The next miracle (v11.1): Owen Youngman

Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Medill / Northwestern

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Tag Archives: Facebook

So Twitter ‘will endure’?

(Adapted from a post to the internal discussion board for my winter 2010 Medill course, “How 21st Century Media Work”)

“I’m convinced Twitter is here to stay,” David Carr writes in Sunday’s New York Times. “And I’m not alone.”

I’m thinking he’s probably right, and for the same reason: “the real value of the service is listening to a collective voice.”

It didn’t start that way for me any more than it did for Carr. It was July 16, 2007, when the Tribune’s Brad Moore told me about a new text-messaging service that RedEye had started to play with. He was reporting to me as its general manager then, and his folks were doing their best to stay on top of communication trends that its twentysomething readers were starting to embrace.

As it happened, I wouldn’t even join Facebook till August of that year, and FriendFeed, Fark, and Digg were even further in the future. Anyway, I signed up, though I didn’t get around to “tweeting” for another month. And it wasn’t until 2008, when the interns that I’d hired to build the Tribune’s social media profile started to show how Facebook + Twitter + Digg = Pageviews, that it dawned on me that those 140-character messages might be a big deal. So I opened a second account — @YoungOwen, the one I’m still using today, since I have been unsuccessful in getting Twitter to untether my first one from my extinct Tribune mobile phone.

And sure enough, I’ve learned enough from tweeting and reading other people’s tweets to see that, like fax machines and filing cabinets, this service is something that’s not going away. As Carr observes, it has become part of the infrastructure; he quotes Clay Shirky: “Anything that is useful to both dissidents in Iran and Martha Stewart has a lot going for it.”

It goes (almost) without saying that the precise business model hasn’t quite emerged. But let me be the one millionth person to note that countless companies are piggybacking on it, mining the real-time “statusphere” or “Twitterstream” to keep track of their brands, promote themselves, or find potential customers. All of those uses are applicable to journalists and media companies as well as technologists and gossips.

It is a peculiar and arcane skill, tweeting something that might be of interest to people you don’t know (which can happen all the time with the right #hashtag). But since journalists need to do that nearly every day in their “real lives,” it seems also to be a useful one.

If you’re not on Twitter, you could do worse than to follow Carr (@carr2n) and the nine users he highlights. You might well wind up deciding to tweet what you learn.

Not dead yet, but for how much longer?

As I have mentioned here a couple of times, the students of the fall Interactive Innovation Project at Medill have been studying the past, assessing the present, and projecting the future of obituaries as a form of journalism and as a source of audience and revenue for publishers. Today on its Web site, obitresearch.com, the class released a white paper, “The State of the American Obituary,” that contains their findings.

They report that the central position that newspapers have held in communicating the news of Americans’ deaths is substantially threatened by changes in technology and audience behavior. Unlike other categories of aggregated listings, this is an area where newspapers today still retain a dominant market share.  In fact, Legacy.com Inc. – the Evanston-based aggregator of newspaper death notices that sponsored the research project, and where (disclosure) I am an independent board member – hosts death notices for 7 of every 10 Americans who die each year.

The class found that new user- and family-driven forms of remembering the dead, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace as well as standalone memorial sites and services, are attracting audience members who want not only to read about their friends and loved ones, but also to participate in their memorialization. While this began happening as soon as the first Web browsers appeared, the growth of social media, particularly among the Baby Boom generation, is causing an acceleration.

In preparing their report, the eight students who worked on this project conducted quantitative and qualitative surveys, reviewed scholarly and industry research, and conducted interviews with employees at newspapers nationwide. Based on their findings, they conclude with recommendations to media stakeholders on how to adapt to the many changes in the landscape of grieving, remembering and memorializing the dead.

You can download the report here. It was principally written and edited by Ashley Bates, Ian Monroe, and Ming Zhuang.  Contributing researchers were Jake Bressler, Alina Dain, Chris Deaton, Tiffany Glick, and Kate Goshorn.

This is your brain. This is your brain on Twitter.

My colleague Ellen Shearer posted a link to the Medill faculty listserv yesterday  about a recent academic study in Scotland with a headline-grabbing conclusion.  In fact, let me quote the headline from the Telegraph:

Facebook ‘enhances intelligence’ but Twitter ‘diminishes it’, claims psychologist

Dr. Tracy Alloway, from the University of Stirling in Scotland, did the study with 11- to 14-year-olds. It indicates that, more specifically,

Playing video war games and solving Sudoku may have the same effect as keeping up to date with Facebook . . . But text messaging, micro-blogging on Twitter and watching YouTube were all likely to weaken ”working memory.”

”On Twitter you receive an endless stream of information, but it’s also very succinct,” said Dr. Alloway. ”You don’t have to process that information. Your attention span is being reduced and you’re not engaging your brain and improving nerve connections.”

This matter of how the brain processes information is of great interest to many people. One of them is my former Tribune boss Jack Fuller, who in fact has devoted the last several years to this topic himself, particularly to the piece that explores how people absorb and understand news. Indeed, he has a book coming out next April from the University of Chicago, What Has Been Happening to News, that explores the topic in depth.

He allowed me to read it in typescript, and I won’t steal of any of its thunder now.  But more than two years ago, in a Tribune Perspective piece entitled “Reasoning With Feeling: Boosters of the Internet see it as a perfect forum for reasoned debate. But neuroscience tells us that emotions keep popping up,” he began to explore what he was learning.

Neuroscience came into its own at about the same time the Internet did. In the past couple decades, new techniques for peering into brain processes haveled to extraordinary advances in understanding the mind. These have profoundly refigured the picture that came down to us from philosophers and early generations of psychologists.

One area is particularly fascinating: The new model of the mind offers important but unsettling insights into why people respond to today’s media as they do.

The archived piece is worth a spin (though the parser that put it up on the Tribune archive site does a lousy job with word spacing every 80 characters or so). Essentially, Jack is exploring a different issue than the Scottish researcher: not the diminishment of intelligence, but the primacy of emotion “[w]hen the brain is challenged to process very difficult information – let’s say, multitasking amid an overload of information.”

Come the spring, you will want to read Jack’s book.  In the meantime, however, I guess I will feel good that I spend more time on Facebook than either Twitter or YouTube.

Though you could argue it might be a better demonstration of intelligence, diminishing or otherwise, to spend less time with both.