hyper and meta

There's a new term flying about newsmedia companies: "hyperlocal." The idea here is that in order for news organizations to maintain their value, they need to generate news that's intimately relevant -- to you, your street, your neighborhood, or your circle of friends and co-horts.

It's an interesting term. I rather like it. Particularly the "hyper" part.

But I have another bit of trendy jargon to offer: why not "metalocal?"

In the words of @IanSohn, "With technology, Is Chicago-London really any further apart than Kensington-Notting Hill?" The answer, Ian, is deceptively simple. It depends upon who you know and where they are.

Distance is mutable. Althrough Ian is in Chicago and I am in London, I feel closer to Ian because his tweets present a meandering narrative of his daily life, thoughts, and experiences. Meanwhile, his long form blog offers opportunities to delve deeper into his ideas and perceptions. It helps that Ian is a very active participant in emergent, real time media.

It matters not that he's in Chicago; I have more of a sense of his world than I do of the neighbor down the street. Metalocal.

And yet. The other night I was at a charity committee meeting. I'm a new member of this committee. Committees are fun. You meet people you wouldn't otherwise. In my case, I met a neighbor. And actual, live-a-few-doors-down-from-me neighbor. And I was delighted. We are similarly proud of the quality of our local Indian restaurant. We share a similar opinion of the greengrocers across from my flat (they need to upgrade their offering.) He's been here longer and was able to point out aspects of the neighborhood about which I didn't know. Bits of gossip, really. Hyperlocal.

I would suggest that proximity is a mind-and-body thing.

Metalocal is mind-oriented. The issues that matter to me and my cohorts, in real time. Is Andy's (Crouch End) wife in labor yet? Is Ian (Chicago) still on Dad duty? What's going down with Prop 8 in San Francisco?

Hyperlocal is more body-oriented. What's the weather going to be like after lunch? Why were they starting construction at 7 in the morning? What happened to the boy who my neighbors and I watched the paramedics cut out of his car after the auto accident the day before yesterday?

When I first relocated to London, I found it hard to maintain a feeling of closeness with my friends back in San Francisco, LA, and New York. I couldn't see the finer grain of their lives, their commutes, their dinners, their Sunday walks. But that was before Facebook, Flickr, et al. The cliche "out of sight, out of mind" comes to mind. It's not that they were totally out of my thoughts -- I was acutely aware of missing them -- it's that I didn't feel connected. The importance of physical proximity was clear to me then.

It's different now. Certainly, physical space matters, we live in physical bodies after all, at least for now and the near future.

But considering that the interface between ourselves and the world our bodies inhabit is sensorial, it seems obvious to predict that as communication technology itself becomes more multisensorial, in real time, the feeling of proximity with those who are far away will continue to increase. Those Flickr pics and YouTube videos and "let's make a random album cover on Facebook" virals and real-time thoughts zipping around the planet really are bringing us all closer together.

What does this mean for freaked-out news agencies? It means that more news will matter to more people than ever before. Meaningful news. Some big stories, some very granular bits of in-the-moment info. How this news gets generated and distibuted is another story altogether. But the need for both hyperlocal and metalocal news has never been greater.

out of body

As I recent purchaser of an iPhone, I've noticed something slightly disturbing about it, and me.

It takes me out of my body, out of the moment, and pulls me into a seductive and slippery otherworld.

The smooth shiny touchscreen is like Alice's looking glass. A simple stroke pulls me into a set of surreal experiences that have nothing to do with my material, physical presence.

It's hard to stay present, in my body, in the moment, when right there in the palm of my hand is a portal into a shiny world of friends and tweets and, perhaps most addictive of all, Bejeweled, which is the crack of all mobile games.

I will need to cultivate some self discipline. Perhaps shorter battery life is not a bad thing.

Guardian of Real Time

From today's Guardian, an article about the dangers of Facebook, Bebo, Twitter et al...

"Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues, such as the psychological impact on children.

She said she feared 'real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.' "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing-childrens-brains

where are you?

I'm trying to put together a simple little event. A salon, if you will. It used to be so easy. You chose a venue, and then you sent invitations.

Now it's way more complicated. Do I tweet you? SMS you? Get your attention on LinkedIn? Facebook? Your work email? Your personal email? Snailmail? Do I even know where you live anymore? Where are you?

Many of the current social platforms, although nominally "free," have a hitch: if someone you want to invite or contact isn't on the same platform, you can't use it to reach them. And everyone seems to be on a different platform. Which means you need to use all of them: Facebook, Gmail, SMS, Twitter, etcetera.

Meanwhile, if I use a broad platform event-planning technology, like Evite in the old days, well, I run the risk that I'm not using the trendy app, and you'll ignore me.

It's time for aggregation. Someone's gotta be funding this. So that all I do is choose YOU -- your name, something identifiable about you -- and my communication will reach you in the way you most want to be reached.

The current dis-integration is not only frustrating, it's wasteful. Of time, intention, resource, attention, and of privacy too. It creates an illusion of intimacy or safety. When really, it's just a hassle. All the data is still out there, still public.

Arghhh.

cheap inspiration

This much I know: it's hard to get inspired when I'm feeling down. And feeling down is contagious. There's a lot of down going around, and it's getting in my way.

What to do?

Taking a walk is always a good cure-all. A wander is even better. Nearly any wander will do, even around your own back garden/yard. It's best if its not a goal-oriented wander but rather, a looking/experiencing walk. Yesterday my partner Mark and I wandered from our home in W10 to Shepherd's Bush Market.

Shepherds Bush Market is moments away from the shiny new Westfield mall. These two marketplaces have some things in common. Each has their own tube stations -- each has two, in fact. The Westfield is full of brands like Habitat, Tiffany, and Apple, while Shepherds Bush Market is full of brands more familiar to people from Jamaica, India, Peru, or Nigeria. You can buy Nike trainers at both. Both have several options for lunch. I'm not even going to make the "you can get apples at both" pun. Sorry.

The Westfield is a wonder, in its own monstrous way. Depending upon your mood, it offers the seeker of inspiration a range of gratifying emotions: from a depression-be-damned haze of gleaming escapism to a full-on hit of post-consumerist cynicism.

However, the miracle of Shepherds Bush Market is that, although physically a neighbor to this monument to brand-fueled capitalism, its a lifetime away from the Westfield in form and content. A ten minute stroll from Next, Gucci, and Niketown, past the betting shops and coffee shops of Shepherds Bush Green, and you enter another continent. Several other continents, in fact.

Typo-ridden Obama teeshirts vie with African printed cloth for the attentions of your digital camera. You discover types of mung beans you didn't know existed. It's a pungent mash-up of souk, medina, and car boot sale. Whole halal lambs, gigantic sacks of cassava flour, enormous yams that could alone feed an entire family, alarm clocks, wheelie bags, multiple brands of Thai fish sauce, fluorescent garlands of fake flowers, Nike Air trainers encrusted with Swarovski crystals. I wouldn't call it a pretty place, but Shepherd's Bush Market is exhilarating, if you're open to it.

I get most inspired when I step out of my own world into THE world. When I'm forced to bump up against alternative points of view, uncomfortable truths. It's exhilarating to have the mind and body challenged by new stimuli. This is why some people climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. I, instead, order the tripe. Or meander through communities of which I am not a part.

Actually, to be honest, I let Mark lead the way, and thus improve the odds we end up discovering boundless inspiration. Left to my own devices I probably would have made a beeline to the Apple Store.

the twitter tipping point

I'm late to the Twitter party, but if the past timings of my adoption of a particular social media platform are any guide, I'm arriving at the Twitter tipping point.

Which means, everyone I went to high school with is about to tweet.

I actually signed up ages ago, but never got all that interested. It seemed like a feature, not a channel. Why tweet when you've got a status update to play with on Facebook?

I was wrong. It's a very different medium than any I've played with before. Formally, sure, it's familiar: that haiku-meets-pithiness of SMS, that click-and-go spontaneity of email, that addictively social time-suck of Facebook. But functionally, and outcome-wise, it's a different bird altogether. Partly because it just FEELS different.

It's been less than a week, and already I'm fascinated by how different people use Twitter so differently. There's a segmentation scheme worth writing up here. The archetypes are easy to spot. The every-minute-detail-of-my-life broadcaster. The haiku poet. The show-offy microblogger. The New York Times -- which simply serves up snack-size portions of itself. Brands broadcasting on Twitter seem sort of silly, but individuals can come off as even sillier. Boris Johnson, London's silliest mayor ever, is a brilliant Twitterer. I'm even starting to like him. (Beleaguered brands and celebrities take note.)

So I firmly believe that Twitter is a valid and rather important new medium. Sure, I've been yammering on about microblogs for over a year. But now, I'm even more convinced that it's an Important Internet Platform. I can imagine whole new forms of Twitter-ish fluency developing. Serialized narratives. Games. New kinds of news distribution. Shopping opportunities. You can already turn a tweet into a tshirt. The challenge is choosing which one to print.

The real time possibilities are alluring. Make it location-aware, enable more fluid filtering, allow intuitive on/off capabilities, and we'd have a medium thats both personally and socially empowering. And fun. And exactly the right size to fit in your hand, your pocket.

Without these modifications, Twitter will devolve into a cacaphonic spew of TMI. (Too Much Information.) But I'm optimistic.

Anyway, right now, I like it. It has a Wild West quality, like the early days of Second Life. And it has an addictive pull, like Facebook once did for me. I'm told the honeymoon period wears off. We'll see.

The difference

There’s a difference between strength and aggression, a wise man recently said to me.

Have you ever been in a situation that required you to consider the shades of difference between the two?

In real time, personality and behaviour are more effective than message and position. In other words, we are understood and known by what we do, how we act – not what we say or how we position ourselves. This is as true for organizations and brands as it is for individuals.

It’s often tempting to be aggressive. Particularly when our buttons are pushed. When we’re angry. When things aren’t going our way.

And look at our world. The news is full of shrill headlines, real time button-pushers – executive compensation, bailouts, job eliminations, climate change, religious tensions – things certainly don’t seem to be going the way I’d hoped.

An aggressive response would be so emotionally satisfying. Proclaiming the wrongness of it all, boldly redefining how things should be, lashing out, laying blame, starting a movement, even. Let’s do it all over beers, down at the pub! Then take it to the streets! It was certainly effective in Munich in 1923. Disastrously so.

I’m aware that my point is a bit dramatic. But then, so are the headlines, and the conversations I find myself in these days.

This is why the line between strength and aggression is interesting to consider.

What would it mean to instead behave with strength? What does the strong person, the strong company, the strong leader do? Look up the word for some inspiration.

Some definitions for the word “strength” that I find useful:

The power to resist attack; impregnability.
The power to resist strain or stress; durability.
The ability to maintain a moral or intellectual position firmly.
Capacity or potential for effective action.

When I survey the brandscape, the business ecosystem, and the high street, this isn’t quite what I’m seeing. Instead, I’m witnessing retrenchment. Brands are self-weakening. Or in hiding, waiting for an upturn.

It’s so disappointing.

In real time, there’s an opportunity for the strong brand, the strong company, the strong leader to stand out. Those that acknowledge the global mood but remain steadfast and unruffled. By not giving in. Staying the course. Reassuring constituents. Being proactive as well as responsive. Smiling instead of grimacing.

Brands that model the solution rather than contribute the demise will thrive in this environment. It’s going to be interesting to see who rises to the challenge.

Please slow down

I don't like the current economic mood. I prefer optimism, and it's in short supply these days. I'm seriously worried that a downward spiral of negativity, amplified by doom and gloom stories in the media, is about to wreak real havoc on our way of life -- and not necessarily to the benefit of the planet. Negativity becomes carelessness, which can in turn generate some very ugly and dangerous outcomes.

I also have this nagging hunch that people want a long-term downturn. Whispers of depression are getting louder, they almost sound like nostalgia for the 1930s. It's as if, collectively, the consensus is that humanity is ready to take a duvet day.

Individually, of course, everyone wants economic stability, growth, and for their dreams to come true. But the mob psychology, fueled by the onslaught of newsfeeds and constant negative innuendo, is something different. Any student of economics knows that all this stuff is ultimately psychological.

A friend of mine works very closely with the most inner machinations of global business and finance, and I always look to him as a litmus test for how things will be going for the rest of us in the near future. Two things he said to me yesterday caught my ear.

First, he referenced Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Her landmark work on the Stages of Grief. He believes that the captains of industry and finance have reached the "acceptance" stage. I asked him what they are grieving. What died? His answer: "Capitalism." A pause. "At least for awhile," he added.

The second thing: he reminded me that it's useless to look at the Dow (or FTSE or any of them) every day, that it tells us nothing. My father used to say this to me. My accountants say it. But in real time, of course, I look at that number hourly like it's some kind of oracle, a harbinger of the state of the world. Not because I'm obsessed, but because that number is simply there, on my screen, nearly all the time. My own mood can rise and fall in synch with it.

There's a Buddhist slogan that's used for meditative mind-training: "Of the two witnesses, hold the principle one." The metaphor suggests that if you are trying to solve a crime or understand a circumstance and you can only hold one witness, you're going to want to hang on to the person who is closest to the circumstance, who experienced it firsthand. Police Detective 101.

In our own lives, the principle witness is always ourselves. Not the Dow, the columnist, the pundit, the President, the web 2.0 mob, but you. You know your life best. I know my life best.

Of course, this assumes that we've cultivated some healthy self-awareness. Something I work hard to do, daily.

So, my principle witness believes that the current mood is horrendous and even dangerous because it is moving us backwards. I can't deny some worrying fundamentals: job losses, bank nationalizations, budget cuts, the rapid shrinkage of my parent's retirement funds. It's bad stuff, and it's real.

Mere optimism can't change those things. Or can it?

I wonder whether happiness might be a more useful feeling than optimism. It's easier to be happy in the moment, happy with what we have right now, than optimistic about a future that's utterly uncertain.

My principle witness isn't entirely optimistic, but he's happy. My own mood is far better than the collective mood. Even my parents, for whom the timing of this whole thing could be devastating, are happy in the moment, and that keeps them going, if a bit slower than before.

Happily slowing down is different than receding or being depressed. It can be good, and healthy, and an opportunity for innovation and growth. Like driving carefully and slowly home down a dark icy road, it's how we're going to get ourselves through this thing.

Real time mean girls

I was having lunch with my friend Shauna this week, who was visiting London from California, and we got talking about real time - my current obsession. Shauna is not only a technological sophisticate, she's a mom, specifically, the mom of my god-daughter.

Her daughter came home recently with a story about a girl who was being bullied at school. Bullying certainly and sadly isn't new, but the tools that tweens now deploy are changing the game. Mobile cameraphone plus MySpace plus Mean Girls plus awkward naked lockerroom photo... you do the math. Nasty. Not only for the victim, but for everyone. Which of course is why my god-daughter came home and talked about it. She was horrified.

Shauna went on to describe other bullying "use cases." For example, bully uses the anonymity of digital media to generate fake 3rd party admission of true love ("jose has a crush on u") thus eliciting a confession from the supposed crush-ee ("omg jose is so hot") which then gets published schoolwide, and the victim of the crush scam is subsequently bombarded with SMS ridicule, all of which ends up costing her not only her dignity, but clogs her mobile account. And, if her misunderstanding parents monitor her mobile and scan her texts, there's yet more shame to be had at home.

Ouch. Makes me glad to be forty.

I can't stop thinking about the ambiguous and broad implications of hyperconnected, location-aware, personal mobile technology. Kids in developed countries are already utterly fluent in using it. They've integrated it into the most basic adolescent rituals: the first crush, gossiping, friendship, discovering music, popularity contests, ostracizing, forming cliques, and as above, bullying.

And it seems to me that these base human instincts become somehow amplified through real-time technology. Bullying is more intense, easier to inflict, more humiliating. Do teachers have any idea this is happening? Less tech-savvy parents? Do they have the skills, tools, and real-time mindset to understand, intervene, mitigate, or help?

Some people suggest that technology convergence is a good thing for us all. I am an optimist by nature, but I can't ignore the dark side of the phenomenon, especially given that the evolution of technology outpaces the evolution of our instincts.

I also think it's enlightening to pay attention to how the kids are using it. It's a glimpse of the future. Not only because it's ubiquitous in their lives, but because their experience of convergence - both positive and negative - is shaping them as people.

Melt

London was a magical place yesterday. All the winter wonderland cliches were true -- and especially apt in this sprawling conglomeration of Victorian ornament, wrought iron details, parks and lawns, palaces and shopfronts. The thick frosting of snow did that thing that snow does: makes you see it all anew. Reframes it all. Especially the soundtrack. Muffled, softened. It was so enchanting to walk around and take it all in, to re-experience my adopted hometown.

Today, I have that kid-like sadness as it all begins to melt under a bright February sun. Weather reports predict freezing rain, everyone's favorite gift from the sky. But thanks to Flickr, a simple search enables me to explore yesterday's dreamscape again. It's nice to take a break from the onslaught of bad economics news and negative media and wander through something real, and totally free: a great city sparkling in white tie and diamonds.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/1016510@N21/