Mark Greenfield

Clay Shirky is one of my favorite commentators on the social and economic implications of the Internet.  His book “Here Comes Everybody” is a must read. He recently gave the keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York called “Information Overload is Filter Failure”.

Shirky’s take is that information overload has been around since Gutenberg invented the printing press.  What has changed with the Internet is when you filter for quality.  In traditional media, this filtering for quality is done by the publisher.  Whether it’s a printing press or a television tower, it costs a lot of money to get started and stay in operation. To stay profitable, a publisher needs to be responsible for filtering for quality.

With the Internet, we have entered what Shirky calls post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything has fallen through the floor and you don’t have to filter for quality before you publish. The filter for quality has moved way downstream – to the user. This has helped fuel the exponential growth of information on the web. Information overload is here to stay and not only are our tools to filter information inadequate, our social systems to handle both inbound and outbound information is broken as well.

As college web professionals, we need to focus on creating credible content that is easy easy to find.  As Peter Morville stated in “Ambient Findability” , findability is more important than usability.  You can’t use what you can’t find.

Here is the video of Clay Shirky’s keynote at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo:

Matthew Levy and Rachel Beanland did an excellent job of covering the Web 2.0 Expo on both Twitter and at their web site He Types She Talks. Mike wrote this great summary of Shirky’s speech and the implications for higher ed.  I’m planning on attending the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco in November. It should be quite a show.

Over the past month I have returned to Twitter. Previously I had been using Jaiku, mainly because of their channel feature. But with so many of my colleagues using Twitter, it was time to make the switch.

I have been amazed at the value Twitter has provided for me professionally. The one thing I didn’t expect was how it creates social capital and strengthens the relationships I have with my professional peers. I’ve learned more about people in a month of following them on Twitter than I have in years of following their blogs. Twitter really lets me see the human side of people that I don’t necessarily see from blogs and other social media.

I am now thinking about how Twitter might be used to augment our student blogging efforts. Our main goal with our student blogs is to give prospective students an authentic view of life at our university. These blogs work best when students identify with the bloggers at a personal level. Twitter can do this better than traditional blogs. So I’m thinking of asking our bloggers to use Twitter as well. Their tweets would have to be relevant for prospective students, but I see great potential.

One challenge is that not many high school students are using Twitter, but I expect that will change. In the meantime I can pull the RSS feed from Twitter directly on to the individual student blogs.

So what do you think? Is using Twitter to augment student blogs a good idea?

I had the opportunity today to return to the classroom and teach a graduate level Anthropology class on Culture Change. I was asked by the professor to get students to think about how this new technological communication might be altering the nature of social relationships, and the very essence of society itself.

The lecture was an abridged version of my “Born to Be Wired: Technology, Communication and the Millennial Generation” presentation. I didn’t need to spend as much time explaining emerging technology to a group of graduate students. Instead we looked more at overall implications of the communications revolution and the sociological changes.

Last week there was a great post on the Freakonomics blog asking Is Myspace Good for Society? Leading thinkers were asked “Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?” They had some interesting answers.

My favorite resource on the use and impact of social networking is Danah Boyd. Her thoughts were included in the Freakonomics post and I provided this link to this Discover Magazine video interview with her as well.

During the lecture we discussed the work of Marshall McLuhan. If you are not familiar with his work, you definitely need to check him out. He was way ahead of his time. I’ve often thought about what he would think about the Internet and Web 2.0.

I concluded my lecture by summing up my take on the best way to approach the use of communications technologies. I created a slide of the album cover of Radiohead’s OK Computer and quoted lyrics from the song “The Tourist”, which includes the line “hey man, slow down, slow down, idiot, slow down, slow down.” I think we need to carefully manage our time online, learn to slow down, and occasionally unplug – something easier said than done.

I’m sitting in my hotel room in Atlantic City finalizing the presentation I’m giving in the Admissions Track at the Middle States Regional Forum tomorrow. The title is “Connecting with Students: New Technologies” and it has two main themes. The first is that “it’s the end of the web as they know it” – that students use the web in a much different fashion than they do. The second theme is that traditional marketing and public relations is dead.

One of the articles I’ll reference is Fear and Loathing in Web 2.0 from Currents magazine. Not only is this a great article, but it’s one of my all-time favorite titles. (I had an interesting night with Hunter Thompson back in the day, but that’s a story for another time and place.) At the conclusion of the article is one of my favorite quotes – “the conversation is the message”.

I’m looking forward to returning to Atlantic City this summer to give the keynote speech at the 2008 eduWeb Conference. This is my first visit to Atlantic City and it is a great place for a summer conference. Hopefully I’ll see you there.

E-mail has been hijacked by the forces of evil. Spam and misuse have caused many people to declare e-mail bankruptcy, something that I may do in the near future. And now the millennial generation is here and they prefer to communicate through IM, text messaging and the communication tools built into social networks making e-mail almost irrelevant to students today. I know there is a problem when e-mail sent from the president at my university is automatically sent to my junk e-mail folder – by filters set up by the university.

While I’m not advocating that everyone stop using e-mail, I would recommend exploring other communications channels, especially those of you who work directly with students. The good news is that there are now numerous alternatives that can augment and even replace e-mail.

Further Reading

• Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead
• Report: Spam Accounts for 90-95% of All Email
• E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’
• The death of e-mail
• Email is broken
• E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 – The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 – Everyware
• Web Trend #8 – Virtual Reality
• Web Trend #7 – The Web as Platform
• Web Trend #6 – Syndication and the End of the Web Page Paradigm

This is the first in a series of posts on my top ten web trends. We will work our way from #10 down to #1.

Trend #10 is the end of print. The web has always provided many advantages over print including greater efficiency, quicker publishing cycles, wider availability, and substantial cost savings due to the elimination of print and distribution costs. That being said, most people continue to print longer web pages because of the difficulty of reading from a computer screen.

The tide is turning. E-reader technology has matured over the past few years. The Sony E-reader was introduced last year and helped revive interest in e-books. Recently Amazon unveiled the Kindle which adds internet connectivity to the equation. The cover story of the November 26, 2007 edition of Newsweek magazine is called “Books Aren’t Dead – They’re Just Going Digital”. Jeff Bezos states “Books are the last bastion of analog… Music and video have been digital for quite some time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early web. But long form reading really hasn’t.” Bezos hopes the Kindle will be the beginning of Book 2.0. This article provides an excellent overview of the issues and impact in digitizing books.

Time will tell if the Kindle will become the IPod of reading. I’m a voracious reader, a trait not shared by a growing segment of our population. The recently released NEA report “To Read or Not to Read” reaches a simple, alarming conclusion – that Americans area reading less and their reading proficiency is declining at alarming rates, especially among teens and young adults. Maybe the Kindle can reach this generation using technology that they understand and help reverse this trend.

Related Articles

• Amazon Sets eBook World Alight with Kindle – Finally, Time For Read/Write Books!
• Envisioning the Next Chapter in Electronic Books
• NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet
• Faculty Members Prefer Digitized Texts