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So, once upon another time, I closed my Twitter account

November 1, 2012

Once upon a time I opened a Twitter account.

I found

  1. I followed nobody and nobody followed me
  2. I had no messages – of 140 characters or less – that I desired to paste indiscriminately and with no defined recipient on the Twitter noticeboard.
  3. When I wished to just write something – not specifically directed to anybody – it was easier to do it on my blog where I was not constrained to 140 characters
  4. I had no desire to let the world in general know what I was doing. Where I desired someone or some people to be informed about my activity – or inactivity – email and mobile phone texts were sufficient to my needs and were not constrained to 140 characters.
  5. I found my blog to be my extended space which provided an open access to the world but where I didn’t much care whether anybody read what I had written or not. What was important to me was clearly the writing of the post. The reading of the post by others was an incidental consequence of no great significance (to me).
  6. I found I used communication primarily as a tool to mobilise actions or to induce desired behaviour in others. Here the transmission of an information package was necessary but  the transmission had to be well directed. Indiscriminate transmission of information was ineffective, irritating to the unintended reader and wasteful. To be effective the information package needed direction and needed to be complete for the intended purpose.
  7. Transmission of truncated and incomplete information led – more often than not – to misunderstandings and invoked unwanted responses
  8. Transmission of information without any purpose was not of interest to me
  9. Reading tweets written by twits did not seem to provide any value to me

Twitter is just another medium. The message inherent in this medium is that the tweeter is so obsessed by his own ego that he must broadcast his indiscriminate, purposeless, directionless, 140 character snippets about his life to the whole world. In short that the tweeter is a twit. Perhaps the medium has its uses. But the medium encourages a general “dumbing-down” of transmitted information. It uses “black and white” when “full colour” is available. It downgrades the quality of the information transmitted.

Bad information leads to bad communication which gives bad actions.

It does not seem to add any value for me.

So, once upon another time, I closed my Twitter account.

Essence of a Manager

Chapter 4: Communication: Hearing What Isn’t Said

Communication is the tool that a manager must make use of to mobilise actions from his chosen actors. Communication is a process and not a singular event. It extends from the meaning that he selects and then through all the subsequent steps of converting the meaning into a message which he transmits as information making up a communiqué directed at a particular recipient. The process continues till it is received, interpreted and reconverted into meaning in the recipient’s mind. But the process is not complete until the manager gets the feedback confirming that his intended meaning has been successfully transferred. The manager retains responsibility throughout the entire process. Language and culture enable communication and are not barriers. Focusing on the recipient leads naturally to the process required to generate the desired meanings in his mind. Any manager can make himself into a good communicator. Some will have to work harder at it than others. But being aware of the steps contained within a communications process is where the learning starts.

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Posted in Communication, Media | Comments Off on So, once upon another time, I closed my Twitter account

Twits tweet

November 1, 2012

twit – A silly or foolish person.
to twit – to be in a state of nervous excitement: “we’re in a twit about your visit”

Are all tweeters twits? Is it only twits who tweet?

But there are many types of tweeters:

  1. Low-life tweeters who merely follow: They are rarely interesting except in contributing to trends. This group includes journalists and groupies. Journalists sift through tweets as if rummaging through dustbins looking for a scoop. For groupies there is the delusion of participation; instant and vicarious gratification. Twits
  2. Rich and famous tweeters: These are the people who need their egos to be constantly fed, who must live in the public eye and need reassurance that their fame still lives. They live in perpetual fear of the loss of their fame. Twits
  3. Politicians: They think that their expositions of political policy in 140 characters or less can get them re-elected or make them popular or can get out the young vote or ……..? Twits
  4. Activists, revolutionaries and rabble-rousers: They hunt for subjects to hang their punch lines onto. Success is in getting a trend going or getting a flash mob together. Twits
  5. Would be socialites and socialists. They set up their stalls in the hope that their 140 characters will be perceived as funny, witty, sexy, profound or insightful. They are easily gratified and are quite happy to have manged to expand a thought into something as long as 140 characters. Twits
  6. Corporate tweeters: These are usually overpaid and underworked PR types or advertisers selling something (usually something quite unnecessary) and who live in a fantasy of creating a “hit” or a “best-seller” in 140 characters or less. Twits
  7. Updates
    1. Re-tweeters: Who have nothing original to say for themselves but who try to remain in the thick of things by re-tweeting. Twits

I am unable to find a category of tweeters who could be considered high-class.

There may be tweeters who are not twits. But that remains to be demonstrated. The empirical evidence suggests that all tweeters are twits.

My hypothesis is that only twits tweet. 

“The medium is the message” – Marshall McLuhan

Perhaps the message of the Twitter medium is that the tweeter is a twit.

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Posted in Media, Trivia | 1 Comment »

The Times’ paywall has destroyed its brand equity and its circulation

October 8, 2012

Thirty years ago when living in the UK I was a daily purchaser of The Times. Three years ago I was a daily visitor to the The Times website and an occasional purchaser of the newspaper (around 30 copies per year when I was travelling). Then they introduced their hard paywall and I abstained. But withdrawal symptoms did not last too long and I don’t miss them very much – if at all. In fact, the absence of The Times from my daily reading  has had far less impact than I would have imagined. Nowadays it is very rarely that I find any references to articles in The Times that I would like to follow up on. The Times is no longer the paper of record in the UK and its restricted access makes it of little value as a reference for others.

I have a theory that the simplistic introduction of paywalls is not the model which will work for a very complex behavioural change in reading and news gathering and reference habits that is currently evolving. I suspect that the successful models will probably be those that involve an expansion of what can be viewed freely, but where this expanded readership can then be enticed into an increase in the purchase of valuable downloadable content. Restricting the initial readership – I think – can only lead to a collapsing spiral of interest and a destruction of brand value. The total circulation of The Times today for both the online and the paper versions together  is less than the paper circulation before the paywall.

In an article actually about the Bonniers struggling to find their own model, Svenska Dagbladet writes about The Times:

It is well understood that for putting value on journalism it is central to be creative in the development of payment models. However, there are some really bad examples. Worst of all is the newspaper that really listened to Jeanette Bonnier.

End the free reading! Close the store!  If you want to read, you must pay!

Which paper was that then? A certain paper called The Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch / News International. Just over two years ago they introduced a so-called hard pay wall. Not a thing was released over the fence without payment. The decision to completely close the site for open access  – and even to the  search engines, which they were forced to back down from the other week – possibly was by following  Jeanette Bonnier’s intuition. Or was it a way for Murdoch to provoke the industry to act. Either way, it was a gigantic failure.

Before the pay wall The Times Online had 21 million readers each month. Today, they have … drum roll! … 130 000 paying customers. Nowhere else in the history of journalism have so many readers – and so many advertisers – been scared away so effectively.

Even more interesting is the effect on the paper version. Its circulation during the same period fell from 570,000 per day to 397000. It is much more than what other newspapers have lost.

The explanation?

  1. A brand fatally weakened as fewer and fewer read the content, and
  2. Subscribers to the paper version shifting their allegiance to the much cheaper on-line, pay-walled version

The result was fewer subscribers, sharply lower revenues and a significantly depleted brand. And that’s what happens  if you’re looking for simple solutions to handle a complex situation.

I have the strong “guesstimate” and rather more than just a belief, that if The Times had increased their online (free) readership  they could have bucked the trend and even increased their paper circulation – by offering more content in the paper version where such content was also available on-line – but for a fee.

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Posted in Behaviour, Media, UK | Comments Off on The Times’ paywall has destroyed its brand equity and its circulation

This Land is Mine

October 6, 2012

“Owning land” is relative.

Nina Paley has put this together

I envisioned This Land Is Mine as the last scene of my potential-possible-maybe- feature film, Seder-Masochism, but it’s the first (and so far only) scene I’ve animated. As the Bible says, ”So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

And the same story is evident all over the globe and not just in the Middle East.

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Posted in Behaviour, Media | Comments Off on This Land is Mine

Why Barron’s Facebook valuation of $15 per share may be too high

September 25, 2012

Facebook shares took a beating yesterday after Barron’s report valued them at $15 per share (compared to the current $20.8 and the IPO valuation of $38 in May). But I suspect that even this valuation is too high. Any share today which trades at more than 20 times earnings is not sustainable. Unless there is a very clear and well grounded prospect of improved earnings, even a 20 times valuation only creates a bubble – which will burst. I use 20 times as my “rule-of-thumb” for the long-term prospects of any technology company and the point at which I can always find a better investment.

The problem with future projections of Facebook earnings is that they have yet to establish a model for mobile earnings and their current pc base for earnings is declining. Not that I have much to invest, but without a clear way of improving earnings I do not think any price of more than $8 dollars per share is worth investing in. An added worry would be the Facebook propensity to hand out large amounts of restricted stock to its employees which only dilutes the value (itself doubtful) for other shareholders.

A personal opinion I have is that as ads get more intrusive they destroy the user-experience and will become counter-productive. Already there are sites that I avoid as a reaction to the ads which are so large, take up so much band-width and slow-down my access. And when a revenue model is dependent on increasing the irritation level with users, the model is flawed. I think the never-ending increase of ad revenues by increasing the number of users while increasing the intrusiveness of the ads can not happen. In fact I suspect that some advertisers are now losing sales because their ads – which may be brilliant in themselves – are now driving visitors away from the sites they are carried on.

So Barron’s valuation of $15 which would be 35 times earnings is certainly no level for me to enter – especially when the future earnings are still so much in doubt. At half that value at around $8 per share (around 18 times earnings) I could be persuaded to enter the Facebook market – though still with the risk that they may not succeed in finding the right earnings model.

Barron’s article ends with :

Stay away from the stock. It could be heading to the mid-teens. 

To that I would add “and I won’t buy until it gets well into single figures”

Barron’s Magazine:

Facebook‘s 40% plunge from its initial-public-offering price of $38 in May has millions of investors asking a single question: Is the stock a buy? The short answer is “No.” After a recent rally, to $23 from a low of $17.55, the stock trades at high multiples of both sales and earnings, even as uncertainty about the outlook for its business grows. 

(more…)

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Arrogant and overbearing political correctness censures Tintin from Stockholm library

September 25, 2012

See update below:

I have little patience with the “do-gooders” who always know best what is good for others. But impatience turns to an active dislike when an arrogant young man (a certain Behrang Meri) presumes that his world-view shall prevail and takes it upon himself to be a censor by removing all copies of Tintin from the shelves of the 10-13 year old library of Stockholm’s Culture Centre. Of course he claims he is doing this “for their own good”. Arrogance and coercion are the stock-in-trade of the “do-gooders” and is wide-spread in Sweden. Banning things for the “good of others” is the order of the day. Some of the coercive tactics employed – even if now coming from the left of the political spectrum – are indistinguishable from those employed by the fascists in Europe almost 100 years ago.

Dagens Nyheter reports (my free translation):

Tintin has been ejected from the Culture Centre in Stockholm. DN can report that the beloved cartoon character has been cleaned out from the library shelves. Now the staff have been instructed to look for any more books which have racist or homophobic values.

The 10-13 year old library of Stockholm’s Culture Centre has  removed Tintin books from the shelves. In consultation with their staff, the artistic director with responsibility for children and activities for the young made ​​the decision.

“That’s right. The picture Tintin books give for example of Africans is afrofobisk. Africans are shown to be a bit silly while Arabs are sitting on flying carpets and Turks smoke water pipes. The image of  the “forest Turk” is still there. It’s about exoticism and Orientalism”, says Behrang Miri, who leads efforts to develop Child and Youth Culture activities in the sections for children, “Tiotretton” and “Lava”. ……. 

Behrang Meri, the self-appointed censor in this case, was appointed to his position in February this year.

He was on the radio this morning and tried to babble his way through by insisting that he was removing the books so that children could actually go deeper into the questions of racism!!  He seemed to be avoiding all questions and merely spouting a practised defence. I would have thought that deepening children’s understanding would only be possible by exposure to the books and not by his over-bearing, over-protectiveness denying exposure to the books. In any case the Tintin serials – which I greatly enjoyed through my childhood – were written in a colonial time and had no racist intentions. It depicted the world-view that existed at the time. Censorship will not change history or cause those times to disappear.

He failed to impress and I cannot help feeling that his ego has got the better of him and his objective is mere self-promotion rather than the cultural enrichment of 10-13 year old children.

UPDATE!

Following a storm of media criticism, officials at the Kulturhuset library in Stockholm have reversed their decision to remove Tintin comic books from its shelves, saying the move happened “too fast”.

I note that it was the head of the Culture Centre who reversed the censorship and Bahrang Meri has accepted being overruled. In spite of his vehement defence of his decision on the radio this morning this was clearly not a resigning issue. Some damage control is ongoing but damage there certainly is:

“I wanted to highlight an opinion piece about issues of discrimination, but realize now that it’s wrong to ban books,” Meri said in a statement. However, Kulturhuset head Sjöström applauded Meri for prompting a discussion about discrimination. 
“The issues of discrimination, equality and norms continue to be debated and discussed,” Sjöström said in a statement.

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Posted in Behaviour, Censorship, Literature, Media, Sweden | Comments Off on Arrogant and overbearing political correctness censures Tintin from Stockholm library

PeerJ – Open access Journal gets started

June 13, 2012

Open access is still evolving and the bottom-line is finding the revenue model that works. But open access is inevitable and the glory days of the high impact factor, pay-walled journals is coming to an end.   They will not disappear any time soon but history will show that their era was the 20th century and that their decline was the natural consequence of the world-wide-web.

PeerJ provides academics with two Open Access publication venues: PeerJ (a peer-reviewed academic journal) and PeerJ PrePrints (a ‘pre-print server’). Both are focused on the Biological and Medical Sciences, and together they provide an integrated solution for your publishing needs. Submissions open late Summer.

Reuters reports:

(more…)

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Journals now hinder the dissemination of scientific information

June 7, 2012

Dienekes’ Anthropology BlogThis is a reblog of a post by Dienekes on his Anthropology blog.

A case well made though I would suggest that it is “dissemination” that is being hindered and that any hindrance of “scientific progress” is collateral damage. But I suspect that the role of journals in scientific dissemination is in transition and the scientific community has yet to exploit, come to terms with or understand the potential of open access. However I do not believe – as Dienekes does – that the solution lies in government coercion – we have enough of that already. The solution will – I think – come from the technology itself. The possibility to disseminate widely will lead to “open access” truly becoming open access. It is already noticeable that the more enlightened scientists – and I would suggest they are the better scientists – all run their own blogs and open themselves up to much wider scrutiny than that available through pay-walled journals.  I also note in passing that “plagiarism” is a scientific crime only because copyright is “violated” or because an individual is trying to get undue credit. But plagiarism – unlike faking data or cherry-picking data – does not necessarily hinder scientific progress (which must necessarily build on the shoulders of those who went before – even if they were not giants and only unacknowledged pygmies).

How journals once facilitated and now hinder scientific progress.

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New Google privacy policy does not bother me…….

March 1, 2012

I see that the EU and French authorities are getting all worked up about Google’s new privacy policy. But that by itself (the opposition by EU and French bureaucracy) makes me think it can’t be all bad. And if the Google dashboard truly reflects the information stored then it does not bother me.

BBC:

Internet company Google has gone ahead with its new privacy policy despite warnings from the EU that it might violate European law. ….

But I am not especially concerned . In fact I am somewhat hopeful that the quality of the ads directed towards me will improve! They surely cannot get any worse.

(more…)

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LSE on Blogging: “Blogging is .. one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now”

February 27, 2012

Patrick Dunleavy (Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science) and Chris Gilson (Managing Editor of the EUROPP blog) discuss social scientists’ obligation to spread their research to the wider world and how blogging can help academics break out of restrictive publishing loops.

Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson

One of the recurring themes (from many different contributors) on the Impact of Social Science blog is that a new paradigm of research communications has grown up – one that de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication in which blogs play a critical intermediate role. They link to research reports and articles on the one hand, and they are linked to from Twitter, Facebook and Google+ news-streams and communities.  So in research terms blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now.

But in addition, social scientists have an obligation to society to contribute their observations to the wider world – and at the moment that’s often being done in ramshackle and impoverished ways, in pointlessly obscure or charged-for forums, in language where you need to look up every second word in Wikipedia, with acres of ‘dead-on-arrival’ data in unreadable tables, and all delivered over bizarrely long-winded timescales. So the public pay for all our research, and then we shunt back to them a few press releases and a lot of out-of-date academic junk.

Blogging (supported by academic tweeting) helps academics break out of all these loops. It’s quick to do in real time. It taps academic expertise when it’s relevant, and so lets academics look forward and speculate in evidence-based ways. It communicates bottom-line results and ‘take aways’ in clear language, yet with due regard to methods issues and quality of evidence. …..  

(my emphasis)

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