Author: Angelo Fernando

Back after a break, unplugged

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A few months back I suggested to a friend that some of us may be experiencing social media fatigue. Which seemed odd, because we were chatting on Facebook!

So this summer, as we set out on a road trip, I decided to consciously go on a social media diet. No tweets from the places we visited. No blog posts. Tons of photos but none sent to Facebook. To breathlessly tweet about a wonderful coffee shop by the rail tracks in San Juan Capistrano would have spoiled the moment.  (Believe me, the Hummingbird House Cafe has a Facebook page, which I have since, promoted!)

The temptation was always there (uploading video to YouTube is now about 2-clicks away) but I decided to save that for later.  The only indulgence was the occasional text messaging between friends and family. It was near impossible to not use Google on the road –text messaging a search query to 46645.

But other than that, it was a good time to stay connected, chat with people in analog mode outside churches, beaches, street corners, bazaars…

Now, however, it’s time to get back to two magazine deadlines. I just might take a different track!

The media are changing. And you?

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In 1999 (before we many of us began thinking deeply about the role of the Internet on the media as we know it), USAID foresaw a trend, or rather a need for citizens to be able to “make informed decisions and counter state-controlled media.”

They talked of nurturing ‘alternative media,’ which at that time made many people uncomfortable. Mainstream media journalists, especially, thought that this would be lead to erosion in standards.

USAID may have never dreamt that something called social media would sow up and deliver this ‘alternative’ into our laps. Later, in 2005, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which tracks newspaper reading habits, recorded a curious shift. They observed that people were turning away from traditional news outlets, particularly those “with their decorous, just-the-facts aspirations to objectivity.” And what were they gravitating toward? They were turning toward “noisier hybrid formats that aggressively fuse news with opinion or entertainment, or both.”

News infused with opinion? That sounded like heresy!

Not anymore! Dozens of news organizations have begun using a combination of social networking, citizen journalism and traditional reporting to do just that.

I mentioned Internews. It may not be ‘noisy,’ but it is definitely a hybrid format. Internews is an international ‘media development organization’ that empowers local media worldwide. Meaning it not only becomes a distribution channel for global voices, but it gives people the tools to connect, and thereby be heard.

A similar organization, Global Voices, is a nonprofit foundation comprising an international team of volunteer authors, and others who are active in the blogosphere. In fact, one of its divisions, Lingua plays a sort of the amplifier role. Lingua, it says, “amplifies Global Voices stories in languages other than English with the help of volunteer translators.” They translate content into more than 15 languages.

Pew’s recent State of The News Media Report talks of how media consumption in a world of increasing mobile devices  forces news companies to follow some messy rules (of device makers, for instance) to deliver their content. The news ecology is getting uneven, it says.

This is where hybrid, alternative media has taken root. Let’s get used to it!

A longer version of this is published in LMD magazine.

Inconvenient truths about Citizen journalists

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Are you rooting for mainstream journalism or the grassroots variety?

How about both? One has the training. The other has the temperament. One has the credibility. The other has access. Mainstream journalism and citizen journalism are shaking hands, and the consequences may be very interesting for the media we consume and our role as potential collaborators.

We typically think of citizen journalists as these accidental reporters –those who in the face of a catastrophic event, grab a cell-phone, and capture a story that would have otherwise never been recorded. We recall the first heartbreaking reports of the 2004 tsunami captured by citizens in Sri Lanka. Commuters, not trained reporters, provided the first grainy videos when terrorist bombed subways and buses in London in 2005. Likewise, the first images of the dramatic ‘splash landing’ of an U.S Airways flight into the Hudson river in Manhattan, New York, were captured by a citizen journalist.

Today, we are witnessing the rise of a new breed of reporters, an ‘accidental profession’ that has begun to turn more professional (‘Pro’) than amateur (‘Am’).

Some ex-journalists and entrepreneurs have spotted opportunities in this space and have begun to create business models, albeit non-profit businesses. One of them, The Uptake (www.theuptake.org),  is a citizen ‘fueled’ news organization. Chuck Olsen, co-founder of The Uptake calls it ‘committing an act of journalism.’ Meaning, going out there and finding the story, not reacting to it.

Mohammed Nabbous, killed in Benghazi, Libya in March 2011, was one of the bravest citizen journos of our time, killed while uploading a story. Check out a video of these last moments at http://bit.ly/LMD0811 In the last part of this video you can sense he is terribly impatient, waiting as a large file uploads from his camera.

“Where is the media?” he asks, rhetorically, with gunfire just outside his door.  It does not strike him that he was “The Media’ –an Am behaving like, and filling the void of, a Pro.

Today many mainstream news organizations have embedded elements of citizen journalism, often training their reporters to use the tools that the Ams take for granted. BBC, for instance is training its reporters to use iPhone apps to file stories. This month, The New York Times opened up a story for citizen participation in making sense of a boatload of email records (24,199) from Sarah Palin. “We’re asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight.

You could find a broader discussion of this evolving Pro-Am model in an upcoming article.

Browsers will take Augmented Reality mainstream

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Rory Cellan-Jones, tech correspondent at the BBC reports on how Augmented Reality is now available in public spaces such as Trafalgar Square.

It ends with a skeptical person saying what many have used before about new developments. The person, of course is one of the Ladygeeks, who says that ionly people with a lot of time to kill will use something like AR. I was immediately reminded of the 1943 comment, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” That was an observation by Thomas Watson, who was the chairman of IBM, no less.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/external/player.swf

While it is too early to tell if AR will go the way of Second Life, which became a nice experiment and somewhat fad, it is too early to write it off as pointless, or too geeky.

Especially with the new Augmented Reality browser, Wikitude, that has already started appearing in some smart phones. Before the browser came along, you could download an application such as Layar that works with the iPhone and Android.

You don’t need to be technically savvy to use interact with AR. The camera in a smart phone, laptop, tablet even iPod is all you need. The browser does the rest. Says Wikitude, “By using the camera, simply hold up your smartphone and explore your surroundings. Wikitude will overlay the camera’s display and the objects you look at with additional interactive content and information.”

Soon there will be many browsers, such as Wikitude. Another good browser called Argon was out earlier, and was developed by Blair MacIntyre, at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. When that happens, it won’t be people with time to kill who begin using it. As organizations, cities, libraries, and media and entertainment companies begin to see the value in layered, augmented information, how we think of AR will change.

Let’s send our congressmen to social media boot camp

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Interesting statement by the Ministry of Defense on soldiers using social media:

“We are not here to gag people, because we acknowledge the ubiquity and significant benefits that social media offers to people and the MoD.”

The warning comes at a good time, almost a bit late in the game, now that soldiers have been using a host of social media to stay in touch with their families and even the media. Now that not one, but two congressman have been caught with poor social media discretions, it’s about time for a social media boot camp for government!

Back in 2004, the military began cracking down on personal journals maintained by soldiers serving in Iraq.  Some still blog, but are not sure if they will get into trouble, as this NPR story, reveals.

This April, in the wake of Wikileaks, a Pentagon official, Doug Wilson talked about how “technology — and particularly technology at the intersection of national security — has outpaced the policy.”

My reaction was: Still? You would think thee are more policy wonks than tech people in government.

It’s not just the defense folks who have realized that policy has always been lagging as technology zips ahead. States have been facing the same problem. A national survey of social media in government found that

  • Two-thirds of survey respondents lack enterprise policies addressing social media
  • One-third of the states responding have enterprise policy standards,and are in the process of developing these
Furthermore, “relatively few have developed policies or guidelines to provide an enterprise context for managing social media tool use,” and are “completely balked by uncertainty”
Bottom line, they are seriously lagging in policy.
But the government has also stepped up, with its just released International Strategy for Cyber-security. It states that

“The United States supports an Internet with end-to-end interoperability, which allows people worldwide to connect to knowledge, ideas, and one another through technology that meets their needs.”

All this big picture stuff is well and good. Someone needs to put our elected officials in a room give them a 101 course in using digital channels. Their DIY method of using social media is turning out to be one of DYI –Damaging Yourself Irreparably.

Will teachers grab onto Augmented Reality?

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What kind of crazy person will incorporate Augmented Reality in a classroom?

Don’t student’s already have too much of gaming and visual distraction in their lives? I hear you. But AR is a whole new system. I don’t think a teacher’s age will be a factor of adoption. I’ve met some who are willing to do anything to make text-books and charts come alive. They will be those who say ‘this is way too technical for us’ –the same ones who fear digital readers will kill libraries, or think blogs are too scary–and stick to photocopies and glue.

Unfortunately students may not agree! Many of them come to school with some digital device in their backpack. They cannot turn them on, but they sure know how to use them. Then, when they leave their analog classroom, and get back home, they become fully-engaged digital citizens. Something’s wrong with this picture!

OK, I over-simplified the problem. Classrooms are not exactly analog. We do have computers for students to use. We do have smart boards such as Blackboard and Promethean. But often, these are used to broaden and amplify what the teacher has to say, not what the student might be ready to experience.

I have covered Augmented Reality many times before, especially how it is being used in business environments. Now, as it begins making tentative steps into the classroom, we need to make sure educators understand where this is coming from, where it is headed. Many will want to understand how it might integrate with that marvelous piece of technology a.k.a the text book!

Yesterday, I interviewed Scot Jochim, from Digital Tech Frontier, a Tempe, Arizona-based company. He has some radical ideas about how AR could be embedded in educational environments to enhance ‘non-linear skill sets.’  (Stay tuned for a longer post on that interview.)

As I have moved from the digital world of business into teaching, I am exploring how schools of the future might be run.

  • Will they be something like the twilight zone scenario portrayed by Ira Glass in a recent episode of This American Life, which featured Brooklyn Free School?
  • Or will it be there be social media-enhanced curricula, such as the school profiled in The New York Times, where a teacher in Sioux Rapids, Iowa uses a Twitter-like feature in a literature class?
In an upcoming story, ‘Messing Around In Class,’ I featured how Higher Ed is moving in this direction, away from the ‘Sage on the Stage’ model to more interactive, collaborative classrooms. Truly inspiring work at Purdue, Scottsdale Community College, and Singapore Management University.

Farewell To Always-On!

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Noise. We hear a lot of it. Sometimes in the form of amplified sound. Other times in a lot of useless chatter.

In the past few weeks, since I gave up my Blackberry and YES, downgraded to a regular phone, I’ve rediscovered what it means to face a day minus the noise that streams into our lives.

But there is another type of noise that’s ramping up as the US election season moves into gear. The noise of politicians trying to get  all ears tuned to their agenda.

This image tells us something about how the hoi polloi could sometimes wrestle control and ask the noise-makers to listen, for a change.

What’s the context here? The lady, supposedly, someone named Virginia Vollmer, used the bullhorn (at a rally in Tennessee)  to ‘talk back’ to the anti-healthcare reform person on the right.

There are many means to change the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio, which refers to how much of the original signal has been drowned or corrupted by the noise.  Sometimes it means turning out the stuff you don’t need to hear or watch. At other times –and I’m not saying this is for everyone –it might mean getting rid of the amplification devices entirely.

In a great post by Josip Petrusa, he notes that we have all become willing accomplices in this noise-making, in the senseless amplification of the good, the bad and the useless information.

The resulting impact of this has glorified, popularized and hyped events, actions and individuals that were ordinary, everyday and commonplace pre-social media into something beyond wild expectations and possibility. I

…Social media itself has fallen victim and benefactor to the cruelty and kindness of this effect. 

For me, suddenly there’s a lot more time for reading, for conversations across a table or in a parking lot.  After many years of being always-on, it’s refreshing to be able to sometimes-on, and focus on what I really care about, at my own pace.

Teachers should be “more than talking heads”

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You may have heard of Nolan Bushnell. No?

He founded Atari, and is perhaps one of the fathers of the video game industry. (He was named by  Newsweek as one of the  “50 Men Who Changed America.”)

He makes a point about education that is true for communicators: that the learning environment is toast, and we are competing for the minds and hearts of an audience that has moved far beyond what our established systems can cope with.

I just got done with an article for publication on why the marriage between newsletter publishers and readers is on the rocks. While researching this topic I came across a common thread between education and business communication. We are trying to pry open the new cannister (attention) with an old set of tools.

The competition for the  minds of kids is not sufficient. We have to have more than talking heads, says Bushnell. (He recommends abolishing classrooms!). The one-to-many distribution of information is fraught with problems.

  • Pace is one of those problems
  • Class size is the other.

These are connected. Altering the pace means altering the class size, he says.

I’ve conducted many webinars and workshops. Virtual and face-to-face. I can see from where he comes. The moment I become the talking head in front of a cool PowerPoint template, I lose the audience. Sure I have their attention, but I lose the connection — between my brain and theirs.

Watch Bushnell’s presentation, and even if you have issues with video games, try to see the meta discussion here. I have problems with the lure of instant gratification and the goals of education. But new media is not something we can keep locked up in a dark room. The academic response to Wikipedia has moved quite a bit from horror to skepticism to adoption. I have seen how teachers have inspired students to create a literary project using a Wiki. Social learning is here –another topic worth exploring –whether we like it or not.

But if I put this aside, I could glean some great ideas from some of what he says here.

Thanks to my friend Manoj Fernando for pointing me to Bushnell

Why the “Unsubscribe” link’s my new best friend

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Are newsletters the face of TMI –too much information?

I must have subscribed to more than I could have handled over the past decade. I’m pretty certain that I was tricked into some of them, too. The odd thing is I love newsletters, and weekly digests. But there comes a time when I just can’t cope with the torrent of the ‘This Just In’ and ‘Today’s Top Stories.’ There’s another problem with e-newsletters. Many have begun to abuse/misuse the opt-in. They often send me duplicates (maybe it’s a glitch), or something that’s a thinly veiled sales pitch.

So over the past week I’ve probably hit the unsubscribe button about two dozen times. For those e-newsletter services that have been slow to purge me from their databases, I’ve happily created a filter to make that happen, and skip my inbox.

Have you had a similar experience, or is it just me? I admit I’ve become ruthless about keeping my inbox to no more than 10 messages deep.

So, to look at it from the opposite end, here’s what this might mean to us communicators. It’s about time we stopped trying to fight clutter with clutter. Let’s start fighting clutter with relevance. This means:

  • Clean up your database. Do some serious database hygiene; purge, segment, and double-checking who’s on our lists. Maybe some people in the database have changed jobs, move laterally, or just use the provided email address for ‘junk’ mail –or when forced to subscribe to something just to get a discount.
  • Stop automating every newsletter to the point that we just fill up the next scheduled one with ‘stuff’ because we don’t like to break the cycle.  (We might be doing our audience a huge favor by giving them a breather!)
  • Write better stories. This is hard because it requires some real storytelling, rather than a lead paragraph, followed by 4 bullet points, snuggling up to a cool stock-photo image.
  • Link to relevance. Point the story and newsletter to something more satisfying than the bland web site. Too many e-newsletter stories that promise ‘more information’ are nothing but traffic drivers. Someone in Corporate wanted to see a spike in page hits, perhaps…
  • Use analytics. Track how many ‘opens’  are engaged audiences. Maybe many of the recipients are stashing your newsletter (and dozens of others)  to be read over the weekend. Which might explain why some never get beyond one click. Maybe that group could become a secondary segment for less frequent mailings, or a different shorter version.

If all your content manager is doing is copying and pasting story leads from other sources, and sending it off to every week, it may be time to kill it.

Or it could be dead on arrival.