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Social media is great. It gives us an opportunity to interact with others, to exchange opinions and experiences. What I found so engaging about videoblogging in 2004, before youtube, before the mass hysteria, was the ability to look at a video made by someone and really get a glimpse of their world. In terms of political dialogue, videoblogging could be a way to open up, of letting people who are living in the outskirts of the media sphere express their opinion to their local community. It was also a way for us to expand our range of sympathies, to get that closer connection with others. Others you might not stop and talk with on the street, or at a social gathering. A typical example of this is the sites made for/with homeless people. Arenas where they can express their world, their challenges and their joys in life.

At a certain point, its as if the focus shifted. The social element is still there, but the narcissistic elements of it have become too dominant in a way. It became a bit too much like marketing, or advertising. When mass media covered youtube back in 2005 or 06, it was mostly about how this or that person was reaching an audience of millions. The long tail, so to speak, was rarely the focus. Many people who posted a few videos on youtube and then saw that they were having view counts like 64 or 1342 were disappointed. They felt like making a video for ten people was not enough.

We have all turned to being broadcasters now. We broadcast, we beep and tweet out messages to the void, the intarwebs, and then we get some feedback from the void. A comment to our blog entry, or a video to our video, or a @ reply on twitter. Conversation begins maybe. Feedback loop is enabled and goes for a bit, then stops.

This leads me to the tyranny of the timestamp. The fact that the timing of conversation enabling techniques is SO important. It’s a hit and miss, and the structure of the system, the requirements of the media, forces us to move on. Your tweet written last night has much less relevance today, simply because the timestamp has changed. The context of you writing it might not have changed, the importance of the subject might not have changed, but the timestamp immediately treats it as outdated. Yesterday’s news, so to speak.

The Norwegian sociologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen wrote a book about time some years ago, and I remember attending a presentation he did at the University of Bergen after it had been published. I remember clearly his way of describing the problem. How our media consumption is affecting our relation to time. Our time.

It acts like a disease, now. A plague that spreads. Our attention span keeps getting shorter, and there are different psychological blocks, or habits, that strengthen it.

One style of the videos I have made in the past have been a commentary on this, or rather an exploration of it. You have a video, with 24 frames per second, and each frame shows something new. Flashing text, images, moving parts that shred, are shredded, and reused. Creating a rhytm. Our minds are adapting and what might a few decades back have been seen as a hazard flutter of images is today seen by many to be at an acceptable speed. Our eyes are so used to the flickering and fluttering of images, from the way we consume media, that it becomes second nature.

In 1966, William Burroughs and a few others made a video called The Cut-Ups, of which you can see a small sample here. (Here you can read more generally about cut-up technique).

There are several layers to time, and we are only consciously aware of a few of them. There is the actual clicking of time, the seconds going one after another. There is perceived time as we consciously appreciate it, and as our body organism sees it. There is time gone, and time that is to come. What happens when we are given something – be it a text, or a video, or a newspaper clip – and we are given no information about its timestamp? Without the timestamp layer in the middle of our consciousness. We might read it, or watch it, and notice things. Some things.

Then, we are given the date. This newspaper article is five months old. That video is 3 years old. That blog post is 2 weeks old. Our perception of the piece is changed immediately. I dont have much data on this, no statistics to back it up, but there is something there.

I have had a conversation with Michael Meiser about this – what is your thoughts? How does this relate to your own interest in google reader and linkblogging? Remember our del.icio.us experiments a few years back?

I am also interested in the work of Adam Quirk and the others at Wreck & Salvage. Here is the latest W&S video:

Fun with Muybridge from wreckandsalvage on Vimeo.

What does naked people have to do with our feedback loop?

My thoughts go to the people of Israel and Palestine. I hope they can find peace within themselves and in their community. Unfortunately, with the current political climate there, this has only a slight chance.

Let us support the moderate forces in these two communities. Those who do not seek to shed more blood as a response to bloodshedding. Those who still believes in dialogue, even after so many failed chances.

Today I have been thinking about what I want to write on this blog today. I have been thinking about who my audience is, what I want to communicate to you. While chatting with my friend Nathan yesterday I thought about the importance of writing for someone. I dont intend to cater to a big audience here, so why not specify more who I really want to communicate with here, and what I want to communicate with you about?

I want to talk about eastern-western culture with Nathan and a few other of my friends, including Abby and a few friends from the Pinoy community here in Denmark. There are a ton of issues I want to cover with Michael Meiser. Jeffrey Taylor’s take on different forms of conversations within the space of ’social media’ is interesting to me. Bicyclemark is a guy I respect so much and yet for some reason get to talk so little with (and I still owe you a podcast talk about my interest in countries like Georgia). There are many others I am interested in talking with, about different topics or about absolutely nothing specific, just a social call.

Last month I realized properly that this year is going to be the year of another election here in Denmark: There will be local elections in October. How will the online tools be used in the election campaigns of these local candidates? I will definitely be helping out where I can myself, but also follow what the development is. One of my main interests is the obsession people have to “be on Facebook”, but without really knowing what they want to use it for.

I originally titled this entry “A paragraph each day” because basically I need to get into the habit of writing again. But to do it without being obsessive, just like I should read more interesting blogs without becoming lost in the data jungle.

I am working on a video that I should have ready tomorrow or sunday. Have a great friday!

The internet: Spheres of infinite random.

In late 1994, I got lulled to the wonders of the internet. “Whatever information I want, I can find it immediately”. Of course, this premise became more and more true with the growth of better search engines, sites like wikipedia, and instant gratification became the norm.

In 2004 I turned to being more consciously interested in the usage of new media for communication within organizations, particularly organizations, and how organizations could communicate with the larger public using these tools. Videoblogging, when that popped up on my radar in december 04, seemed like the perfect tool. Visualizing stories to then share them with others.

But as time went by and I saw sites like Youtube take hold and not only become household names but also immensely powerful media machines in their own right, I started becoming sceptical towards it. It was not so much the dogs on skateboards that bugged me as the seeming randomness of it all.

During the christmas vacation I was going through my old notes and notebooks, and I noticed this phrase which I had written sometime in 2005: “Spheres of infinite random …”

Yes, the randomness of it all. A blog post could be written, and it was almost pure chance as to whether that post in itself becae ‘a hit’ or ‘a miss’. Factors like phrasing of headline, clever use of images, and timing the posting of course came into effect, but it was still a big gamble: Would the post become bigger than its individual comments? Would it enter a larger conversation? Or, to focus less on our ego: What good would this post do?

A few years back I would do things like linkbaiting (mention Robert Scoble or Dave Winer, and it pops up on their radar somewhere) and I would see how conversations are broadcast through systems, maybe becomes memes, and eventually die out or live their own life in some random comment field. One of these attempts to start a conversation (which is another way of putting it) was my post about ‘hacking the attention hierarchy’ (google search / my original post) which led to some comments on my blog (comments which are now lost due to my database noobness), but did not live on further. I later realized that wanting to enter larger conversations with your post is like entering a gambling contest. Will your post, if it is a reaction to some tech blog post, appear on techmeme? Will your post appear on someone’s radar when they are awake and ready to interact to your post in a thoughtful manner, or will it just become another blip on their radar?

Taking a look at mentioned techmeme or the featured videos on youtube or other sites, what is common is the air of randomness over it. Of course, on techmeme most of the major stories are either big news (like Microsoft possibly laying off 15.000 people) or things that are mostly interesting because a certain personality wrote them.

These news stories and the expressions of individuals become beacons which the sphere rolls about, the sphere of infinite random. Random because, as much buzz or comment frenzy as something might get, it becomes – in most cases – mere blips on the radar. Soon something else, written by someone else, or a news story about another tech company, grabs our attention, and yesterday’s questions becomes outdated, out of our zoom, as memorable as yet another radar blip.

Many companies and organizations are working on ways to let conversations grow organically (organic conversations is an excellent term, Jeffrey!), and several people I know are seriously concerned with the context. But I don’t know quite how much attention they are getting, or if their message is shared in a larger pool. In a world where the instant gratification of data-driven questions a la ‘what is the population of Chile?‘, how does our larger questions get served in the ecosystem? When our attention span becomes ever shorter, how does this affect our ability to process information on a deeper level? To interact closer with others, interact with their ideas in a manner that goes beyond a few @s on twitter or a quick email.

The last few months I tried to disengage from the internet. I still checked my mail now and then, and I wrote occassional twitter messages, but mostly I have tried to re-align my relationship to where I am. Read books, spent time with the gf, buried my grandmother who passed away, thought a lot about what she talked to me about my media consumption a few years back.

2009 is here now, and one of my new year’s resolutions is ‘to write’. In the sense of writing more here on this blog about topics that interest me, but also to create movies again. As illustrations to the words. Instead of trying to enter those larger conversations I will be working more on making them internally stable. Cover the individual threads more in depth. One of my central topics of interest is still communication, and particularly the communication between organizations/politicians and the public. An organization dealing with HIV awareness in Kenya is about anything but randomness, and it will be interesting to explore examples of how organizations from around the world are using new media tools to share their vision, and also how they could do it.

I wish you all a Blessed 2009!

And I will end this first post of the new year with a totally random clip from vimeo

HAPPY TREE FRIENDS – Books Of Fury (www.htfonline.tk) from Happy Tree Friends on Vimeo.