Alex Steer

943 words | ~5 min

The BBC News website's Tech Brief pointed me towards this post on Religion Dispatches, which revisits the argument for the similarity between hypertext and the literary practices of medieval monks:

The medieval books we admire so much today are distinguished by the remarkable visual images, in the body of a text and in the margins, that scholars have frequently compared to hypertexted images on internet “pages.” The function of these images in illuminated manuscripts has no small bearing on the hypertext analogy. These “miniatures”... did not generally function as illustrations of something in the written text, but in reference to something beyond it. The patron of the volume might be shown receiving the completed book or supervising its writing. Or, a scene related to a saint might accompany a biblical text read on that saint’s day in the liturgical calendar without otherwise having anything to do with the scripture passage.

My academic training was in medieval English bibliography, so it's always good to see medievalists clamouring for a bit of relevance. However, since medieval book-making and modern internet cultures are pretty much my specialist subjects, I have to disagree slightly with the claim.

It's true that glossing, whether pictoral or verbal, was a fundamental of monastic text production. In contrast with the modern tendency to privilege originality of composition, the mainstream of scholarly thought in the medieval west saw thoughtful reproduction (copying) as an important end in itself. In part this was due to the cost in time and materials to reproduce texts. Don't think of illuminated manuscripts here, necessarily. Most manuscripts are much simpler affairs, but even so required patience, skill and financial outlay. The best work (at least until about the late fourteenth century) was done almost exclusively in monasteries, a fact which had a major influence on both the texts which were copied and the discipline of copying itself. The best scribes were not just photocopiers with human faces, but thoughtful textual critics.

As you'd expect when most copyists were monks, textual criticism owed a lot of its theoretical foundations to theology. And, in fact, with its roots in the Late Antique period, the theology of the monasteries had been intensely aware of its dependence on textual criticism and the status of its faith as a religion of the book. Some branches of theology arose explicitly from the need to reconcile the interpretative difficulties of the Bible, and particularly the complicated relationship of the Old Testament (thought of as shared with the Jews) and the New. This need - to show that the New Testament represented a fulfilment of the Old, superceding but not obviating the Jewish scriptures - is at the root of typology, the discipline of Christian reading popularised by the work of Origen, which saw Old Testament figures and events as prefigurations of New Testament ones.

With so much of Christian textual theology dependent on analogy, it is no surprise that monastic copyists took pains to discern and point out the analogies, figurations and lessons in the texts they copied. Typological thinking was not reserved for the relationship between testaments, either. It pervaded monastic understanding of the past, present and future too. The theology of time saw it as a linear progression marked with cycles of return and repetition. This was true in the short term - the cycle of feasts and fasts which marked the progress of the liturgical year - and in the long term. So there was a religious imperative to teach people to draw out the parallels between past and present as a way of negotiating the perils of the religious life into the future.

Students of theology were taught to find the typological significance of all sorts of events. They were taught, in other words, to make links between texts.

But does this mean medieval monks were the original hypertext makers? My answer's still no. This may sound obvious, but the defining feature of hypertext is the ability to move between texts. What matters is the immediacy of access to another resource.

Unsurprisingly, this is lacking in analogical glossing. It's not just a technological barrier that means that a gloss is not a hypertext. The glosses acted as reminders, not just as references. Unlike hyperlinks, they did not necessarily point to 'something else' that should be chased up as soon as convenient. Instead, they referenced ideas and images that were already familiar. Whereas hyperlinks provide a series of optional next steps to new things, analogical glosses provided a whole frame of reference for thinking about something new.

That said, copyists were masters of intertext and metatext - respectively the referencing of other resources and the creation of information structures capable of organising resources by various kinds of relation. Intertextual and metatextual thinking are fundamental to hypertext, and more widely to search engines and the semantic web.

They're not a rediscovery, either. Intertextual and metatextual thinking underpins the arrangement of libraries, dictionaries, thesauruses, the indexes in books, footnotes, object-orientated programming, file dependencies, and most of the other innovations that make managing information bearable. This tradition is long, and more or less unbroken. Medieval monks weren't prefigurations of the internet. They wouldn't even have seen themselves as the originators of this kind of information organisation. But they were there, way upstream, pointing readers in interesting and useful directions.

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Of all the social media statistics, this one is most loved. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. With 500 million members, only China and India are bigger. But what kind of a country would it be?

A country governed by a small unelected elite.

A country which conducts routine intelligence on its populace.

A country in which the main sectors of industry are farming and organised crime.

A country without effective separation of powers.

A country which makes it hard to leave.

A country where the median age is 26.

So, if Facebook were a country... it would be Burma.

Great.

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PSFK (along with others) reports on the adoption by two British police forces of IBM's CRUSH system. CRUSH (Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History) 'analyzes parameters like crime records, offender profiles and intelligence briefings to look for patterns and identify potential areas where a crime may occur'. It's interesting stuff.

This kind of predictive analytic cartography isn't new, though. Charles Booth showed a similar range of interests when making his London Poverty Map in the late 1890s. Booth was part of a generation of analytically-minded social reformers who gave Britain an insight into the geography of deprivation. His colour-coded classification of London streets shows that his interest extended beyond mapping poverty to understanding its effects. He describes the black-shaded areas as 'Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal'.

The image below shows the area round Borough High Street, where I used to work.

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Are location-enabled social networks a golden opportunity for marketers? Brian Solis says yes, by virtue of engagement potential; Forrester says no, by virtue of demography. So I'll say not yet, by virtue of network effects.

In a nutshell, I argue this. For now, I'm not sure anyone's found the extra benefit that comes from marketing in an environment that combines geolocation and social network effects (as opposed to one or the other). In the future, they may, but I suspect they'll concentrate their efforts on already-massive social networks (e.g. Facebook) and sharing platforms (e.g. Twitter) as they add geolocation functions.

A couple of months back someone was poking round in the code that underlies the mobile version of Facebook, and noticed they'd built in support for location-based features. Facebook finally went public with this in late June, though so far not much has been revealed.

Twitter added a geo-location tagging option to tweets in November 2009, and last month extended this feature under the name Twitter Places, making it easier for mobile Twitter users to 'tag' the location they're tweeting from.

So far one of the big drivers of this behaviour (by social media channels and users) has been technology – geo-location is pretty straightforward with many smartphones, and still fairly novel. And geolocation functionality is increasingly standard. Here in South Africa, more than 10% of phones sold this year had GPS built in. (I'd love to tell you the source for that, but I've lost it. Sorry.)

It still needs to be genuinely useful, though, and we're seeing a lot of really useful applications for geolocation functionality. We're moving past the novelty-value stage of geolocation.

However, with a few notable exceptions, like the dubiously brilliant 'Please Rob Me' site, the combination of geolocation and social networks doesn't yet offer much more than you can achieve with an iPhone running Google Maps, from a utility point of view. Most of the best location-enabled apps do not make use of social network effects, even if they make use of social sharing effects like tagging and notation.

So far geolocation + social networking hasn't meant business, aside from a few 'look, we're on this thing' promotions (e.g. Starbucks' Foursquare promotion). Foursquare's just hit two million members, but it's still functionally pretty niche, and others (e.g. Gowalla, Loopt) are way behind. No-one really knows what they're for, except fun.

Foursquare gets most of its inbound referred traffic from Facebook, which is one of several reasons for suspecting that it may get hit very hard by the arrival of Facebook location features.

That said, so far brand activity on Foursquare and the like has been very promotional (come here, buy stuff, get discounts, etc.). So compared to a lot of 'fan engagement' activity on Facebook it's actually pretty measurable (for brands) and pretty useful (for consumers). So maybe geolocation will become a way for consumers to get better value out of brands in social media - effectively, by stalking them for deals.

I'm not sure I'd be rushing to tell any brand to get on Foursquare, though I'd certainly encourage brands who are interested in/insistent on 'doing social media' to see if location features might provide them with a way of adding some utility. There's an obvious applicability of geo-location for retailers ('we're nearby') and FMCG ('available here'). I'm unsure how much value is added by social network effects ('5 people you know visited this bar last week'), though.

I'm happy to be wrong, though. Anyone got any great examples of geolocation and social networking making themselves useful together?

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This is a presentation on Starbucks' digital strategy by Alexandra Wheeler, their digital strategy director. As you'd expect, it's pretty much the last word on how Starbucks does digital.

Did anyone else read it and think... well, obviously?

As you'll know if you've just read it, Starbucks is the 'most engaged' brand online, but there's absolutely nothing surprising in the presentation. Assuming there's not some secret that they're keeping from the world (and, let's be honest, there's not), Starbucks has built its online presence and reputation purely by doing all the basic stuff that every single social media opinion piece goes on and on about.

Talking to their customers online, responding to comments and queries fast, posting entertaining content and inviting interaction and creativity under their banner.

It doesn't involve Nasa, solid fuel boosters or competition with the Soviet Union. It's not rocket science. So why does it work so well?

Firstly, because it's Starbucks. Despite all the hype, there are pitifully few examples of strong brands being built through digital communications. Starbucks, as well as being a strong business, were already a strong brand with a consistent identity, look and feel, and a meaningful place in people's lives (usually, somewhere between home and the office when a reliable caffeine hit is needed). They found a way to capture that in their online presence, using enthusiasm for the brand to drive enthusiasm for the digital offer, which now feeds back into enthusiasm for the brand.

Secondly, because they actually do it. They do it a lot; they do it everywhere; they put effort and time into it. They treat is as both a broadcast medium and a public relations and customer service channel. They were there before they needed to be (unlike Eurostar or Domino's, for example), and they threw their weight behind being good online citizens, so they soon became part of the crowd, not an interloper. And now they've made it, they don't let up, which suggests that they do what they do for the love of the medium and the benefit of the community. There's clearly no need for Starbucks to work as hard as it does online - it could get away with far less. But the internet is a creative culture that thrives on extra effort that can't entirely be justified economically, so Starbucks' sheer graft wins them respect. It feels like a brand staffed by people that care about making the internet the greatest nation on Earth.

So Starbucks describe their core philosophies in all the usual terms: be about relationships, be authentic, build coalitions, make commitments, provide content, etc. I think they're doing it right, but analysing it wrongly.

If you want to be as good as Starbucks online, it turns out you need to...

1. make things people like;
2. provide them efficiently and without hassle; and
3. work really hard at serving the community.

In other words, online success is driven by social responsibility.

Surprise.

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Here's a thought.

I'll go mad if I hear another marketer claim that online social media has empowered consumers to talk about marketing. The implication is that they didn't do this before. This is a little like claiming that the birds didn't sing until someone recorded them singing.

Social media channels have done more than improve the general audibility of people's conversations (about everything). They have shifted the balance of power away from those people and organisations who traditionally had access to mass broadcast media, including marketers. This is pretty obvious.

In South Africa they use the term 'historically disadvantaged', which seems ripe to be applied to those of us who can now be heard through social media.

As in post-repressive regimes, the historically disadvantaged users of media suddenly find they call the shots by weight of numbers. They also have little to lose, so their demands for change can be far greater.

Marketers will never again be able consistently to beat ordinary amateur users of social media by any measure of creative excellence. Ever. This is because spending power is nothing compared to weight of numbers. Just as no amount of money can buy you perfect health, yet all of complex life evolved for free, so the internet is always more creative because it can afford to fail thousands of times for every success. No organisation can budget for experimental failure like this.

The thought is this. If you advertise, your main competitor is now the internet. And that's a bit like playing charades against God.

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Karl Marx's idea that commodities are objects which have a use value raises some questions for planners thinking about the future of media channels.

In Capital, Marx gives the example of a coat to demonstrate the labour theory of value - the notion that the value of a commodity in a market depends on the useful labour that went into its production. There are problems with the labour theory of value (see here), but more interesting is the underlying assumption it makes: that objects, especially commodities, are manifestations of ideas about value.

Take the coat. Any coat is a manifestation of the idea that there is value in being able to keep the body warm and move around at the same time. This idea provides a mandate for function - 'something should exist that keeps the body warm without inhibiting mobility'. This, in turn, dictates form. A specific coat will be a manifestation of various ideas of value which govern its exact form (e.g. presence or absence of a hood, thickness, length, material, colour, cut), combined with the influence of copying as a short-cut to invention which stops has having to invent the coat over and over again.

If I make my own coat, my own ideas mandate its function, which together with my resources governs its form. If I make a coat to sell as a commodity, it's influenced by my ideas about other people's ideas of value, measured largely by how much they're willing to exchange or sacrifice to get the coat I've made. As a tailor I have to work out which ideas of value to subscribe to, before I can know what the function of my coats will be (e.g. should they be fashionable, hard-wearing, costly or cheap, etc?), as this determines the form.

This is where we make the leap from Marx to media.

What happens if we treat media like commodities in Marx's sense? That is, as items of exchange whose form is ultimately determined by ideas about other people's ideas of value.

When we do that, questions like 'What is the future of magazines?' look rather odd.

We're used to defining magazines by their form: collections of bound pages, intermediate in size between pamphlets and books. Or by their function: as compilations of short to medium-length texts and images, usually on a common theme, frequently topical or current in nature and entertaining or superficially informative in style.

But what is the idea of value in a magazine? Suppose it's the idea that there is value in having access to entertaining and superficially informative topical content which is portable in nature and which can be enjoyed in short bursts without requiring intense focus of attention.

The important question, then, is: is this idea still valuable? If it is, then we can see what kind of function is mandated. We might find that there is still room in the marketplace for a commodity that fulfils this function. We might, alternatively, decide that there is not: that we are now all sufficiently well-connected and well-resourced that we can compile our own entertainment without the need for curation.

If we find there is still a useful function, we examine our resources. Here's where an existing function may take on a very different form. In the 18th century magazines took on the form they still have today (more or less) because printed paper sheets were an efficient and cost-effective delivery vehicle for this idea of value. At risk of summing up the entire digital revolution in six words: this may no longer be true.

So maybe we need to start planning for the future of media not even with function, but with the idea of value. We also need to accept that old forms die hard, as whole economies are geared up to create them. But there may be creative potential even in this. As ideas of value change, the world ends up littered with zombie forms. Just as warehouses became flats in Britain in the 1980s and vinyl LPs are 'upcycled' into handbags in South Africa now, so zombie media can be appropriated as manifestations of new and different ideas of value.

And if this post has left you with the image of a zombie Karl Marx in a coat reading magazines... good.

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Below is the latest version of 'What the F**k is Social Media Now?' presentation by Marta Kagan at Espresso - Brand Infiltration.

I'm a planner with a particular interest in social media and in trends and futures, so I get a lot of exposure to presentations like this. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of this one.

The good stuff first: it's beautifully presented. And it has comedy non-swearing, which is always a plus. In terms of designing decks that people want to spend time with, it's a classic.

But that just makes it a very well made blunt pencil. Like many 'ooh wow social media' decks, it starts with a terrifying barrage of big numbers, just in case anyone hadn't noticed that lots of people are using social media channels. But I'm not convinced there's much more to it than that. As an argument it's organised paratactically. Lots of facts are stacked up, and the reader is left to conclude that the sheer scale of social media changes everything. Which it may do, but if I'm a confused marketing director I'm none the wiser. There is an obligatory 'so what should you be doing?' section, but the answers are one-liners, often one-worders, like 'listen' and 'engage'.

The result is a presentation that comes across as a bit smug. If you are as super-savvy as its authors, you can feel good about yourself. If not, you feel inadequate. It ends with the PowerPoint equivalent of a business card, so maybe the objective is to pitch by force of accreted facts, but I wonder if that's really the best way to get your audience on-side. The overall effect is to shout 'I know so much about social media it hurts', without ever saying 'Here's how we use all this homework to solve your problems.'

It is worth a read, though, if you're a planner. The design work is excellent, and it's a useful summary of up-to-date facts.

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A post on Wired's news page yesterday covers the issue of funding and spending by Wikileaks, the website that publishes leaked documents and protects whistle-blowers. It was prompted by an anonymous message to the PGPBoard discussion group by a 'Wikileaks Insider' querying the use of money by Wikileaks, which has received 400,000 euros in donations via PayPal and bank transfers since December, but spent only 30,000 euros of this.

The Wired story is commendably even-handed, and clearly well researched, with (to me) fair evidence from the Wau Holland Foundation, the third party which handles the donations, that abuse of funds is not taking place. However, with the spectres of inefficiency and misuse laid to rest, it's fairly mute on the matter of why Wikileaks is receiving so much more than it spends.

In this sense it misses an important point which applies more generally to non-profit organisations, and which is important to me as a planner and an ex charity analyst. So here it is in bold.

Non-profits need reserve funds to cope with unexpected events.

That's not hard to grasp, and neither is the detail: anyone with a savings account should get it intuitively. Strategic planners often break down future events by probability and impact. For most organisations, from a community centre to BP, reserve funds need to scale in accordance with the potential impact. Fixing the community centre roof will cost less than dealing with a Gulf Coast oil spill, unless you're really being ripped off by your builders.

Probability doesn't affect the requirement for reserve funds so much, except in a yes/no way when combined with impact. If an event would have a huge impact but has a very low probability, you don't bother putting money aside to cope - hence the lack of a market for Alien Death Ray Insurance. Assuming you only set aside reserves for events that have a reasonable probability of impacting on your business, there are two other factors I'd suggest you need to consider: frequency and regularity.

People who live in glass houses and throw stones all day should get window insurance and have their glazier on speed-dial, because broken windows will be frequent and regular (one per throw). People who live in trailers in Tornado Alley should get trailer insurance because the frequency of trailer destruction is relatively high, even though irregular (tornado activity being hard to predict). People who live in stone-floored houses in Cape Town need electric fan heaters in the cupboard because every winter it gets cold, even though it's only once a year for a few weeks (regular but infrequent). People who live on the San Andreas fault with its irregular, infrequent catastrophic shifts are really just kidding themselves.

What about Wikileaks? It's almost the perfect model of a non-profit which needs to insure itself against highly probably, high-impact, highly irregular events of unknown but potentially high frequency. Wikileaks is effectively living on the San Andreas fault, but it's not kidding itself. Nobody in Wikileaks knows whether, on any given day, a government or corporation is going to launch a vastly expensive lawsuit against the organisation which could shut down its operations by court ruling or by forcing it to spend all its money on legal fees. But they know that it's likely, given the nature of their work.

On the evidence, the financial decision-makers at Wikileaks know how much they don't know about the future, and are planning accordingly. Without the benefit of more information, I'll be tentative, but it may turn out that Wikileaks are doing exactly the right thing with all that money.

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My post on New consumers, new rules: branding the World Cup appeared on the Futures Company blog on Thursday.