Where's the continuity?

by Brett McLaughlin | @oreillybrett | comments: 7

I've recently resumed a childhood love affair with comics. In particular, I'm a fan of the Uncanny X-Men. While they're not as edgy as the Dark Knight, and not as hip as a Dark Horse mini-series, they're what got me started on comics, and what I continually go back to. (Besides that, they're much more interesting and generally less sucky than the movies and cartoons of the same name.)

Of course, it's been a while, so I hopped over to UncannyXMen.net to figure out what's been going on. They have a nice primer to help you figure out how all the various titles intersect, which is non-trivial to keep track of in the X-Universe.

Interestingly, I ran across this:

This struck me: continuity. Readers loved the continuity of the story.

While it's easy to chalk this up as a function of good fiction, I don't think it's that easy. Putting aside issues of story, I'm struck by how much looking back and forth I tend to do in reading a comic. I'm scanning a bit ahead, and reflecting back on what I just read and saw, even while reading the current panel. I've got this constant sense of context; I have a continuity in which what I'm learning (about a comic book character, about a love interest, about an island that's about to be submerged by supersonic waves triggering earthquakes along fault lines, etc.) fits.

So why would we simply accept that in non-fiction--especially projects and products that purport to actually teach something--we can't have continuity?

In many ways, this is the genius of visual series like Head First, and to a lesser degree in this specific case, the Missing Manuals. I'd also argue that this visual format does wonders for the Twitter Book and our new Best iPhone Apps book and site. Without having to re-read a page or flip ahead, you have a sense of visual context. You have a continuity that can be absorbed in a glance, even if you're ready body text at the top of a right-hand page.

I could go on and on, but let's stop the exposition. Here's a simple question: in your reading, your writing, your speaking, your programming, what are you doing to create and absorb context and continuity? I believe there are ways to achieve this in almost every field, and I believe this is an important part of what sets the elite apart from the... well... non-elite, in terms of communication.

Where's your continuity?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bot

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 2

Web technologies often allow you to scale things that weren't scalable before. Unfortunately, that list of scalable things includes spam. From unsolicited phone calls to unwanted emails to unnecessary tweets, it can seem like we're getting progressively overloaded with information we don't necessarily want. One group blamed for the increase in online spam are Twitter bots - Twitter accounts created to automatically perform certain behaviors like following anyone who mentions "candy" or retweeting any mention of the the word "fashion."

Some people find such bots to provide annoying and useless clutter. I, on the other hand, have come to love the bot. In an age of information overload and filter failure, good bots can act as an initial filter for discovering pertinent things within the real-time information ecosystem. Unless you're fanatical about a subject, why follow 100 military bloggers or 250 marketing gurus or 85 fashionistas when one or two bots can collate their best stuff and simplify your life? Who has time to find all these accounts, track up-and-comers, and listen to everything they say? I tend to be a one-bot kinda guy. And when I find a good bot, I hang onto her.

Bots love to exchange gifts with you, too. Generally, my tweets are relatively long and filled with informative nouns - and bots appreciate my efforts. Every instance when I mention "celebrity" or "baseball" or "journalism" to the world is like giving a tiny gift to a bot that keeps it relevant. And in exchange, the bot ensures that my information automatically gets to a wider audience of people that I don't know yet. Around the clock, bots are selflessly recruiting my next generation of fans. And my love affair with bots is just beginning; because they're inherently unjealous creatures, I can use as many bots as I want, whenever I want, however it pleases me.

Brands, on the other hand, always want to be my soulmate, even though they don't often love me back. They don't tell their friends what they heard from me, and they don't share their best gossip with me. Usually when I meet a brand, I find them to be a very distant anti-filter that talks only about themselves. They're rarely chivalrous. Unlike bots desperately seeking my attention, brands only want me when I talk to them first. Sometimes they thank me for the compliments, and sometimes they're sorry they hurt me, but either way I always feel a bit empty after talking with a brand. Brands are just not that into me.

Brands tend to be very jealous and are always checking to see if I'm being faithful. Yet while I sit around hoping they'll get in touch, they always seem to be busy talking to someone else. One brand that's on my mind all the time is Comcast, but how often do they ever think about me? According to my diary, @comcastcares wrote me four times, and @comcastbonnie just once. Frank and Bonnie (and Scott, too) never suggest novel things I might like to watch based on shows I tweet about, never give me the latest news about high-speed Internet connections, and they don't even try to sell me on the digital phone service I don't have. This brand only tries to make me happy after they've hurt me.

I'm not the only one getting his feelings hurt. Unlike bots I love who share my information and give me some in return, Comcast rapidly narrowcasts in a multiplexed Kabuki dance designed to cheer us up when we're feeling blue about them. Frank and his colleagues send messages to specific people 97% of the time, and retweet what they say less than 1% of the time. And its not like other brands are thinking about me a lot either - even my beloved Starbucks only retweets fans like me about 1% of the time. Sure, I'm on cloud nine during an occasional encounter with a brand I really like, but they always seem to roll over and ignore me afterwards.

Developing relationships in a socially networked era is difficult because there's less old-fashioned courtship and more emphasis on "hanging out." It's hard to find a truly generous brand nowadays. That's why when it comes to brands, I like to spend my nights with non-profits that friends set me up with. A new article points out a lot of great reasons to develop relationships with non-profit brands: they're member-driven, promote community participation, create value in people's lives, and engage audiences by speaking to their primary interests.

Developing a relationship with a non-profit brand in this economy is hard, though - they always want me to pay for everything. Bots, on the other hand, are happy to go Dutch. Sure, most Twitter bots aren't great at engaging in conversation, but I think they can be thought of as stripped-down non-profits. The reason I have learned to stop worrying and love the bot is because they're created by passionates to collate knowledge from people they don't know, and share it with other people they don't know. Call me Dr. Strangelove, but I'd rather have a good one-night stand with a generous bot than a bad long-term relationship with a selfish brand.

A Climate of Polarization

by Gavin Starks | comments: 10

Guest blogger Gavin Starks is founder and CEO of AMEE, a neutral aggregation platform designed to measure and track all the energy data in the world. Gavin has a background in Astrophysics and over 15 years Internet development experience.

We're all aware of the emotive language used to polarize the climate change debate.

There are, however, deeper patterns which are repeated across science as it interfaces with politics and media. These patterns have always bothered me, but they've never been as "important" as now.

We are entering an new era of seismic change in policy, business, society, technology, finance and our environment, on a scale and speed substantially greater than previous revolutions. The sheer complexity of these interweaving systems is staggering.

Much of this change is being driven by "climate science", and in the communications maelstrom there is a real risk that we further alienate "science" across the board.

We need more scientists with good media training (and presenting capability) to change the way that all sciences are represented and perceived. We need more journalists with deeper science training - and the time and space to actually communicate across all media. We need to present uncertainty clearly, confidently and in a way that doesn't impede our decision-making.

On the climate issue, there are some impossible levers to contend with;

1. Introducing any doubt into the climate debate stops any action that might combat our human impact.
2. Introducing "certainty" undermines our scientific method and its philosophy.

When represented in political, public and media spaces, these two levers undermine every scientific debate and lead to bad decisions.

Pascal's Wager is often invoked, and this is entirely reasonable in this case.

It is reasonable because of what's at stake: the risk of mass extinction events. If there is a probability that anthropogenic climate change will cause the predicted massive interventions in our ecosystem, then we have to act.

The nature of our actions must be commensurate with both the cause and the effect. The causes are many: population, production, consumption - as are the effects: war, poverty, scarcity, etc.

Our interventions will use all our means to address both cause and effect, and those actions will run deep.

Equally, we must allow science to do what it's designed to do: measure, model, analyse and predict.

From a scientific perspective we must allow more room for theories to evolve, otherwise we'll only prove what we're looking for.

However, if we ignore the potential need to act, the consequences are not something anyone will want to see.

It's not something we can fix later (for me, "geo-engineering" is not a fix, it's a pre-infected band-aid).

Given the massive complexity of the issues, and that - really - anthropogenic climate change is only one of many "peak consumption" issues that we face, there is no way we can accurately communicate all the arguments that would lead to mass understanding.

However, the complexity issues are no different from those we face in politics. They are not solvable, but they are addressable.

We can communicate the potential outcomes, and the decisions that individuals need to make in order to impact the causes.

Ultimately it's your personal choice.

My choice is based on my personal exposure to the science, business, data, policy, media, and broader issues around sustainability. That choice is to do my best to catalyse change as fast as I possibly can.

We all need to actively engage in improving communication, so that everyone - potentially everyone on Earth - can make informed choices about the future of the planet we inhabit.

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Recommended reading:

http://www.realclimate.org/ is a great resource.

Today, the UK Government launched a campaign "to create a more science literate society, highlighting the science and technology based industries of the future"