For the past few days, I’ve been listening to Seth Godin’s Tribes on audiobook while I walk to and from work. It’s been a great book so far, and I’d highly recommend it to people who haven’t read it yet.
I just got to the part where he talks about the two approaches one can take in strengthening their tribe: tightening or broadening. In a nutshell, if you want to make your tribe more powerful, you can work to either tighten it, or broaden it. If you tighten, you strengthen the connections between the members of the tribe, or between the leader and the tribe membership. If you broaden, you bring new people into the tribe. It’s a bit of a quality vs. quantity battle.
Using this terminology though, we can easily extrapolate the concept to the social networks that help facilitate tribe building. Social Networks themselves can either be tools with which we tighten our personal networks, or broaden them. By looking at it this way, I think a lot of the “what is twitter for?” and other questions people have about social media can be answered with (relative) ease.
So, let’s look at each type individually:
First, a tightening network. Think Facebook, Dopplr, or Friendfeed. These tools don’t encourage you to meet new people, instead, they enable you to strengthen the connections you have with people you already know. These networks benefit from their closed nature by encouraging us to share information that many deem private (whether it be last night’s drunken photos or your vacation plans). You won’t meet new people on these networks, but you will get to know the people you do know, better.
In sharp contrast to tightening networks are broadening networks. These networks encourage you to connect with new people, not people you already know. The textbook case, of course, is Twitter, but brightkite and most content sharing sites (flickr, youtube, blip.fm, etc.) work in a similar way. For most twitter users, Twitter is a way to meet new people they don’t know in real life; people who share interests, are from the same city, or who are just really funny.
While this is all well and good from a theoretical perspective, the practical implications of understanding this categorization are huge. I’ve had a ton of friends tell me they don’t want to sign up for twitter because they don’t know anyone else using it. Or I’ve had friends who sign up, follow the four friends they already know who are on it, and then complain that it isn’t that interesting. Conversely, you often hear stories of people posting their embarrassing videos on YouTube to share them with a few friends, and then the video goes viral and their lives are ruined. Both of these represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what the tools are for.
Once you understand what the tools are for, using them becomes easy. You don’t need to sign up to twitter if all you plan on doing is talking to the friends you already have on facebook. And you shouldn’t expect to get a large following on networks which are designed to tighten your connections (unless you’re already famous).
Additionally, I think this is an important consideration for people who are building new online tools. Do you want people to use
What do you think? Is this a good way to think about the differences in social networks? Should we even bother thinking about it? What other classifications exist between networks?
While I maintain radio silence from all internet communication until the WWDC Keynote is posted, I thought I’d share a great iPhone app I discovered this weekend:
In a nutshell, DSLR Remote lets you control your Canon dSLR with your iPhone. It is as amazing as it sounds. Maybe more amazing.
While even the most basic features of this interest me (you can adjust shutter speed and aperature, ISO, etc), what makes this hands down worth the $9.99 is the built in timer (they call it an intervalometer to be fancy). With it, you can take photos at set intervals in order to create time lapse videos. I’ve been considering buying a device to let me do this for a long time, but standalone devices cost around $150. Pricey. So to get one for $10 is an amazing deal, and to have it built into a device that is always in my pocket is a bonus. I really want to get into more time-lapse stuff, and plan on doing some on my upcoming move across Canada, so this is perfect.
Now, of course there is a hitch. In order to work, you need to have your camera connected to your computer, and be running the (free) server software from on1. For me, this isn’t that big a deal since I have a laptop and keep it with me most of the time, and certainly could bring it anywhere I plan on taking time lapse videos. But it does restrict where you can set your camera up while using the software. To get around this, I might just invest in a really long USB cord. One advantage to this is that it allows you to save photos either directly to your computer, or to your computer and memory card. So when your done shooting, you don’t even need to upload. Easy peasy.
I should also mention that this set up seems to be quite finicky about your order of operations. If you plug the camera in, before turning on the server software (or maybe it’s vice versa…) it won’t work. You just need to play with it a bit.
To give a bit of a demo of how it works for time-lapse videos, here is a little video of me writing this blog post. One photo every 5 seconds, condensed to 10 seconds. Also note the awesome new threadless.com t-shirt I am wearing, just got it today.
I generally avoid buying apps on the App Store (most things end up being free sooner or later) but this is one I couldn’t pass up. If you have an iPhone (of any variety) and a Canon dSLR (so far it’s only compatable with Canon, Nikon soon I’m guessing), I can’t think of any reason you wouldn’t buy this app.
For as long as I can remember (probably late 2007), Getting Things Done apps have been the bane of my existence. I’ve tried them all; desktop apps like Evernote, Things, or Mail To Dos, web based services like Gmail Tasks, Action Method Online, mindmeto, and the old “try my best to remember” method. None of them worked for me.
The problem is that with almost all of the online systems, I practically needed a reminder to remember to add things to my list. Even using things like Evernote or Gmail Tasks from my iPhone, I never got in the habit of taking it out and typing in something I need to do. And to top that off, because I’ve gone back and forth on so many systems, I have piles of old to dos clogging up my accounts on all of these sites, so I never know which one to go to, and which things still need doing.
But, as if from the ashes of forgotten notes to self, a new option arises which will herald in a new era of me doing things.
Behold:
A notebook! I’ve been using a big bulky one on and off for awhile, and it’s been working pretty well, so I decided to go buy a small one which I can carry around with me. Now, I can jot stuff down wherever I go. Yes, I could do that on my iPhone, but I find the tactile nature of actually writing something helps in some bizarre way to make me want to do the things I put on the list. Also, and I bet there is scientific evidence for this, physically crossing something off a list is far more satisfying than tapping a checkbox with your mouse.
So this notebook comes from a cool company called Whitelines who I had never heard of but they seem to be creating really neat products (if you are into pads of paper). Apparently the lines don’t show up when scanned. I will have to do a test for that. I considered getting a moleskin, but let’s face it, those are a bit pretentious (sorry if you use one, but come on, you know it’s true).
How about you, what do you use to keep track of all the stuff you need to do?
Well, change your life might be a bit strong. But “5 TED Talks that could potentially make you think about stuff for a little while” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. That said, I think these are all very good and if you haven’t seen any of them yet (a few are pretty old, but classic) you should give them a view. They aren’t short, but all are worthwhile and have great insight into the world, our lives, and the future of both.
Since I know most people won’t read this post to the end, I’ll put a question at the top: What are your favorite TED talks or other presentations? Is it weird that I watch scientific presentations for fun?
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
I’m putting this one first because of all of them, I think this is the most important to watch from a day-to-day point of view. Also, it’s hilarious. If you only watch one of these, watch this one. But do watch the others too, because they are also great. If you consider yourself creative, are a university professor, or have children, you definitely need to watch it.
“My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
“I think you’d have to conclude that the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top.”
Dan Ariely asks Are we in control of our own decisions?
As a holder of a degree in Psychology, some of the examples he uses I had seen before, but the point is very important; phrasing of questions and design can make a huge difference in how we make decisions.
“If we understood our mental limitations in the same way we understand our physical limitations, we could design a better world.”
Seth Godin on the tribes we lead
Personally, I’m more of a Chris Brogan fan when it comes to social media gurus, but Chris hasn’t given a TED Talk (yet) so Seth will have to do.
“The internet was suppose to homogenize everyone by connecting us all. Instead, what it’s allowed are silos of interest.”
Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us
Where Seth talks about how technology is changing the way we interact with each other, Ray is foretelling the amazing transformation that will take place in how we interact with technology. I’ve been a huge fan of Ray Kurzweil since reading The Age of Spiritual Machines back in high school, and I think he offers a bold, yet well thought out, vision for the future. Even if only a quarter of the things he predicts come true, the future is going to be amazing.
“It’s not just an alien invasion of intelligent machines, we are going to merge with our technology”.
Aubrey de Grey says we can avoid aging
Speaking of the future… Aubrey de Grey says the worst pandemic in our world is aging, and we can cure it. As an added bonus, he has one of the best beards on the planet. Just because we’ve been dying of aging since the dawn of time, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
“Most people, when they hear I am predicting that a lot of people today are going to live to be 1000 or more, they think that I’m saying that we are going to develop therapies within the next few decades that will so thoroughly eliminate aging, that those therapies will let us live to be 1000 or more. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that the rate of improvement of those therapies will be enough…we’ll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of before we have any 200-year-olds.”
Like I say in the video, it was a great book, and I think anyone interested in learning more about social media should give it a read.
This was my first time trying something like this, and so it took me a couple tries to get something coherant. It isn’t quite as tight as I would love to see- there are some “umms” and pauses- but overall I’m happy with it. It’s hard to actually look at the camera, the first few tries I was looking at myself and the video looked like I had a lazy eye (there’s probably a bit of that in there still).
I was going to write about a feature that facebook should introduce, but then I went looking for it in the settings and discovered it was already there. But since I didn’t know it existed, I am going to assume at least a number of other people didn’t see it either.
The feature is the ability to view your profile as another individual.
Type a friends name to see how they see your profile
This is going to be very important as Facebook begins to encourage users to divide their friends into groups, each with different privacy allowances.
Here’s how it works: If your settings allow some people to only view specific information (for example, your mom can only see the photos of you studying, not doing keg-stands) you can use this to view your page as if you were them. While you should be able to determine what they can see by fiddling with the settings, this gives a great added “peace-of-mind” level to the security settings. You don’t just need to trust that you got all the settings right, you can view it to make sure.
While you probably won’t care too much about checking each and every person, or every group, this is great for the people who you really want to ensure are seeing certain content (ie. bosses, parents, and kids). As facebook becomes a bigger and bigger catalog of everyone you’ve ever met, tools like this are going to make it much easier to monitor your image without resorting to mass unfriending (if you want to do that, check out this great discussion on haligonia.ca, with master unfriender Joel Kelly).
I would also love to see this improved to allow you to view how your profile appears to people who are not your friend, or people within your networks who are not your friend. I have my settings set to disable my profile to all nonfriends, but it’s always nice to get confirmation that this is happening.
Well, it’s certainly been a long time since I’ve posted on here.
If you have this blog still in your RSS reader from when I was posting to it 2 years ago, thanks for being so patient, you should probably consider purging your feeds more often though.
Here is the deal: My last post here was April 15th, 2007. At the time, I was taking a lot of photos and was using this blog as a place to showcase some of the photos I was taking, outside of services like flickr. I think what happened though was that I stopped taking as many photos and then it just didn’t make sense to be posting them to a blog anymore, so my blog fell into disrepair.
More recently, I’ve been keeping a new blog, Dave Everyday, that I was using as a journal of my life. The problem I’ve run into there is that I am getting really bored of chronicling my life. I post to Twitter a lot, and so that captures a lot of the what I do each day stuff that I was then re-hashing onto my blog. In the end, I wasn’t getting what I wanted to get out of it, out of it.
So that brings us to today. I’ve decided to re-appropriate this blog, re-name it (I will come up with something even better than Dave Emmett’s blog soon), re-brand it (there will be photos, but that’s not the point), and turn it into a place for me to share my thoughts about stuff going on online, which is what I spend most of my time thinking about anyways, so I might as well write some of it down and see if it’s helpful to other people. I’m bringing this blog back (rather than start a new one) because it has my name in the url (or at least my approximation of my name I use for every online service), which I figure is a good thing.
We’ll see how this goes, I’m sure one day I’ll get this blogging thing down. For now, I’m just doing what seems like the best idea at the time.
Today is my birthday.For some reason, I woke up at 6am this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got up and after checking the news and all my RSS Feeds, I decided I might as well go for an early morning walk, cause that’s what I’ve always imagined people who wake up at 6am do.
So I went down to the dykes and walked around and took some pictures. It was nice, very relaxing. The weather has been awful lately, but today has been beautiful, so that didn’t hurt.
Someone left these shoes sitting on the…boardwalk? pier? I’m not really sure what to call that thing. But there were shoes, red ballerina shoes (To me they look like ballerina shoes at least). Very random.
So anyways, I figured it would be a good idea to take a self portrait today, since it is my birthday, no better time I figure. So I took this:
Didn’t really come out how I had envisioned it, but I still like it. Different. And I cross processed it in Photoshop to give it a different feel.
But on to the point, I’ve always kind of wanted to take part in the 365 Days project over on flickr, but have never really gotten around to starting. So, as of today I am. In a nutshell: Every day for a year you take a self portrait and upload it to the group. Why? why not. Actually, I have a few good reasons. First, I’ve always thought it would be fun to do something like this, but lacking any coherent starting point, it’s always been easy to just put it off. Second, I find I haven’t been taking many photos simply for the sake of taking photos anymore. This will help me change that, since I’ll have to take at least one photo a day. Third, I’m getting my Strobist flash system soon, and a book on lighting technique, so I’ll have a lot of inspiration and the technical ability to pull different things off. It’ll be a fun experiment. I won’t post them all on here, cause that would just be annoying, but I will be uploading every day to the set on flickr. Technically I won’t be uploading one every day, for example, I’m going to Mexico at the end of the month and won’t be bringing a computer, so I’ll upload all the pics from those days at one time after I get back (I think I’m only bringing the film camera for that too, so that should be fun).
Well we got more snow. It has now snowed 3 times in April, which is definitely 3 times too many.
With the newspaper done, I haven’t really been taking a lot of photos. All year I’ve just been taking the photos I need to take, so the process of just coming up with ideas on my own for photos has been eroded a bit. So, I guess I have to get back into the habit. But because of the snow and general awfulness of outside, I didn’t want to go far. So I just took a few from my porch.
I experimented with a new technique to convert these to black and white which I learned from Journal of A Photographer, which is an excellent blog by a guy in Vienna who used to work for Magnum (talk about an awesome job). It gives them a bit of a different look, so I don’t know if I’d use it for everything, but it doesn’t hurt to know a new technique.
In other news it is my birthday in 2 days. For my present, my girlfriend went halfsies on an off camera lighting set up recommended by Strobist. If you haven’t seen that site before it’s definitely worth checking out. I can’t wait till it arrives.
This is not your average blog post; it’s actually my submission of my term project assignment for my Politics of the Mass Media course. I chose to submit it this way because we are, after all, talking about the mass media, and therefore it only makes sense to submit my project using the mass media; in this case, my blog. For those of you who aren’t Dr. Pyrcz, this was the assignment:
Shoot a portfolio of 7-10 photos and submit these as a portfolio, with a 1000 word commentary regarding the role, nature, and standards of photojournalism, and defending your portfolio in this light.
The video that I’ve attached is the portfolio of images, each with captions as well as spoken annotation about the choices I made for including/taking each photo. I promise I don’t sound like that in real life. The introductory video is the time lapse video I shot during the event, which you can see in full here. Underneath the video you’ll find my 1000-ish word commentary, complete with hyperlinks to most of the references. Enjoy, particularly if you are Dr.Pyrcz.
The video quality is not perfect, you can click here for the full version over at Google video
Photographers have the unique ability to show people what is happening in a way that no other medium can. A single moment, frozen in time, can express what words and video never could (e.g. this photo[1] of a young Vietnamese girl screaming after being hit by napalm). Armed with this power, it is the role of the photojournalist to inform the public, and in so doing, invoke action from them. As James Nachtwey[2], renowned photojournalist for the VII photo agency[3], expressed at a recent speech[4];
“Photographers go to the extreme edges of human experience to show people what’s going on. Sometimes they put their lives on the line because they believe your opinions and your influence matter. They aim their pictures at your best instincts; generosity, a sense of right and wrong, the ability and the willingness to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable.”
From this perspective, photojournalists act on the behalf of the audience to deliver them with a true account of what is going on, and what can be done to change it. Photojournalism is not, however, audience centric. It does not give the audience what they want to see, but rather what they need to see. This perspective sees the photojournalist as having an inherent socially responsibility; a photo of something that is prescribes how it should be.
Not every event though requires the photojournalist to prescribe change, but every photograph can inform the viewer about the unique experience of a particular place and time. For example, covering a sporting event[5] does not require a photojournalist to make efforts to inspire action from the audience, but they can still capture the unique emotions experienced during the game.
While this role of photojournalists to inform and inspire action from citizens has remained constant since photography was first used for news purposes, the nature in which photographs are shown to their audience is changing dramatically. Traditionally bound to appearance in newspapers or magazines, photography is now more and more viewed online. Furthermore, online photojournalism has transformed from the single shot of an event coverage typical of newspapers, to multimedia presentations involving photographs, sound, and occasionally video (for examples, see The New York Times[6], The Washington Post[7], and Magnum in Motion[8]). This shift from single frames on grainy newsprint to in depth multimedia coverage has numerous implications for the field of photojournalism.
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan proposed that media could be either hot or cool[9], with this distinction influencing both the form and content of the media. Hot media speaks to its audience, without much room for interpretation or debate. On the other hand, cool media speaks with the audience, allowing individual interpretation an analysis. Traditionally, photojournalism appearing in newsprint has been cool; the image quality is sub par, forcing the viewer to fill in the gaps of what the photo is depicting. Furthermore, because newspapers traditionally only run one photo along with most stories, the rest of the event must be inferred by the audience from that one photo (as well as the accompanying story).
This has changed with the development of online multimedia photojournalism. Because photographs are displayed on crystal clear, backlit monitors instead of newsprint, the audience is no longer required to make any inferences about the physical content of photographs. In addition, because multiple photographs of a single event or story are now used instead of a single photo, the audience is afforded a more complete view of any event; at the cost of the ability for individual interpretation based on a photograph. In this way, photojournalism is shifting from a cool medium to a hot one, a transformation which could radically transform the scope of photojournalism. If McLuhan is right that “the medium is the message”[10], then a shift in photojournalistic medium will alter the message of photojournalism as well.
In light of these changes to photojournalistic practice and distribution, the need for strong journalistic standards is more important than ever. At a time when digital cameras have eliminated film cameras from most of the professional world, and digital technologies are rapidly replacing traditional practices, ethical standards are imperative in order to maintain the privileged position journalism holds in democratic society. This is of particular importance because photographs taken with digital cameras, or processed digitally, are “[susceptible] to easy, unlimited, and virtually undetectable manipulation.”[11]
Using Adobe Photoshop, or any number of other photo editing software, photographers can easily erase parts of images, input data from other photos, adjust the tonal range or colour of an image, as well as a multitude of other adjustments. While this ability has opened up a range of creative potentials for the artistic photographer, it poses a serious risk to the credibility of the news photojournalist whose photos are only effective if they tell the truth. It is with this danger in mind that photo agencies, organizations, and individual newspapers have devoted considerable effort to updating and enforcing their ethical codes. Reuters, for example, published a list of acceptable uses of Photoshop earlier this year,[12] which clearly states that there are to be “no additions or deletions to the subject matter of the original image.”[13] The decision on the part of Reuters to publish this type of document is likely influenced by the fact that a Reuters photograph taken over the summer was exposed as being heavily manipulated, resulting in the firing of several Reuters staff.[14] Other groups, however, are also publishing updated ethical codes, including the National Press Photographers Association[15], and the Toronto Star[16].
Ultimately, however, it falls to each individual photojournalist to develop and uphold their own sense of ethically acceptable behaviour. The guidelines offer a starting point for each individual to decide what they are and are not willing to do to in order to fulfill their role as a photojournalist. Personally, I refrain from all digital editing outside basic levels adjustments and black and white conversion when working on news photographs. Furthermore, when taking photographs I strive to remain unobtrusive, observing and documenting the action but not interfering with it. This includes never requesting for people to change their actions so I can ‘get the shot’ or using photos were people have intentionally posed for the camera. The photos from Relay for Life illustrate these standards.
In keeping with the new practice of online multimedia presentations seen throughout the news media, I decided to submit my portfolio of images from Relay for Life in this manner. This style of photojournalistic presentation lends itself well to this project; I needed to submit multiple images together, and the multimedia format allowed me to incorporate both video and audio content in addition to the photographs.
While my primary role as a photojournalist at this event was an informative one, there is a prescriptive element to these photos as well. By showing the efforts of regular university students to raise money for cancer research, these photos call on others to do the same. These photos, to paraphrase Nachtwey, are aimed at your generosity[17], they call on you, the viewer to help in the same way these students have.
[11]Wheeler, Tom. Phototruth or Photofiction? : Ethics and Media Imagery in the Digital Age. Mahwah, NJ, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., 2002, p.28
In sharp contrast to tightening networks are broadening networks. These networks encourage you to connect with new people, not people you already know. The textbook case, of course, is Twitter, but brightkite and most content sharing sites (flickr, youtube, blip.fm, etc.) work in a similar way. For most twitter users, Twitter is a way to meet new people they don’t know in real life; people who share interests, are from the same city, or who are just really funny.
Recent Comments