Matthew Allen

The first of several posts, each relating to a different unit of study at Curtin

Introduction

Over the past two years, students in Internet Studies, Curtin University studying the BA (Internet Communications) and related courses have been doing a lot of authentic assessment involving online activities. These assignments are  authentic in that they are ‘true’ to the content of their studies (that is, aligned with the outcomes), ‘ real’ within the likely fields of employment for graduates, and ‘natural’  for the the emerging dominance of knowledge networking in society. More on these three variations on authenticity in a moment.

Not all assessments fit this pattern (nor should they), but we have seen significant improvements in the motivation of students to complete and exceed the requirements of assignments, as well as a greater degree of creativity and expression suggesting deeper engagement with learning. It has also, we think, improved students’ attention to more scholarly traditional assignments (such as essays) because of the variety we engendered across all assignment tasks. (And, it should be noted: essays are authentic – to the lifeworld of academic which also remains important as well as work and elsewhere).

Much of what makes these assessment approaches authentic is that they are public. Here, then, are some examples which suggest some of the value of embracing public knowledge networking as the basis for assessment, at least in courses that involve digital media and communications but, most likely, in any course where students need to work with, communicate and reflect on knowledge and, in doing so, become producers, not just receivers.

Web Communications 101 (WEB101)

A major component of the assessment in this unit is a ‘web presence’. More than a website and blog, a web presence interlinks a central node with linked  services and nodes to expand the digital footprint of a user and established their online identity. The negotiation and communication of identity is central to this unit: it’s not just ‘how to blog’.

A very small number of examples of these web presences are:

• Michelle’s Curtin Uni Learning Portfolio
• Caja Design – Web 101 – Blog
• Smartworks Education
• Outback Gold – A Website For Those With Gold Fever
• Reflection (and Stuff )

Over 400 students have taken the unit: sorry, can’t show them all. In particular, look at how some students have made their web presence almost entirely ‘real’, with bare hints of what it connects to (their study); others have not. Some students, as evidenced by these presences, are now using them as part of other units of study too.

Note that students happily created their own informal, computer-mediated network spaces such as Web101 – Curtin University | Facebook; and staff teaching also use the web as it was intended – free and rapid information exchange – to support this unit:  Web101 Assignments FAQ.

A big part of the unit also involves the use of twitter: see the most recent  Twitter search; delicious is also used.

Please look at “I Tweet Therefore I am?” by Dr Tama Leaver, chief architect of the WEB101 learning experience.

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As I have argued elsewhere: the authenticity of these assessments is not a simple ‘flip’ from artificial academic work into ‘real’ web work. They are a negotiation and a compromise in which equally valid requirements from both knowledge networking and education are brought into a creative and productive tension. In the next instalment, I will provide some examples of what happens for students in the followup unit to WEB101.

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the first TEDx event in Perth – called TEDx Nedlands to locate it more precisely. Here’s the modestly great idea I was able to share, slightly edited for online presentation…

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We all need to care for the Internet

It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for your attention and interest in this event – my thanks to the organisers for being asked to participate! Feel free to tweet and blog during my brief talk – augment the reality of the event through whatever channels you desire. I’d almost feel offended if you were not multitasking at some stage. [Refer to the great TED talk by Renny Gleeson on anti-social phone behaviour that had preceded me]

When you research and analyse the Internet professionally, as I do, it can be quite daunting to be asked to come up with ‘a great idea that is worth spreading’. So many people around the world have incredibly good ideas about what to do with the Internet, and on the Internet that I am more likely to want to hear others’ ideas and not present my own. Indeed, the Internet so easily allows those good ideas to spread around that there is a very wide audience for them: an audience of which I am an enthusiastic member. If you have a great idea, it’s easier than ever to bring it to people’s attention, directly and without having to rely on the filtered, controlled and limited channels of traditional media and knowledge dissemination.

Of course TED is one of the best examples of this phenomenon – what a great idea it is to use the Internet to spread around great ideas! And, you see, in this event today not only the spreading of ideas – definitely modest in my case – but also the spreading of the very idea of TED. It’s a synergy between content and process, between information and meta-information. This synergy is what the Internet is all about. Data does double-duty: it is itself, and a reference to itself.

Today’s theme is “Opportunity. Resource. Endeavour”. While we can think of many ways to explore it, I am struck by how, in this one short phrase, we have a really clear statement about the power, potential and challenge of the Internet in our society today. The net is a profound opportunity – opening up new lines of communication and collaboration, new social, business and political possibilities for action and innovation. The net of course is also a tremendous resource – frustrating at times in its multiplicity and chaotic distribution – but wonderfully fulfilling as a source of information.

On these two points, I suspect there is nothing more to be said. But the third, Endeavour, is perhaps less obvious, more open to interpretation, question and debate. It is the inspiration for my presentation, because it reminds us of the direct, personal role that we must take. To have endeavour is to strive, to make something of those opportunities, with those resources. It is both reassuring and demanding all at once.

So, what is the modestly great idea I am sharing today, inspired by this call for endeavour? It’s simple. My idea is that, we all need to care for the Internet. We, meaning us…you and I, collectively and individually. We don’t need to be careful of the Internet – we do need to tend it, help it, nuture it and give expression through our caring for it of the importance it plays in our lives. To care for the Internet suggests we value it and express or enact that value by being present, mindful members of the Internet.

So what can we do to ‘care for’ the Internet? It’s easy: the injunction upon us all should be to contribute to, not just take from, the Internet. Let’s look at Wikipedia for an example.

Wikipedia is a great resource, multiplying and expanding constantly, but only as good as the contributions made by all of the people who create, edit and sustain its content. It has gaps, it has errors, it has disagreements. What should be done about it? Rather than constrain its use (the foolish advice, often passed out in our high schools and universities, ‘don’t use Wikipedia’), we should embrace it and value it, but only on the condition that we always seek to improve it. I looked yesterday at the Wikipedia entry for TED and thought – there’s a project! It needs a lot of work and could be so much richer and more informative.

Wikipedia, more than any other of the early online innovations from the first wave of the Internet in the last last century, models for us the idea that individuals, working without centralised control and direction, could nevertheless collaborate on a shared endeavour. It also models for us the fundamental basis of the Internet’s power to change the world: the effort invested by one individual is, because of the global reach of the Internet and the internetworking of content, capable of realising disproportionately high returns on that investment. Finally, Wikipedia shows how the Internet – especially when conceived as a read/write web, in which consuming and producing content are conjoined and equally available in the same techno-cognitive moment – reduces the cost to the individual contributor to the point where that investment is worth making.

Because Wikipedia empowers the individual work as part of a collective without the overhead costs of that collective, and leaves open to the individual the calculation of investment and return (in whatever currency matters, but most usually regard and reputation rather than cash), it best models the revolutionary rise of user-generated content which has marked the last five to ten years of the Internet in our lives. But, despite this empowerment of the individual, Wikipedia remains a collective enterprise: the individual is only able to participate because of everyone else who is doing the same thing and we can observe them at work, in the traces of activity on the Wikipedia pages. We see everyone, someone and ourselves among them all at once.

It is not just Wikipedia of course. I use it as an example. There are so many opportunities for contributing to the Internet that I can barely summarise them. We can write blogs, we can comment on blogs, we can promote blogs and share them. We can create social movements, networks, and communities as well as join them, shape them and make them work. There are countless special interest groups that exist and work to enrich their members’ lives through online forums and other interactive web environments. Literally thousands of emergent Web 2.0 sites exist whose sole purpose is to call out to you, the user, and say ‘hey, we’d love you to add something here’. You can originate content in many forms; you can recreate it through mashups. You can build the tools which others use to be creative. You can rate, rank, annotate, comment on and otherwise amplify that content. You can extend that content by sharing, forwarding, embedding and otherwise reusing it. You can curate that content by maintaining it, managing it, defending and interpreting it.

Originate; Recreate; Build; Amplify; Extend; Curate

Taking care of the Internet is not just about ‘adding content’ or streaming one’s life online. There is, to be frank, too much narcissistic sharing of the self, and not enough sharing of usable knowledge and information. Social media exchanges through Twitter and Facebook (to name the most important two at the moment) is important for connecting people’s lives, but we must be careful that the Internet is not reduced solely to this kind of exchange. I have long thought that the computer screens through which we connect with the Internet are also mirrors, reflecting back ourselves far more regularly than being the windows to the world we are often prompted to imagine. So caring for the Internet means: contributing content that is designed for others to benefit from rather than being designed for our own consumption. Social media needs to be ‘we’-media, not ‘me’-media.

Equally, however, we must care for the Internet by contributing to it so that its inherent potential for diverse voices, opinions, actions and engagements is not overridden by sophisticated conglomerate media producers and managers. There’s a lot to like about mass media – print, TV, radio and so on – but even as these forms are now delivered via the internet, mass media is not and must become the Internet. Caring for the Internet is about taking individual responsibility to ensure that the net remains common property, not the dominion of a few who can drown out much of what they find there: this responsibility is exercised by writing the Internet, producing it, in the way we desire as diverse individuals, and not just by consuming it. Otherwise we become the apparently passive, undifferentiated audience so desired by mass media [I say apparently because - of course - no audience is passive].

So, before I conclude today, let me ask of you three things you can do, sometime in the next month, to care for the Internet in this way: to contribute to it, to build it as the common, collective network of people and information which ensures it continues to offer resource and opportunity. Here are three things you should endeavour to do.

• Go to wikitravel.org. Find the page relating to Perth or, if you live somewhere further away from our glittering metropolis, your ‘home’ page. Make it better. Think about who will read this page, what they want to know and have at it. It’s easy. Even if you add one sentence, or correct one mistake, you have made a difference. Reflect on how your ‘home page’ might now be where you are or what you do, and just ‘my space’.
• Go to flickr. Before you do, have ready some great pictures of things you like, places that inspire you, events that move you. Share them. Give them away. Make a profile and a collection for yourself, and tag the photos so people can find them and use them.
• Go to hubpages.com. Read an article you need or want. Imagine you wrote it: wouldn’t you love to have a comment – detailed, useful and extending – added to your article? Go ahead and show respect for what you have just consumed by commenting.

I should add, I gain nothing at all by mentioning these three examples – there are many others you can use too! Perhaps more than anything you can take care of the Internet by finding the place, the people, the network where your contribution will make the most difference.

The Internet is, and can be sustained as, a commons: an information commons. Its resources are non-rival and cannot be consumed or spent; it is a commons which will not suffer from the traditional tragedy of the commons that Hardin outlined in 1968 in which the common availability of resources free for all will lead to the destruction of the very thing we value. But it is at risk nevertheless; the new tragedy, perhaps the farce, of the information commons will emerge when a lack of care and maintenance of its content begins to render it unusable as a commons.

The Farce of the Information Commons?

The sweeping all-consuming infoverse which now emerges from networking and communication may be non-rival, but it has thrown into sharp relief just how limited our resources are for engaging with it. Our will, our attention, our insight – all these resources are scarce and can only be used once at any time. But devoting a small amount of them online, to care for the Internet, is a necessary duty now.

In conclusion, let me rephrase this idea, that we all need to care for the Internet. What motivates people most of all to engage with ideas, knowledge, information, creativity is the thought that they are communicating with others, making and presenting themselves through what they say and to whom they say it. Caring for the Internet is, then, really about caring for those we rarely or never see and to whom we do not often or ever speak with: when we care for the Internet by contributing and curating online content we must always imagine the users, like us, looking online – we reach through the Internet to create connections between people based on the generosity of spirit with which we give freely of ourselves.

I commented recently on Twitter that Facebook = the new AOL and, not surprisingly, then discovered that many others (e.g. Kottke.org had already had my apparently novel insight! (This effect can either deflate one’s confidence or increase it – I am not the first, but I am as wise as the crowd – some examples from the crowd thanks to googlesearch). And, clearly, Facebook is trying to create an experience of online life / augmented reality / social and cognitive networking that stands apart from, or is potentially isolated from the ‘web’ within which Facebook exists – though it claims to be embedding itself into the web, of becoming a sort of underlying social networking of people, data and places throughout the web, I actually see the plan as one to enable its users to never leave the facebook environment except when prompted to do so by something in facebook, and then be returned to facebook. So, in this model of online behaviour, Facebook users would look out over the low walls of the garden and observe interesting things elsewhere in the jungle of the net; would at times scurry out into that jungle, but otherwise would remain safely inside the habitat of Facebook. As Siliconbeat reports, Google should be worried about this new wave of Facebook’s expansion of the way it will encompass online behaviours into a single space: communities that serve Facebook.

There’s a real sense of imperialism about Facebook. Sure we worry about the approach to privacy (see Raynes-Goldie, First Monday and the casual manner in which Facebook treats its users, by changing rules on them, making them feel (and indeed be) disconnected from their data bodies. But what worries me more, at this stage, is how Facebook is attempting to exploit more and more of the Internet for its marketing purposes (through the ‘like’ function, and by embedding internet affordances into its environment) and to claim that what matters in information acquisition and production is what is liked, or networked, between its users. (note too – Facebook acts as if everyone online is a Facebook user – a lot of them just don’t know it yet). So the challenge we face in responding to Facebook and its extraordinary (and network-effect growing) power is not how Facebook works in its own terms (after all, one can opt out, to some extent, if you don’t like it), but how it acquisitively eyes the Internet as the source of the raw informational material which it needs to sustain itself.

Google has an equally imperial view of information – witness the book digitisation issue, the constant acquisition of individual online behavioural data. What I find interesting to consider, though, is the difference between how these two behemoths of the online world approach their activities. Google achieves its empire (an empire of mind and data) by networking diverse nodes together – there is, really, no one place where Google ‘is’ and can be found / managed or located. Googlemaps tells us that Google is everyone and nowhere all at once. Note how Facebook is absolutely locatable – it’s all about what happens inside that Facebook environment (content brought into that space); Google is all about what happens everywhere else (but monitored by Google). And, while Google ‘profiles’ us when we sign up for its services (and even when we don’t), there is one key component of most online activities which we don’t find through Google – the public profile. Google is, truly, ‘faceless’ book – except that your face is very clear to google, if you choose to embrace its multitude of data services.

Facebook, then, strikes me as the inheritor of Yahoo!’s location in the web-world of the 2000s – a place for ‘us’ to form networks; the networks are a consequence of accepting what we give up when we use Facebook. Google is the service where the network is t he starting point: the network of data, the networking of us within the infoverse of the Internet. While Facebook might be viewed as a force for the enclosure of the net, as a company that seeks control (and market profitability) through a very explicit presence, an overlording curator of those within its domain, Google – equally potent – disperses itself throughout the Internet; invisibility, implicitness and distributed power work for this company.

Since both of them are searching, in the end, for revenue streams from advertising , Facebook and Google compete (though Facebook is far less pervasive, less successful in those terms). But the competition is not just for ‘who wins the most revenue’: like most deep struggles within capitalism, Facebook and Google are engaged in a kind of ideological struggle to define the Internet in ways which (in the minds of users) will constrain and shape the Internet’s future. So, in years to come, will the Internet be – largely – seen and used inside the low walls of Facebook’s crowded gardens? Or will it be itself the garden, and Google a kind of viral thread interwoven with its every use?

Beginning today (April 12) at the University of Adelaide, I will be presenting a ‘show and tell’ on Using Web 2.0 in your teaching: ideas, applications and affordances for enhanced educational outcomes.

I am going to look in detail at the following applications:

• xtimeline – great collaborative timeline tool
• listphile – lists and database tool
• slinkset – ‘open’ social news builder
• posterous – blogging flexibly
• mind42 – mindmapping collaboratively
• quizlet – flashcards are more than you think
• reviewbasics – co-annotation of documents
• springnote – wiki for personal and group use
• knol.google – publish your knowledge
• wiggio – great groupware

These and more are summarised in the handout for this presentation.

Formal abstract
The presentation focuses heavily on the way that a wide array of Web 2.0 / social media applications can be used in higher education, whether in distance or on-campus learning. The presentation will demonstrate the ‘top 10’ innovative applications which exemplify the different ways in which Web 2.0 can make a difference for university learning. Designed to provide practical, usable ideas, the presentation emphasises how the technologies which might be chosen must be understood in terms of their relationship to the content, assessment, outcomes of learning, and the particular context provided by students and the subjects they are studying. The presentation will involve detailed visual display of various applications. It moves beyond general discussion of blogs, wikis and social networking into consideration of unusual and valuable online services and sites which are not well known to educators.

Thanks to Elaine Tay, Tama Leaver and all the people at the 14+ universities who have helped organise this; thanks to the generous support of the ALTC

One of the most important reasons for being at blogworldexpo is to review and understand the view of social media from the perspective of those who make their living through and from social media. Here are reports, reviews and reflections on social media as the conference unfolds:

(First up, discussion panel on Social media success stories)
Alice.com: how to use social media to sell basic household good – toilet paper and so on?. Passion and energy of users. Would assert that one of the key dynamics here is to embed within the selling of products the everyday contexts of use, creating a deeper and richer sense of what ‘experience’ or ‘identity’ one is buying. New company, social media makes the brand visible, rapidly.

Comcast – a defacto case study of customer service online: “how do I get into the social media space?” – very common theme. Success, however, comes from: passion. Frank, guru of this, emphasises passion about customers and this can be unleashed through social media – get people “out there” discussing the brand. Passion is a key term in sessions today; there’s a deep evangelism here marking out social media as an open and entrepreneurial space, not well understood, not yet reduced to dispassionate rhythms marked by bureaucratic (efficiency oriented) systems. “I can know why people are calling Comcast [via twitter] before they even call us”. The “customer story” is what motivates improvements in the culture of consumer care; the numbers don’t speak, the ‘story’ does.

Oscar Mayer (Weinermobile – Hotdoggerblog.com)
Taking an old idea and developing it into the social media space; large company, management worried; making old brand relevant to new people; ‘continuing the journey on the hotdog highway with the weinermobile’. Social media as space which allows people to be honest about what they think [ link back to mommy bloggers as authentic]; emphasised in questions: authenticity matters – does the net encourage this?

Caminito Argentinian Steak house
Situation was – restaurant losing money badly; 80% of marketing spent on the 1 newspaper ad; nothing on social channels. Goal was to own first page of google for this particular small steakhouse. “for your average consumer, they don’t know who SEO works” – so, again, there is a degree of explicit manipulation of the market space?

Ideas and specific takeaways

• From business perspective, social media seems to be strongly linked to creating an identifiable individual consumer as a real person, not just as a demographic or number on a chart; (Comcast and the ‘story’ anecdote).
• Differentiation in the business view of social media: is it a public space or not? eg twitter v facebook; importance of public spaces for searching, also a sense of honesty in these spaces.
• People in business often emphasise how neat it is that things are popular virally, rather than paid direct advertising. There’s a strong ‘this is so much cheaper, freer’ line which is a close parallel of the opensource and other aspects of the net as cultural form.
• Importance of recognising conversations about brands happen all the time, marketing is about getting into those conversations even if they are bad. “Humanise the brand”
• Large companies are afraid of social media; internal dynamics from corporate marketing – control of the message.

Conclusion

Reviewing several conversations and sessions over the past two days, one of the main issues that emerges is the difference between media-as-information and media-as-marketing channel. Many of the speakers and attendees don’t differentiate between ‘the media’ as a general social phenomenon and ‘marketing’ that can be conducted through the media. Thus, social media, as business sees it, is simple a vast new array of marketing opportunities; there is no concern or issue with the degree to which a consumerisation of the Internet might or might not fit with its underlying qualities, nor with other desires or interests or politics. For this reason, I think, the ethical issues raised in one session, on mommyblogging were difficult to resolve, and not expected because traditional ‘media’ (marketing) read social media as undifferentiated from the entirely commercialised space, in the USA, of media generally. Ultimately, then, the challenge for the future of the development of social media is for people to navigate between conflicting expectations which are coded into the technologies we use; the challenge for the blogorg (the community of bloggers who identify as such) is to develop ethical practices which understand the ominvorous capacity of ‘the media’ (mostly marketing)

Reflections
The speakers articulate sophisticated theories of identity and interpersonal communications (for example, discussion of the value of personalising corp identity via real-people pictures on twitter); these are mobilised and deployed unselfconsciously, yet are often blind (at least explicitly) to other dimensions of the broad problem. Two examples from the SM session from day 1 of the conferences:

• failure to discuss the internal politics of PR v the rest of the company, even though the problem is identified (eg social media is about culture of business, especially large)
• how do you listen to the stories of people not using social media?

The critical issue of brands emerges from RJ’s Technorati keynote – “brands are in the blogosphere”; social media, from a marketing perspective, is all about the way brands get spoken, not just presented to society.

As I head into research for ALTC fellowship into Web 2.0, am starting to gather ideas for how to categorise (or analyse the categorisation of social media)

Periodic Table of Social Media, Liebling

Momblogging is a popular theme at blogworldexpo. Lots of sessions on this theme. Will cover some of the issues here, via blogging various sessions over next two days. To provide a sense of importance 30 million+ moms blog (I assume in the USA). Note the importance of media demographics – ‘moms’ as category; does it translate worldwide? does it matter if it doesn’t? US trends create global movements in similar countries. Perhaps I will get momblogging going in Australia?

This is a blog of a couple of sessions at the conference… scroll down for latest.

Some research appearing:
The radical act of ‘mommy blogging’: redefining motherhood through the blogosphere (lopez, 2009, NMS)

See also Works-in-progress: an analysis of Canadian mommyblogs (Heather Fleming, SFU)

Some important background / reflections:

marketing uses words like communication and community and conversation, too. Marketing has a direct, less analytical, yet curiously more realistic understanding of what these words mean in action, especially (in this context) as a way of harnessing and joining with women’s online activities. Consumerism as a purpose in life is also important.

First up, as I delve into the world of Momblogging:

Kate Thorp ‘Moms: The Ultimate influencers on the web’

Who is the Mommy Blogger (the archetype, not all)
“mostly female” [nice gender comment]; at home, younger children, living life online regularly, sharing of advice, emotions, reflections; content focus is on kids and mothering. BUT she’s ‘talking about brands’ and she has ‘control of the purse strings’ – eg 85% of car purchases determined by mother. Thorp reflects on marketing industry – there’s a long history of targetting women, but she asserts a change of state possible through social media, reaching more deeply into the home and focusing on women, rather than having to use a woman to reach the male decision maker. Especially younger women, with kids, heavily involved in online world – evidence shows much less TV viewing

Media shift – nice triptych; customer engagement (Social media); lead generation (direct marketing); identification (brand marketing).

“Experience trumps expertise” – this is the mantra for marketing people focusing on mothers; draws on deeper social trends away from expertise towards wisdom through prior experience [does this relate to truthiness?]; value of anonymity through social media for some kinds of information requests. value of personal connectivity – immediacy.

The mommy blogger is both a person and a marketing category: Thorp discusses in detail value of these types of people in generating brand awareness, spread of information. Emphasises, as a marketing lesson, the need for participants to speak freely. Then discusses traffic interaction – builds bloggers into a campaign, traffic to and from their blogs and the main marketing channel “it’s collaborative”. Critical to use them because they are the intermediaries of influence into other markets.

And to sum up this paper: nice question re race. Thorp responds that social media is not just white middle-class lifestyle. Is racial differentiation re-produced through different assumptions about gendered roles?

Session on Ethics of mommyblogging

One of the key issues that emerges, as if from nowhere, is the question of what disclosure is required for people who blog, and then take some kind of commission or product which they then endorse. It is a good example of how a moment occurs and then builds, almost without anyone realising it, to the point where mass or scale moves this apparently sub-cultural, unregulated moment into the mainstream and old rules need to be applied, creatively, to that moment.

(background: Soon, Bloggers Must Give Full Disclosure)

The discussion is relatively straightfoward at the panel; focuses on the practical issues relating to being an opinion-leading mommy blogger who has been approached, or is already, leading social media conversations for money, and not for love. (refer back to the professional blogger class that Technorati claims). The ethical questions articulated through a technological language – when is a tweet a sponsored tweet? everytime? whenever mentioned? or only when it is explicitly a sponsored tweet? ‘if I get paid to promote a game, what happens in 6 months time when I am not being paid but mention the game because it’s something I am doing?’

Panel is wrestling with the question of sincerity – that’s the power of mommyblogging, and yet it is what disappears when you start paying (perhaps). Good comment about needing to edit sincere posts which are wrong (eg someone endorsing a babyseat in a car by saying to use it in a wrong way). [The challenge here is that sincere is not equal to true; this is one of the fundamental issues of the Internet].

Also true that companies were fearful – if they didnt give in to ‘giving away’ products to bloggers, they worried that bad things would be said about them. An inversion – the blogging moms exercising a kind of exploitative power over the corporations [reflecting back the fundamentally unethical world of consumerism?]
But, as is later pointed out, companies regularly attempt to be nice to people, as consumers, so as to generate good word-of-mouth.

Bloggers saying – “i love the product, but have to say something negative so that people believe me” – response “if you are being honest, nothing else matters”.

Comment from floor – “mommyblogging is an industry” and earning a living is important and should happen, but ethics matters. This question, implicitly, turns it around – the ethics is actually a call for marketing industry to be ethical – to pay the damn money!.

Ads on momblogs – very small number of clickthroughs, but high clickthrough rate; comment from professional – design of blogs is bad, ads don’t work there. Bloggers need to basically professionalise their sites, get serious about metrics and analysis and updating.

Side notes:
There’s a deep sense of authenticity and presentation of the real self (as experienced or wanted) in momblogging at least as understood from the marketing perspective; social media is understood as a way of being who you are ‘for real’ but in the context of social connectivity online. An entirely different perspective to anything concerned with escaping from children or mothering; a focus on the real which, I think, is deeply connected to marketing which needs people to be real, so as to ensure the right sales pitch is made and their information is mobilised.

Social construction of gendered identities; moms are both characterised conservatively (they are the heart of community); and yet also progressively (they can be successful in business and at home). Moms, too, reconnect gender with family life, which is critical for marketing because of the money to be extracted from a whole family unit (which is why mommy bloggers can be men too). Do moms also speak truthfully, in the discursive sense? If so, why are they believed to be that way moreso than men?

Part of the story here is that mombloggers are a special kind of consumer, an ‘active consumer’ perhaps, who has opinions and knowledge, wants to share, performs their identity through the agency of consumerism – not buying but being the consumer. It’s not unlike the active audience research in TV studies.

The ethical question is most interesting; the industry wants people to be brand- and product-promoters in their everyday lives – so the challenge is that mommy bloggers are constructed as people who do this for free, anyway, authentically, and yet… this isn’t enough – advertisers want to control and manage this via paid endorsements.

I notice that sincerity, authenticity (and by implication ‘grounded in real experience’) come to be very important; celebrity endorsement is less about ‘experience’ but ‘celebrity’ – though drawing on the fantasy that the celebrity uses the product; mommyblogger endorsement is the inverse – someone utterly like you, the customer, whose words are convincing precisely because, in a media-saturated world, they are not the media. So new media is a kind of not-media, as I have argued elsewhere, but in this case because it is anti-media. I note, too, that there is a deployment of the moral imperatives which are common at this conference – to speak honestly, to be sensible, to be normal – this is a grounded articulation of more complex ideals of an ethical life which perhaps are difficult to maintain without a deep sense of community with like-minded individuals.

Laura Fitton, @pistachio “how dare you not be awesome” (First keynote for blogworldexpo)

Fitton, takes the stage, “twitter turned her life inside out”, “little things to make the world better”, “when everyone gets it – 4 billion handsets – then some amazing things are going to happen”. Home-bound mom, blogging, twittering, playing, brought into her life “ideas..people…energy”; but it is not “about me”. What you personally can do – if you don’t do it – then you are cheating other people as well!

Awesome – a personal strategy, but it’s about sharing and inspiring others; creativity, personal commitment, ethics, quirkiness. Social media unleashes “awesome” because it aggregates that strength and passion.

Emphasises mentoring as a key aspect of social networking.

Describing superpowers: Fitton’s is ‘being lucky’ – demonstrates (Wiseman, Luck Factor) that luck can be managed, created based on intelligence, insight, optimism.

Unpredictability of twitter; ‘what technology is twitter disrupting?’ – face book, isolation, email… NOT interrupting lack of resources. Focusing now on twitter; twitter as ‘global sensing and reporting” system; asking for mathematical tools to analyse this datastream. Twitter kills the ‘influencer’ model of mass media; Fitton doesn’t see her role as influencer – it’s the message NOT the person. (refs various ‘unknowns’ who get to be important via msg – eg photo of plane in Hudson). Big media does NOT get it.

A key message “you are not alone” (links to her personal foundations in twitter?); astute insight – socialising is huge in business, twitter is about socialising .

Really key idea about social media: you have to connect with people, your link is not about ‘driving traffic’ to your site, nor narcissistic posting; it’s about opening a space for people to gain from your insights and so on.

Conclusion: “Influence WAS attracting attention to yourself”

great keynote

Side notes
Not surprisingly, different vibe from academic conference; more open to locating pedagogic stories within personal experience; but, there’s curious synergies – while the discourse is different, this keynote is self-ethnographic research, and the presentation communicates outcomes from that research, both as summations and openings for the future. It’s also damn more entertaining than most keynotes!

Keynote, both presentation and reaction, creates embodied performance of the passion and significance with which many people take to, and live through social media; there’s a nice edge to Fitton’s presentation – it’s about negotiating the potentials and actuals for individuality and ego which often have too much emphasis with the much greater impact that collective strong self-identification can bring: we can see Wellman’s networked individualism at work.

Theory in action: academics discuss the challenge of making people see that technology is not determining, but is interwoven in a kind of actor network way, both enabling and guiding, but always within social context. She mentions twitter and similar, but these are not divorced from social context; indeed twitter now stands in for a deep and sophisticated self-theory of social mediated networking – twitter is a language through which new forms of social relations are spoken or, at least, new ethics for progressive social life

The dichotomy between the influencer and the influential message approaches (she sees twitter as the second); I think there is a third component or a way of linking, since I am not sure that people are not still influential (partly through things other than twitter, but also through presence and reach). The power Fitton describes – eg getting donations from 1000s of followers – is a network power, a combination of the message, the followerers and the sender. This brings crowd-wisdom/action back into the mix.

“Twitter literacy” – excellent; it’s about an ethic of care, of the self and the environment. Literacy, online, is a more advanced version of netiquette which was always about respecting the applications and the network, not just the person. Once again, we have a deep sense from Fitton that ethical behaviour is both necessary and valuable; it is achieved/ managed by education within a social grouping not just within the self; ethics sustains environment

I sense a degree of faith (not unlike religiousity) in discussions of twitter, especially in a practical way – eg how do key twitter advocates convert / evangelise people in their companies to see how it can work – reminiscent of discussions I was involved with late 1990s about the net. Perhaps the question to ask is: what will disrupt Twitter?