Publics, Flow, Phatic, Tummeling and Out-groups - New Words You Need to Know to Understand the Web

Kevin Marks
Originally uploaded by O'Reilly Conferences

Last week at Web2expo I gave a 10-minute keynote on the new vocabulary needed to understand where the web is going - most of this comes from sociology and anthropology. If you've been following my blog, you'll recognise this inculdes ideas from my Twitter in Theory post, from the Flow Past Web, from one on Digital Publics and of course from the Tummler post. Here's the video:


And here's the presentation, which uses Prezi's mindmap-as-presentation software:

Mark Cuban's Big Lie

Mark Cuban assumes that Live Video - everyone forced to watch the same thing at once - is the goal. But Live TV is dead.
This is old media thinking writ large. People pay for products - Tivo, DVRs, iPods, TV series DVDs - that turn streams into files they can watch when they want to.
We've solved how to send video over the net many times already.

The rare cases where millions of people want to watch the same thing at once — Presidential Inaugurations or faux Gladiatorial contests like American Idol, the World Cup Final or the Superbowl — are great uses for broadcast TV or satellite, and lousy uses of the net. What works is watching the event with friends on IRC or Twitter or a social network, sharing comments. That's what you need to stream over the net with low latency.

Cuban is conveying the last gasp of the self-important TV broadcast mentality that dreams of intoning "here we are, live to the nation", and all we can do is listen. But we can all talk back in parallel now, and build our own narratives with our own publics. That's what the net is for. As Douglas Adams put it last century:

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this.

‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

Blogging's not dead, it's becoming like air

One thing I learned at Technorati is that one sure-fire way to get linked to by bloggers is to write an article about blogging. Sure enough, The Economist and Nick Carr have, with their 'death of the blogosphere' articles, garnered a fair bit of linkage.

Their curious obsession with the Technorati Top 100 is missing what is really happening. As JP points out, the old blogging crew are still around, they're just blogging less that those paid to do so a dozen times a day. Not because they are less interested or engaged, but because there are now many new ways to do what we used blogs for back then.

In 2001, if we wanted to share brief thoughts, we used a blog; to link to others’ posts, we used a blog. If we wanted a group discussion, we made a group blog.

With Technorati, and trackback and pingback, we built tools to follow cross-blog conversations, and learned that we are each others’ media. As I wrote in 2004:

The great thing about weblogs is when you discover someone. Someone who makes sense to you, or someone who surprises you with a viewpoint you hadn't thought of. Once you have found them you can subscribe to their feeds and see how they can keep inspiring or surprising you.
You can even start a blog, link to them, and join the conversation

A year later I reiterated:

By tracking people linking to me or mentioning my name, Technorati helps me in this distributed asynchronous conversation (thats how I found Mike and Dave's comments, after all). However, as I've said before, "I can read your thoughts, as long as you write them down first". In order to be in the conversation, you need to be writing and linking. Perforce, this means that those who write and link more, and are written about and linked to more, are those who most see the utility of it.

What has happened since is that the practices of blogging have become reified into mainstream usage. Through social networks and Twitter and Reader shared items and Flickr and HuffDuffer and all the other nicely-focused gesture spreading tools we have, the practice of blogging, of mediating the world for each other, has become part of the fabric of the net.
This may be the first blogpost I've written since August, but the many digital publics I'm part of have been flowing media and friendly gestures to and from me all the time.