Blogging UX Week - Steven Johnson Keynote (Monday)
Steven [Berlin] Johnson gave the week opening keynote, an in-depth look at the thing he got right, and things he got wrong, in his book Interface Culture.
He began by talking about the “attention economy,” the idea that the public will pay vivid attention to whatever is placed directly in front of it. Links, from the blogosphere or any other source, are votes in this economy. If something is voted up (or linked to) enough, it very much becomes the focus of the public eye and crowds out everything else related to it or in the same space.
One of the things that Steven believes he hit on was the idea of “metajournalism”: journalists filtering the headlines down through their own slant. But, sometimes that slant becomes a little too important, and readers, instead of getting “just the facts” end up only getting the facts that they want; they only listen to people that echo their own personal view. (There’s no real cross-pollination of ideas, just enforcement of beliefs).
Steven then touched on “Interface Ecosystems.” This is the mash-up; as Steven stated, “you’ve solved that problem, I point to that and solve this problem over here.” It’s the concept of “information as modules”: if you’ve already figured out one way to do it, why should I spend time figuring out another when I can just use yours? Steven cited the Flock browser as an example of this concept: it’s a rainforest ecosystem, where no energy is wasted. You’re browsing, you’re blogging, you’re tagging without a hitch.
Web 2.0 is when we “lost control of some of our pages, in a good way.” Pages, due to being mashed-up, commented on, tag, blogged, and rebutted, now change and adapt to the content around them; the concept of static HTML pages is slowly falling away. Steven believes this is the true interface, the place between medium and message where creativity and communication takes place.
Johnson next talked about the dangers of the “hive mind,” where people fall into almost a rut of ideas, changing things to their whim and, perhaps changing them too much. He cited Updike (’books are edges, the boundaries of experience’), and Laneer (’the hive mind is a cruel idiot’) to show that we might joining groups and, like sheep, blindly following along without any thought to what we’re actually doing or what consequences we face.
Johnson discussed the power of the “long tail.” The long tail gives rise to the “triumph of the niche”: if you have an out-of-the-way interest, odds are someone else will too; the long tail builds communities from disparate members. He cited the curling blog as an example of a long-tail, thanks-to-the-Internet community. Without the Net and its participatory nature, the people living on the long tail would never be able to connect, they’d remain isolated.
Do we live in a hitcentric world or a long-tail world? Steven argues we live in both. Sites like boing-boing will always dominate the Technorati blog rankings just because of their sheer size. Yet, the curling blog still lives on the tail, connecting people in ways that is just not possible with any other medium. Long-tail statistics still might not rival pure hits of the most popular sites, but the long-tail still thrives in spite of those numbers.
Steven discussed hypertext, which he believed to be the Internet’s greatest power. Indeed, hypertext has evolved from anchor tags in static HTML pages to a whole different interface: richly linked blogs and user-powered tagging sites like del.icio.us show us the true power of hypertext as a medium for connection and communication. Except, of course, for YouTube, which provides the usual: a looming exception to an Internet rule.
Steven warned against falling victim to the making your life online “the daily me,” a life where we “only listen to people with our values.” This trend, siloing oneself into a life of one side of an issue destroys the heart of communication: there is no dialogue between sides of an issue. We need that dialogue desparately so that we can evolve as a society.
Steven talked about the great battle between mass personalization versus spam. Spam is the loudest noise, the most disruptive signal to effective communication on the Inernet. Using a discussion from his blog as an example, Steven showed us how disruptive spam could be: Steven posted (opinion), a reader responded (rebuttal), and WHAM! porn spam (disruptive noise). The battle between effective communication and useless noise is waged daily across the Inernet.
Finally, Steven talked about an inherent power of the Inernet: its flexibility as a medium. TV is inflexible: you can see only what is programmed for you to see; that’s it. The Internet is a “shape-shifting” medium: we can make it whatever we want to be. Yes, spammers might intrude every now and then, but we can ultimately adapt the Internet to turn down their noise and turn up the conversation, the communication, and the connections.
Edit: D’oh! Missed this page of notes. Here they are.
Johnson talked next about the Internet’s power of serendipity: you can always discover something you weren’t looking for (like with the random article link on the wikipedia main page.
He next discussed the bottom-up structure of cities, which parallels the bottom-up nature of the long-tail of the web. There’s a vampire meet-up group on meet-up: that’s the power of the long tail. “Before the web, if you were a vampire it was very difficult to meet another vampire.”
The web (and web 2.0) now lets us leave very visible bookmarks: are favorites are on display, especially on sites like everyone’s favorite collaboration news site, digg.
Johnson summed up the interface culture, now led by companies like Google, MySpace, and YouTube, and the bloggers as a group living under the phrase, “Let’s make it easier…”
