We are a deeply social species and we engage in “social grooming” all the time, i.e. acts that have no particular informational importance but are about connecting, forming, displaying and strengthening bonds, affirming and challenging status, creating alliances, gossiping, exchanging tidbits about rhythms of life. I personally doubt that there is substantially more social grooming going on today, on average, compared to the pre-Internet era. The only difference is that the Internet makes it visible. What used to be spoken is now written and published potentially for the world to see. That’s it. There isn’t more or less of it. What has happened has resulted in the shuffling of the traditional understandings of private and the public, and as such, it has enormous consequences but it does not signal that we are dumbing down. We were always this dumb.

The full critique can be found here.

“Mumblespeak makes potentially interesting works unreadable, contributing to their esotericism. Good editing does not involve cutting material, but cutting chaff. I’d wager that the average scholarly book’s length could be reduced by 1/3 to 1/2 without removing any actual content. Such effort would do two things: first, it would reduce the size of books, making them more approachable, affordable, and legible to a broader readership. Second, it would incrementally reduce the costs of printing, since fewer pages costs less on a digital or an offset press.”

The comments to the post are also very worth-while.

(I’m planning on posting quotes and links more frequently, since Twitter is often too limited for this).

Wrapped kitteh.

With weeks of social isolation, and an increasing amount of repetitive strain injuries, last week was finally the time to hand in the New Media master thesis! After having the essential meetings and discussions with UvA professor R. Rogers (honestly, planning is still not my strongest point), I finally got some grip on the main topic of life-streams (such as fast-paced update and comment environments like Twitter or the Facebook News Feed). With an theoretical inquiry I looked into existing models of surveillance, and specifically how they are imposed, reinvented, or modified in the life-stream services. Eventually I coined the term ‘mixed surveillance’ to describe the popularization of tracking tools aimed at ‘the crowd’ while at the same time companies mine large amounts of personal data. Here, openness has thus become a commodity for both companies as well as individuals. The piece is titled as ‘Persistence in Life-streams: An Inquiry Into The Implications of Mixed Surveillance’.

I will publish my thesis on the blog once it’s graded and (when necessary) corrected. For the time being, here’s a tag cloud to get a general idea of the text:

Now what  could be the cultural implications of Spotify’s uprise? In the article ‘Spotify: All you can eat‘ (Dutch), Marc Brekelmans draws the line between Spotify’s proposition and ‘all-you-can-eat’ restaurants:

“The content library is vast – more than you’ll be able to consume – yet,  although the right ingredients, the quality is disappointing. The food lacks the refinement that characterizes a decent restaurant which is why the one leaves the venue with an unsatisfied feeling.”

I find Brekelmans’ metaphor of the all-you-can-eat restaurant is a poor one for numerous reasons. First of all, the wide variety of ingredients doesn’t mean the consumer will be have a taste of all what’s available, as a matter of fact: there is no tangible menu except for the featured artists in Spotify’s start-up screen. Exploration of tastes does merely exist through the exchange of dishes within communities (for example: Playlistify let’s the user ‘bake a playlist’), by search and through hyperlinks. There’s obviously a lot of content excluded from a single user.

Furthermore, I don’t believe that musical exploration, consisting of constantly selecting, discarding and reflecting on latest discoveries is much different compared to traditional media. Associating with bands or music and developing a certain taste has always been a qualitative trajectory in which one can only engage in through the critical ear. In my opinion, in this process the medium-specificity (having a record shop or a digital library) is not all that significant and merely a puristic argument.

In closing, cultural surplus is all but new with the introduction of Spotify, I think it’s also safe to say that the application won’t eliminate evaluation as a part of developing a personal taste. In my opinion, Brekelmans’ argument towards this surplus is one that applies to the music industry’s premise for over decades now.

• Why wasn’t there a proper overview of who would be participating in this debate? If anythings essential for being able to discuss it’s knowing your opposition and the positions of each participant.
• Deriving from that: Where did all the representatives go? I didn’t notice any politician or entertainment industry spokesman contributing to the debate, why bother to have a discussion with just consumers? (Of course, consumers plea FOR Net Neutrality).
• Why Twitter? It has so many inappropriate aspects in respect to a proper debate. Real dialogue is nearly impossible due to several factors: (1) asynchronous messaging (2) following behavior: every user’s timeline differs, unless everyone knows how to find the #downloaddebat timeline, and (3) moderation is undoable because of lack of orientation.

Also, why would it be a good idea to discuss by using limited amounts of words? Of course, aphorism could be considered a poetic format in which people could express themselves, but is it useful in a debate? I don’t want to sound as a nostalgist, but aren’t nuance and elaboration two key features that mainly come to their right in a traditional debate? Maybe by using the communication platform, the Consumentenbond thinks it’s okay to have debates through mere oneliners? Or maybe they just wanted to get an estimation of the opinions across Twitter? (Why entitling it a ‘debate’ then?). It leaves me wondering what the initial intentions were with the discussion, and why Twitter would be considered a suitable platform for it.

Not very suprisingly, the realm doesn’t depart much from the D&D conventions, which is nothing that you haven’t seen before. It’s got Halflings, Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Warforged and Drows (a fancy name for dark elves) to choose from, and offers the straight-forward class archetypes ranging from different spellcasters, melee and rogues (although mixing class skills is also allowed, as with Runes of Magic). You start off as the only of survivor of a shipwreck, from this point the usual questing and raiding starts.

What sets DDO apart from other MMO’s when it comes to gameplay is the direct control over a character. While the control scheme itself is quite similar to other third person games, it plays a lot more like a hack ‘n slash game in contrast to the static MMO’s in which you sequentially activate skills while standing still. In order to attack your foe, you got to have your target in your crosshair, and sweep your weapon with one mouse-click. This demands more of an active play, which also makes PvP’ing a more hectic experience. (The aiming mechanism is most welcome, but not all revolutionary, it’s been implemented earlier in e.g The Chronicles of Spellborn.)

Tragically enough, besides the controls it’s the common MMO stuff including the usual points and levelling systems. I’m seriously beginning to wonder if these games are being developed for people OTHER then those who gave up on World of Warcraft to look for something fresh (although probably they won’t find much satisfaction here). The world feels bland and stitched together by numberous dungeons (there are plenty of those), that all feel similarly generic. My biggest problem with DDO would be that besides questing, there’s no profound neccesity that people will actually interact with each other. Most likely, you’ll merely stumble upon other players in front of some of the harder dungeon for the sheer purpose of raiding.

Yet, I’m still waiting for an greater dynamic in which player skills and actions complement each other (and not just in the form of archetypes) and where gameplay isn’t split up in small instances that are deliberately isolated from the world as a whole. Warhammer Online already implemented scenario’s that were triggered when groups of players coincidently run into each other to participate in an instant quest. Ultimately, this group mechanic alone did not lead to a more balanced world in stead of a ego network, but it was a starting point.

The MMO genre, in my opinion, has been stuck in an long-lasting identity crisis of not being able to combine group dynamic and individual character-development. Why not ignore all of the artificial point systems and focus on gameplay, player interaction or, for instance, the design of possible hypernarratives that involve the worlds as a whole? And if the latter idea seems too big to implement, why not scale the whole project down and make it at least more comprehensively balanced? DDO in that way feels like an aged iteration that constantly raises the feeling of lack of relevance while playing.

For those who don’t know the concept: In BF1943 (which was re-released for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 online stores), you play as the United States Marine Corps (USMC) or as the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN). There’s only one gametype, conquest, in which you capture checkpoints (flags) and defend them with your team. The matches are held in one of three Pacific locales.

Now, the first and foremost aspect to take in consideration when discussing BF1943 is how much it simulates, or rather the historical accuracy. It must be said that the game doesn’t try hard on outlining the actual war between the two nations, there’s no political or diplomatical backdrop, no motivation, to introduce what you’re actually playing for. The loading screens are mostly filled with gameplay tips, instead of a clear description of the historical situations. Avoiding these burdensome topics raises a crucial question: does it do so for promoting war without noting the obscurities of WWII, or is there another possible consideration? I’ll come back to this question later.

The second aspect would be how much biased the game is. For instance, you could look at the team balancing. I would say that the game doesn’t accept much preference of one team over another. On what side you play is completely random, and the classes and strenghts are evenly balanced. Here, the simulation part is again mainly non-existent. Of course, the warcries and looks of the avatars are modelled to the two opposed nationalities, but this could be defended from a gamedesign standpoint; you need the opposed team to look different to keep the play effective. Sociologically, this is completely banal argumentation, and it reaches to the most basic objections about warfare. But maybe there’s some comfort in the final game aspect.

Thirtly, I would like to discuss the self critique in war-based shooters. As there’s a great array of ludic shooters like Timesplitters, Team Fortress, Battlefield Heroes, Duke Nukem, or even Quake, they all take the morbid subjects and transform them into a cultural products. As with Battlefield Heroes (a free-to-play spinoff of the original Battlefield iterations), the opposing teams are based upon the Nazi’s (National Army) versus the Brittish forces (Royal Army), presenting itself as a colourful parody instead of a gore warsimulator. I think that a large segment of today’s First Person Shooters (FPS’s), have a sound self-awareness when combining (real) violence with fantasy and gameplay conventions (exceptionally, this is relation is more skewed with i.e America’s Army).

Beyond these points, it’s probably a good thing to stay alert on how biased wargames are presented in modern times, and what the actual ‘play’ consists of. I also think there’s a great diversity in the depiction of conflictual events that can be attributed by different factors like consequence (as a moral tool), team balance or the overall depiction and semiotics of the game. In this perspective, there’s a wide grey area in which violence and play blend together in sometimes controverse or otherwise creative ways. After all, I think BF1943 in its core, is enough of a abstracted shooter to enjoy as a game, rather then one to argue the controversy of.

(Please don’t hestitate to start a discussion; I just wrote some quick thoughts down )

Over the years Twitter has gradually developed, meanwhile its practices have also changed drastically. The contemporary celebrities took their places, the early adopters started exploring the potentials while lobbying about it and ultimately the platform rapidly started to expand in terms of functionality. Although the range of features on the site stayed very loyal to its core functions, there has been a recent announcement [1] of a Twitter Labs for testing out third party add-ons, following the succesful formula of Facebook Prototypes and Gmail Labs.

But besides all the fuzz, when it comes down to core functionality, what does Twitter facilitate in terms of content? We could say Twitter still maintains to be a text-based application, or rather an narrative-based one. This might seem obvious, but it might not entirely logical if this will remain the case. Numberous multimedia applications gain popularity within the network; music [2], video [3] or photos [4] can all be easily broadcasted without having to type anything.

As the well-known mediacritic Andrew Keen blogs about Twitter, he’s generally optimistic [5] about the possibilities it could have for ‘his kind’, namely writers:

(..) An electronic network for messages of under 140 characters, is an ideal venue for writers to distribute their clever, superior words to the Twitmasses. It is a shop-window for talent, a dream platform to build an army of “followers” — readers who literally follow and sometimes even redistribute my words. Twitter is dramatically more efficacious than any blurb on any book jacket. It’s a beautifully speedy way for writers to market themselves in real time to actual or potential consumers of their books.

Of course, the tool itself is very much capable of generating attention (or for building new relations), as many contemporary writers have succesfully build a fanbase [6]. Still, in this case there is a lack of evidence of the relations between their ‘actual’ succes and Twitter exposure, as most probably only the big get bigger (following the Long Tail model). Also, it’s not all that clear if there’s a strong linkage between the celebrity’s fanbase and the quality of the updates, as this networking behaviour relies on multiple factors. With leaving the cleverness in linguistics (or the marketing benefits of this) outside of the discussion, there’s not much of a reason to believe the established writers own their ‘Twitter-succes’ to their updates only.

Thus, in a broader debate, the question raises: how much do users, or does the incentive of the Twitter-network, care about the quality of textual narratives? The process of automation (e.g the format for updating your location with the Twitterific client [7]) within the microblog service imply that there’s already some preference to easy-to-use templates, instead a ‘hand-made’ message. Of course, writers would tend to defend the field of narrating, but there’s much doubt if this will hold when the aphorism trend carries on like it does.

Therefore it’s not so much the question if the tendency of shortening messages and communication will occur, but rather how this will manifest in media use. In an extrapolation of the update-culture you could ask where the point of a constant stream of generated data will be reached, operating rather fully as a datamining-mechanism. This turn would inherently introduce a different state of communication as the sender takes on the role of the medium itself. In this picture, the development of efficient data transmission would impose different adjustments to our current communication-model. The question remains which side Twitter will endorse as the it’ll supposedly change its form towards the will of the indie developers while incorporating the Twitter Labs expansions.

Finally, multimedia usage within the Twittersphere could be seen as more engaging or even more communicative, as a picture says more than 1000 words, even in a 140-character messaging system. Maybe this subject requires some more attention in future writings.

• [1] Twitter confirms ‘labs’ implementation (http://thenextweb.com/2009/10/02/twitter-labs/)
• [2] Twisten.fm, sharing music with Twitter (http://twisten.fm/)
• [3] Twiddeo, sharing video with Twitter (http://beta.twiddeo.com/)
• [4] Twitpic, sharing pictures with Twitter (http://twitpic.com/)
• [5] Blogpost Andrew Keen, ‘Why I’m on Twitter’ (http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=556&doc_id=174507)
• [6] Writers on the WeFollow directory (http://wefollow.com/twitter/writer)
• [7] Wikipedia entry on the Twitterific client (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitterific)

Nowadays, many of the popular social network sites are advanced platforms that more or less evolved from simple community platforms or fora. Where Myspace, Friendster and The WELL (later the Dutch De Digitale Stad popped up as a similar landmark) took off during the 90′s, Facebook, Hyves and hybrids (Morgan Currie earlier elaborated on this subject) like Last.fm emerged. These latter cases did benefit from the post-bubble internet revival that was presented as Web 2.0. As the 2.0 philosophy was fundamentally always present in the social network configuration, the emphasis for the new branch of services is much more on the facilitation of vast networks of interconnectivity. In practice, this results in tools which enable users to ‘network’ more effectively. The systems’ algorithms, along with its databases, needed to be revised to give new users a kind of starting-point for this manifestation. This is made clear by the directed recommendation-systems that basically scans and compares the different user-profiles. However, as of today this often results in plain and predictive references that depend on singular data. By saying this I’d like to exclude the Last.fm ‘neighbours’-technique, as it focuses not on the personal data, but rather on the capturing over time that generates a more accurate listening-profile.

As the current network sites streamline this connectivity of nodes differently, there’s a devious (though popular) network in the uprise: Twitter. Often described as a ‘microblog tool’, I find this case to be evenly (or more) a networking tool, since it (according to the Wiktionary definition) somewhat facilititates “the act of meeting new people in a business or social context”. I use the word ‘somewhat’ because the software is never genuinely transparant on the interconnectivity of its users, and doesn’t recommend similar users as on the other network sites. The system could easily be critized for the usage threshold, since the many of the real successors seem to be already established celebrities or people who tend to work in marketing or networking-reliant sectors. There also are numberous of blogs and books dedicated to the subject of effective networking on Twitter, this tendency also underlines the difficulty of positioning and maintaining accounts properly. Then again, this does not in any way exclude other low-end usage from being capable within the network, though it does identify the system as not very accesible in terms of communication.

Another obstacle in this efficient way of networking is formed by the active mode the platform demands from its users. The user’s networking strategies (consisting of medium literacy) fully determine for the succes or lack of it, this entirely breaks with the passive profiling tradition that encompasses filling in profile endless webforms or by protocological input. On Twitter, profiling is much more inferior to the actual (140-character) microblogging it facilitates. In this sense, the user profile becomes less of a static ‘personal branding poster’, but rather a representation over time. No longer is the user’s profile fixed on just one conception, it could be stated the Twitter microblog is inherently positioning the users more as a organic – being able to adept or adjust thoughts over time in the form of updates.

This character of real-time (or real-life) streams of data causes new challanges in terms of the abilities for sustainable networks to develop. This is partially why the previously mentioned marketeers are so eagering to develop efficient networking-tools, as their business largely consists of consultancy and services. Sites like Mr. Tweet have already begun on programming toolsets, although they rely too on the old tradition of comparing biographical information instead of the actual messages. One of the current tools to plow through the information masses is by using Twitter’s search function. Although this search engine offers some advanced features, it again demands dito query input. One might impose that this is an effective way to find anyone regardless of the updating behaviour, but the fact is high-end users obviously dominate pushing more passive users below the surface.

Another option is to index your the followers of the people you already follow, which again can turn out to be a arbitrary task. This method again pushes the super-connectors forward, leaving the incidental encounters as the network’s structure remains more or less hidden.

In conclusion maybe Twitter could (or should) be seen as a more hybrid network, as it mainly connects users on the basis of their updating behaviour (leaving out the super-connectors) that leads to the unpredictable network dynamic. Ironically, the system doesn’t connect anyone to anything by itself and simply eludes the term ‘friends’ in the node-to-node relation in contrast to ‘old’ networking-sites, which makes it all more confusing for low-end users. In future research, the actual relations between the user’s productivity and the criteria for emerging interconnectivity should be outlined more clear, as well as an outline of the obstacles in the development of networking tools, as those would have to rely more on the language than on profiling in the case of Twitter.

From the day of birth of the Wikipedia project, the online encyclopedia has been a highly controversial case. The debates range from information accuracy (including the inquiry of the information-knowledge relation once again) to the pyramidic usermodel (often undermined as too free or too open) or elsewhere as a fierce debate on the contributions coming from businesses, or just from innocent bots.

Less is spoken of the site’s hyperlink culture (or hypertext race), in which in the ultimate goal is to ‘sew together’ articles. A process of more and more overlap occur regarding the different subjects. In the ambition of finding the overlaps, there´s not always the same kind of accuracy in semantically connecting the pages from a users point of view. As a study of the MIT shows, people browse more effectively when the linked pages share a logical semantic structure. The weaker hypertexts work as a obstacle for effective in this case.

Meanwhile, in the more mainstream tendencies of Wikipedia, hacks and mods are slowly taking place. Although the site’s priority has always been the outkeeping of hackers, the platform of ‘play’ is obviously a small island in the seas of information for numbers of reasons. Therefore, finding a mod of the encyclopedia came as a suprise. In the Wikipedia Game visitors instantly participate in a browsing-contest. The concept is simple: get to a given entry starting from a given page. Players for example are given the startpoint of the entry about Long Island, where the goal is the entry about Arkansas. The competition-page puts the Wikipedia-page in a frameset, and counts everyone’s score. The websurf competition is up for 200 seconds before the page finally refreshes with new keywords. The participant who uses the least clicks to get the ‘trail’ right scores. Competitors get to see the hypertextual route as each match ends.

As modest as the netgame presents itself, it also projects characteristics on the side of the information portal as well on the media usage. One could argue the user, while competing, gets more aware of its searching (in)capabilities or realizes the temptations of ‘hypertext distraction’.

In the same way, a highly similar game was developed by the MIT as a cognition study. In Wikispeedia people were confronted with the same game setup as in the Wikipedia Game. Only here the results would be measured to get insight in the (supposedly increasing) browsing capabilities of the individual. The project was an alternative take on the MIT’s Open Mind Common Sense Project.

The researchers of Wikispeedia state in their research paper, called Wikispeedia: An Online Game for Inferring Semantic Distances between Concepts:

“The initial getting-away and the final homing-in are much more predictable after seeing game data than before, and the idea is to use the information gain to guess where the homing-in phase, and thus the relevant part of a single game path, starts.” (West et al., 2009)

This quantative study would provide data to optimize the web in a more semantic and therefore meaningful way. (In respect to the MIT paper: the project goals were never to develop semantic frameworks for the Wikipedia system, but to get a greater understanding of human cognition in a hypertextual environment.)

Although the gathering of statistical user information could possibly contribute to a greater understanding of the common sense aspect of webbrowsing, the case of Wikipedia could as well be a heavily controversial case to build upon.

In the sense of getting from A to B, users could be assisted with a certain context-specific algoritm. However, maybe the results of the Wikispeedia project would only become of practical use if someone governs this hypertext fettishism. Therefore understanding of the cognition of webbrowsing is only useful when the system and its users are literate enough to give up the interest of information completeness to usability. As the information is structured as it is it’s maybe more fair to reverse the questions into: do Wikispeedia and The Wikipedia Game contribute to user literacy over Wikipedia? And in a broader perspective: what would be the consequences be if a information network like Wikipedia becomes focused mainly on the semantic research? Would information get ‘hidden’ as it’s only presented when its algoritms predict so? Most likely, the fields of semantic web-browsing with emphasizing the user-experience would clash with the stubborn dogma’s within of the (or any) web-based encyclopedia. The tensions in the editing have already exposed in the hypertextual warfront as we know it (in which completeness obviously wins over usability).

The final research paper would elaborate more on this semantic web in relation to the ideals of a web encyclopedia. In this comparison of interests, also a reflection upon the current situation of Wikipedia could be extracted. (I any case, this is not a disqualification of Wikispeedia project, rather it is a extrapolation of the projects ambitions upon the Wikipedia context.)