When an artist considers a blank canvas, she dreams of painting something beautiful.
When a blogger looks at a blank WordPress form, or a YouTube user stares at his own image in a webcam, he dreams of describing his lunch.
What are the most popular works that arise from social media? Sex tapes, silly dances, essays on open source software and renditions of Pachelbel’s Canon on electric guitar. They’re sleight of hand or stupid pet tricks, not profound art.
Social media seems to discourage the profound. Why is that? Where is the art in blogging or Twitter or Facebook? Can we create works of deep meaning and lasting achievement in social media?
That’s a big fish to fry in forty minutes, but I’m hoping we can have a conversation about lasting human creation and the social web. I’ve been using the Northern Voice wiki to assemble some of my thoughts and take a shot at my thesis.
If you’re interested, I encourage you to read over what I’ve done so far, and edit, add, disagree, suggest and otherwise contribute in the comments here or over there on the wiki.
To summarize, the central question I’m struggling to answer is something like this: who is making the lasting, universal, profound works of art on the social web?
Early in my professional career, I did a lot of informational interviews. I did an internship program after university, so that required that I talk to a lot of potential employers. Those conversations focused my mind on what I did and did not want to do in my career.
In the past few years, I’ve been able to return the favour, and answer questions about the worlds of marketing, software and so forth. When possible, I try to make introductions to other folks the interviewer might find helpful. I guess I do an interview every month or so.
I’ve had enough experience with information interviews, then, to make some recommendations on how to complete a great one.
Prepare your questions in advance. This forces you to think about the meeting ahead of time, and demonstrates to the interviewee that you respect their time.
Make your questions as specific as possible. Specific answers are probably more useful than general ones–they’re also easier to answer. If you’re just kicking the tires on a career, then try to get your broad questions answered by other means (books, the web, industry events, and so forth).
Be friendly and personable. You want to put the other person at ease. If they’re relaxed, they’re likelier to speak frankly, which will prove invaluable in the long run.
Don’t ask for a job.
Don’t ask how much the interviewee makes. Again, the internet is your friend for estimating salary ranges.
Tell your story. You should listen more than you talk, but it’s important that the interviewee gets a sense of who you are.
Ask what the interviewee loves and hates about their job. These questions, I think, can be particularly illuminating.
At the end of the interview, always ask “is there somebody else you think I should talk to?” There probably is, and the wider you cast your net, the likelier you are to find the job that best suits you.
Send a thank-you card. An email is acceptable, but a card is extra classy.
As for being the interviewee, I think the most important thing to do is to be encouraging but honest. If you think the market for blimp pilots is pretty flat, for example, then say so. You’re doing the interviewer a disservice if you just tell them what they want to hear.
I was reminded to write up because my most recent informational interview experience was particularly kick ass (thanks to the interviewer, not me).
Jules recently posted about her web stats. They tell her, among many other things, that she still has one or more readers who are still on Windows 3.1 (originally released on March 18, 1992). I thought I’d check the stats for this site for the same very, very late adopter. No such luck–the oldest visitors that my Google Analytics account shows are on Windows 95 (two of them in the last month, as it happens).
Then I thought to check what percentage of Windows users are using Vista, and what fraction is still on Windows XP. Windows Vista was released a little over two years ago, on January 30, 2007. It has, as I’m sure you’re well aware, been plagued by criticism. I know many XP users who will skip Vista entirely, moving straight to Windows 7 (as of yet, it has no slicker name).
I checked this site, as well as a client’s site (they’re in the software industry). I compared Windows XP and Vista usage for January, 2008 and January, 2009. Here’s what I found:
For this site, as a percentage of all visitors on Windows:
XP
Vista
January, 2008
80%
15%
January, 2009
66%
31%
For a client site, as a percentage of all visitors on Windows:
XP
Vista
January, 2008
81%
13%
January, 2009
74%
21%
Those numbers don’t add up to 100% because there’s a fraction of users on Windows 2000, NT, CE, 98, 95, ME and so forth.
I checked a couple of other sites, and the numbers look more like my client’s site than my own. Vista usage floats around the 25% mark for January, 2009. What should the adoption rate look like? I really have no idea. Microsoft surely hoped that a majority of their users would be on Windows Vista by the time they released Windows 7.
Our latest phone book arrived today. I picked it up off the welcome mat, carried it through the house, out the back door and deposited it in the recycling bin. Pulling the plastic wrap off the thing, I noticed a little card affixed to the front of the book. It’s called the “ecoFinder”:
It’s a little card with advice on how to dispose of things like batteries, old phone books and the like. Apparently it’s also promoting a directory of “over 1,500 environmentally responsible businesses” that’s new to this year’s phone book. Or maybe the directory is just a pilot project in Quebec? I’m a little unclear, based on the media release. Hang on, here’s a hilarious release mentioning the directory in Victoria’s phone book, as well as the “noteworthy” news that “the residential and alphabetical business listings has been increased from 6 to 7 points”.
This is a classic case of greenwashing. Aware of their reputation as a big waster of paper, the Yellow Pages Group is trying to deflect attention toward their ham-handed efforts to ‘green’ their brand.
I was at a friend’s place last week. They lived in a big apartment complex, and the phone books were arrayed around the edges of the foyer like sand bags holding back a flood. If my own Yaletown apartment is any measure, dozens of those phone books end up in the recycling bin.
You Can’t Opt Out Yet
This is the first phone book we’d received at our current address. I decided I’d call the Yellow Pages Group and opt out of future phone books. Here’s the thing: you can’t.
It’s 2009, and you can’t choose not to receive the phone book. In July, 2007, Annie Marsolais, a Yellow Pages Group spokesperson said there were no plans to implement an opt-out program: “The print book is here to stay because there are advantages to the format.”
Less than two years later, the Yellow Pages Group has changed their tune. Ms. Marsolais recently said (and I’m translating with my dodgy French), “since certain people expressed a desire not to receive our directory anymore, in 2009 we’ll put in place a mechanism which will permit people to remove themselves from the list.”
It’s pretty shameful that it’s taken them until 2009 to apparently consider an opt-out process.
The Arguments For Phone Books are Dwindling
A couple of years ago, I remember wholeheartedly agreeing with Lee’s proposal that phone books should go from opt-out to opt-in. There’s some interesting debate in the comments, but just like newspapers, the writing’s on the wall. The yellow pages needs to transform itself, or die.
One of the more robust arguments is that phone books are a basic service that everybody, even those without internet access and cell phones, enjoys. That’s true, but it gets less convincing with each passing year. Consider that, in 2007, 73% of Canadians had internet access. That’s up from 57% in 2003. I suspect that we’ve nearly reached 80% in early 2009. At what point does the phone book simply have too few users?
To a lot of Canadians I know, the Yellow Pages is just a huge brick of junk mail that arrives all at once. I recognize that they use recycled materials to print the book, but there’s still a ridiculous amount of waste in the manufacturing, distributing and waste management of the books. The Yellow Pages Group is proud of the fact that they publish about 30 million directories. That’s pretty much one for every Canadian. I wonder how many of them never get opened.
How long do you think the Yellow Pages will last? 2012? 2020?
Some time last year, in some context, I’d mention the idea that Julie and I had to run a kind of TravelCamp in Vancouver. It would, I imagine, be in the mode of VinoCamp. That is, it would be an evening or day where enthusiastic travelers would come together to trade stories, tips and tricks about globetrotting. We’re thinking it would occur in Vancouver during the second half of 2009.
These events naturally attract the geeky and social media types, but I’d hope to corral some Normal Humans from the travel industry to participate as well.
The subject arose again today on Twitter, and a few people immediately expressed interest. So, as a kind of placeholder, I’ve set up a Google Group. It’s an announce-only group, and so will be very low-volume. You probably won’t receive more than six or eight messages from it. Once we have more details, I’ll set up a wiki or some other mechanism to solicit ideas and suggestions.
Today is the day of the (does it get a definite article?) Twestival, a kind of Twitter-powered meetup in over 175 cities around the world, in support of Charity: Water. It’s a terrific idea, and the best example yet of a non-profit organization or charity wielding new communications channels for good.
Here’s the blog for Vancouver’s Twestival. The event will be in the Opus Hotel in Yaletown, organized by Rebecca of Miss604 fame.. I’d thought about organizing one in Victoria (as that’s where I happen to be today), but ran out of bandwidth.
Sameer points to this effective ad for Charity:Water featuring the hotness that is Jennifer Connelly. Fetching celebrity + hot social media trend = victory.
For whatever reason, when I hear “Twestival”, I think of the prologue from Into the Woods.
When it comes to the outdoors, James is ridiculously capable. A couple of years ago he took me fishing up in Squamish. Well, he went fishing. I floundered around in a freezing river, waving a long graphite stick at the fish who mocked me with their toothy grins. That followed the time we went snorkeling for crabs.
Here’s James’s latest demonstration of woodsy prowess (caution: graphic photos of the inside of a small deer ahead). Boris, Travis and James, among others, discovered a fawn that had frozen to death in Boris’s parents’ backyard on Bowen Island:
In truth, I felt pretty unsure. ‘Doing something’ meant butchering the fawn. I was all for wild game but I didn’t know that everyone at the open house would be as open. And I didn’t have any hunting knives. I had excuses: I had never butchered a deer that wasn’t a fresh kill, I had never butchered a deer, never mind a fawn, in BC, within sight of downtown Vancouver and the birthplace of Greenpeace and all those moral vegetarians.
But, in the end, he went to town and they had a deer feast. I might have even temporarily suspended my no-red-meat habits for a taste of Bowen Island deer.
I was recently reading New Yorker magazine, and encountered a reference to a sub-genre of movies called “mumblecore”. From Wikipedia:
Mumblecore is an American independent film movement that arose in the early 2000s.It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital video cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors. Filmmakers in this genre include Lynn Shelton, Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, Aaron Katz, Joe Swanberg, Todd Rohal and Ry Russo-Young.
Based on box office revenue and some crowd-sourced review sites I checked, mumblecore has yet to find its 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of the list in Wikipedia, I’d only heard of one of the films, Baghead, and I hadn’t even seen that one.
Truth be told, these films sound like dreadful, film school wankery. But, then, I’d better watch one or two before I actually pass judgment. Have you seen Baghead? Or maybe Dance Party USA?
