‘Hi John, what did you do this weekend?’

‘Not much – Friday night I stayed in, but on Saturday a friend was having a youtube party, so I had quite a late one.’

Not true.  No-one I know had a youtube party on Saturday, and the notion of a youtube party is not something you are expected to know about, but are actually not aware of because you can’t keep up with the edgy new media vanguard.  However, it’s a sentence which I think is closer to being a standard piece of conversation than you might think, and here is why.

A funny thing happened to me the other night.  I was having a drink at a friend’s flat when someone mentioned a clip on youtube that they thought was funny .  Without a moment’s hesitation a laptop was produced and we all sat down to watch it, oh how we laughed.  Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, you might say.  However, what (quite naturally) happened next was that someone else stifled their chuckles enough to suggest another video, which we all watched and laughed heartily (again).  This went on for a good half hour, until we all got a little embarrassed and decided to stop being so damned geeky. 

Half an hour.  Isn’t that quite a lot?

I don’t expect this kind of an encounter is a rare occurrence.  It’s certainly happened to me a good couple of times and I imagine 80% of the student population do it all the time.  But if you think about it, prolonged, communal youtubery is quite an interesting phenomenon, for 2 reasons:  1, it brings an element of  face to face social interaction to the medium which I’m not sure the people who hailed the revolution of web 2.0 ever really meant.  2, this face to face interaction brings with it a whole set of intriguing social rules and dynamics.

Let me elaborate point 1.  Web 2.0 was (is?)  all about (among other things) people easily creating and sharing content with one another, with the web providing a means by which to do so.  People thought it was great that a guy from Uruguay could make a video about knitting which could be viewed, responded to and commented on by my grandma in Poland, or a janitor in Delaware, or the Queen.  It introduced openness of communication.  But what it also did was introduce content that could be discussed and shared in a personal context, not just by people firing off links at each other down the information superhighway, but shown to one another after dinner, whilst you’re getting ready for a night out, pointed at whilst crowding around a monitor in the office.  It provided content people could physically take someone by the hand and show to them, which is an altogether different thing.

Which leads to point 2.  For years marketing gurus have been mindful of the fact that you are much more likely to buy something if it’s recommended by a friend.  In focus groups we’ve run here at Online, we’ve heard that it’s important to someone sharing a link to something on the internet that they preserve some kind of  reputation.  If you post lots of trash on your friends’ walls you exhibit a certain lack of credibility that is not insignificant.  This kind of thing manifests itself wonderfully if you bring it into a face to face group dynamic.  Picture the scene: my friends and I have worked ourselves into a cheerful youtube frenzy via a string of  Japanese TV shows, childhood nostalgia,  dramatic rodents, and Hungarian rappers.  Then someone enthusiastically types in a link to this.  The group tries to get into it, but it’s a slow starter, and they fall into an awkward silence.  Energy drops.  Suggestor tries to pick it back up with this one, but it’s worse.  Mumbles excuses.  Gets coat.

Similarly you musn’t over share.  You’ve got to let everyone in the audience have their say, otherwise they feel left out.  You can get the youtube samaritans, who in the face of their friend’s poorly chosen pat them on the shoulder and reassure them that it was funny, really.  Picking a youtube video to share with people in this context requires a judgement of mood and possession / lack of sense of humour.  You need to deal with those maladroit ‘Hang on, we need to wait for it to load’ moments. You need to be sensitive to what certain people might find impressive, and what leaves them utterly nonplussed.  You need to be consider whether they’ve just had their lunch.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s possible to over-analyse this.  But in thinking about how these technologies are changing communication we mustn’t neglect the possibility that it opens up new ways to interact with the person next to you, not just the Delaware janitor thousands of miles away.  Of course all of these communal internet encounters (’social surf sessions‘, if you will) occur as afterthoughts to what you or I might call ‘normal’ social situations – people just fall into them.  But 5 years ago no-one could possibly have imagined the way in which youtube wanders into our everyday exchanges now.  5 years hence?  Get your party invitations ready.

technology, web_2.0, youtube

So the media outcry about Street View continues. Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) today defended the roll-out of Google Street View to UK cities by saying that “We agree with the concerns over privacy… The way we address it is by allowing people to opt out, literally to take anything we capture that is inappropriate out… and we do it as quickly as we possibly can.”

Schmidt missed the point with great precision: the reason that many people feel uneasy about Street View is that it is impossible to find out if you are somewhere in there. You can’t opt out if you don’t know whether or where you are even included. Faced with this vast volume of information, it is simply impossible to manage your own digital identity. You don’t know what of you is out there, or how you appear (regardless of how many guilty secrets could have been snapped by Google’s roving cameras).

This is particularly significant if we consider that schools and universities spend considerable time and effort emphasising the importance of digital identities, teaching Twitter literacy, or interview technique (dangers of scandalous photos or inappropriate comments appearing in internet search). Many of us spend a good proportion of free time managing our online identities, whether through Twitter, Facebook, blogging, or massively multiplayer gaming. That people are concerned about the unknowable possibility of their presence on Street View is hardly surprising, regardless of whether they have something to hide.

Still, is it not a bit bizarre that citizens of one of the most CCTV-observed countries on the planet are concerned about a few static frames online? We could regard Street View as an exercise in open access to information, surely a step in the right direction, toward databases that presume freedom of information rather than hide from it.

Indeed, in the wake of exposure of inappropriate surveillance by our own government, it is slightly amusing that Street View now has a black hole where the Houses of Parliament used to be. However worried we might get about practices of surveillance, it is perhaps comforting that the centre of our state feels exactly the same as we do.

censorship, google, street_view, surveillance, technology, web_2.0

As a facebook devotee, (and moreover one that tries to ignore the adverts) I’m always keen to hear of ideas for making the site financially viable. Therefore, the article, Networking site cashes in on friends, published by the Daily Telegraph (admittedly contested elsewhere) caught my eye as offering an interesting alternative to the traditional marketing/premium services conundrum.

Apparently, Zuckerberg and his team are planning to capitalize on facebook’s massive user-base through polls, and lots of them. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Zuckerberg demonstrated the power of facebook as a market research tool by asking 10,000 American users whether they believed that Obama’s fiscal stimulus package would revive the economy, and users in Israel and Palestine about contemporary peace issues. Impressively, he was able to feed the results back to the audience in minutes.

Surely facebook can’t compete with a trusty focus group for in-depth consumer insight, but with a user-base of 150 million and the ability to target users based on the information revealed in their profiles, facebook’s size could offer consumer brands the opportunity to almost instantaneously poll a very large sample of people.

Would I answer a poll that appeared on my minifeed? I’ll be interested to see.

crowdsourcing, facebook, market_research, web_2.0

On the internet, keeping up with the times is paramount. The web is practically synonymous with the cutting edge and it wouldn’t do to be caught out lagging. But the problem for those trying to navigate its evolution is that novelty and potential brush shoulders with the shallowness of fashion. When Facebook first grew in popularity in the UK it seemed little more than a sleeve on which superficial teenagers could wear their popularity. But now the site reveals a surprisingly subversive depth, a place for championing causes little and large and organising events both political and playful.

Charities soon pricked their ears up to this, attempting to galvanise supporters in this online hiding place of “youth”. It is not hard to find groups for every major charity, and a few (notably Save the Children and the NSPCC) have even invested in developing their own web applications for activism and fundraising. The NSPCC’s application allows users to sign up to specific fundraising events and to group together to raise the money required. The active connection that these embody is much more inspiring than simply signing up as one member among hundreds in a generic facebook group.

Following its meteoric rise, Facebook overtook Myspace in the Alexa rankings this summer. This had much to do with the Myspace’s failure to sufficiently embrace the use of internal applications on its pages, to synthesise itself adequately with the rest of Web 2.0 technology.

But the embrace of the social network is not without reservations for the charitable sector. At Online, we already commented on Number 10’s fear of the network. Networks are simply antithetical to the privileged centre that dominates in any hierarchical organisation. This is not simply jealous directors clinging on tooth and nail to the control of their brand. What is at stake for the NGO sector is the responsibility a charity feels toward those who give their money and time. If an unofficial group organised by supporters of a charity raises funds by appealing to causes to which the official charity does not actually give, donors have every right to feel duped.

The internet is not simply one channel that charities must be cautious of. It can reach into the heart of how they do business. Kiva is a site where donors can lend capital to people in poor countries who would otherwise find it hard to get a reasonable loan. Many donors feel uneasy about giving to large charities because they use some fraction of donated money to support full time staff. While Kiva does sustain its own bureaucratic framework, it challenges the traditional charity model by producing the feeling of an unmediated social relationship with the recipient.

While social networks usurp central control, and Kiva usurps bureaucratic middle-men, ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) may prove far more successful for activist awareness-raising than traditional pamphleteering methods. Indeed, next to the rise of ARGs, social networking sites seem a little dated in their contemporary online potential.

While some charities are still scrambling to optimise their facebook presence, after months of waiting, Cancer Research UK has finally launched its very own ARG, Operation: Sleeper Cell. Several big names in the ARG business are involved but the main authorship was the outcome of a competition open to all. This follows the success of World Without Oil in proving the ARG a powerful medium for activism. The new Superstruct game looks to fill a similar function in coming months, part of an emerging genre of “ethical” ARGs.

The authors of Akoha, another new project, dub their brainchild “the world’s first social reality game”, seemingly a combination of chain letter logic, social networking and competitive altruism. Whether or not this is a cure to the modern malaise of isolated individualism, these creative collective web-based projects are revealing themselves as powerful means for opening people’s minds (not just their wallets).

It is a tenet of ARGs that it is not necessary to restrict oneself to computer-based media for playing. Phones, live events, television and music are often crucial. Growing portability of web technology, prompted by the iPhone and the scramble of its exasperated competitors, is producing a massively expanded field of possibilities for activism. Being confined to the desk is no longer necessary for using social networks, and the ARG medium is pioneering the furthering of this extension, exploring the consequences of if one had to leave the desk to play.

In ethical ARGs we see an appropriation of the social network for the use of a controlling centre. The puppetmasters who control an ARG are in a position of sophisticated dialogue with the most cutting edge of web technologies, and manipulate these new media toward engaging ends. There is always some degree of interactivity in an ARG, but the story is always held together by the organisers. Akoha is made up of people free to choose their missions, but ultimately all the missions are written by the company.

Here lies massive potential for charities looking to distribute a message, promote their brand, but all the while remaining in control of their own messages. Competing with the big players in social networking is hardly an option, but with the delineation of these new puppetry technologies, piggy-backing certainly is.

Charities, marketing, web_2.0

In an interesting development last week, video sharing site Veoh left court relieved having successfully fought off copyright-related allegations. The victory could be good news for Youtube who are in the midst of a similar copyright battle themselves.

In response to Veoh’s victory, Youtube commented that they too ‘go above and beyond the law to protect content owners whilst empowering people to communicate and share their experiences online’. Whilst this immediately sounds like philosophical spin, I think it is important to look a little deeper at the ‘power’ and impact of Youtube.

Browsing the blogs I stumbled across Anthropologist bigwig Dr Michael Wesch who has been singing Youtube’s praises from the rooftops, or the digital soapbox, studying in depth the value of the virtual community. Most can appreciate Youtube on an everyday basis but what I found interesting about this guy was his determination to investigate the ethics and implications of the website. Who’d have thought there was more to it than Star Wars kid?!

Wesch’s research stems from his ‘participant observation’ methodology by which he submerges himself in social, cultural or occupational practises so as to gain a fully fledged understanding of them. It is this kind of strategy that journalist Louis Theroux is famed for, most recently entangling himself in the cosmetic surgery industry.

Louis Theroux goes ‘Under the Knife’

I enjoyed watching Wesch as he quirkily attempted to become a ‘youtuber’ in the same way that Louis Theroux gives you an access all areas pass on his ‘weird weekends’. I didn’t even have to leave my desk (not that I would have had to, ironically!).

Wesch serves up some great food for thought about the influence of Web 2.0, it made me think about the impact it has had on so many lives worldwide. Essentially:

Change in media and technology = change in human relations = change to lifestyle

My favourite illustration of Wesch’s was his likening of Youtube to the fall of the corner grocery store at the hands of the supermarket juggernauts. This honest observation illuminates man’s need for community, relationships and authenticity whilst we strive in the modern world for individualism, independence and commercialisation – a sad and complex tension. I think Wesch is strangely right when he says that Youtube bridges this gap because it is a community of individuals.

This community means that the vlog can potentially be viewed by millions of people. The strange thing is that in reality a vlogger is actually alone addressing a single camera, exposing their thoughts and feelings to an unknown mass of other users. There is certainly something disconcertingly Orwellian about this invisible audience. Despite this, the vlog has liberated people worldwide; ‘Hi Youtube’, a common opening to entries, has become our modern day ‘dear diary’.

Wesch’s discussion of hyper self-awareness praises the ‘diary-room’ setup for providing self-examination as well as the freedom (because of physical distance) to openly engage in dialogues with other users. Debate ranges from grappling with the finer details of Britney Spears’ breakdown to political rants! From the weird and the wonderful to the sober and the serious, 9232 hours of video is broadcasted on Youtube every day. In the last six months, Youtube has produced more than the 1.5 million hours of programming cobbled together over 60 years by the three major US television networks. What is incredible is that 88% of it all is new and original material. The world of vlogging has had an enormous impact upon this.

‘Leave Britney Alone!’ cries vlogger Chris Crocker

Evidently pressure mounts on Youtube and friends to tighten their leash on the user-upload/copyright chimera. The threat posed to this innovative environment by a $3 Billion lawsuit could be catastrophic, but with Veoh off the hook users are now optimistic about the website’s future.

Do, if you have time, check out Dr Wesch’s video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU

Culture, marketing, web_2.0