Pretty much anybody I meet I try to friend on Facebook. I’m friends with my dad, I’m friends with some kids I used to teach, my colleagues, my uni friends, school friends, some people I’ve only ever met once, and I’m sure I’m friends with some people I don’t actually like.
Let me quickly say this is not a post about how you should use Facebook. There are legitimate conversations to be had about how we should interact with each other online. But you miss the point if you debate things like how many friends you ‘should’ have on Facebook (what portion of your social graph you should friend). The internet is almost defined by the fact that we are able to use the tools that emerge in – often unexpected – ways that most suit us.
My point about who I friend on Facebook is that whilst I can still manage my image (I’ve never changed that profile photo of me in Africa because I think it makes me look rugged and adventurous but caring) I do have to be less hypocritical.
This is maybe only notable because I have been known to be sensitive to context. This is another way of saying – no, not that I’m hypocritical, that is too strong – that I’ve acted with one group of people or in one situation in a way that I might be embarrassed for other people, in another situation, to have observed. I, like Tony Blair, sometimes drop my aitches when I talk to taxi drivers. I’ve pretended to know what I’m talking about when discussing football. I haven’t quite done this, but I’ve exaggerated stories. But on Facebook the updates I post, the photos I share, are available to everyone. I am less and less able, and less and less inclined, to pretend to be a different kind of person to different groups of friends.
What’s my point? Barriers between contexts are breaking down as a result of social media. This has implications for everybody but particularly for anybody in the public eye, like politicians.
My generation (just, but definitely the one following) have grown up with our youth documented on Facebook. It’s a little bit as if, in preparation for standing for parliament or congress or President, we have already begun publishing a pretty-much-tell-all Dreams from My Father.
And my reading of how my generation are using Facebook is not that we are desperately conscious of this and so desperately inhibited as a result.
If, because of the new ways we are using the internet, we are living a bit more in Bentham’s Panopticon prison, then for the moment this is ok. It is a good thing. Critically, we are in a better situation than at other times when technologies have been used to enforce self-discipline and self policing, because this technology is democratic and decentralized. We are as much able to hold to account as we are held to account.
I think we’re entering a period when we all (politicians, but also companies and organizations) are going to have to get used to greater transparency, necessarily greater authenticity and I’d like to hope, as Bernie Hogan in a great lecture for the Oxford Internet Institute on iTunesU says, as a result greater liberty and tolerance.
Richard II diffuses the 1381 Peasants' Revolt at Smithfield
The tools that are (really only just) becoming available on the internet have the potential to place the interests of the many, probably for the first time in our history (since the early Medieval period, since…forever?) , on an equal footing with the special interests of the few.
One of the things that has made it difficult for the many people without power to be heard by the few with power is that the advantage of the many (the fact that they are many) is often negated because it is so difficult to capture and channel the Moment in which a desire for change occurs (i.e. to harness that visceral reaction of someone saying, “That’s enough, we have to do something”).
This Moment dissipates easily (and, moreover, the methods by which it has in the past been effectively captured are pretty crude; they lend themselves to extremism, violence etc.).
But with the tools that are becoming available online this Moment can not only be captured easily, but aggregated to an appropriate scale and accurately represented; people calling for change can take on the level of participation they want (the options for involvement are no longer just sign the petition or join the march); and action can quickly be taken that has an impact at the points of the political (small p) process that have the greatest impact.
Many of the barriers to doing something are being removed.
I don’t believe this is primarily a technology revolution. I think it is far more than this: a social revolution that is dramatically changing the way we (societies) organize ourselves.
I think the guys at Pear Analytics, as reported by the BBC here, are missing the point about Twitter.
The whole bloody point of this social web business is that there is zero cost to tweet or post or comment. So it is almost impossible to pass-along no value. Even if only my mum is interested that ‘I’m eating a sandwich’ then I have passed on a tiny bit of value at zero cost.
Moreover, it is exactly their categorization of this kind of message as ‘pointless babble’ that show they miss the point.
We are in an age of zero cost, peer to peer and mass communication. It is not the role of anybody to describe conversation as pointless babble. That’s an old media mindset. There aren’t gatekeepers any more. I’ll define what I think is pointless thank you very much.
It is very difficult to separately categorize ’self-promotion’ from ‘conversation’ or even ‘pointless babble’. Anybody in the business of self-promotion is increasingly required to engage in conversation.
And far more importantly: Aggregate the pointless babble of hundreds of thousands of people and it’s no longer pointless babble.
This is another from my work blog.
Does the music itself have value, or is monetization through gigs & merchandise enough?
Cont’d from Should music be free? Part 1 where Oli and Jacob discussed the musician Trent Reznor’s pioneering efforts online to make music pay. And Oli told Jacob he may have got the wrong end of the stick.
Oli: Why shouldn’t people pay to own or play a record (and yes, ‘pay’ here could include Spotify style ad-supported models, I mean it in a wide sense where musicians are being reimbursed for people listening to their recorded music)? I believe musicians should be able to monetize the actual music.
Some people are claiming that music should be free, that digital piracy is absolutely fine because Artists can and should make money out of just gigs and merchandise. This is a position held by a fair number of technology utopians but I believe is disconnected from how most people feel. Most people see value in music and are quite happy to buy a song from the artist. The current problems have been to do with cost and ease of purchase/use, not with the actual concept of paying for music.
Jacob: Completely agree that music has a value. I’d be cautious of one point: ‘musicians should be able to monetize [it]‘ – I’m not sure how far ’shoulds’ get you in economics…
Artists need to monetize music however they can. And I don’t think making money out of gigs and merchandise is a consolation prize for them.
I think you’re right that the Nine Inch Nails innovation is exactly what we need to see. I also agree that the concept of paying for music is probably accepted and that it’s issues around ease of purchase (and also ideas around ‘fair value’ – the feeling that we’ve been ripped off for so long) that are really the important ones.
Oli: Fair point on the sloppy usage of ’should’. What I intended to convey was that I believe people are actually okay with the concept of paying for recorded music and most people do not expect it to be free. If I am correct in this, then musicians should be in a position where they can charge money for it and people will want to pay for it. I didn’t intend ’should’ to convey that there was some ‘God-given’ right, or that there was any moral cause here.
I still disagree about gigs & merchandise. I think we may be going across purposes here because I’m not saying that these aren’t important revenue streams, I am merely rejecting the notion put forward by some people that all recorded music should be free and that gigs & merch are an entirely satisfactory alternative revenue stream.
This is hugely insulting to these individuals who have worked to produce the music, they are effectively being told that all that work is worthless and they must now do further work before they should be recompensed. I can’t understand how it could be argued making money off merchandise is okay, but making money off recorded music is not. If someone were to come along and start producing perfect replicas of the bands merchandise at a lower cost, stealing their customers, how does the band now make money? Purely through gigs? If we would protect the band and make producing these cheaper replicas illegal, why is this different from recorded music?
I currently cannot see the feasibility of any system where bands are not recompensed for recorded work. Ultimately I won’t be surprised if the mechanism for payment gets hidden (e.g. a subscription/tax is hidden somewhere, song plays are tracked and artists are then recompensed out of a pot based on this) but there has to be some system whereby artists get paid for recorded music.
Part 3 cont’d from Batmanghelidjh vs. Batty Boy
In Part 2 we looked at two versions of new types of schools. We can debate whether either of these models constitute good schooling. I think it’s exactly this debate (essentially on structural change in education; about how schools could be reorganised) that is good news for UK education. It’s because of this debate, and my hope for the fruits of it, that I believe we may even be about to see a Renaissance in UK education.
A Renaissance?!
Yes. Because the time – the next few years – in which this debate will occur, and its fruits grow (gosh this is a cheesy metaphor) has got some good things going for it:
1. A good place to start from
The foundations for a renaissance are pretty strong. Education today is reaping the benefits of the increased spending of the Blair years.
We have a teaching profession who have been feeling pretty good about themselves. They have a better status and more money than for sometime before ’97. And the profession has lots of new, young, motivated teachers (including recently some new maths teachers fresh from the banking sector).
But for some time we’ve been getting close to realistic limits on education spending. It isn’t clear that more money would make much more difference.
Well now we can’t spend any more and everybody knows it. The debate has to move.
It will be the new entrants, I think, the Young Turks, who will prove instrumental in achieving structural change.
2. Education 3.0
You can’t make a point about anything these days without referencing the social media-internet-tech revolution. And, yes that does have lots of practical and game-changing implications for the classroom.
But what I really mean builds on the Young Turks point above. Is it just me or do my generation look admiringly at the boot-straps, start-up attitude of Silicon Valley et al, in a way that maybe previous generations in Britain haven’t looked at entrepreneurialism before?
What is exciting about education at the moment, for sure, is the talk of hacking or disrupting it (the A VC blog talks a good talk on this). Education 3.0 (yes, that is my tongue slightly in my cheek for the silly name) is about taking that Silicon Valley attitude of entrepreneurial disruption into the school system – one of (the?) most conservative and outdated of institutions.
What if we looked at the fundamentals of education and found a more efficient way to make it work? Those in the education Renaissance are in a good position to do for education what Amazon did for retail or Apple for music.
Ps. There’s not a bad track record of disruption coming out of recessions.
3. Change is a-comin’
Amazingly the Tories may be talking some of the right ideas. They want a focus on outputs. They seem to want to break down the monolith – making it easier to start new schools.
And it looks pretty likely that they’ll be winning the next election.
Plus, we live in grassroots days. Bottom-up movements have been inspired by Obama and the power of the internet.
I think we could be about to see pressure for structural change in education coming effectively from both the top and the bottom.
………..
This is from my work blog
…the first post in an occasional series called ‘Head to Head’, in which Promise employees publish email conversations they are having on topical issues. The first debate comes from Oli and Jacob, who worked together out of our Dubai office in 2008, building Promise’s largest and longest running online community to date.
On their days off in Dubai they would debate all things interesting about the impact of the new era of mushrooming diversity, globalization and mediated communication – particularly in relation to the geeky world of the web.
Jacob thinks Oli is an unfailing cynic, hyper-critical of anything that smells like a fad or a bandwagon. Oli thinks Jacob is way too optimistic and doesn’t want to hear him talk about ‘web 3.0’ or Twitter ever again.
They were arguing so much that Jacob was sent to our Washington, DC office. These informal posts are cut and pasted pretty much directly from their continuing email conversations…
Oli kicked off the debate with a link about Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails releasing an iPhone App and generally being pretty innovative online: building communities and pioneering ‘a new, fan-centered business model that radically breaks with the practices of the struggling music industry’.
Jacob: The way to make money as an artist is to build a massively engaged community online. Monetize through concerts, (+ merchandising I suppose). Love it. I like his point about starting where the fans are. Starting from the point that we expect a lot of that stuff to be free now. I like it as another way to monetize eyeballs without relying on advertising. The attention economy is not dead.
Oli: Yeah although I’m cautious you may have gotten the wrong end of the stick. Reznor doesn’t believe music should be free but he’s being pragmatic in a world where you are often competing against free. He‘s done a lot of innovative stuff selling his records.
His collaborative album with Saul Williams was released as a free MP3 or for $5 you could get it in a variety of higher quality formats including lossless. Ghosts I-IV was available as a partial free download, a complete free stream as well as several paid editions at various price points. At the top end was a limited edition $300 CD/Vinyl/Blu-Ray deluxe pack with footage, original multi-track audio files, signed photography book etc. So he is doing what he can to actually retain the value in the music but unlike the record companies he’s starting from the premise that you need to show people the value in the product, not just demand that there is value in it.
A lot of things work well for him because he’s an established artist, but I like the fact that unlike the cynical Radiohead gimmick etc. he is actually looking into new business models that other artists could replicate (e.g. the Saul Williams case).
Jacob: Absolutely. Not saying music should free. Monetizing gigs and merchandise is still monetizing the music. As you and he say it’s about being pragmatic and starting from where people are now (in terms of their attitude to music consumption), rather than moaning that people aren’t where you want them to be. Paul Carr in No use crying over spilt ink is on a similar theme in relation to newspapers.
I think the new business model is the most interesting point. It’s a different kind of community to what we do. But, you’re right – he knows how to engage people. The point of his new business model is to convert that engagement into revenue.
TBC shortly…
Part 2 cont’d from What can UK schools learn from torture in Iraq
The Guardian compared two versions of new types of schools in an article in April: the work going on at Camila Batmanghelidjh’s Kids Company with Ray Lewis’ Young Leaders’ Academy.
Batmanghelidjh’s business card reads “Love is all it takes” and the success of her school, she says, comes from her staff having “an absolute memory of how it feels to be a child.”
The kids at Ray Lewis’ school line up for military drill every morning and the Guardian journalist records him shouting at them, “You a batty boy?…I don’t see any rhythm in this room. You move like poonani!”
When I posted this article to Facebook a friend of mine replied, “I read that article too. I thought they were both a bit weird to be honest…”
Yeah. That’s a fair point. (Read the article.)
But at least here are some ideas for new models that mainstream schools could adopt. And what’s interesting about some aspects of these models is that they don’t have to cost any more than what we currently spend. Last I checked lining up kids and shouting at them was free.
Part 1
Education needs to change but we’ve got no money.
It’s pretty much consensus that isn’t it?
The money bit: of course, we all know we’re in austerity times.
The education bit: well, whether it’s low levels of reading and writing or high levels of bad behaviour, too many failing schools or not enough good teachers, most people agree that there’s things that are not right with our school system.
What we need, say a number of high profile educationistas, is structural change.
Structural change in education is:
- Change that doesn’t reverse every time the government’s focus shifts elsewhere.
- Change that has a real, lasting impact on young people.
- Change that isn’t just about the inputs.
- Change that doesn’t require the constant pumping in of ever increasing amounts of cash.
I think that means that we need to focus on schools themselves.
………..
We know that the environment in which stuff happens matters.
The Stanford prison experiment, dusted off for the world again during the Iraq torture trials, brings this gruesomely to light.
And the environment definitely matters in the case of education. The school building, but more importantly the school’s systems and structures – the way that teachers are organised and incentivised, the way that pupils are managed and tracked – all this stuff matters.
We have tried to tackle the school building bit of structural change with the shiny new academies we’ve been commissioning. But there’s not very many of them and it doesn’t look like we’re in an era of huge capital expenditure any more.
So how are we going to affect structural change?
For a start we may have to focus on actual structural change (the systems and the organisation in schools) rather than the structure of the school building.
I think we’re going to need to look at new models of how schools might do their job better. We need to look at new types of schools.
………..
I have had a lucky escape and narrowly avoided looking like a wally. An online magazine had expressed a tentative interest in me writing something on Zimbabwe for them and I’d pitched the title: ‘Why there won’t be a revolution any time soon’. You may have noted in my last postcard a certain wonderment at the alarmism churned out about the country given that business was then still booming. I had been forming a point of view that saw the crisis here rolling along indefinitely.
In my defence it might not have been so far off the mark. The western press have been shrill and this crisis has been going on for an awfully long seven and a half years. A hyperinflationary economy tends not to be close to meltdown when there’s food on the shelves and power still flows. Moreover, Zimbabweans usually anticipate a bit of political trouble around now, mid-winter. The government likes to nip in the bud any grumbling unrest caused by power diverted from homes to wheat production and a spike in the dollar, but things soon return to normality. And let’s not forget, because my consultancy job here (coming to an end in time for the start of autumn back home) gives me a good view of it, that the Harare Stock Exchange had been on an upward trend pretty consistently since January. In one day in June it jumped 50%.
Naturally then, it was a bit of a shock to get a call from my boss as I was away on a business trip in Mozambique saying, “Maybe you’d better take your time in returning”. Things had turned nasty. Power wasn’t flowing – at least there were several blackouts every day. The shelves were emptying. “Damn”, I thought, “There goes that article”.
The cause of all this was a Eureka moment from the old man Mugabe who’d come up with a sure fire way to halt inflation. He demanded that retailers charge less. Forget supply and demand. Forget the cost of your goods. Slash your prices. There’s a great rumour about the Price Commission (as sinister and Orwellian as they sound) turning up at a car dealer’s. They slashed the price for Isuzu twin cab trucks to 15 million Zim dollars and promptly bought up the lot of them. 15 million Zim dollars works out as about fifty quid a car!
Now back in Harare it does look like this time things can’t return to normality. Some businesses appear to have taken the attitude that if the old man is going to go down this route and force them to sell unprofitably, well, rather than duck and dive through as they have previous troubles, they’ll let their stock be cleaned out and shut up shop.
The result will be, and is already in the first industries to go, that supply chains collapse. As this happens it will become evident that price-cut-by-edict doesn’t work (oh, really?!) and that the only option left will be nationalisation. That indigenisation bill I dismissed in my last postcard? Maybe I am looking like a bit of a wally after all.
All this is not a revolution. But what it is is the crisis reaching a new stage. It is likely now, although I’m steering clear of predictions, that this is the beginning of the end. A period in which confidence won’t bounce back a little in the course of a general decline, but in which things will only get worse. It might be for six months or a year, but by the end of it Mugabe will have gone. The best case and probably likeliest scenario being a quiet shove from inside Zanu-PF (accompanied by assurances from the West via South Africa that he won’t end up in the International Criminal Court?).
When he does go the international community has an excuse to start lending the country money again and the inflow of dollars will stall hyperinflation. Whether the new leader, groomed and enriched in corruption, will have the courage to effect the kind of long term change required is quite another question, but, going by the form of the higher echelons of the party so far, sadly unlikely.
Still new in my job I was a mute number two beside my boss in the second row of the Rainbow Tourist Group’s annual general meeting. In row one sat Nasty Nick van Hoogstraten. Nasty Nick is notorious back home in Britain for conducting his business violently (with a grenade through a window) or allegedly violently (with hired hit men committing murder). He’d managed to get himself into a position, by stumping up a large amount of cash to underwrite a rights issue, in which he believed he was owed a portion of Rainbow Group shares that had found their way into the hands of a shady Jewish consortium who’d made their money in Romania.
With the votes attached to his remaining shares Nasty Nick attempted to block all but one of the motions proposed. He called the Jewish non-executive director an illegally elected carpet bagger. The representative holding the shares for the National Indigenisation Trust told Nasty Nick that a white man like him should jolly well pipe down and remember who’s in charge now (not, I think, implying the Jews). Nasty Nick’s chummy relationship with the old man Mugabe didn’t appear to carry any weight this time, because in an easily won proxy vote the government’s block of shares went with the Jewish director and the rest of the board and against van Hoogstraten. Nasty Nick vowed to see them all in court.
It begs the question quite what is going on in Zimbabwe when such corporate shenanigans generate such heat. I mean, I thought this was a country with no economy left.
It clearly isn’t. At a lunch a week before with some financial friends the announcement in the Herald, the propagandist government paper, that an ‘indigenisation’ bill was on its way caused a ripple of concern. But a ripple only, because talk of such a bill has come to nothing before. This time, though, word was that it had gone through parliament and was just awaiting the old man’s sign-off, or had got his sign-off and was just waiting to go through parliament…With no idea whether the Herald was on this occasion the voice of Zanu-PF, or exercising its well honed ability for utter fabrication, this bit of news was after all still a rumour. What ‘facts’ there were amounted to the probable requirement that all companies would have to be 51% indigenously owned. There was confusion over definitions. Whilst, as far as it could be fathomed at all, the bill was explicit in its use of the term ‘indigenous’, the word ‘local’ had also been bandied about. For the white Zimbabweans I was having lunch with, although not for Nasty Nick, this, of course, would make the world of difference. The point was made, not for the first time, that when in such cases the word indigenous is employed, what it really means is black. Historically shifting populations anywhere render the word indigenous pretty defunct.
A certain amount of satisfaction was evidently taken in accusing Mugabe’s men of racism, but the conversation quickly moved on to practicalities. Would ‘51% of companies’ end up being expanded to include trusts, what about property? One of my lunch companions, to avoid some previous piece of legislation or the threat of it, had established a company, as a ‘front’, which owned all his property. Would he need to make plans to install a dummy team to take over 51%?
What struck me over lunch then, and observing the Rainbow Group hoo-ha, was that among an awful lot of Zimbabweans the economic and political situation as written about in the west is regarded completely without dramatic sensation. Of course, I’m in the capital, and in the case of that lunchtime and that AGM my companions were Hararean money men – stock brokers and deal makers for whom the current bull market is reaping rewards. (The stock market is for many the preferred form of investment since saving cash is clearly crazy and for other assets, like property, you need US dollars and anyway will probably be outbid by an aid worker or expat.) But they were not all party men, nor callous profiteers (except maybe Nasty Nick), nor the kind of people who if the country was about to enter its self destructive apogee you’d expect to remain ignorant. Despite the economic situation and the indigenisation rumblings, business in Harare is not in a state of panic.
It remains to be seen if Nasty Nick will have his way with those Rainbow Tourist Group shares. But interesting, nonetheless, that in a country whose economy is reportedly on its knees there should be such an impassioned fuss over who owns a small portion of shares in one of its hotel chains.
