Sebastian has published a post recently, where he wraps us the recently emerging discussion about the dominance of “content silos built by a handful of big commercial players”. The ease of publication that has been built into systems like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Medium and the like, comes with a loss of control and ownership for the content contributors. With regard to publishing content, the analysis is profound, and I do concur with most of his statements and the ones of those referenced by him.
However: I think a crucial part is missing from the picture. Here are my two cents on the topic.
Writing on the web has changed its reference in recent years. While the excitement for a topic still seems to be the main driver, generally leading to original and informative content, we’ve seen various other writing techniques emerging that seem to increasingly interfere with that. “Curated content” is one fairly recent phenomenon: a piece of information is referenced with a notion of attitude – usually along the lines of agreement/appreciation, or disagreement (even despisement). The aspect of information (as external reference) is paired with an aspect of giving directions to readers.
On top of that: “Information” doesn’t necessarily have to refer to an aspect in the outside world any more, but can as well concern the inner constitution (or: mood) of a person writing about him/herself. Turning a publishing intent towards “a confession” presupposes the existence of an audience that is potentially interested in statements of an individual that is treating its own inner state as if it was accessible as a piece of external information.
That certainly isn’t a new thought, let alone one that would be attributable to Social Networks alone (linguistic theory had this as a topic for the better part of the 20th century). But the proper distinction between “expression”, “representation”, and “appeal” (Bühler, 1934) gains a lot of modern relevance when looked at in relation to Social Networks.
Social Networks have managed to create audiences, and helped people to manage and maintain online identities with all their complicated relevance structures. They help people exposing and externalizing their private activities (like eating, not liking the weather, or going to work) and turning them into media events with a news value.
The revolution through Social Media does not primarily lie in enabling people to create those messages easily, but in addressing an audience. Taken to the extreme, Social Media enables persons to hold their audience hostage. A commitment of “befriending” or “following” opens the stream of continuously flowing trivialities, and by “liking” or “favouriting” as the sole means of instant reply, an affirmative feedback is induced which amplifies and reinforces a relevance assumption of a sharing individual (let’s not even start talking about all the corporate gibberish that is clogging our newsfeed). “Contradiction” or “not liking” requires formulation expressis verbis, and is more often tied to discussion forum participation where anonymous comments, or pseudonym usage is possible. Until today, there is no “Dislike” functionality in Facebook.
Our writing tools are bound to get simpler, and technical knowledge to master content production gets more widespread. Catering to an audience is not. Instead, we see our newsfeed flooded with irrelevancies, and are presented with “null information bits” like “[individual] xyz likes [company] abc”.
So we need to ask ourselves: How can we break through the monopolization and monetization of audiences and identities?
One widely accepted way of handling this is to generate teasers for publication in Social Media, and to reference the source texts (images, whatever) hosted on one’s own platform.
The identity through which these teaser posts are handled is bound to the Social Network it appears in, and duplicating identical posts in various channels (manually or via tools like IFTTT) seems a valid means for addressing audiences in different channels.
As only the teaser text (ingress, abstract; whatever you want to call it) appears in Social Networks, the production and ownership of genuine, original content is retained, as the content is hosted and managed elsewhere.
Assembling feedback and comments in the same place where the content appears, and getting all the different vanity aspects sorted out that Social Networks are fueling so well and easily these days, seems to be a much bigger aspects, yet it is widely ignored.
Today, personal information is inextricably linked to the channels contents appear in. The Professor has a home page (or at least: contact information) on his/her University department’s web pages, employees have their contact information presented on their company’s website, members of other organizations have their respective entry in the organizations’ org chart. “No representation without membership”, it seems.
And here is where the problem lies: all of these beautiful Social Networks with their ease of assembling bits and pieces of content to form an ever-lasting stream of stuff are only staging an identity of yours with relation to this particular context.
As a result: Your LinkedIn/Xing identity most likely is different from the identity you have on Facebook. Your Twitter identity differs from the one you may have had some years ago on My Space (and how does that link up to your recent SoundCloud identity?). Plaxo, StudiVZ, Behance, anyone? Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Thumb, Foodspotting. Catmoji, Doximity, Grom Social, …
But once more, Social Networks come to the rescue.
“Identity aggregator services” like “About.me” are addressing this issue in particular: they allow users to create an umbrella page, featuring all sorts of profiles across all sorts of Social Networks.
While platforms like “Rebelmouse” are creating News feeds for one user across different Social Networks, About.me caters to the person and their multiple identities across the Social Web itself.
About.me’s page description text is summing up this challenge and the service promise as “About.me makes it easy for people to learn about you and find your content…”
The service’s main page bears nearly the same introductory copy text, but is leaving out a tiny bit: “Having an about.me page will make it easier for people to find and learn about you.”
It seems as if the reference structures have finally shifted from “your content” to “you”. “You” has become a content stream.
Does it come as a surprise that “about.me” is a hosted service in its free version, and that using it on a custom domain costs money? Does anybody wonder that I need to create an account (or sign in with FB/Twitter) to see what’s in (more precisely: who’s in) that service? Does it surprise you that a Google search for pages hosted on the about.me domain is only possible through the search string “site:http://about.me” ? And, when finally finding one of the pages hosted in there: isn’t it to be expected that a small promotional overlay shows up, inviting you to “Claim your free page”?
“You” and “Your content”. We need to find a solution to this design problem that doesn’t involve “throwing money at the problem”, or surrendering to the next platform.
Microformats enabling rich snippets could theoretically solve this particular problem, but I wouldn’t bet my life that Google would anytime soon let go of promoting their own proprietary identity silo named Google +.
Thank you for your comments. I fully agree that audience and identity – and their ownership – have to be an integral part of this debate. To me, your example of about.me illustrates how the prevailing logic leads to solving the silo problem by building another silo. Who would really want to build an “identity” on a VC-funded platform that may cease to exist at any point (as happens to most startups at some point).
A truly free (as in “open”, not “freemium”) solution would be an open source software like about.me to be run on any server (while it could still be offered as a hosted service as well, e.g. like WordPress). Obviously, the challenge remains that this kind of approach – while restoring openness on the web – may have a hard time to get traction with the masses.
While I don’t see an answer to that challenge (yet), I believe that there is great value in a discourse about deliberating the trinity of content, audience and identity. The current models of building identities, audiences and content at the mercy of commercial interests (monopolization/monetization, as you mentioned) just seem to contradict their very nature.
You have a bunch of very valid points here. Let me pick two for a start:
– If that “open source software like about.me” would use an established metadata format that stands a slight chance to be recognized and valued by search engines as relevant for people searches, it may at least connect with a few users out there. And occasionally spread from there.
– If it was available in a few common formats (and: yes. Me personally would appreciate a WordPress plugin a lot. Call me lazy! Let’s contact the folks from ghost.org. They may like it, too!), via GitHub or so, and if the supported platforms were selected carefully, it would be a valid step towards the right direction.
I can’t really tell whether “schema.org” is a force to be reckoned with, or yet another industry scam. If it is the former, it may be worth trying. If it is the latter, your particular approach is far more fruitful:
(1) creating genuine content [content!], (2) hosting it on a domain that is tied to your name [identity!], and (3) posting it to channels where a potential audience is loitering [audience!] seems to represent the best approach that we currently have.
Here’s why:
Ad 1: those crazy people who are searching for particular topics beyond the main stream would know how to craft a reasonable search string for finding contents beyond the beaten path.
Ad 2: If your name was a mark that mattered: domain matches still outperform any other keyword matches for your name (as of Nov. 2013, when I last checked SEOMoz’ survey results. Insights from there: For your particular name, your domain match comes first. For my name, my acquired SoMe stuff comes first. Bottom line: Who would have thought that my name is such a commodity. And: I need to regain control over my name online – possibly at the expense of my namesakes. For now).
Ad 3: “Producing genuine content – or just teasers (Ha!)” might make a difference for an audience that is likely to feel more and more bored to death by streamlined, marketing-infused messages that are just meant to “generate Reach” in mainstream Social Networks, but are not set out to “start a discourse” somewhere else.
The point is no longer: who’s right, and who’s wrong. The point is: are we ready to continue discussions although we may lack what VC-funded platforms are offering so easily: “an audience”?
Thanks for the nod, Sebastian. I’ll gladly drill into Felix’ article and his references to see the POSSE and PESOS approaches at work (I like these names, really!).
The tricky thing with the “spam” discussion (“Is an advertisement on Twitter for my own blog post considered spam by my fellow peers?”) is the underlying channel- or audience-related question: Does this content have a potential relevance for the audience reached here? As “relevance” is a quality attributed by an observer, not by an originator of a message, we have to leave that answer to those who decide to act or not act upon the message. Me personally, I was glad I’ve found your Tweet about the blog article of yours, Sebastian.
Formally spoken, the border between “importance”, “potential relevance”, and “spam” is blurry by nature. “Being considered important enough to directing interest” is what all communication aims at getting established. Any attempt to communicate is distracting by nature. Any communication effort is potential spam.
It occasionally helps me to remind myself that “communication is unlikely”, as Niklas Luhmann had put it already back in 1981. In essence, communication must be considered a reciprocal sequence of mutually stabilizing patterns. With that perspective, it inevitably gains a “temporal” aspect besides the “topical” and the “social” aspect.
The beauty with sociological approaches that recognize the procedural character of their objects of investigation is that they can provide much more precise descriptions of the underlying mechanics, without having to recur to potentially unknown or intransparent entities beyond their realm.
For our case at hand, I see the demand for conceptualizing the building blocks of “Identity”, “Content” and “Audience” as forms with a largely temporal aspect.
The term “form” in this connotation (opposed to the term “entity”, as contained in “identity”) is referring to George Spencer-Brown’s thoughts collected in his book “Laws of form”: characterized as a distinction with double reference: (1) to the inner state of a mark in an otherwise unmarked space (to gain a notion of stability), and (2) with a reference to a (yet) undetermined context (ensuring perpetual irritability). Changing between the sides of the distinction, and appending further distinctions is possible.
For an application of this setup, I will go and re-read Dirk Baecker’s “Studien zur nächsten Gesellschaft” over the weekend. That may help me understanding how such a structure can be conceptualized fruitfully for our topic.