My Digital Notebook

A view from the boundary

This is an interesting tale. I’ll just report the facts of the recent public fall out between Will Buckley of the Observer newspaper, and Jonathan Agnew, the BBC’s cricket correspondent.

Here we go.

Saturday 22 August:

Jonathan Agnew (affectionately known as Aggers) interviews Lilly Allen (the pop star) live on Test Match Special during the lunch break of the final Ashes test at the Oval. (Listen to the audio here)

Sunday 23 August:

An article is published in the Observer by Will Buckley (the Observer’s senior sports writer), describing the interview. The article is called When Aggers met Lily: an unrequited love affair for the middle-aged, and it included the following paragraphs:

“And, finally, it arrived but when it did so, and as is so often the case, Agnew/Allen turned out to be more about the interviewer than the interviewee as Aggers attempted to walk the dangerously thin line between benevolent uncle and desperate middle-aged man panting on the edge of the dance floor. He failed. “You weren’t even born then, oh dear” and “I’d have thought you’d be more of a one-day girl” and “I’m quite getting into your music” and “I’ve been out there and played a bit” and “it’s just destined to be” and “is this what you expected to find up here” and “we might go and see Warney later” – all suggesting that Aggers had positioned himself firmly on the pervy side of things.

“It had all, as with so many putative celebrity couplings, started with a tweet. Aggers was alone in a stand in Edgbaston. He was lost, but he was found. “We keep plugging the Twitter because it’s good fun,” said Aggers, who went on, not to put too fine a point on it, to admit that he has been stalking the young singer ever since the third Test. So it was that he knew Lily had bought a watch which … wait for it … “didn’t fit”. “It looked big,” was the Aggers verdict.”

Monday 24 August:

Jonathan Agnew writers on Twitter:

• I gave Will Buckley 24 hrs to aplogise for calling me a pervert, and he has declined.
• If you feel moved by this his boss is brian.oliver@observer.co.uk well, as you can imagine, I have taken being called a pervert quite badly.
• and you should hear how he described readers of theObserver to me……
• I will tell you how he described his readers (you) if he fails to print a total apology to me and my family on Sunday
• Don’t want him sacked…just an apology

[Five tweets over a 15 minute period, the last at 11:16 PM ]
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Meanwhile, more and more comments are left by readers of the Observer at the bottom of Buckley’s piece. Most of them attacked the writer for a ‘jealous’ and ‘nasty’ attack. You can read a long list of them here.

Tuesday 25 August:

The Observer receive more comments about the article throughout the morning and at around ten o’clock Lilly Allen publishes the following on her Twitter page:

• I rerally [sic] think this Will Buckley guy should apologise to @aggerscricket, he was nothing but kind and gentlemanly to me during our interview
• i dont know 1 person that agrees with The Observer on this one. Maybe this is Buckleys attempt at creating a name for himself as the demise
• of the Observer Monthlys(including Sport) are imminent. Sorry @aggerscricket , i should have left you all alone

[Three tweets over a 10 minute period]

At 2:48 p.m., the Telegraph publish the following article: Lily Allen defends Jonathan Agnew over ‘pervert’ slur

Meanwhile Jonathan Agnew writes on Twitter at around midday:

• “Apparently a statement from Buckley will be appearing soon in the comments under his “article””

At 3:15 pm Will Buckley publishes the following response in the comments’ section:

My, what a commotion. Before the tone becomes even more shrill I would like to apologise to Jonathan and his family for any offence caused by this article. It was intended to be a skit on Aggers and Tuffers and the cult of celebrity but has obviously not been received in this way. The joke missed. As they so often do in the blogosphere.

That said, it should perhaps be pointed out that at no stage did I describe Jonathan as a pervert. I am unlikely ever to be in a position to comment on Aggers’ sexual proclivities and even if I did find myself so placed I wouldn’t dream of doing so. The word I used was ‘pervy’ which to me is a Benny Hill style word rather than one to be taken too seriously.

There is also, it goes without saying, no foundation in my claim that Aggers is jealous of Tuffers. Who could be jealous of Tuffers? This was merely a piece of whimsy based on Jonathan being slightly pompous and huffy when Phil refused to become caught up in the excitement about Lily Allen coming to the TMS box and delivered his wonderful Denis Bergkamp line.

As I have written many times before, TMS is my favourite sports programme and I can’t wait for the team, tweets and all, to be broadcasting from South Africa.

Wednesday 26 August:

More comments followed Buckley’s apology overnight and the following morning Jonathan Agnew writes, once again on Twitter:

• “Just for record, am leaving it to the Obs Sports Ed to decide if that apology is sufficient. But what an eye-opener this has been for all to the power of new media. It is here and will change the way news is responded to, in particular. This showed what twitter can do. Thanks

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It’s an interesting story, with a few unlikely participants.

Firstly, it is interesting that a cricket commentator (see previous post) turned to social media to express his anger rather than a more traditional media channel, and, secondly, it is worth pointing out that Buckley blames  all of the ‘commotion’on the blogosphere (curiously he does not think his article has much to do with it) in his apology. He writes:

“The joke missed. As they so often do in the blogosphere.”

This naive – and rather dismissive – sentence betrays Buckley as someone who still hasn’t quite got it. And it also reminds me of a blog post written by Graham Holliday on his Noodlepie blog which is simply titled ‘Wankers’.

Nearly three years ago, he wrote:

“I came across this quote which perfectly sums up the clash of old and new mindsets – I’ve added links to make it a wee bit more understandable.

I do get the sense that the Guardian’s columnists are simply not used to this kind of medium, they are not used to getting feedback in public where they can’t just hit ‘delete’ to get rid of a pesky critic.

Suw …. likened such old school thinking to this:

It’s like them walking into a pub, making their pronouncements and then walking out. Later, they are shocked to find out that everyone is calling them a wanker.

Nowt new. I just love the last two sentences. Perfect.”

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image credit: speckled jim

image credit: Julie Berlin

For the sake of brevity

Twittering in just 140 characters is an art. The challenge is to be succinct, interesting and informative or funny in one go. The goal is to spark a thought or prompt a reaction.

Good Twittering is like good subbing: drawing out interesting quotes, writing provocative headlines and framing a thought or a perspective.

All told, I’d estimate that with each Tweet you have around a second to catch a person’s attention. And if you fail repeatedly, you’ll just end up being ignored.

And as Twitter has grown, a new language has sprung up alongside it: clever ways of passing a message on quickly and effectively.

Some of the best have even forged their own individual style; one example of which would be @jemimakiss who regularly mimics the odd phrasing of the “I Can Has Cheezburger” website.

The FAIL game

More irritatingly, however, have been the appearance of Twitter clichés. Any regular user will quickly notice them and they are becoming more frequent. I’ll sketch three which annoy me here:

Firstly, people have started to carve each news story up into one of two categories: fails or wins (who knew that analysis could be so simple?).

It’s a simple formula: find a news story that you like and plant the word WIN (and possibly an explanation mark) next to it; if you don’t like the story, all you have to do is replace WIN with FAIL. It’s a terrible habit, and one which is getting increasingly popular.

Another favourite is to prefix a link to an opinion article with the phrase “what s/he said” – a very effective construction that only becomes annoying when you see it fifteen times a day.

Finally, and this is the one which will one day prompt me to great violence – is people going “nom, nom, nom” at lunchtime.

These are ways of sidestepping the linguistic challenge of writing something intelligible and fresh in just 140 characters. They are signs of bad Twittering in just the same way that “economic climate” and the “green shoots of recovery” would be symptomatic of stale financial journalism.

With all the fuss about Twitter as a platform or a medium (or whatever the hell it is), we might as well start thinking about what makes a bad tweet. And what doesn’t.

image credit: It’s just a robin, me’nthedog

From all of the available evidence, you’d have to conclude that Twitter is a frightening little tool. Here’s an extract from an article written by Barbara Ellen in the Guardian at the end of March:

‘You can’t blame “yoof” for this one. People into Twitter are the same people who fell for MySpace, in turn the people who used to project their holiday snaps on to walls at dinner parties. Every generation throws them up – painful, self-promoting bores, uber-narcissists to the nth degree, so fascinated by their every dreary, pointless move they can’t believe we’re not.’

We should all commend Ms Ellen for having squeezed every drop of vitriol that she possesses into a single paragraph, but why, you might ask, did she bother? It’s not as if people have been sandpapering under her armpits or clattering saucepans on her head. No. There’s obviously something about Twitter which is much worse than that.

Twitter, for the benefit of those readers that have been living in a cave for the past year, is an online social networking tool – the latest achievement of web 2.0 that has already given us Flickr, My Space, Facebook and Spotify. It allows you to publish short updates of 140 characters or less, and enables you to reply to questions and link to stories. It’s a deceptively simple tool that was used to great effect by Barack Obama as part of his election strategy last year, and ever since hundreds of thousands of others have joined in his slipstream, causing its number of overall users to leap swiftly upwards week after week ever since.

The golden-age of the uber-narcissist

I’ve long been of the opinion that there are three attitudes that one can take to new technology. Firstly you can ignore it and hope that it goes away. The second, and by far the most British way, is to laugh at it, claim that it is inadequate, infantile and nothing better than an idle waste of your precious time. And thirdly, you can try to understand it, and – if you can – use it.

I’m not advocating Twitter for everyone, but I’ve seen enough of it to state that it is useful. You can use it as a news feed, as a forum for discussion, a medium for connecting with interesting people and a way of promoting your own material. Twitter is the outgoing, liberal sibling of Facebook. Your network is not merely confined to old school and university friends, but can be handpicked to suit whatever you want. In my case I’ve journalists, photographers, charity workers, politicians and comedians that I can listen to and learn from whenever I switch it on.

But for Ellen these are no redeeming qualities. For her Twitter is just another symptom of ‘the golden age of the uber-narcissist’. It’s another nail in the coffin of the private self; a further silly Internet tool with a ludicrous name that shamefully encourages us all to broadcast the minutiae of our lives. It’s the most annoying thing since Facebook, and if we don’t rise above it we’re all going to be rightfully damned forever to weekends spent worrying about our friend list, our follower count, and smiling wildly into the lenses of digital cameras, in desperate attempts to make it appear as if we are having a better time of life than we actually are.

Of course, there is more than a grain of truth in this. I fondly remember growing up in the 1990s, an age when holiday photos were entombed forevermore in leather albums on a bookshelf in the hall and not open for the world to see; when it was possible to lose touch with people you didn’t much like; and when you had to plead with your parents to get your girlfriend added to the ‘Friends and Family’ list, so that you could call her excitably at seven o’clock – on the dot.

It was a less excitable era, before the arrival of mobile communication, and when you arranged to meet a friend in the park with a football at half past one, you wouldn’t think for a moment that they wouldn’t be there. And if they weren’t you’d know to ring the police because they’d either been abducted on the High Street or their house had just burnt down.

These digital times

But society has changed. We’re now more open, more capricious; we’ve grown adept at broadcasting ourselves and cultivating our very own images. With nowhere left to go, capitalism has turned the self, the very last private frontier, into a commodity. Some people might not like this and others might not understand it, but it has happened none the less. The 1990s, with its squat, bottle-green telephones and finger dial faces seems a very distant place indeed.

The fate of humankind is such that every generation, in turn, is saddled with its very own revolution; and just as the ‘60s saw a cultural revolution, the noughties have experienced a digital equivalent. Little more than five years ago there was no such thing as Facebook, Skype, My Space, You Tube, Blip, Spotify or Twitter. Now their places in our world are so assured that they have entered our language as verbs: to facebook, to skype and to tweet.

Of the lot, Twitter is the most slippery: the most difficult to grasp, and the one with most potential. It’s particularly favoured by the media, and with newspapers suffering catastrophic declines in readership, journalists have been embracing Twitter in their thousands as an alternative medium. They’ve dubbed it a digital news wire, a forum for debate, a lead generator, a hotbed of citizen journalism, and faster than anything that ever existed before.

In November last year news of the Mumbai attacks was broken and tracked on Twitter; the iconic image of the US Airways aeroplane sprawled in the Hudson was published there just moments after its crash; a year before all of this, a prolific blogger named Robert Scoble smashed a digital boundary when he ‘live tweeted’ the birth of his son Milan online; and, just two months ago, Sky News appointed the world’s very first Twitter correspondent. What the future is going to look like, nobody knows.

It’s easy for people like Barbara Ellen to sneer, caricaturing Twitter as nothing more than a drab hangout of restless narcissists; but what are the real motivations behind the bile? Is it an underhand desire to suggest that their own lives are filled solely with high thoughts and meaningful actions? Could they be prompted by fear? Thinly veiled admissions that the media is no longer the exclusive fiefdom of the educated and powerful? Or is it just worth remembering that these were probably the very same people who were complaining about the introduction of email in the 1990s, the calculator a decade before that, and were probably carping away about the dangers of The Beatles in 1963.

Either way the world’s changing, 140 characters at a time.

Adding Up

Here’s some maths for a Friday morning:

• I’ve got a 246 ‘friends’ (their word) on Facebook. So far this year I’ve interacted with 14 of them. (5.69%)
• I follow 102 people on Twitter, of which, I’ve interacted with 28 in the last two months. That’s just above a quarter.

Now, let’s compute this with some social anthropology. In a study published in 1992, Professor Robin Dunbar, then of University College London, published an article in the Journal of Human Evolution that proposed a theory that came to be known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’.

Here’s how Wikipedia explains Dunbar’s Number:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150. (link to Wikipedia)

Dunbar’s Number was calculated by studying apes, their social networks, and by extrapolating up until he had a relative number for us humans. And if you apply this number of 150 to social media, then the results can be revealing.

Broadly put, our brains can only cope with mental mind mapping for 150 people. So, even if I did nothing else spend my time on Facebook, I still wouldn’t be able to properly follow the activities of all my 246 friends. If you go with Dunbar, it would be biologically impossible.

But if you look at the active numbers of people in either my Facebook or Twitter account, the numbers suddenly become more sensible. 28 on Twitter and just 14 on Facebook (none these, incidentally, overlap). These 42 people constitute my active social media network – a number that I, as a simple primate, can understand.

A bit more maths:

• I have 46 names on my telephone of people that I keep in contact with (I’ve just checked) by telephone or day to day contact and without using social media.
• As I demonstrated earlier I know about 42 people via social media and I, more or less, can understand what they are up to and where they fit in. (88)
• Add to this a collection of family members, office colleagues that I see on a daily basis and other casual contacts that might number around 50 more. (c.138)

Then you are getting something approaching 150. Accuse me of bad maths if you like (I was never any good at it anyway) – but I think that it serves as an interesting approximation.

So what about all the others? The people on Twitter that follow thousands? All the Facebookers with hundreds of friends? The Blip dj’s with scores of listeners? How do they keep up?

The answer is that they don’t. It’s impossible. We just can’t do it. Our brains are not sufficiently well wired to spool a constant stream of information from a vast number of people. But that’s not to say that people haven’t tried.

Jim Connolly and digital burn-out

Social media burn out is a real and dangerous possibility. The most notable example, I think, comes from a marketing specialist named Jim Connolly who went on a famous, high-octane tour of Twitter during the second half of 2008. Connolly’s online marketing strategy was to meet as many people as possible and propel his brand into infinity – and he did this through Twitter.

He followed everyone, and they followed him back. He was polite and useful and helpful and spent vast amounts of time responding to all of his followers’ questions. One quote from his blog notes that:

‘I was amazed to see that even during a fairly quiet period, I was investing an average of 2 and a half hours each day!’

A further quote was even more revealing:

‘The rest of my Twitter time was spent dealing with the hundreds of Direct Messages I get each day and filtering through the hundreds of people who follow me each day; to see from their profile whether or not to follow them back. This is an increasingly time consuming problem, as so many people are now doing that follow / unfollow trick, to attract auto follows and make it look like they have lots of followers.’

Most of the Direct Messages I get on Twitter are people asking me; ‘please share this link with your followers Jim’ or asking me to look at their blog / website and give them some tips. I’m also getting stacks of spam sent to me via Twitter’s Direct Message. This all takes time to review, answer or delete.’

Quite predictably it ended in burn-out. Admirably Connolly held his hands up before his 22,250 followers and declared one day that he couldn’t possibly do it any more. If only Professor Dunbar could have got hold of him, he might have pointed out that it was probably because he was more than 148 times over his golden limit.

Social Media or Broadcast Media?

Let’s not miss the point here. The large numbers of followers, friends, contacts and so on that are associated with social media are, in the main part, to do with advertising and not engagement. Simply put, we are all getting better at broadcasting our own lives. Stephen Fry is an excellent example of this and by most sensible measurements; he is no more  engaged in social media than the Queen is.

Fry is remarkably adept at broadcasting his life to the world – through his Twitter account or through his blog. And whilst he does answer individual Tweets and respond to direct messages, I suspect that any real interaction that he had with the public through social media has long since vanished.

There’s nothing at all wrong with how Fry uses social media, but don’t be mistaken: he uses it to broadcast and effectively manage his fan mail. He’s not a long-term component of an online conversation.

The Economist talks about this:

‘Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.’

I want to keep my social media activity useful. I realise that my Facebook account is already a lost cause, but I want to keep my Twittering to the point. To that end I don’t automatically follow everyone who follows me (something I used to do) – I prefer to keep it simple, meaningful and manageable.

Dunbar pointed out that many institutions had been organised around the number 150 – Neolithic villages and the maniples of the Roman Army were notable examples – and it’s good to get some historical perspective. Because, after all, we’re products of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and despite the fact that social media has arrived with a jolt in a few sharp years – we still firmly live in a world where it is impossible to have seven hundred friends.

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Image Credit: Stewf