site. She clearly didn't understand that increasingly we don't trust journalists (or politicians, or bankers) half as much as we trust our friends and long-term relationships with our favourite bloggers. She also hadn't picked up that not only the final product is under threat from regular Joe producers, but the processes of journalism are opening up, too. It's not just Google search that allows us to factcheck the factcheckers. With the Guardian's release last week of the Open Platform we can have access to all the data sources that, traditionally, made up the secretive black book of contacts and information of the old hack.
Until today I had never heard of the ENPA. If its spokespeople and lobbyists continue to peddle such chuff in the future then I will be head of the queue (well, just after Jarvis, McIntosh, Loosemore, Locke, Shirky and most of the people I'm lucky enough to work with) to watch yet another swift redundancy in the newspaper business: the ENPA.
Pic: Newsprint
Tanya Byron reckons we're guilty of Ephebiphobia, the fear of young people, as we incarcerate our young people in their bedroom prisons and replace the dangers of the street corner with risk-taking on unbridled access to the net. Worse still, the challenges raised by the continued lack of interest we take in our children's use of the net are coming back fast to create broader challenges for society.
The reaction to this might be 'teach the kids and teach the parents'. But we're now in an era where it's not so much about signposting where to go on the web, but teaching society how to navigate the net without even a map.
For years now, parents (and by default most educators and decision-makers) underestimate what young people do online. While most adults think youngsters spend somewhere in the region of 18.8 hours per month online, the reality is that UK kids are averaging 43.5 hours a month. Only four of those hours are spent using the net in schools, the rest is mostly unaccounted for on mobile phones and at home in those bedroom prisons. What's going on in those remaining 24.7 hours each month is unknown. The people with the media literacy challenge are not just young people - it's adults, too, who lack the basic alphabet of understanding that's needed to bottom out responsible, creative, enjoyable and engaging use of the web by us all.
Gen-Y doesn't exist
We know from research, anecdote and a cursory glance across Bebo or Facebook profiles (I've probably viewed close to 15,000 in my previous work with Learning and Teaching Scotland) that we are wrong to annoint youngsters with some sort of technological superiority through lables such as the "Google Generation", "Gen Y" or, my pet armageddon, "Digital Natives".
Firstly, we know that while young people are taught how to swim in the safe goldfish bowl of school and private intranets, often by educators who themselves have a filmsy idea of how to operate in that arena, they are completely incapable of operating safely and responsibly in the oceans of the web. If young people are to learn how to upload and download information responsibly then they must be allowed to play with their technologies with the lifeguard of the educator to drag them back to safety when they start to falter. Filtering these technologies serves only to compound the ability of the educator to work with the youngster on media literacy, and harms us all in a wider sense.
Secondly, we romanticise the technological creativity of our youngsters online. While large numbers now upload material online (close to 78% of teens according to most recent research) most of this material is photographic - i.e. mobile snaps from nights out. Creating and publishing original narrative, original code or Facebook apps or even mashed up video or code is not currently a regular pass-time of you average British kid, though we are beginning to see valiant efforts to make this process of creation-publication the norm in our schooling.
However, most don't come close to the kind of creativity illustrated by a young Mark Zuckerberg, pictured, who avoided his near flunk at Harvard art class with some online creativity, a story recounted by Jeff in WWGD. With a few days to go until his final exam, for which he hadn't done any work (well, he was creating his $15b company), he created a site with copies of the artwork that was likely to appear in the final exam, put in some comment boxes under each one, and let his fellow students know that he had created a collaborative study guide. All they had to do was fill in the blanks. Not only did a cheeky Zuckerberg pass with flying colours, but his classmates also did better than normal thanks to their formative assessment that Zuckerberg offered them.
But here's the tough question Jarvis doesn't ask: how many youngsters actually do that, or even think of it as a possibility? Today's literacy benchmark is copy and paste. A media literacy strategy, instead of talking about how we block copying and pasting, and enforce filtering, rating, copyright and IPR restrictions, could begin the hard work of illustrating how copy, paste, open sourcing and creative commons-ing can lead to much better content and information for all.
The challenges of attracting attention to these challenges with a public that's hard to get
The biggest challenge for a 'strategy' like this is that it's incredibly hard to a) attract young audiences b) keep them and c) turn that into some form of value. Channel 4's arguably one of the best broadcasters in the world at doing this, and with 4iP and Channel 4 Education's work online, we're attempting to work out how we replicate television's success at 'reach' to this group online, on mobile and in socially connected games.
Matt Locke and I have been playing around with Dave McClure's Metrics for Pirates in our work with independent companies to push them to think about those questions: how are you going to attract people, how are you going to keep them, and how are you going to turn that into some sort of value? Matt came up with a strong reduction of this, and I made it look less pretty but more utilitarian by insisting on a timescale for each metric. Take those three questions and apply them to what we know about online community uptake (that 90% lurk, 9% will follow regularly and 1% might contribute something) and we end up with a roll-your-own site metrics table:
To help see it in action I made one up for YouTube, had they approached 4iP a few years back for funding. It shows how a site that "gets people to upload videos" has added a lot of small ingredients to the recipe to take people on that more-complex-than-it-looks journey to uploading a vid. It still takes great ideas and a strong awareness of the potential of different technologies and techniques (RSS, Ajax, email, marketing, business development, cloud computing) to be able to fill it in and act on it, and this is where we might just see some problems in our institutions and schools. The knowledge and understanding just isn't there in enough quantities to high enough a level.
Our well-meaning institutions are another obstacle in the process
One could even go as far as saying that it would be counter-intuitive, professionally suicidal even, for institutions to seize this opportunity to engage with young people - any people - in this kind of open, copiable, distributable, redistributable, changeable, alterable way. Jeff Jarvis is right:
As a starting point, therefore, media literacy begins with much more communication between young people and adults when we're taking decisions on how we proceed. There are three main areas that need tackled first:
To take that point of empowerment further, and to conclude, there has to be a realisation that while artists and creators of content used to have value in owning their IPR in a world of atoms, in a world of digits this ownership if IPR comes only with costs. In a digital world if you own the only version of something then, for a while, your IPR has value but, eventually, will be commodotised as me-toos appear - not direct copies, but similar and maybe even better.
If you let people copy and distribute your stuff then you're able, eventually, to reduce your overhead on marketing and distribution - your fans and copiers are doing this for you. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is twofold:
1. Get over the idea that your creation is the last stop of the creative bus:
People will change your message, distort it, make it worse, make it better, create something you hadn't intended - your original will always be your original, their altered version always their altered version. The important thing here is that it's as easy as clicking a link or running a Google search to find the original source and to let the user/participant make their own mind up as to which message they are more engaged with.
2. Find alternative means of being recompensed for your initial efforts
Have your original stuff carry ads or sponsorship, give away poor versions for free but top quality versions for money as eBook fans and TV companies on YouTube and social networks already do, find the George Lucas approach to making your stuff, and make your money on something else.
Pic 1: Smoking and texting
Pic 2: Zuckerberg
I'm in a snowy Prague at the European Union Commission's Media Literacy and Copyright Conference, where the strange but predictable and slightly 20th Century juxtaposition of copyright, piracy and our 'literacy' with media is reflected in the media packs provided by the European Audiovisual Observatory.
It includes gems such as Online Games from the Standpoint of Media and Copyright Law (pdf) which makes a point of comparing video games to film, and applies the 'logic' that their copyright and distribution be controlled in the same way. Unfortunately, it fails to apply the logic in the other direction, that one where openness and free distribution bring success and riches to the likes of Playfish, a London-based social games company whose five games in Facebook's Top 10 have helped the company generate millions of dollars in revenue and funding, or to iMob, the current iPhone social game that turns over around $1m a month from its subscribers.
Other hits in store include Searching for Audiovisual Content with its openner on the "dangers of search". Anyone from social app developers to filmmakers should be hungry for open, wide and free search to their stuff. CBS worked that out halfway through the production of their video on demand website Innertube, realising that the site should probably have been called www.cbs.com/nobodycomeshere. YouTube, not Innertube, is where their audiences hang out, where their public comment on, mashup and make more engaging (for them) the content. Above all, it's where they search for it.
During the conference itself I'll be challenging these more traditional views that there is greater worth in ownership of 'stuff' in an age of digital media rather than making it easier for people to find, alter and republish.
It's in the unhandily titled Media Literacy panel, a phrase that is open to even more (mis)interpretation with 34 more nations in the room than normal. It's also up against panels on Copyright and Piracy, so a lot of the folk that would maybe benefit from a jolt of reality are likely to be having their 1999 preconceptions of media confirmed. Oh well, at least I can send them the link to my blog post of the talk. And, if they're not of the blog persuasion, they can just go and read Jeff's new book for starters, the oeuvre that's currently infecting every bit of dialogue I have on the question of what it means to be media literate.
Pic: CC of Charles Bridge, Prague