Tom Chatfield
Can you keep a secret? Image by Girius
Yesterday, a friend told me the story of last year’s summer internship competition at Saatchi & Saatchi. Eager young beavers had to start a Facebook group, and the one whose group got the most members won the coveted internship. Only problem: within two weeks, Bristol university graduate Tiffany Philippou’s brainchild, Secret London—devoted to sharing members’ inside knowledge of London’s more elusive delights—had won 182,010 members and promptly morphed into a startup.
Marvellous, the power of the web. What interests me, though, is why Secret London worked so well. For starters, it’s a self-evidently good idea. People love sharing inside information about bars, gigs, bands and locations on social networking platforms. That’s why yoof spends so much time online, up to its armpits in Tweets and tinyurls. But why do they love it quite so much—and what larger social purposes is it serving?
Think of yourself for a moment as a node: your web presence a pinprick connected to millions of others via everything you’ve said and done online. What is it that gives your particular online presence value—and status? It’s not your unerring ability to regurgitate received opinions, or type ”lol” a dozen times. It’s the content you generate that’s unique to you: what you actually think, where you’ve actually been, the things that only you know. Largely, in fact, it’s real stuff that gives your virtual presence value: your take on real places, real actions, real people. Read more »
Anjana Ahuja
Take a bracing jaunt to the seaside to catch the Brighton Science Festival, which runs from 12th-28th February. Highlights include a pub chat with Richard Wiseman, magician and psychologist, explosive chemistry shows and Polly Toynbee on whether science and politics mix. No need for a bucket and spade. Visit
www.brightonscience.com
Does skin colour point to scientific difference between races? Author Kenan Malik and others will be discussing this contentious issue on 28th January at London’s Wellcome Collection. Should race play a role in contemporary science, or is the term too loaded? The evening debate is free but ticketed. Book at:
www.wellcomecollection.org
In the world of Facebook, Bebo and countless others, it’s tempting to wonder: how many friends does one person need? Robin Dunbar, evolutionary biologist and anthropologist at Oxford University, takes the question as the title for his new book (published in February by Faber) about the lingering legacies of our evolutionary past. The answer is 150, which is now known as Dunbar’s number. But don’t hang your head in despair, Gordon. It includes family too.
The Royal Institution in London hosts a monthly book club featuring science-themed novels. On 8th February at 7pm, fiction lovers will be discussing Intuition, by Allegra Goodman. The tale of ambition, love and fraud, set in a Boston cancer laboratory, was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. It’s free and no pre-booking is required—although it might feel a little crowded if you bring all 150 chums. www.rigb.org.
Tom Chatfield
Stronger than ever: World of Warcraft keeps people playing with constant updates and fresh rewards, like this flying mount
Kristian Segerstråle is telling me what makes his videogames company unusual. “Most of the $50bn [£30.4bn] or more spent on videogames each year goes on that emotional, solitary, caveman-like journey of you versus the monsters,” he says. “But our games are different. They’re not about what is going on between you and the screen; they’re about what goes on between you and your friends when you play. They’re much more of a medium and a catalyst, for expression, competition, co-operation.” They are also a stupendously good way of making money.
Segerstråle, a boyish 32, is founder and CEO of Playfish, one of the world’s leading “social gaming” companies: makers of a new kind of videogame that is rapidly becoming as essential to online life as sharing images or reading a blog. It’s mid-November and he is “super excited”—not surprisingly, given that Playfish has just been bought by one of the world’s largest and most revered videogames publishers, Electronic Arts (EA), in a deal worth up to $400m (£250m). Playfish didn’t exist two years ago. Today, its games have over 60m unique monthly players and it’s not even the largest in its sector (market leader Zynga boasts over 100m after just two-and-a-half years in existence). So what, exactly, has been going so right?
The easiest answer has two words: social networks. Facebook, the world’s most influential social networking platform, now has over 300m active users. The only website to command more online traffic is Google. Other leading social websites like MySpace and Bebo reach several hundred million users globally. Factor into this the swelling number of smart-phones with internet capabilities, such as Apple’s iPhone, and you have a big business opportunity. Because, next to sending messages, the single most popular activity within these new social platforms and on these new devices is playing games.
The history of games is as old as civilisation. Competitive games are recorded as far back as 2,600BC, while archaeologists have found game “boards” that were apparently scratched onto the backs of statues by bored Assyrian guards in the 8th century BC. Technology has not changed human nature but it has given unprecedented rein to some of our innate impulses and, in particular, to those parts of us that the world of work and business have not used to best advantage: our love of exploration, learning, interaction and, perhaps above all, our sense of fun.
Playfish has created ten games to date, and most of them are a long way from the traditional idea of videogames as a violent, crude form of escapism. Its first title, Who Has the Biggest Brain?, is an IQ quiz. Starting to play it takes less than 30 seconds: having logged into Facebook or MySpace (or switched on your iPhone), you look up the application and, after a few clicks and no expenditure, start playing. An excitable cartoon figure invites you to pit your wits against four classes of game: analytical ability, calculation, memory and visual processing. And then you’re off—counting the number of blocks in increasingly complicated Lego-like shapes, for instance, or answering a series of sums against the clock.
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Evgeny Morozov
Read more in this debate: media guru, Clay Shirky, responds to Morozov’s criticisms and defends the web as a positive force for democracy. Morozov replies to Shirky here.
Hear more: Evgeny Morozov speaks at Demos on the subject: “Is the internet really changing politics?”, and Prospect’s Tom Chatfield interviews Morozov here.
My homeland of Belarus is an unlikely place for an internet revolution. The country, controlled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, was once described by Condoleezza Rice as “the last outpost of tyranny in Europe.”
Its last presidential election in March 2006 was followed by a short-lived and unsuccessful revolution. The initial protests were brutally suppressed. But where public rallies couldn’t succeed, protesters turned to more creative forms of insurgency: flash mobs. In a flash mob, social media or email is used to assemble a group of people in a public place, who then perform together a brief, often surreal action. Some young Belarusians used the blogging service LiveJournal to organise a series of events in Minsk with subtle anti-government messages. In a typical flash mob, the youngsters smiled, read newspapers or ate ice-cream. There was nothing openly political but the subtext was: “It’s better to lick ice-cream than the president’s ass!” The security services made many arrests, but their actions were captured in photos that were posted on LiveJournal and on photo-sharing websites like Flickr. Western bloggers and then traditional media picked up the news, drawing attention to the harsh crackdown.
Details of this rebellion have since been celebrated by a cadre of mostly western thinkers who believe that digital activism can help to topple authoritarian regimes. Belarusian flash mobs are invoked to illustrate how a new generation of decentralised protesters, armed only with technology, can oppose the state in ways unthought of in 1968 or 1989. But these digital enthusiasts rarely tell you what happened next.
Enthusiasm for the idea of digital revolution abounds. In October, I was invited to testify to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Washington DC—a hotchpotch of US congressmen, diplomats and military officials. The group was holding a hearing titled: “Twitter Against Tyrants: New Media in Authoritarian Regimes.” I would once have happily accepted the premise, but recently my thinking has changed. From 2006-08 I worked on western-funded internet projects in the former Soviet Union—most with a “let’s-promote-democracy-through-blogs” angle. But last year I quit. Our mission to use the internet to nudge citizens of authoritarian regimes to challenge the status quo had so many unexpected consequences that, at times, it seemed to be hurting the very causes we were trying to promote.
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Damian Tambini
Murdoch: the death of free speech?
Reports today that News International will move the Sunday Times online to a “paid-for” model are part of a more general shift away from a “free as in free beer” internet, as I mentioned in my article in this month’s Prospect. But do these moves mean we should worry about a move away from a “free as in free speech” internet?
It depends of course whether your definition of free speech includes people’s right to receive and exchange ideas among one another. If it does, the brief period in which newspapers and broadcasters have attempted to gain market share on the internet by offering free access and have funded distribution through advertising has been a boon for free speech. It has been a period of amazingly fast and free exchange of ideas. Facebook, Google and the wider blogosphere have emerged as the major new distribution mechanisms for news and comment and they have enabled us to flag, point, post, tag, “like” and comment freely and quickly. Yet as the newspapers teeter on the edge of collapse, we do have to acknowledge that somebody has to pay for journalism.
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