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Post-fact Britain

Byrichard

I was in the graduating class of 2000 with 99 other students representing more than one hundred countries. As an individual I already have three nationalities and four identities. I am British, Italian, Polish and a foreigner living near Geneva, Switzerland. As a result of this mixture I said, when I was in Tanzania in 1999 that I was European because that was the simplest way to describe my identity. When I first heard about the Brexit Referendum months ago I thought that this was so stupid that I thought it was not a serious project. It did become a serious thing, especially in a post-fact Britain.

Because these narratives typically involve a selective use of facts and lenient dealings with matters of truth, they have given rise to symptoms of a post-factual democracy. A democracy is in a post-factual state when truth and evidence are replaced by robust narratives, opportune political agendas, and impracticable political promises to maximize voter support. source

For months I saw that The Guardian and other newspapers were heavily critical of the European Union. You couldn’t read an article from their website without getting the feeling that Europe was a terrible place. This bias, this message encouraged me to switch to French language media to get a less biased, less anti-European narrative. The Guardian is relatively open compared to the British tabloid press. The British tabloid press lied and misled its readership. Twice The Sun lied about the Queen supporting Brexit. Twice it suffered no consequences.

It is well known that Murdoch is anti-European. Few men have done more to fuel anti-European frenzy than the Australian-American media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, owner of several newspapers and the UK’s most important private television news channel. In his book How Britain Will Leave Europe, former Minister for Europe Denis MacShane describes how former Prime Minister Tony Blair considered holding a referendum on adopting the euro, only to renounce the plan for fear that the “shadowy figure of Rupert Murdoch” would use his media empire to campaign against it. Source

When you control the media it is easy to push your agenda forward. Conspiracy theories are always about how our privacy is being invaded and about how our phone conversations, e-mails and other communications but few of them address the problems of indoctrination or brainwashing. They rarely look at the message that we are being given on a daily message. We have to ask “What is the root message that we are getting?” In the United Kingdom the root message was “Europe is bad”. Imagine if the BBC, The Guardian and other news sources had provided both sides.

The website notes that as an EU tier 1 area, “companies can benefit from the highest level of grant aid in the UK”. Earlier this year the sports car company TVR announced it would build a factory and create 150 jobs there. Will it still come? Will the Circuit of Wales, a multimillion-pound motor racing circuit a private company has been proposing to build on the town’s outskirts creating 6,000 jobs? Will the £1.8bn of EU cash promised to Wales for projects until 2020 still arrive? source

Imagine if the Fourth Estate in the United Kingdom had been used to provide people with clear examples of how the EU was investing in the UK. Imagine if instead of focusing on getting people to vote Leave the British media had provided a complete and unbiased view of the European Union. Wales voted against the EU and yet this article shows that they had a lot to gain by remaining within the EU. Between 2014–2020, Wales will benefit from around £1.8bn European Structural Funds investment. Source . 

In his first public comments since last week’s historic referendum vote, the owner of newspapers including the Times, Sun and Wall Street Journal said leaving the EU was like a “prison break … we’re out”… Source

There was a period when we could read about the imbalance in wealth and investment between Rural England and London. This imbalance was making people uncomfortable and one of the reasons for which the BBC decided to become decentralised was to address this concern. It is interesting that for a number of months the BREXIT campaign has focused all of that dissatisfaction at the EU rather than London. In a 2010 article by the BBC we find this sentence: But even fans of London admit it is too expensive, too dirty and too crowded. And its critics say that it sucks talent, money and opportunities out of the rest of the country. source. Brexit has not resolved this issue. Could this explain why around 7 percent of the British population have emigrated from Great Britain?

According this this article 4.9 million brits emigrated from the United Kingdom to live as migrants in other countries. This figure is from the UN population division. In theory I am British migrant as I live outside the United Kingdom. Brexiters (I will not play their game and call them brexiteers) made such a big song and dance about migrants coming to the UK and yet  British people are the single most mobile population in Europe. In Switzerland you can’t go a day without meeting Brits. Can you imagine the backlash if Europe decided to behave like England did?

I believe that people spent so much time worrying about privacy that they forgot to think about the prominent message in the media. They were groomed to see Europe in a negative light and voted accordingly. By choosing to provide people with the message that they wanted to hear the Leave campaign won. In a Post-fact Britain the checks and balances to hold brexiters to account failed. A campaign was won on lies and instability has resulted. The silver lining for other nations is that pro-european sentiment has risen. They have seen what a farce anti-European movements are.

 

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Quora and lateral thinking

Byrichard

Recently I saw the question “Why can’t I charge my mobile phone while riding my scooter?” on Quora so I decided to provide the answer that you see below. In my eyes my answer is legitimate. As an ingress player, as a scooter driver, and as someone who has done what I describe in the answer below I do not see why it is not a valid answer. Quora and lateral thinking are not synonymous. It would seem that Quora users do not like lateral thinking.

This is a legitimate answer because within the ingress playing community everyone that I have met uses an external battery to recharge their phone whilst out and about. Some of them carry the battery in a pocket, others in a bag and yet more of them have a special case for the bike so that they can play the game with ease whilst moving from portal to portal. If you haven’t played Ingress on a bike then you should definitely try it.

To have a reasonable answer downvoted by a user of Quora degrades my motivation to contribute to the site. I was once threatened with a ban for providing a link to back up and source what I had written. A second time I had personal attacks for writing a question to a questions asking for thoughts on a topic and now I see this downvote to a legitimate answer.

Social networks and online communities should be about open and free discussions where peoples’ thoughts and opinions are valued. When they are not valued then the return on investment for community members declines. It also discourages people from contributing to the community. Ideally you should highlight what you like and ignore what you dislike. By ignoring what you dislike you offend no one. You discourage no one.

Quora stats

In the grand scheme of things I have had 153 upvotes and only one downvote that I am aware of. This should not discourage me from using the network in future. I will take a break from the social network once again. Other social networks are more inviting, more open, more stimulating.

Facebook Disengagement
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Facebook Disengagement

Byrichard

Facebook disengagement by those I know has become so serious that I have decided to take a break from the social network myself. For many years this was a network of people I knew and spent time with in person. It has school friends, uni friends, activity friends and social media friends. For many years it was a place to socialise, share events and images. From the moment Zynga polluted Facebook with Farmville the conversational aspect of the social network degraded. As the conversation declined the sentiment that Facebook was a waste of time became a reality.

Facebook users no longer use the network to share their lives and converse. They use it to share sensationalist rubbish. Aside from Social media marketers Facebook has become a ghost town. As normal people no longer use the social network you are saturated with sensationalist rubbish. Facebook has become the preserve of the lowest common denominator. It has become a tabloid news distribution network and those who enjoy intellectual stimulation have moved on to other networks.

The content has declined in value to such a degree that I felt myself turning in to a troll. Every second or third article that people share is sensationalist rubbish and I feel the urge to call it rubbish. I don’t want to offend individuals so rather than do this I will take a break.

Social networks are about people connecting and conversing. It is about sharing what inspires us both through the adventures we have and through the links we share. Every article and headline should inspire us. For as long as social media practitioners focus on telling us how to feel rather than provide a description of the content of articles I will stay away.

Conversations are personal and current affairs articles should be factual. When a network like Facebook no longer has conversations and when articles are emotional the world is upside down and the model is broken. It is time for social networks and social media to become personal once again.

It amuses me that I write this about facebook. I wrote the same about twitter a few months and years ago. Social networks and their strategists keep making the same mistakes.

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Social Media and The Human Return on Investment

Byrichard

Social Media and the Human Return on Investment, because contrary to popular belief we use social networks to socialise, not to shop.

As we grow older and more mature our close network of friends changes and evolves. We go from school friends to university friends and then to professional friends. In the process we move from a village to another village, from a town to another town and eventually from one city to another. In the process the links we have with some friends strengthen and others degrade over time. This is modern life.

I find it hard to discern whether the return on time invested on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others is decreasing because people’s understanding of these social networks is shifting or whether it is related to growing up. As the people I know get married and have children their priorities change and privacy becomes more important. We have to keep the children safe.

Facebook, as a social network is less engaging than it used to be. The people I have as friends post less frequently, the events we can participate in together is shifting and the content shown in timelines is evolving. To compensate for the decline in friends engaging in social networks like twitter and Facebook people are following publications, brands and news sources. This flow of information is tailored to the lowest common denominator. The sensationalist writing style discourages me from following these sources of information.

I have a concern that what were social networks until two or three years ago have become advertising networks on which people occasionally socialise and interact with other individuals. I feel that a bigger and bigger portion of the time that people spend on advertising networks is looking at mainstream content and comments. On Facebook as I scroll down the timeline I notice an increasing number of adverts. Personal posts are less and less frequent. Has the community left this “social” network?

I have spent years thinking about online communities and how they interact. During this time I have seen the ebb and flow from one type of community to another across multiple platforms and applications. Within the next two to five years social networks will be virtual reality environments such as we saw with World of Warcraft, Everquest and Second Life. The question is whether people will want to socialise in virtual reality or whether it will be populated by gamers.

Every online social network is stigmatised. This stigmatisation prevents people from fully exploiting the potential of social networks. We see this stigma through the use of dating apps rather than Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks. Dating apps are stigmatised but at least you swipe left or right and you’re done. ;-). You’re only “active” for a few seconds at a time. On Facebook and twitter you need to be active for hours, days, weeks or even months… You have to be careful. You may be stigmatised. 😉

Now that most people see social networks as a waste of time it gives us more time to do other things. It gives us time to read, to do research, to watch television and even to go two or three hours without looking at a mobile or computer screen. Imagine that. 😉

I believe that on the one hand the stigmatisation of Social networks as a waste of time has discouraged people from using them to their full potential. As a result of this people feel comfortable spending ten to fifteen minutes a day on these networks. On the other hand I see marketers, public relations specialists and advertisers push for their campaign to be seen. As peer to peer communication goes down and human return on investment (ROI) decreases, and as marketing campaigns take over the timelines they are effectively closing the door on people’s motivation to spend time reading through their timeline.

 

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Narcissism and the World Wide Web

Byrichard

According to a New York Times writer, Narcissism and the World Wide Web are increasing. “Narcissism is increasing…“

If our egos are obese with amour-propre, social media can indeed serve up the empty emotional carbs we crave. Instagram and the like doesn’t create a narcissist, but studies suggest it acts as an accelerant — a near ideal platform to facilitate what psychologists call “grandiose exhibitionism.” No doubt you have seen this in others, and maybe even a little of it in yourself as you posted a flattering selfie — and then checked back 20 times for “likes.”

Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and others grew from a desire people had to connect with others. In it’s golden age both Twitter and Facebook were about dialogue and conversations. They were about mutual respect and listening. During the Golden age of social media we would get to know people so well via Twitter and Facebook that when we met in person we felt like we had known each other for years. For introverts and more reserved people this was excellent. We could hide behind the screen until we built enough trust and confidence to meet the person behind the username.

Fast forward to 2016 and the wrong people have been heard when it comes to social media and it’s purpose. Many people have the false notion that social media is about self-promotion and self-aggrandisement. This is incorrect. Social media is about dialogue and personal connections. I only follow people who will converse with me should I comment on one of their tweets. The images I share are of the beautiful world around me. Facebook is a network of people I have studied with, worked with or met at various conferences.

There are a number of topics that the article should have explored. The first of these is solitary living. How many of those who use social media live in a house or apartment alone. The second question is whether the commute to and from work allows these people to have a social life and meet friends once the work day is over. The third topic to explore is whether friends live next door or in another country. My friends are distributed around the world, from Australia to Europe and the Americas and Africa. Imagine keeping in touch with such a broadly distributed network of friends.

Social networks and social media, rather than lead to narcissism are encouraging the opposite. They are encouraging people to share their personal life with friends distributed around the world. It is because we live in McLuhan’s global village that social media play such an important role. Remember that just because one attractive woman has a million Instagram followers liking her pictures does not mean that there are not a thousand other people sharing images with a small network of friends from social media.

Don’t let yourself feel stigmatised for being a social media user. Connect with new people. Share your passions. Don’t let the Luddites question your motives.

 

 

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Social Media and the Lizard brain

Byrichard

I wanted to write about Social Media and the Lizard brain. My experience of information technology and Social Media is that it is a great tool for people from different backgrounds to come together and have a calm and logical conversation. Some people believe that “we need a social media with heart that gives us time to think.” I strongly believe that the culprit is not social media but rather the way people are taught to think in general and how the stigmatisation of online interactions has led people to feel negative when using social media.

With a smartphone in your hand, System 1 thinking becomes the dominant mode of thought. Nobody can handle the volume of data in 2016 without relying on ifeelings to come up with instantaneous responses, often triggered by how you see others reacting. There is less scope for deliberation and discussion – the pressure is to make a snap judgment and move on. I love this film, this article is deplorable/fantastic or politician X is a welcome breath of fresh air/duplicitous bastard.

This is an erroneous view. The World Wide Web is a powerful social tool because it allows us to think for a week or two before posting a reaction. Imagine that you are reading a printed newspaper article and you are offended. You write a letter the same day in the hope that it will be published as a reaction to the article. You react without the time to think. Once you send the letter it cannot be edited.

Social media and the World Wide Web allow two things. They allow you to read around the subject. Rather than write based on anger and emotion you can study the topic you are responding to. You can write on reaction, you can rewrite it. You can share that reaction. You can change your mind and you can delete it.

I find it an interesting paradox that articles are written about how Social media require us to use the lizard brain rather than reflect when I personally find the opposite to be the case.

System 2 thinking is slower and more deliberative. You marshal evidence, you exercise judgment, you discuss with others and you try to arrive at conclusions

When I am unfamiliar with a topic I go to Wikipedia to familiarise myself with a topic and there is a good chance that I will read articles on the subject. I really appreciate that in modern life when we find interest in a new topic we can either buy e-books or audiobooks in order to study topics in depth. We start the day with limited knowledge about a specific topic and by the end of that same day, we have enough background information to join the conversation.

To use a cliché social media is not the villain that people are making it out to be. Social media is a conversational tool and a democratising opportunity. When people are taught to think independently, when people are taught to reason, and when people are taught to research topics before writing a response they are productive.

I have a rule. If my response takes more than 140 characters I will drop by Facebook or Google Plus. If it is longer than a paragraph I will write a blog post. By following this logic, emotion is taken out of the post.

Marshall McLuhan talked about hot and cold media decades ago. Social media is a cold medium. The audience needs to do the work. The audience needs to fill in the gaps. Parents, Schools and Universities need to teach people to understand the limitations of the media they are using whilst at the same time teaching them to be critical, to find more than one source before forming an opinion. The problem is not with the medium but with the way in which people are prepared for the new medium.

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The idiocy of the Hashtag

Byrichard

Every day I am reminded of the Idiocy of the Hashtag. Twitter is a conversational medium where the more we converse the more addictive the social network becomes. Every single @ reply was a reaction to what we said or shared. Connections between users were strong and so the network effect took twitter from being a strange experiment in 2006 to being a social network from 2007-2009. In those days we engaged with people directly.

Social media marketers, people with families and other priorities came to twitter and decided that they would indoctrinate people in to seeing twitter as a broadcast rather than conversation tool. Broadcasting did away with the conversation. It replaced the conversation with buzz words like ROI (return on investment) and other buzz terms.

From a conversational medium where everyone talked directly to everyone else these “experts” hijacked the conversation and encouraged the use of the hashtag. The hashtag took person to person communication, encapsulated it in a hashtag and neutralised the individual to individual communication channels. Individual to individual communications are what makes all social networks addictive. If I believe that someone wants to listen to me, to talk, to exchange ideas then I am likely to make time for them, to read what they have to say, to create a personal connection. That personal connection had me travel to Paris, London, Geneva, Lausanne, Lille and other destinations.

Imagine that twitter was still a conversational medium. Imagine that we established personal connections with the event organisers. Imagine that instead of a hashtag we were talking with the twitter account of event organisers. Imagine for a moment that twitter was seen as networking, that socialising on this network was not seen as a waste of time. Imagine that it was seen as a wise investment of time.

I was at two international events last month in Geneva and I had my laptop and a data connection (or two if we count event wifi). I could have listened and live tweeted the events and I could have engaged people socially. I could have engaged with the panel and the speakers.

They want me to use a hashtag. I refuse to use hashtags because a hashtag is not a conversation. A hashtag is metadata. Metadata should be used to help with threading but should not be the conversation. The conversation, comments and thoughts should go directly to the organisation. The impact of a conversation is far stronger than a hashtag.

A hashtag is solitary, is lonely, is disjointed, fails to engage. We see it’s weakness every time an event takes place. I was at one event where I saw that the hashtag only appeared in tweets by the event organiser. The only other place it appeared was in retweets. If you work as a social media marketer you need to engage with people. You need to get people to reply to your tweets, not tweet a hashtag. Event twitter accounts should serve as a conversation hub. They should trigger groups of people at the event and following the event remotely to converse, to share what they think, what they do, who they need to help them.

There are two strengths to twitter that very few people use. These are the ability to connect with like minded people before an event, so that by the time you meet them in person you can proceed with a collaboration rather than small talk and secondly to connect with other people after an event, to establish more personal connections.

Remember that twitter is a 140 character medium. Twitter is great for short conversations and quick updates. It lacks in substance when it comes to sharing content. Facebook, Google Plus are better when what you have to share takes more than 140 characters. Facebook and Google Plus allow you to build connected communities in a way that is impossible on twitter. Both Facebook and Google Plus have threading, have topic separation and more. They are modern web forums. Twitter is a chat room. Use the web forums to have threaded conversations around specific events and panels and use twitter to establish personal connections with event attendees and others.

Yesterday Twitter decided to allow people to follow 5000 twitter accounts. “While it’s entirely possible to see a lot of activity when you’re following 2,000 accounts, the 5,000-user limit increases the chances that you’ll see something interesting.” Social network stickiness relies on familiarity and a personal connection. If you follow 5000 accounts there is an excellent chance that you will fail to personally engage with any of these accounts. As a result twitter will be the place you visit because of hype rather than personal interest.

Twitter is a conversation medium that has identified itself as a broadcast medium which is why there are so many spammers present today. It has encouraged people to have millions of followers, it has encouraged people to follow other people whom there is no chance of personal engagement. They have encouraged their user base to listen rather than interact. Look at the million follower accounts and how they idealise this, rather than the more manageable 300 person limit.

Three or four years ago there was some discussion on the number of people that individuals could know well and that number was low. They said that we could get to know about three hundred people well. This means that if we’re on twitter we should not follow more than three hundred people. We should follow those whom engage with us. We should make time available to those who make time available for us. We should make sure that we have personal connections with as high a percentage of those we engage with in social media as possible.

When twitter was still a social network and twitter celebrities were still normal people we could converse with iJustine, Sarah Austin, Chris Brogan and many others. With Seesmic we could connect with Scoble and Le Meur. In the early days we could create warmer connections because there were fewer of us and attention was not as costly as it is today. Essena O’Neill is one of the people who came to social media too late. She managed to have more than half a million followers which is fantastic for the ego. Half a million followers would make most people happy.

She also set up a website to fight against what she described as the cult of social media. She deleted 2,000 photos on Instagram that, she said, “served no real purpose other than self-promotion”, and scrapped her other social accounts.

Marketers misled people. Shareholders got Social media companies to focus on the wrong thing. Social Media is a social medium. Social media is a method by which for people to communicate with other people with similar passions. Social media is about conversations between individuals. The social media landscape should be about you and I becoming friends. It should be about writing blog posts, sharing images of adventures and more. Social media should complement our physical social life. By Physical social life I only mean the social life with people whose hands we can shake, with people we can hug and with people we can have adventures with.

The idea that each of us should create a mass following is wrong and it is destructive. It is wrong because most of us are not that interesting and we do not travel so much as to find thousands of like minded people. We should focus on a small tight network of people. I found that small tight network through Glocals. For about two years I was part of the Glocals Geneva Scuba diving community and for three years I have been part of the Glocals Activ’events group.

In London social networks got me to participate in tweetups, barcamps, tuttle meetups and more. Each of these events saw me meet with and perpetuate social media friendships that were friendships in the physical world. Some of these friendships are now eight years old. These friendships also saw me at LeWeb and seesmeetups. These friendships are not fleeting. Some of them are over a decade old, from before “Social Media” days.

This shows that if you are honest, if you are open and if you are genuine in your use of social media you can establish friendships. The conversations are an exchange of ideas, loves, passions and concerns. Twitter calls them “followers” but I call them friends. I often speak of “twitter friends” because some platforms are great for news, others are great for sharing images and yet more are good for conversations or debates.

I came back to blogging because I grew tired of the hyposphere. A few weeks ago I started to call Facebook, twitter and mainstream media the Emotional Media. Hard news and information were far harder to find. Conversations and personal connections have also become a distant memory. Social Media has been hijacked by commercial interests to make money for people whom are not aware of the damage they are doing to social networks. I see social networks as a fantastic place for introverts to socialise. I see social networks as a very nice way for introverts to be extroverted, to meet new people, and to create relationships, rather than to sit in the background. Marketers hijacked that space. Essena grew up at the height of the Emotional Media. She was indoctrinated to believe that follower counts, likes, favourites and non conversational measures of success were important. She was never told that social media should be about personal connections, about individuals.

As a person who has been online almost every day since 1996 I grew up with the world wide web and so I have seen it’s progress over the years. I formed my character at the same time as the world wide web and then social media formed their own. Let’s Be Game Changers is interesting because  Essena is part of the generation who was born after the World Wide Web. She came to this space when marketers were distorting children and teenage values. They put importance on the wrong things. Let’s Be Game Changers is a way of opposing the values system instilled by Social media experts and Social media managers. Social media should be about solitary or lonely individuals having personal conversations with their peers. Social media should be a way of getting to know new people. Social media should be about conversations, passions and activities.

Years ago I spoke and thought about the Social Media Living Room. I even bought the domain. The idea of the social media living room is one where we come to a virtual space, an online space and we converse. We share images, videos, thoughts and aspirations with other people. Those virtual interactions become so frequent and so warm that eventually we want to meet in person and when we do a friendship emerges. During the social media Golden Age everyone I met was via Twitter and quite a few more were via Seesmic. During this age geography and nationality did not exist. We were likeminded people meeting internationally. Companies and organisations need to re-create that personal connection so that what I called Emotional Media can once again become Social Media. I want to have conversations. I want to meet new people and work on interesting projects.

 

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Vanity fair is wrong to label Zuck as the top disruptor

Byrichard

Zuckerberg Tops Vanity Fair’s 2015 List of Disruptors

Every successful social network first establishes a friendship network where a tight knit group of people interact with each other on a very frequent basis. In the case of facebook it was uni friends interacting with uni friends from the same campus. On twitter it was people in the same time zone conversing with people in the same city as themselves. It eventually led to face to face meetings and a new network of recognised friends.

The same can be said of Seesmic when it was about “Join the Video conversation”. Notice my avatar… It’s the seesmic racoon. 🙂

Zuck wasn’t a disruptor or genius so much as the right person in the right place at the right time. Nothing he did was innovative. He just packaged it effectively.

As a side note I have noticed that over a number of years the social aspect of twitter has suffered. It no longer feels like a social social network. it feels more like Google Reader.

it’s amusing to see how social networks evolve and revolve from one type of network to another depending on what people want-

Mark Zuckerberg Tops the 2015 New Establishment List—and Snags the October Cover!

I remember when there were dozens of RSS aggregators for the sharing and distribution of blog articles. Over time traditional sources used the same technology. Google Reader and Google News became good sources for getting news stories and information. Facebook and twitter, social networks, decided that conversations were a waste of time and so encouraged their networks to be used as news aggregators. Recently Facebook reached the billion user daily mark.

Amusingly this happened when the social network is at it’s weakest. It’s Unique Selling Point, connecting friends, has been lost. I went back to blogging because I grew tired of the rubbish being shared on twitter, facebook and other social networks.

For years I insisted that social networks were a great way of meeting new friends and finding new business opportunities but as everyone overdid it with followers so the conversation and personal connections decreased.

In the article they state that “Facebook chairman and C.E.O.Mark Zuckerberg has struck deals with The New York Timesand BuzzFeed to publish articles directly into users’ pages.”

I don’t go to facebook for news. I use the NYtimes app, I use Google News, I use news360, scoopinion and other applications. I use the applications because I found the condescending and sensationalist tone used by facebook marketers was offensive. We are a generation of university graduates on a university social network being treated as if we were primary school students. I don’t appreciate it.

I also don’t appreciate the multiple posting of the same articles and tweets in timelines both on twitter and facebook. In theory twitter is an app that you keep open and monitor throughout the day. If something has to be posted several times then congrats on having such a disengaged audience. ;-).

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The Dumbing Down of mainstream media

Byrichard

Recently I have found mainstream anglo-saxon media much harder to tolerate. A few years ago I went to see 90 films in 9 months. I had no TV and the World Wide Web wasn’t quite as accessible then as it is today. For years I could watch BBC World from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep. I also read articles and blog posts.

I can’t stand the hollywood film output anymore. They are so comfortable with their formulas that within ten minutes I knew the plot line.

I used to read dozens of newspapers a day and dozens of blog posts a day. I noticed that blog posts started to become formulaic and so stopped reading blog after blog. The quality of content went down at the same time as output went up. Every blog post was a Top Ten article.

Newspaper headlines used to provide the audience with information about what the article was about. You’d read the headline, skim the first paragraph and decide what to read next. As Social media became socially acceptable for growing portions of society so we see the decline in headline usefulness. Headlines should answer the who, what where, when, why how questions and engage you as a reader. The Guardian, the BBC, The Independent and other news sources rather than writing headlines about the content of articles write sensationalist headlines that are designed to blackmail you in to clicking a link. Usually the articles hidden behind these headlines are a waste of time. They provide little of value and they assume ignorance of current affairs.

We live in the information age. Within 15 seconds whether you’re sitting at the top of a via ferrata or in a library you can get information on any topic that interests you. Remember that the web is the hypertext markup language. When you write today you can add links to help contextualise the story, you can provide videos and pictures. You can also write in as much depth as you would like.

In the information age I would have liked, and I would have expected that writing would become more demanding. Knowledge would be assumed and context would be easy to provide. When background information is a search engine result away it would be logical to assume that experts and writers could write as if we, the lay reader, were also experts.

Look at the way the refugee crisis is covered. We see terms like “thousands drown in sea” “Fortress Europe should let in more refugees” and many more phrases. These phrases do nothing to inform and educate the audience. They are only entertaining us. They are encouraging prejudice and stereotypes rather than discourse. With unlimited bandwidth, time and space the topic of refugees and migrants could be covered in great depth. Documentaries could be produced to provide context as to why people are pushed from where they lived. Xenophobia is a result of over-simplification. Imagine that tomorrow when you wake up you see François Hollande or David Cameron in Calais speaking with refugees. What effect would that have on the national debates of migration? We see ourselves as liberals and we see ourselves as citizens of the world. Why, as citizens of the world do we never see our leaders visit refugees? Let’s forget the status quo and let’s go for a contextualised actuality. (Actuality, Actualité, french for news. I chose not to use the stigmatised word Reality).

Another example of the dumbing down is the TWIT network. I used to love listening to those podcasts. I would listen to at least five or six of their programs a week. TWIT, Macbreak weekly and others. I started to lose interest when they switched to video and my interest decayed completely by the time it was more chit chat than news. Editing gave their shows value. Without editing you’re wasting an hour and a half of listening time.

Media production and advertising revenue is based on the “Lowest Common Denominator” theory. The simpler content is to understand the more views it will get. The more views it gets the more valuable it is. When media assets are owned by the financial sector and when giving dividends to share holders is more important than value to costumers so you get the erosion of quality. This erosion in quality means chasing a greater number of eyeballs with an ever decreasing quality of content. The Guardian, the BBC and other “mainstream media” companies have fallen in to the trap. They don’t need the money, they’re subsidised, but they need the eyeballs to justify their funding nonetheless.

If the mainstream media want to destroy themselves then that’s fine. In theory. In practice this leaches in to the social media landscape. As an early adopter I join social networks and social media distribution platforms in their early days, when the intellectual, entrepreneurial and curious people are around. Conversations and friendships make empty social networks look and feel lively. As users engage stickiness grows. As stickiness increases so value increases. Look at Twitter and Facebook as prime examples. Twitter was a fantastic conversation tool in it’s early days, so fantastic that for the first time in a social network I would meet with users every week at it’s peak. Facebook was a uni friend network. We had all partied together and as we knew each other well we could be open and social in a closed network. When advertisers, social media gremlins and PR professionals came in to these landscapes so the conversation chased the rabbit down the hole of the lowest common denominator. Conversations diluted and friendships decayed to the point where trolling became standard.

The dumbing down of the mainstream media led to the decline in sociability and friendliness on social networks at a time when social media became mainstream. As a positive last thought everything is cyclical. We will see mainstream media smarten up again. We will go back to long form articles, and we will go back to interesting film plots.

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Social networks and project collaboration

Byrichard

Jacques Yves Cousteau’s documentaries would have done well in the social media age, especially if the social media age moved away from profit and money. Imagine that social media companies such as Facebook and twitter were Not For Profit Organisations and imagine that instead of having advertisers they had sponsors. The quality of content and discussion would increase and the time wasting element that so many people worry about would be gone.

Alexandra Cousteau, grand daughter of Jacques Yves Cousteau is on twitter and she shares articles related to conservation and related topics. Not for profit organisations such as MSF and UN organisations such as the United Nations Development program all share content and articles that provide their followers with valuable resources for bringing conversations forward.

Social networks should be seen as anything but a waste of time. Their purpose would be to find clients, to find collaborators and to find mentors. In having these three resources finding new projects, employment and collaboration opportunities would increase. We would eliminate viral videos, tabloid content and keep high value, high return on investment prospects. Rather than PR and marketing specialists flooding our timelines with emotional but useless content we would have high value content worth responding too.

The aim would be to demonstrate our strengths in a high brow environment where conversations are possible and encouraged. From the time I was ten years old I have lived in the international community, between school, where I worked, university and more. As a result friends are distributed around the world rather than driving distance. Imagine that this network stopped seeing social networks as tabloid as commercial and a waste of time and instead saw them as useful work tools.

For me this is nothing new. When I was in London when twitter was in it’s infancy and when facebook too was in it’s infancy I saw both social networks as networking tools. I met hundreds of people via both networks and I continue to do this today but at a less efficient pace than I would like.

The aim would be that for every four or five days of social media use I would get two or three in person meetings with people to discuss projects and collaborations. I would also like to be inspired and encouraged to work on specific projects.

The Game Ingress by Niantic labs is a perfect example of what I would like to see within a professional context. Through the game Ingress I have met people in Paris, Fribourg, Lausanne and Geneva to mention just a few. If I go to Paris on the 22nd I can meet agents. If I follow mission days or First Saturdays then I can meet people in a number of cities. I mention this because although ingress is not a professional network it is still a project network. It requires geographically based teams to collaborate to achieve goals. If we could distribute that kind of network for documentary production and collaboration then employability and familiarity would both benefit.

It’s a shame that with all of the communication tools we have today we see social networks such as facebook and twitter as PR and marketing tools rather than collaboration and relationship tools. I have web designers, musicians, camera operators, writers, journalists, photographers, fundraisers, financial analysts and digital analysts as friends on Facebook and yet it is hard to see what people are working on. Imagine social networks that are optimised to benefit from your existing network.