Stopping by Jyri Zengestrom’s blog, I ended up on a Top Model’s blog and finally on Trendwatching.com… Oh my god!!!
This is a wake up call and probably what the hoopla is all about when we read about various takes on information mirroring and personalization. Andrew Keen (echoed by Nicolas Carr and others) comments:
Another word for narcissism is “personalization.” Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.
Trendwatching talks about twinsumerism and collaborative filtering. A twinsumer is someone’s likes matched to a ‘twin’ product or service. They add:
Collaborative filtering (Wikipedia’s definition: the method of making automatic predictions about the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users) has been around for a long time (in internet years, that is). Pioneering this space was Amazon.com’s recommendation software, which could tell a customer that others who had also bought Rushdie’s Midnight Children, appreciated The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, too. [...] Others have followed.
They add that Collaborative filtering is fueling what they call Nouveau Niche, and what I briefly referenced in a prior post, that is the The Long Tail :
BusinessWeek called it ‘The Vanishing Mass Market’, Wired Magazine spoke of the Lost Boys and the Long Tail. Others talk about Niche Mania, Stuck in the Middle, or Commoditization Chaos. We at TRENDWATCHING.COM dubbed it NOUVEAU NICHE: the new riches will come from servicing the new niches!
These are niches created by these micro content markets of each and everyone’s Youniverse! I completely understand the Narcissism metaphor being used by vocal critics, but…. Trendwatcher tags yet another trend they’ve called Generation C (C stands for Content):
The GENERATION C phenomenon captures the an avalanche of consumer generated ‘content’ that is building on the Web, adding tera-peta bytes of new text, images, audio and video on an ongoing basis.
The two main drivers fuelling this trend? (1) The creative urges each consumer undeniably possesses. We’re all artists, but until now we neither had the guts nor the means to go all out. (2) The manufacturers of content-creating tools, who relentlessly push us to unleash that creativity, using — of course — their ever cheaper, ever more powerful gadgets and gizmos. Instead of asking consumers to watch, to listen, to play, to passively consume, the race is on to get them to create, to produce, and to participate.
They mention the inevitability of much ‘crap’ being created–”superior tools and no talent still equals useless content” but acknowledge that there are exciting new niche markets created exclusively by ‘non-professionals’ with talent and new tools.
Now contrary to the verdict of culture flattening by Keen and Carr (destruction for Keen) I can’t come to the same dire conclusions. Projecting from Friedman’s ‘narrowcast’ view of culture and connectivity trends, there is simply too much of the rest of the world being edited out of the picture (see various critiques of Friedman’s flat world view). Even if the above trends can’t be denied, they are fueled by consumate consumerism, more than productive content generation. Popular culture is certainly of interest to a certain extend, however there are other less flashy ‘happenings’ that need a more fine tuned focus to see them. There are also more consumers of content than producers (good and bad); more readers than reviewers and active filters; more French bloggers than American ones (writing practices that pre-date the electronic media). My point, trends are not independant of the cultural roots of their embodied and geographically situated participants and take on their color.
I believe to a certain degree in collaborative filtering as an Information management tool; as distributed sense-making; and as an informal kind of peer reviewing. Will I find these filtering others around the google corner? Perhaps yes, if my super-encounterer luck is up! Perhaps not (and probably not). In most cases I will need to rely on trusted information producers and other sources of productive filtering and creations which take time to locate. Furthermore, if the creativity of tools and bandwith are fueling more ‘production’ of content, we’ve all seen how utterly demanding in time, energy and mental bandwith maintaining online presences can be. Enough to discourage more than one after a few months of enthousiam.
To make a cultural point, the book I’ve been reading by Scollon & Scollon’s Nexus of practice provides a number of stories about vocality and technology related to indigenous people of Alaska. It seems their style of discursivity is strongly skewed towards silence and observation over public participation and ‘all out’ vocal displays on or offline. In Alaska their connectivity is very much up to date due to the military structural needs of the past. The authors quote one Alaska native saying: “I can only speak to you to the extent I know you” (p.133). Online identities complicate the matter even further when faced with virtual ‘strangers’ . Direct questions, the authors tell us are understood as scolding and are responded to by reflection in silence–not writing nor response.
I suppose many other cultural characteristics could be studied to disconfirm the blanket statement of similar techno appropriation leading to a cultural flattening and the end of High Art (Keen’s elitist art) as we know it. These are Western shoes, western values, western discourses. Perhaps another form of colonialism is setting in: techno-colonialism! If not in the access to tools or pre-defined contents (though mostly English) than in the discourse that assumes this reality is a shared view and lived experience affecting all in the same way.