A taxonomy of social media? Forget it.

Posted on by John Helmer
Social web share buttonsWhen I was preparing a couple of articles on social media for this blog earlier in the year, I had a quick scoot around Google to see if I could find a taxonomy of social media. I hadn’t realised it would be such a big ask. It seemed, to me at least, a fairly reasonable request. Standard research procedure. You’re surveying a particular knowledge area and you want a map of the terrain and boundaries; some kind of idea of what the thing you’re researching might contain and how these contents can be broken down into logical categories. I wasn’t asking for a precise ontology, just a usable classification scheme. Aside from the unsatisfactory nature of what I turned up, (follow the links in this post by all means and judge for yourself whether I’m being too harsh), the question soon loomed of why on earth I would expect such a thing to be available. Continue reading →

How disruptive is social media for publishers?

Posted on by John Helmer
Social media is widely felt to be a disruptive technology – which is to say, a technology that alters a market in unexpected and not very predictable ways and one that has particular implications for publishing. However, a truthful answer to the question posed in our title if we take it to mean ‘how disruptive is social media to publishing now’, is probably very different depending on where in the industry you sit. At the extreme end of things, the rise of blogging, Twitter et al is causing many newspaper publishers to question and in some cases modify their customer proposition. Meanwhile, trade publishers, who have a similarly direct exposure to the rapid upheavals in the consumer market driven in part by social media use, are more likely to complain about the latest outrage perpetrated by their new and unwelcome gatekeepers, Google/Apple/Amazon than to worry about social media per se. This is certainly disruption but feels more like a spat between big old companies and big new companies. Continue reading →

I’m getting mad (with Marshall McLuhan)

Posted on by Rob Yates
 

‘You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.’

I would imagine that Understanding Media (1964) is surely one of those books – like Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Klein’s No Logo – owned by many yet read by few. Great then, on the occasion of McLuhan’s centenary to be able to remind oneself of his ideas online over a sandwich. Through Tom Wolfe’s excellent introduction I learned of the influence on McLuhan of catholic mystic Teilhard de Chardin. Now, in writing this, I thought it’d be useful to link through to the excellent entry on de Chardin (who shaped the religious and intellectual outlook many a mid-century catholic intellectual including Belloc, Chesterton and Auden amongst others) in the ODNB. But if I did that, the majority would end up here, on a page so utterly dreadful that it is to user experience what Fat Burger is to healthy eating. Instead I have few choices but to direct you to here. More depressingly, and completely unsurprisingly, if you Google ‘de Chardin’ the first result is from Wikipedia and you give up long, long before you find a scholarly hit in the results. Continue reading →

Will e-reading make us stupid?

Posted on by John Helmer
A recent Gartner report marked a minor milestone for e-reading. Apparently, time spent reading on screen is now almost equal to the time spent reading printed paper text. And this apparent vote in favour of digital by readers is not only quantitative but also qualitative: ‘The huge majority of tablet and iPad users say they find screen reading either easier than reading printed text (52%) or about the same (42%)’. Some educators and academics however, have doubts about whether screen reading really does offer an experience of comparable quality to print. Much cited in these debates is Anne Mangen’s article ‘Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion’ published in the Journal of Research in Reading (2008, pp. 404-419), which asserts that digital text makes us read, ‘in a shallower, less focused way’. As we pass yet another significant milestone, the 100th birthday of Marshall (‘the medium is the message’) McLuhan, our attention turns readily to the issue of how screen-based reading might affect not only reading habits but also our wider culture. According to Kevin Kelly we are undergoing ‘a second Gutenberg shift’ in the move to what he calls ‘screen literacy’. But will the results of this shift be injurious for the culture that print reading has given us? Will more e-reading make us all stupid? Continue reading →

Should publishers care about social media?

Posted on by John Helmer
99.5% of social media experts are clowns, according to Gary Vaynerchuk (a bit of a social media expert himself) interviewed on TechCrunch. As someone who lives in Brighton, with its thriving new media community and unfortunate penchant for trendophilia, I have to confess that his statement has a ring of truth about it. I have seen their collapsing cars, their oversized shoes, and on more than one occasion have had water squirted at my specs by their trick buttonhole flowers. In other words: I’ve attended a lot of social media presentations. As soon as the Powerpoint arrives at its final slide, you ask yourself: ‘Well it sounded great, but what did he actually say?’. As a topic, social media has become yawn-inducing. It’s high on the hype curve and trending downwards as typically most of what you hear is hot air. So, should publishers waste any time at all even thinking about social media? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Continue reading →