| | | | | | |

Social conversations and the social media

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

If you read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” you see how important it is to take notice of other people, to be positive and to be interested in what they are doing. That can be a challenge for everyone. We all have different priorities so putting other people first is a challenge.

The World Wide Web is a place where we can listen and talk at the same time. We listen to a conversation and then we comment. We can start our own conversation and wait for others to see it and respond. As a result we are both engaging with others and letting others engage with us. There is a bilateral trade which leaves both parties feeling good.

Social media, today a misnomer, was a conversation place. Everyone talked with everyone and everyone became familiar with everyone else. The Global Village that Marshall McLuhan wrote about looked like it would become a reality.

At the time when this reality looked the most feasible was the time before mobile phones and proper data plans. At this time we used computers from a fixed location, either at home, an office, university or other places. With Wifi we had some freedom but nowhere the freedom that smart phones and data plans have provided us with.

That’s why people’s feeling that mobile phones are disconnecting people is such a ridiculous notion. In my vision of the world, in the adoption cycle that I observe the mobile phone is the great connector. We meet people online, we appreciate them, we meet them in person. Seesmic and the early days of twitter were very good tools for this lifestyle.

As data plans included more and more data so it would follow that social media websites would be about individual to individual conversation. It would logically follow that people would feel more at ease conversing online as their friends adopt the technology and have chats. Facebook, twitter and Google Plus should be social web forums where people are interested in the people they follow.

What I see, as data plans and smartphone adoption rises is the opposite. People share links and promote rather than converse. Social media should be rebranded as Ego Media, brand media or advertising media. The platforms that should have made us conversational have been overtaken by advertising.

It’s a good time to continue blogging. It’s a monologue until you contribute a comment. The World Wide Web is a de-centralised conversation tool and we move from platform to platform looking for the places where the personal connections are strongest. As the social media days fade in to history now is the time for each of us to blog, to write about what we feel passionate about.

Similar Posts

| | | | | |

Twitter as a way of life

Byrichard

Twitter is not a social network, rather it’s a way of life. The more you use Twitter the further it gets into your way of life. It allows you to follow current affairs, geek out about social media and keep in touch with friends that uses the social network. What’s more it’s a network that does not require any specific device.

At first it’s a confusing place. Look at the public timeline and it’s a torrent of junk and sifting through it will take hours a day. As you spend more time on twitter though you find people of interest to follow. In some cases it’s friends from the physical world, in other cases friends from other websites on the web and then more.

In reality what makes twitter interesting, and part of what makes people use it is how efficient it is at getting a message across. You’ve got 140 characters to express yourself. In Paris I was told I speak in 140 characters or less. That’s not a bad thing. In fact it’s good. It’s about the continual flow of information.

Imagine you’re swimming down a river but everytime you move to stay afloat you have to close your eyes. That’s what article and blog reading is. As you focus on one task so your ability to focus on anything else dissapears. That’s fine in the old media where pages are static and where airwaves are limited.

In the modern world though it is necessary to absorb many sources of information at once. How many of you have your ipod, laptop and mobile phone with you at the time you’re reading this post? I’m sure most. How many of you have more podcasts than you can view or listen to? How many of you have more programs recorded on PVR than you can watch?

That’s why twitter is a lifestyle. It’s about constantly looking for information and building an understanding of current affairs through constantly taking in little bits of information. Stop talking about the social media on twitter, rather start talking about the good old fashioned time efficient soundbyte. Want to be heard. Don’t take people’s time. Encourage interest instead.

Many people are complaining about the decentralised conversation, the notion that blogs are no longer the center of attention, that twitter, friendfeed, facebook and others are killing the conversation. In fact quite the opposite is true. If you’re in New York you’ve got one set of people, if you’re in London you’ve got another. if you’re in Geneva you don’t have much… To have a decentralised conversation means that many ideas can be explored at once and as pillars of the online community meet at various events so the conversations can once more converge.

Don’t worry about comments on a blog, think about the conversations and the people you’re having them with. That’s where the fun is to be had.

|

Twhirl as your Twitter interface

Byrichard

For those of you familiar with twitter there are a number of ways of keeping up with information and my current favourite is Twhirl. What I love about using Twhirl is how well it works.

At first it feels clunky. You’ve got to download adobe air, then you’ve got to download twhirl and once this is done you’ve got to get used to the user interface. I went from twitterific to here and the transition was relatively painless. I missed one or two of the keyboard shortcuts.

Since then I’ve grown to enjoy using it for three key reasons. The first of these is that you don’t need to restart it as there are no caching issues. For someone who tweets as much as I do and follows as many a lot of time would be sent reseting twitterific. Not with Twhirl. It’s got over 5500 tweets right now and no sign of slowing down.

The second feature i love is how you can choose whether to @, DM, Favourite or re-tweet. Anyone using twitter is familiar with the first three. The re-tweet feature is fun. It allows you to retweet verbatim quite easily. I don’t see it used often luckily but it’s a nice gimmik.

The third feature that I enjoy are the shortcut keys specific to this program. R for replies, F for friends, D for direct messages and then there are two or three other such short cuts that could be of interest.

As an aside you’ve got the filter option although having not used it I can’t comment. It’s a nice package and anyone using Aero should give it a try.

| |

The Cult of the Amateur – thoughts on the book

Byrichard

When I heard with what hate one podcaster talked about the Cult Of The Amateur I told myself that I should read this book because it addresses a question that is at least two hundred years old, mainly the difference between high culture and low culture. High culture is seen as everything that has taken research and thought to create whilst popular culture is anything else. High culture might be a painting displayed in a museum whilst popular culture is something that most people could succeed in doing themselves.

The book begins with the idea that an infinite amount of monkeys can produce the work of Shakespeare given enough time. The fact they may write Shakespeare is not the problem. Andrew Keen, the author is more worried by all the uninteresting, inaccurate content that is produced and how easily it is spread. He is worried that as websites like myspace and youtube become more popular so the level of the product is degraded. He sees this as having a negative effect on culture.

He works from the premise that, back around 1999, when he was part of the first internet boom he had the idea that the World Wide Web would help distribute great works of art and culture, from Tchaikovsky to Stendhal and others. He was disappointed that at a Friend of O’reilly’s meeting people were concentrating on user-generated content rather than high culture.

That is one part of the story. Another of his concerns is that people are writing about topics they know little or nothing about and as a result are spreading disinformation. He looks at a few examples in politics and current affairs to show how there are some failings within the new media landscape. This made me think of how important the university would become. If everyone is a writer/editor and publisher so it would make sense that they train to become experts in their chosen field. Anyone can write and share their knowledge but that is no reason for the work to be sloppy.

Look at the Roman section of my website. I wrote it ten years ago when I wanted to write down everything I knew about the Romans and within a short time it had been formatted for the web. Over the years people found the site and found that the information was useful therefore they referenced it. As a result of this, I became a resource for school children worldwide. I had no credentials. I was an IGCSE and then IB student as I worked on various parts.

Finally, ten years later I’ve graduated, and through learning the academic process the value of the content I produce has improved. I have gained slightly in authority. When I listen to people speak about the media and how it works I have familiarity with two hundred years of technological progress therefore I am familiar with some of the “old media” and how they influenced popular and media culture. As a result of my studies, I found myself disagreeing with one podcaster and how he expressed anger against Andrew Keen and “The cult of The Amateur”. Such views should not be expressed.

One aspect that is of particular interest to all those that I have studied with and myself is that of the amateur as a producer of content. When you have six thousand people who are writing about specific themes for free where is the demand for the professional author or content producer. He takes the example of advertising and how because amateurs want their content to be seen, offer this to advertising firms. As a result advertising firms save a lot of money. Personally I believe that this is a trend that is popular because of how cheap the means of production have become but that within a number of years the passion for users generating their own content may disappear.

As more and more hobbyists and amateurs produce media content so the role of the professional becomes more uncertain. Why spend years studying at university to be a media producer or journalist if a construction worker is making films in his free time for no money and distributing it to a global audience? It’s an interesting time to work in the media because of how affordable technology has become. I have everything it takes to create and distribute video comfort from the place where I am living in London. As long as I get a good documentary idea I can carry out every stage of the production process without going through the production companies. As a result of this, I have complete editorial control.

Andrew Keen is getting us to pay attention to questions that it is essential we answer. Who is our audience, how are they getting our content, how reliable is it and how can we sustain ourselves to continue doing what we enjoy?

Social Media Silos

Social Media Silos

Byrichard

Years ago we heard that Facebook was a silo. What was meant by this term is that FaceBook would pull content into its social network and behave like a portal, without allowing people to leave. It encouraged people to see the World Wide Web as Facebook and nothing else. For a while it worked.


Zynga and The Death of Conversation


When FB was young, and vibrant it was a network of friends having a chat, until Zynga came along. When Zynga came along it went from being a conversational website to a gaming site. It became a waste of time in the eyes of many. It went from being a way of connecting with uni friends and colleagues to being a source of time wasting.


As if that wasn’t enough FB was used to manufacture consent for the Far Right groups. It helped Brexit, it helped Drumpf. It even helped genocide and experimented with making people depressed. It never apologised.


It bought Whatsapp and Instagram so I stopped using both apps.


Twitter Requires a Login


Quite a few of the Right Wing Websites require a login. Some of them are even geoblocked to restrict who can see, and participate in conversations. Although Twitter was text based it was a web portal for many, for a decade and a half. It had become a niche website where people went for a chat, shared news and current affairs, and kept up to date with people and topics that interested them. Musk destroyed that convivial atmosphere, which had already atrophied beforehand, but he made it worse.


Required Login


Another Perspective


The SubRedditor Victory


Last night and this morning I read that Reddit has seen its valuation decline as a result of the protests by subredditors. I see this as a victory. I don’t care about third party apps, or other reasons for the protest. I supported the protest because I’m tired of social media giants and venture capitalists purchasing web communities, and treating them as cash cows, rather than communities.


Twitter, Facebook and Reddit are, or at least were, communities. Communities should not be up for sale. Communities should be alive, healthy and vibrant. They should be about conversations and connecting people.


This morning, and last night I saw that the New York Times has yet another article about how to help teenagers ween themselves off of their social media addiction. For decades I have writtena about social media as a lifestyle, as a modern way of socialising. For decades Venture Capitalist Social Media has told us “Social media is bad”, “social media is addictive”. If it’s either of these things it is because of the social media companies that choose to ignore ethics, morality and corporate social responsability, rather than because the medium is bad. Social media is a blank canvas. We make it healthy, or unhealthy, by how we interact with it. VCSM is toxic. There is no doubt about that, but that’s why it’s good for FB, Twitter and Reddit to silo themselves. Keep the toxicity within.


Valuation Decline


The Early Web and Now


In the early days of the World Wide Web we could pay for a server, and then we could install PHPpb and other web forum software on our sites and we could self host, or contribute to the communities that meant something to us. The same is true in 2023. The tools are better. We have the Twitter/Facebook clone with Mastodon, Calckey and the Fediverse. We have Kbin and Lemmy for the threadiverse, so we can join or start our own instances. Finally we have Peertube and Pixelfed as YouTube and Instagram replacements. The future is open source and crowdfunded. Remember that this is the natural status quo. The Social Media giant age was an aberation on the World Wide Web. It’s nice to see that it has ended.


Attract, Don’t Repulse


There is a paradox in the social media giants pushing users and developers away just at the moment when seducing users, and developers is most important. Remember that Jaiku was like Twitter and Identi.ca was like Twitter. Both failed because Twitter had more gravity, so it attracted people to it, and they never left, until a few weeks ago. Reddit, Instagram and Twitter are easy to clone with the tools that we have available today. Today social media companies should be doing everything they can to keep people from jumping ship. The social media giants are showing apathy towards their users, and their users have somewhere to flee too.


And Finally


Now that the Social Media Giants are making mistakes and driving people away I am excited. I am excited by the prospect of being able to join smaller, more niche communities, and bouncing around from instance to instance, rather than being stuck on one of the giant monoliths. Now is a time when we can build and experiment again, on a human scale, a SuperSoaker scale, rather than trying to fill a syringe with a firehose.

On Being Told Not to Fear AI

On Being Told Not to Fear AI

Byrichard

They love to say “Don’t fear AI”. They all say “AI is meant to help people with their work”, “AI is meant to be a personal assistant” and more. It’s not AI we fear. It is stakeholders, governing boards and accountants. They are the people we fear. Throw in Inhuman resources for good measure. We “fear” AI because they, all the groups mentioned above, want to use AI as an excuse to fire human beings because computers are theoretically, and only theoretically, cheaper. 


AI Isn’t Cheap


It turns out that AI requires a lot of computing power, and computing power requires buildings, passive cooling, solar panels and more. It also requires network resources and a trainer, to teach the AI to do what it’s meant to do. I listened to a podcast about an AI Dungeons and Dragons that requires enormous amounts of computing power. AI Dungeons and Dragons requires a lot more than a top spec personal computer. It requires an array of computers. Is that progress?


Learning Prompt Engineering


When I was experimenting with building apps with AI I saw the limitations of AI. AI is great, but learning the art of “prompt engineering” is key. What is prompt engineering? It’s the art of learning to give instructions to an AI system so that it gives you the results you desire, at the quality you desire. It’s about iterating through prompts, until you get the AI to do precisely what you want. 


Keeping Things Simple


A huge effort is being made to get AI to respond to humans as if it was intelligent, but that intelligence, to some degree is an illusion, because it has to learn from millions of documents, over a period of time, and people continually have to give it feedback, to improve it. 


Reinforcement Learning


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX08NT55YhA


This is an interesting video about how AI learns. 


And Finally


As a media asset manager you learn to organise information so that it is easy to find. To a large degree that’s what AI does. It gathers a huge amount of data, and then, over time, we teach it to give us the results we expect when we ask one question or another. 


What this means is that we can spend billions on teaching AI to give us useful information, or we could spend time on writing more useful documentation, where the answers we seek are easier to find. We don’t need AI to replace humans. We need humans to organise information more intuitively. There’s a reason you come across Google Fu as a term. 


As I invest time in learning Hugo I sometimes find myself asking chatGPT questions, when I get stuck, because I can’t find the documentation I want. Sometimes I get useful answers, but at other times it is unproductive. 


The Real Value of AI


For me the real value of AI is not in helping us ask questions and get answers, it is in automating tasks that require humans a lot of time. Transcription is a useful feature of AI because it can automatically transcribe text, and then a human can double check that it is correct. AI can then automatically translate the transcription, and a human can go over the translation, and tweak it, and those tweaks can be fed back into the AI. 


With Media Asset Management AI is useful too. DV video tapes were 63 minutes long, and 63 minutes takes a long time for a human to watch, keyframe, keyword and more. AI could do the same thing within minutes, and then a human can qualify the result and tweak it where needed. 


AI should also be used for proofreading, rather than writing. AI can be taught all grammatical rules, and ensure that what is written makes sense. It could even be trained to recognise where people reading from a teleprompter would stumble, and other suggestions to make the text flow. 


Conclusion


In a rational world AI is just a tool that people can use to streamline their workflow, catch errors, speed up tasks like transcription and more. The drawback is that it gives an excuse for accountants, governing boards, stockholders and others an excuse to say “cut out the humans, let AI do the work.” Plenty of tech companies have done just that. It’s not that people fear AI, but that people don’t trust those in charge of budgets not to make immoral and irrational decisions, by firing the humans, that generate value in the first place. 

Experimenting with Pi Hosted and Portainer

Experimenting with Pi Hosted and Portainer

Byrichard

Yesterday I watched a video about setting up a so I experimented with using the Pi-Hosted script to install docker and then portainer. Pi Hoster uses two scripts. One installs Docker and the second one installs Portainer. Portainer is a web interface to install docker containers instead of doing the same thing via the command line. It allows you to install Pi-Hole, Ad Guard, PhotoPrism, Nextcloud and many other solutions on a single server with relative ease.

Opaque Installations

I say relative ease because I find that with Docker containers and Portainer it installs things without making it clear where things are installed. Docker and portainer also have the bad habit of putting things on a network that is internal to Docker and Portainer. It simplifes things so far that you are not fully aware of what it has done. It took trial and error before I managed to learn what the admin user name was, and I had to reset the password, before I could use it. I think that PhotoPrism did not like my password so it ignored it, without portainer warning me, so I had to look for instructions on how to reset the password manually.

Several Apps on a Single Machine

Once I had achieved this I had NextCloud and PhotoPrism running side by side as docker containers setup by Portainer. I don’t like not knowing everything I need to know about an install. I also wish that Docker, and portainer would make adding devices to the home wifi network more intuitive. That’s one of the things I need to learn more about.

Backup and Replicate

One useful feature of portainer, and the reason I wanted to experiment with it, is that you can backup the setup from one machine, and replicate it on another. If I have a Raspberry Pi and I configure it to have Home-Assistant, Pi-Hole, NextCloud, PhotoPrism and one or two apps then I can save the backup file, and launch it on a second machine and it will install the same apps with the same configs to that machine.

You might spend minutes, hours or days trouble shooting but once you find a solution that works it becomes replicable. This is a key part of modern computing.

And Finally

If you’re looking to learn about setting NextCloud and PhotoPrism up manually then you can find tutorials for that but it takes time, and trial and error to get things to work well together. The second option is to download dedicated images where a Pi runs NextCloud, or a Pi runs Pi Hole, or a Pi runs PhotoPrism. The drawback is that you need one Pi per project, which takes space.

By using Pi-Hosted to install Docker and Portainer with ease, and then using the Pi specific template, you are able to install Pi friendly docker images with ease, through docker, although some trial and error still takes place. I would recommend using Docker and Portainer once you know what you want to install and you want to shift from experimentation to production, at least within the home. Once the Portainer apps are setup, and you backup, you can migrate to another Pi, without cloning SD cards, or going through the same steps every time.

Pi-Hosted is useful to know about, to save time with future installs.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.