Deep Media

Are Web metrics corrupting online media?

We're sup­posed to be living in an "attention econ­omy," right? But standard Web metrics don't really measure attention. Uniques, page views, monthly aver­age users—none of these take into account how long a visitor spends, whether the visitor is satisfied, or even if the visitor is human and not a bot. For all our talk of Big Data, au­di­ence measure­­ment remains a remarkably crude sci­ence. And yet, because ad­ver­­tisers and in­vestors rely on these metrics, they have a distorting effect on social media and pro­fessional media alike. This has been one source of Twitter's problems, but it's even worse with online journalism. If the sites with the most uniques win, it's easy to game the system by baiting users with value-free content. So cheese­ball aggregators like Viral­Nova—which just sold for something approaching $100 million—get rewarded, while more serious stuff is penalized. 

When people fall for crazy clickbait come-ons, you won't believe what happens next. 

I've been fasci­nated by this phenom­enon at least since 2009, when my colleague Daniel Roth pub­lished an excellent story in Wired called "The Answer Factory." It was about Demand Media, a self-aggrandizing start­up whose stated mission was to pub­lish "what the world wants to know and share"—which turned out to be a cynical euphem­ism for "what we can stuff with ads and trick peo­ple into click­ing on."

 

 

From VR to HBO, the top 7 meta-stories of 2014

For anyone who follows not just stories but meta-stories—that is, stories about storytelling and how it's evolving—2014 was a pretty big year. Along with twelve months of shootings, bombings, protests, invasions, and epidemics, we've witnessed profound changes in the way journalism and entertainment alike are being presented to us. Some of these developments have been building for years; others came out of the blue. Before we go rocketing into our next revolution around the sun, let's pause for a brief recap. 

1. Virtual reality gets almost real

Atop the 700-foot wall of ice in HBO's "Ascend the Wall"

Social Media Week 2014: Human in a digital world

The Official Guide to Social Media Week New York 2014

How can we regain control, establish balance, and preserve what makes us human? This is what we will be exploring during this year's Social Media Week. 

So ends a series of recent posts by Social Media Week founder Toby Daniels on The Next Web. Back in November, Toby asked, "How much power do you have over your tech obses­sion?" (Spoiler alert: Not much, as evidenced by that couple at the next table—we've all seen them—who spend the entire evening gazing into their smartphones.) A couple of weeks ago he asked, "what would happen if we lived with more intention—tried to be more human in this age of digital technology?" And in one of the videos embedded above he explains that this winter's Social Media Week—which begins on Monday in New York and seven other cities around the globe—was designed to examine "the idea that there are two sides to technology: the positive impact of how technology is shaping our lives, but also a negative aspect as well. What we wanted to do really during Social Media Week was to explore both sides of this argument." 

Data dump: Unlike Facebook—or tax it?

Douglas Rushkoff's announcement earlier this week that he was quitting Facebook happened to coincide with a major New York Times story about a new French proposal to levy a tax on online data collection. The connection? Both raise an issue that's key to the future of the Internet: Who owns the data we users leave online? Us, or the companies that harvest it in return for all those free services they provide? 

So far, the answer is obvious. But both Rush­koff and Nicolas Colin, a former entre­pre­neur who's co-author of the French tax pro­posal, are arguing in their separate ways that that's not how it ought to be. 

Rushkoff is the rare thinker who is re­freshingly clear-headed at the same time that he's assertive almost to the point of com­bativeness. His latest book, Present Shock, due out March 21 from Current, argues that we've moved beyond futurism to something he calls "presentism": Caught in the rushing river of realtime, we struggle to stay afloat. In a post earlier this week, he announced that in his own attempt to do so, he was quitting Facebook 

. . . because my participation on the site is simply too inconsistent with the values I espouse in my work. In my upcoming book . . . I argue—as—I always have—for engaging with technology as conscious human beings, and dispensing with tech­nologies that take that agency away.

 

Henry Jenkins on 'Spreadable Media' (part 2): How Web 2.0 went wrong, and why 'viral' sucks

Last week, in part one of my interview with Henry Jenkins, we talked about how he and his coauthors came to write Spreadable Media and what it means that the "participatory culture" of the Web focuses so much of its attention on broadcast properties like Lost or, more recently, The Walking Dead. Today, in part two, Henry takes on some of the basic metaphors we use to describe the things we do online. 

In the book, you argue that a number of the terms we've used for years to talk about Internet-related activities are in fact misleading and outright damaging. You object in particular to the infection metaphor of phrases like "going viral." Does this really damage the idea of participatory culture? 

A key assumption in this book is that words matter, that the metaphors we use shape the assumptions we make and thus the actions we take, all the more so in the context of an emerging and still ill-defined phenomenon. We argue that the term "viral media" consistently strips agency from the participants within networks of circulation. Infection metaphors lead many to think of those who spread videos as the "unknowing hosts" who are acting "irrationally," and we think of the content as somehow "self-replicating."

Even stories have stories (and why it matters)

Sometimes the story behind the story can be as illuminating as the story itself. 

A couple of years ago, Jason Fried of 37signals gave a TEDx talk about work, and why it doesn't get done. 37signals, the Chicago-based company behind such productivity tools as Ruby on Rails and Basecamp, likes to note that its products "do less than the competition—intentionally." And Jason, a cofounder of 37signals and coauthor of a short book called Rework, has developed a parallel career of sorts challenging the dreary tropes of what passes for conventional wisdom in management. So in both of his careers, Jason has made a point of pursuing the counterintuitive. And he's struck a nerve. His TEDx talk—which contains such gems as "[Facebook and Twitter] aren’t the real problems in the office. The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings"—has racked up nearly 1.6 million views. 

Brand empathy: How mirror neurons can reduce the gap between brand and self

Contagious Magazine, the London-based quarterly, is the most seductively gorgeous marketing publication around, and remarkably insightful in the bargain. So when production editor Emily Hare and North American editor Nick Parish said they wanted to run an essay based on The Art of Immersion's discussion of the role of empathy in advertising, I was more than happy to pull something together. This is the piece that resulted, from the current issue of Contagious: 

In the early 1990s, long before social networking existed on the web – almost before the web itself existed, in fact – a monkey in Italy made a wholly unexpected contribution to our future under-standing of the phenomenon of empathy. The monkey, which was part of an experiment in a neuroscience lab at the University of Parma, was watching a research assistant eat an ice cream cone. Because the scientists were trying to map the part of monkey brains involved in rehearsing things, the animal had needles in its head – needles so thin they had been implanted in individual neurons. As the lab assistant lifted the cone to his lips, one of the researchers noticed a particular neuron lighting up in the monkey’s brain – the same neuron that would have lit up if the monkey itself had made such a motion. The scientists tried putting a piece of food on a table, taking it off the table, taking it from another researcher’s hand, each time with the identical result: the same neurons that fired when the monkey did something also fired when the monkey watched a person doing it.

 

Social Media Week: A tale of two cities

Call it a delayed reaction. I think the full import of Social Media Week began to hit me a couple of hours after my first event—the opening press conference at Social Media Week Hong Kong, to which I'd been invited as a guest speaker. In my talk I stole a line from my book, something about how we're all embedded from birth in a network of fellow humans. My point was that in the most fundamental sense there's nothing terribly new about all this—that people existed in social networks long before we had "social networks."

Report from Jeff Pulver's Twitter conference: Humbled by our own creation

Sometimes you seize the moment, and sometimes the moment seizes you. That's what's happening with Twitter right now. I spent most of the morning at Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters Conference in New York, and the message coming through was a kind of unabashed wonder at what Twitter is engendering. 

The timing, of course, is remarkable. Twitter had already emerged as a critical communications tool in emergencies large and small, from the earthquake in Sichuan to the ditching of an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River, but never in an event with the global stakes of the current political upheaval in Iran. Maybe that's why the mood at the two-day conference, which has attracted a couple of hundred people to a small theater in midtown Manhattan, is so far from the snarky tech chauvinism that's common at such events. As Pulver put it, "I don't take any of this lightly. I've learned to appreciate moments in time."