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A few weeks ago, on a whim, I tagged a public Google+ post with my location. I did it as a personal documentation measure, so that I could go back and remember where I took the photo of the pneumatic tube system from the 1950s that I thought my media history-inclined friend would get a kick out of. But something unexpected happened: a complete stranger, having found my post using the “public/nearby” feature, commented on my post, sharing his memories and experience how the tubes were used. A week later, after I posted about a surreal bike accident, people in the neighborhood where it happened commented alongside my friends to wish me well. Looking online, I saw numerous descriptions of similar uses and it got me thinking about what makes the experience Google’s Public/Nearby feature so different from those of Twitter and Foursquare (I don’t really actively use Facebook at all, so I can’t comment on Places).

You Are Here (1968) by John Lennon

Part of the difference, of course, is the publicness of the content in Public/Nearby. My “shouts” on Foursquare are viewable only to my friends (unless shared through Twitter or Facebook). My location-tagged content on Twitter, while potentially public, is accessible if you’re looking at my feed, making the information very much personal in that sense.

Twitter and Google+ share the fact that you append location to content, rather than appending content to location, as with Foursquare. In that sense, Google+ and Twitter are primarily organized around people rather than places*. For Twitter, however, location is an added layer of data on a piece of content, but it is isn’t an organizing factor. So, if you look at your friend’s location-enable tweet, you can see where they were when they shared that information. However, you can’t see all tweets from your follow-list that have been shared in a given location. The location of tweets gives more information, but it doesn’t change how that information is encountered.

For both Foursquare and Google+, on the other hand, location can be a primary organizing structure for accessing, sharing, and classifying information. However, in Foursquare, the definition of “location” is based on defined venues, however flexible the spatial parameters around those venues might be (consider the many “moving target” check-ins to extreme weather conditions). If you’re sitting in a cafe, you might look at the public information associated with the cafe, or the cafe counter, or that neighborhood, or the nearby park, or a cab driving by, but you cannot see it all the information within the area around your position.

What makes Google+’s location features unique is the fluidity of the role of location data. It can, like twitter, be another layer of information about a post, but it can also, like Foursquare, serve as the organizing structure for accessing and producing information. But unlike Foursquare, if you hit the “public/nearby” feature in Google+, you get all the information shared publicly in a given area around your position. In sharing information, it’s structure of appending location data to content encourages more user-focused content, in the manner of Twitter. However, in allowing location to also be an organizing factor Public/Nearby uses place as a means to access information like Foursquare. To put it overly simplistically, it feels as if Twitter uses people or organize information about people, Foursquare uses place to organize information about place, and Google+’s Public/Nearby feature uses place to organize information about people.

Another potentially interesting, but far more difficult to untangle distinction, emerges if we think (very broadly) about space versus place. I don’t want to get into the complexities and nuances of the space/place relationship, but for the purposes of this post think of spaces as generally a geographical area and place as a specific space imbued with value and meaning that is, as Marc Augé defines it, “relational, historical and concerned with identity.” In that sense, whereas Foursquare emphasizes not only places, but particular places (given their policy of regulating “duplicate” venues), Google+ is more spatially-inflected, grouping information in relation to a given geographical parameter regardless of the boundaries and definitions of the places within it. But the space of Google+ nearby/public is not an undifferentiated space, but a position-specific one full of information and discourse. In that sense, we might think of it as a placed space — defined by the physical area but articulated as “relational, historical and concerned with identity.” Again, this doesn’t go anywhere near the complexity of space/place relations, nor does it take into account the technological functions of how Google+’s GPS system determines spatial parameters. Just some beginning observations on how different technologies shape our encounters of/in spaces and places.

I’m also curious if there’s other location-based services that address/define spaces and places in different ways, so would love to hear about your ideas and experiences.

*At least, in how I use Foursquare. As with Twitter or any other platform, different groups and individuals may use the tools in different ways, resulting in different experiences.

Image from CNN.com

Last week, amongst all the frustration, euphoria, and confused wonder surrounding the events in Egypt, Malcolm Gladwell and others got mired in another discussion regarding the relative efficacy of social media in creating political change.

I don’t want to rehash the back and forth (some thoughtful opinions here, here, and here), except to say that I empathize with Gladwell’s frustration, I really do, but I think that his push-back isn’t particularly illuminating or necessary. It’s true that some of the over-emphasis on the role of social media runs the risk of overshadowing more considered analysis of the historical context and implications of what happened in Egypt. And I have to admit that seeing some of the twitter and foursquare jokes made me bristle with annoyance briefly (not because they were making light of the situation, but because they made light of the privilege we had, as media and communications professionals in the US, in being able to be cute about it all). Maybe its a function of my youthful optimism, but I think Gladwell does a disservice in validating these strawmen as something worth arguing against.

For me, claims that social media brought forth the revolution in Egypt exist so deep within a territory of techno-narcissism that isn’t really even worth refuting. And it’s not unexpected — these technologies are still relatively new. We’re still trying to sort out what they can do. If we look at early film and TV criticism, so much focused on the “how” over the “why” in the same way that Gladwell laments, and it didn’t prevent the “why” (and the “what”) from dominating the discourse as the novelty wore off.

But more importantly, I think his arguments about social media not being relevant to revolutions makes the same awkward assumption as the claims that facebook changed Egypt: that what’s compelling about what happened online has everything (or anything) to do with Egypt per se. Maybe because I think of them as dramatically important in totally different arenas, I don’t see the emphasis on one or the other in competition with one another for column pixels. Because something significant did happen on and to social media, but to think it was what twitter and Facebook did (or didn’t do) for Egypt is to have things backwards. Twitter didn’t happen to Egypt; Egypt happened to twitter and is may be transforming how we think about the role of social media in our lives and communities.

Annie Paul makes the provocative suggestion that the crucial difference between these networked-enabled revolutions and their predecessors is that they’re essentially “leaderless revolutions.” The idea of a leaderless revolution is interesting precisely because it means that participants were able to conceive of and enunciate themselves as a public without need for a central voice.

In my work on transnational television audiences (pdf), I’ve suggested that what is radical about fan communities online is not only their collectivity, but their visibility, their conspicuous publicness that has implications for how we think about cultural citizenship. There is something of that here too, that what is compelling about what happened online is not only how information was circulated, but visibility of that circulation.

At the risk of over-stating, could we consider the pivotal role of social media use (and not the technologies themselves) as something that may have not brought about a revolution, but accelerated the formation of a manner of public sphere surrounding it? That it catalyzed and amplified one of the critical steps towards any politicized public, which is the recognition and articulation of itself as such?

The impact I think isn’t about the events are they were happening, but how we document for posterity. That in tagging tweets with a hashtag like #jan25, we were not only ensuring that they were included in information that was circulating in the moment. We were also making a declaration about its relevance and inclusion into the historical document of that moment. In lock-step with the recognition of a public as such is the increasing collective self-awareness of the historical. What is potentially transformative is the ability to collectively participate in the process of historicization, to influence the terms and organizing criteria for inclusion into the historical discourse through meta-data. And that ability is dynamic, accretive, and fluid in ways and at a scale that simply wasn’t possible before. Not to mention that the first major tag that blew up was a date — a clear recognition of the historical moment.

What are the implications of this sort of networked politics? Or what my close friend and fellow cms-alum Lan Xuan Le called a “flashmob politics” (a phrase that nicely encapsulates both excitement for the potential power of collective energy and the fear of that it may ultimately be impotent in creating lasting change). How does the use of these technologies change the ways we negotiate — articulate, mark, possess, surveille, construct — space, information, mobility, history?

First, a couple of pieces that looks at “traditional media” concepts in light of new media practices and insights:

• Over at Harvard’s Berkman Center, there was a recent talk from Jure Leskovec that tracks quotations-as-memes use in news cycles. While I’m more of a qualitative gal myself, I do have to admit a certain amount of geeky quant envy whenever I hear “mathematical model.”
• C3 2009 white papers are going on official release over at the Convergence Culture Blog. First up is my esteemed colleague Sheila Seles discussing audience models and online video.
• Pat Hanlon, whom I’ve had the fortune of working with at Thinktopia, has an insightful and galvanizing post about smart product design and innovation as a vital part of branding.
• Speaking of design, basic web publishing is almost “traditional media” by now too, isn’t it? BBC breaks down its design overhaul in light of how digital publishing has changed, making it more social, accessible, and global.

• On the media+globalization front, there’s an interesting post by C. Custer that asks if Twitter use in China might not be more dangerous than liberating. I brought up a similar post in a post I wrote for C3 back in early 2008 about how the discourse on Chinese digital censorship has been too tech-focused. Pervasive and deep censorship operates at a much more profound level through social, economic, and political controls — blocking websites is merely a surface symptom.
• Jace Clayton has posted up excerpts from an interview with himself and Kelefah Sanneh from Bidoun Magazine all about noise music. As he puts it, it’s for anyone who’s ever wondered about “what that distortion pedal has to do with American race relations.”
• Race-relations related, Alex Williams at ReadWriteWeb reports that Google, Yahoo!, Apple, and Oracle refused to release the gender and ethnicity breakdowns of their employee base, declaring the information a “trade secret.” Either they’re afraid of bad press due to their white male make-up, or they’re stockpiling minority innovators and don’t want all the boys’ club tech companies to know that minorities and women can be good at innovation too.
• And on the less political, more wonderful side of technological innovation, a simply gorgeous sound visualization project from Jonas Friedemann Heuer.
  

• On the media consumption side, I’ve been marathoning Lost, hoping to catch up before the end of the season, since I’m pretty sure there’s no way to remain unspoiled for the finale. Plus, it’ll make Lost fans less annoying.
• I’ve also gotten hooked on Echobazaar from the folks over at FailBetterGames, a great little indie twitter-integrated social game with wonderfully evocative worldbuilding in a twisted-classic seedy steampunk London underworld, and infuriatingly addictive game-play mechanics. My only complaint is that there’s no way to send direct invites to my twitter followers so that I can recruit more compatriots for my shady dealings.
• Another great twitter-related amusement: New York Magazine book critic Sam Anderson is tweeting the best sentences he reads everyday. Awesome use of twitter as an on-the-fly curation tool.

I recently stumbled across a post on tomatonation.com regarding the controversy surrounding prominent mommy-blogger Shellie Ross’ decision to tweet about her son drowning. I had heard vaguely about it previously and dismissed it with a long-suffering “oh lord, the internets” eyeroll, but the tomatonation piece make me think about it a little more closely.

Putting aside the impossibility (yet sad inevitability) of judging someone else’s grief, it doesn’t make sense to demonize any one channel of communication as wholly unfit for one type of information and not others. Technologies are anything but innocent of social power, but they also don’t come with predetermined regulations of use. But if we look at Madison McGraw’s now infamous backlash against Shellie Ross, it becomes clear that much of vitriol comes out of a sudden conviction that tweeting — that online activities — encroaches on the real life duties of motherhood.

In other words, the backlash is symptomatic of our contemporary crisis between public and private life, yet another flare-up of a long-brewing technology-triggered moral panic like the ones that have accompanied the development of everything from motion pictures to railroads. Once private acts can now bind us with networked publics, and public events come ready-made with backchannels of private communication. Twitter, and other social media technologies, are generating increasingly contested contact zones between the ideological bravado of the public sphere and the deep intimacies of the domestic one, a digital borderlands where it is becoming harder and harder to differentiate one from the other. And it is becoming harder and harder to accurately anticipate what things are best kept to ourselves.

Moreover, Shellie Ross’ tweets became the focus of such vicious backlash not only because it transformed one of the most deeply domestic acts — child rearing — with a very public one, but also because we are culture for whom public displays of mourning, however abbreviated, remain significantly taboo. Even now. Or perhaps especially now, as technological advancements and wonderous gadgets reassure us of our progress, our ever-increasing forward momentum. And it is disconcerting to see these things as an outlet for something as gear-halting as simple grief. Mourning seems the ultimate recursive loop.

But consider: we humans make sense of our traumas and delights by calling them out, giving them the names and reasons needed in order to share their burdens with one another. In that light, perhaps twitter is an appropriate vehicle for grieving after all. Its limited space gives us the freedom to articulate our distress with whatever utterances we can salvage from the wreckage, however mundane or superficial, and verify that we continue to exist even as someone else does not. And its publicness may remind us, crucially, that though our lives have suddenly grown unimaginably smaller, we are still not yet entirely alone.

This was later cross-posted to the Convergence Culture Consortium blog

A funny thing happened on my way to check out the new Skittles homepage-as-social-media-experiment that’s been generating all sorts of attention over my twitter feed. I went to the homepage, and in my sleep deprived idiocy, entered today’s date in their terms of service agreement instead of my birthdate.
And since Skittles decided to take my word for it that I was born today, it deemed me underage and thus not the appropriate audience for it’s free-for-all social media aggregation scheme.

While it was indeed my own oversight that got me blocked from their page, the block speaks to the underlying problem with this stunt, which is that while the idea seems interesting, the execution and practical application might fall somewhat short of potential.

There is, of course, the technical side in which their terms didn’t manage to catch that I’d entered an impossible birth date. But beyond that, there are other practical issues, such as the overlarge navigation console pointed out by Stan Schroeder at Mashable. Moreover, as Christopher Carfi astutely observes in his blog, with no way to regulate the signal/noise ratio, the site runs the risk of people loosing interest because of the sheer volume of content.

However, what interests me is that my mistake this morning presents a dilemma that has yet to be discussed in the first flush of interest and excitement over Skittles.com’s new strategy. For all intents and purposes, in aggregating this content through their site, and thereby putting it under their terms of service, they are effectively taking content that is otherwise open to and created by the public — what is essentially public discourse — and branding it as their own, then resetting the parameters for access.

What in one way appears to be a handing over of control to the consumers to discuss and use the brand as they wish, is in another way an assertion of a measure of ownership. Skittles owns the site and set the regulations and protocols of interaction there, but the site is composed of content created totally outside of those regulations, content created through social relations that did not agree to the boundaries that Skittles requires for its site. In other words, by asserting their right to not only aggregate, but then redefine the conditions through which the content can be viewed, Skittles is suggesting that they have some claim over the content by virtue of it being about them.

Of course, though this echoes of the notion of “fan labor,” Skittles’ incursion is fairly minor . After all, your content is still available openly elsewhere, and the terms Skittles has imposed on it seem to only be limited to age to prevent minors from open access to potentially objectionable content, which is a perfectly understandable, if somewhat ironic, concern. But it makes you think: in talking about Spreadable media, we had always been so focused on instances of individuals and communities appropriating and claiming ownership of the content of corporations for their own ends, but media spread is by nature multi-directional, so we can only expect that it would work in the other way as well. Is it different when companies appropriate content created by individuals for their own purposes?

And while this stunt certainly generated the attention it was looking for, is any of that sustainable? It is merely a flash of PR hand-waving or does Skittles actually have an idea of how they want to begin facilitating relationships between both the brand and its audience and between audience members through the brand? And more importantly, is this really the right step towards the kind of relationships they will want to cultivate?