Last post: Thesis finished and graded

I somehow managed to get my thesis finished on time, and got an A (yeeeey) for my long sleepless nights. I am now employed as a research fellow at the University of Agder, doing research on social media and e-participation. I will not post to this blog any more, but will start a new one as soon as I get around to it. Thanks for reading and commenting!

 

Why western society will never change

I’m supposed to be writing up my thesis, but this ad I came across via Spotify just makes me too angry to continue writing. For those who do not read Norwegian, it is an ad for a Norwegian building materials company, where they have stolen Obama’s “Yes we can” slogan in order to convince Norwegians to spend even more money on redecorating their houses (like we need to. There’s hardly a single bathroom left i Norway that doesn’t have Italian marble style tiles).

Naomi Klein wrote about this phenomenon in her book No Logo, where business in stead of fearing counterculture and rebellion in stead puts it into a marketable package and start selling it, in essence making what could have been a real political statement into just another commodity. Maxbo are basically doing the same thing by spoofing Obamas slogan, telling us that changing the political system just became a matter of buying some new stuff for your house… How can social media and politics compete with that?

 

The future of newspapers?

VG Nett reports that Amazon is about to launch an e-book reader for newspapers, in an attempt to salvage what is left of the paper based news media.  Without the costs of distribution and printing, a paper such as the NY Times could be sold for as little as 90 NOK a month, far less than the cost of subscribing to the paper edition.

I’ve worked a few years in various newspapers, and thought about this since I first heard about e-book readers. An interactive e-book edition would provide most of the benefits of paper im terms of typography and the feel of reading a finished product (as opposed to the Internet, where there’s always more stuff to browse), and also have the benefits of the Internet, with multimedia content embedded in the news stories, advertising that is customised to the reader’s needs, and the possibility to update stories as they evolve.

Of course you get all of this online already, but for those of us who would miss the morning paper, e-books might become a good replacement. And there’s also the business part of things. Paying for content online is something most people won’t consider, but they happily pay 50 NOK for a ringtone on their mobile. So why not pay to get up to date news on a specialised reader? I’m looking forward to see what happens with this, and hopefully we’ll see e-papers in Norway in a few years.

 

Deadline approaching fast

The deadline for my thesis is fast approaching, and my brain 1.0 isn’t capable of writing up the thesis and blogging at the same time, so there haven’t been as much activity as I would like. But writing the blog has been interesting in its own way, I am more able to sympathize with those politicians who are not all that active with their social media efforts. Serious social media use takes up a lot of time. Time that I sometimes feel could (and should) be put to better use.

I will try to post a few more updates with findings before shutting down the blog.

 

NY Times discuss online comments

The media has been discussing the value of online comments for some time now. The New york Times has an interesting analysis of what types of comments are posted during various times of the day, and conclude by saying (as we’ve heard many times before) that the few interesting comments are drowned out by vast amounts of clutter.

I’m not disagreeing that we could do without a lot of the harassing and poorly formulated comments that frequently appear online. But I don’t think we should apply the same rules to online comments as we do for newspaper editorials and debate either. After all , one of the major criticisms of the public debate is that “the public” is limited to a handful of people who get their comments printed, making the debate elitist and of little concern to the average citizen.

Perhaps the critics need to stop thinking so much about language, form and argument in individual comments, stop applying their own standards and listen to what si beign said? If a hundred out of a hundred and fifty comments says something along the lines of  “we don’t like this proposed something in our city, but we are not used to the debating style of the academic community and the media, so we can’t be bothered to explain why we feel that way”, maybe the comments as a whole has some value in revealing public opinion?

 

more findings: blogging

Trying my best to write a blog myself, I should be careful what I say about politicians’ blogs (My excuse is that I am really just writing for myself, to summarise my thoughts). There are big differences between the politicians who “get” blogging and those who don’t. Some, such as Audun Lysbakken and Sondre Olsen, are excellent writers, who manages to turn boring political issues into interesting reading (They almost turned me over to their political side, even though I’ve never voted for any of their parties). Others are not as good, and their blogs reads more like a long list of rejected newspaper debate clippings than as blogs, with their lack of links, impersonal language and recaps of what you’ve already read a thousand times before in political pamphlets.

The Minister for Health and social affairs, Bjarne Håkon hanssen, has done an interesting experiment. He used his health blog to ask readers for comments on a health reform that is being discussed now in April. Readers responded well, and there are hundreds of stories from people who give detailed information about their own encounters with the Norwergian health system and suggestions for improvement. I guess people love to talk about their health anyway, so this was a good idea. I am lookuing forward to see more blogs requesting comments on reforms and planned legislation.

 

Politicians, this is how it is done

the Youtube symphony orchestra really shows off the potential of social media at its best. Youtbe invited musicians from all over the world to audition for the orchestra by sending in a video of themselves playing a piece made by composer Tan dun.  Winners were invited to play in Carnegie Hall.

Most interesting is the mashup video made by Youtube, playing Tan Dun’s piece by compiling all of the submissions. Political parties could learn a lot from this, and to be fair, some of them are trying. Arbeiderpartiet has launched a video contest via their web site and also on the social media platforms they are part of. Their Youtube video announcing the contest has been watched almost 4.000 times, so it will be intersting to see the results. I doubt, however, that they will dare present all of the submissions.

 

Done researching political parties on Facebook

I’m finally done with my examination of political parties Facebook use, and my initial optimism based on the interviews has somewhat dwindled.  The official pages and groups have little activity. Some users post questions, some try to start discussions, but there is little evidence that politicans are replying. When they do, it is often with the same standard political answer you’ve heard a thousand times before. There are exceptions, though, and I think that with a little more effort, and a little more training in how to present your message in social media, things would improve.

Jens Stoltenberg and Siv Jensen, leaders of the two biggest parties, are a bit more active than the others, and there is a lot of discussion going on among users. Høyre is asking for voter input in policy creation, and several of the parties have started groups for or against different issues. Venstre and Senterpartiet mostly use their groups and pages to publish notes with links to news on their own web pages, which of course means that there is little user acitivty and dialogue going on.

My preliminary conclusion is that most of them are trying, some are succeding in some areas, but that all of them still have a long way to go if they want to grab voter support from Facebook.

 

Even more links

Researchers from Internet Studies at Curtin University of Technology have published a collection of links on Delicious, on topics ranging from academic journals to microblogging and web 2.0. Lots of interesting stuff here, wonder when I’ll have time to read it all…

 

More resource links

Lots of people are doing lots of different things with social media. Megan Keane, Online Community Manager at Techsoup,  has collected some interesting links to social media resources (Flickr, techsoup, Twitter and Second life) in her wiki. Lots of interesting stuff there, hope I’ll get a chance to read it sometime soon.