Tom Chatfield
…say what?
When David Cameron returned to London from this year’s Conservative Party Conference, what platform did his train depart from? Why did the engineers of the longest continuous-span suspension bridge in the world change the blueprints after construction started? Those were the easy questions. Now, try these for size. Agtaq gufnx mbvrp eselx vurnm xsmqc aqzxa gakro altam yrvtn tpqzy vgnbx nofqw gonov? And who on earth is the person named in the hieroglyph on the left?
I’m sitting with my wife and two increasingly bemused friends experiencing the future of quizzing—or at least the future of quizzing in countries with high rates of iPhone ownership and comprehensive 3G networks. We’re in the Coach and Horses, Soho, and pretty much the only rule is that anything goes. Short of assaulting our two quiz-masters with a blunt weapon, there is nothing we can’t do, or won’t need to have done by the end of the evening if we want any chance of victory. We can call friends. We can use the internet. We can crowd-source our queries out to our thousands—well, tens—of Twitter followers. We can even, I have discovered, simultaneously phone National Rail Enquiries and send an inordinately expensive text message to the mobile phone service Any Question Answered, although neither of those options does much good.
Welcome to the Hive Mind Challenge—the first ever quiz where both cheating and Tweeting are de rigeur. Founded by tech gurus Adrian Hon and Philip Trippenbach, the event—which took place on Tuesday this week—was the trial run (”the alpha; not even the beta!”) and was both a wonderful and mildly terrifying experience. For a start, there were the massed ranks of Macbooks-cum-dongles that confronted my motley band as we entered. We were wielding, between the four of us, one iPhone, one Blackberry, some kind of Palm device that none of us knew how to use, and one ordinary mobile phone that didn’t like sending text messages. When the batteries ran out on the iPhone half way through, we nearly walked out in despair, so comprehensively were we out-gunned by the massed ranks of geekery surrounding us. But I’m glad we didn’t. Read more »
Elizabeth Kirkwood
Online following: @satan love thy neighbour
Jesus was born to tweet, or so it seems. He was after all something of a dab hand at pithy aphorisms. But just what would he tweet? Jesus: @thepeacemakers bless you! If you can think of any better ones, put them on twitter with #historytweets — we’ll give a free subscription to Prospect for the most original. Can’t say fairer than that.
But would you follow Jesus on Twitter? It seems you would according to our new Twitter poll of 2000+ people in the UK (carried out by YouGov). Jesus wasn’t, however, the most popular—we are, it seems, a far more nationalistic bunch than that: if British people could follow any figure from history on Twitter, they picked a national hero with a talent for speeches considerably longer than 140 characters—Sir Winston Churchill. How might that go? winston_c @adolf_h We will fight you on the beaches.
The poll tested a cross section of the 11% of British people who use Twitter—an estimated 5.5m people—and compared them to the rest of the country, revealing that while they have a strong liberal bias in their politics, their heroes are in fact conservative, by today’s standards at least. Churchill topped the list (34 per cent), with Jesus (30 per cent) and Darwin (28 per cent) second and third respectively.
Churchill was most popular among potential Conservative voters, men, the over-35s, and the English. Jesus, meanwhile, came first among Labour voters and Scots. But the two are a statistical dead-heat with Liberal Democrats, women and the under 35s.
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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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John Naish
American pop group Forever the Sickest Kids: releasing mini-albums for young fans who lack focus
Kerry McCarthy MP is Labour’s Twitter tsar, with the job of pushing 140-character messages towards busy internet users. But her own life, it seems, is too frantic for much more than even this tiny task. “While I might be able to summon up the energy to tweet of an evening, composing a blog post is somewhat beyond me,” she confesses. And if our newspapers are to be believed, McCarthy is hardly alone.
In the popular imagination, ours is a generation unable to focus, encircled by diversions and fuelled by an ever-quickening media culture. While there is a lot of truth to this, the wilder assertions about our fast-moving world may be exaggerated: after all, the majority of British people don’t use Twitter (see our poll, p37), and most of us lead lives nowhere near as stressful as that of a Labour MP. Yet it is undeniable that catching our attention is becoming less and less easy in a world with ever more channels and websites.
The problem, as neuroscience reveals, is that humans are rotten multitaskers. An often cited 2001 study by psychology professor David Meyer at the University of Michigan examined the brains of young adults performing multiple tasks, like solving maths problems or classifying geometric objects. He found that our brains don’t spread attention across tasks, but flip back and forth between them. This demands extra cognitive effort, draining mental focus away from the tasks themselves. The more distraction, the less attentive we become.
This is stressful for individuals, but potentially ruinous for those trying to sell us things. Marc Stewart, guitarist with American rockers Forever the Sickest Kids, says his band will now release three mini-albums, each a few songs long, every six months. The aim is to connect with the group’s 13-24 year-old fans who, Stewart says, have “short attention spans.”
Meanwhile the board game maker Hasbro has begun marketing accelerated versions of its bestselling games, Monopoly and Scrabble, with the slogan “take a 20-minute game break.” The new Scrabble Express only has two words on the board at any one time, while the “Q” tile has been replaced with “Qu.” Monopoly Express is missing the hotels, chance cards, and even cash (which is replaced by a cash-machine card). Who has time to count notes? Phil Jackson, head of Hasbro’s games unit, says market research showed that players were bored by Monopoly’s protracted endgame, as players slog it out to avoid bankruptcy.
Advertisers are learning from the research, too. Brands like Nestlé are already experimenting in the US with shrinking their television adverts from 30 to ten seconds. Studies by American media-buyer KSL Media show that these shorter messages still generate two-thirds of the “recall” of longer slots. MTV is even introducing five-second ads on the web, citing studies into “user tolerance” that show their viewers wouldn’t watch anything longer.
Today’s flick-flack of marketing stimuli is designed to catch our waning attention, but it may shorten spans further, warns Richard Silberstein, director of the Brain Sciences Institute in Melbourne. The human brain is designed to respond to the unexpected. Anything from an attacking animal to a new camera angle in a film perks up our attentiveness. But, Silberstein says, “if you expose individuals to environments where they don’t have to sustain their attention… their ability to sustain it for any length of time may become compromised.”
What follows is a sort of attention arms race to the bottom. Companies find it difficult to break through the noise of modern media, so they must dream up ever cleverer, quicker ways to catch our eye. But the more they do this, the thinner our attention spans will wear—and the harder, faster and sharper the ads, shows and propaganda will need to be.
New weapons are soon to enter this race, says David Lewis, a Sussex University neuropsychologist and marketing expert. With the broadcaster Astra, he is developing “hybrid TV,” where viewers simultaneously watch programmes and surf the web on their television sets. Lewis says the government’s recent move towards allowing product placement on television gives advertisers a strong incentive to develop such ideas, which will make shopping while you watch television easier than ever.
If this all sounds ghastly and intrusive, there are upsides. Lewis thinks the future will be a world of “permission marketing” where, instead of barging messages into people’s heads, advertisers will have to present a sufficiently attractive proposition for people to decide to invite them in. On hybrid TV, for example, if you like a celebrity’s jumper, you can point your remote at it, click “buy” and it’s in the post.
Plus, some groups might welcome a world in which we pay less attention. British political parties are experimenting with electronic doorstepping, from the twittering Ms McCarthy to Tory chairman Eric Pickles, who placed his party’s first adverts on the online music-streaming service, Spotify, during October. Perhaps they and their fellow MPs could take heart from shorter voter attention spans? Alastair Campbell once said a scandal-struck politician need only survive for 11 days; this was the longest a story could run before the world lost interest. Maybe the attention crash will shorten this. Soon, even a tweet could be a long time in politics.
James Crabtree
Yes, its yet another poll about twitter
In the new edition of Prospect—in shops tomorrow, but on subscribers’ doormats today—we have a new poll as part of a fun feature about the politics of Twitter. The claim is that Twitter is an oddly liberal tool: a mouthpiece for what we have (not entirely originally, I must admit) dubbed the “twittering classes.” The killer bit of the poll is where Twitterers lie on our scale of liberal/authoritarian groups—way out to the extreme, see the graphic below. It also has some lighthearted stuff about Twittering figures from history too—more on that later tomorrow. You can find it on page 37 of the print edition, inside Evgeny’s wonderful piece on dictators and the web.
We’ll put all this up on the web soon, along with responses to Evgeny’s thesis from Clay Shirky and others. But given the Guardian and Telegraph did stories on our Twitter poll today I thought I’d just put up the text of press release for people to see. Obviously we’d be grateful if you could tweet this, mentioning @prospect_uk when you do so!
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PROSPECT PRESS RELEASE: NEW TWITTER POLL
Often seen as little more than a harmless waste of time, the much-hyped online social network site Twitter is increasingly being used as a tool by liberal and left-wing political campaigners. Twitter users are among the most liberal groups in Britain, a new national poll of 2000+ people by Prospect magazine and pollsters YouGov reveals.
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Brian Semple
The internet: a dictator's best friend?
When Barack Obama met with Chinese students yesterday in Shanghai, he called for greater internet freedom in China, saying that “the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes.”
However, in the upcoming issue of Prospect web guru Evgeny Morozov argues that the west has not only vastly overestimated the power of repressive regimes to censor the internet, but is also misguided in thinking that the internet is good for democracy. Instead, authoritarian regimes are finding new ways to control the web:
The “great firewall of China,” which supposedly keeps the Chinese in the dark, is legendary. Such methods of internet censorship no longer work. They might stop the man on the street, but a half determined activist can find a way round. And more often than not, official attempts to delete a post by an anti-government blogger will backfire, as the blogger’s allies take on the task of distributing it through their own networks. Governments have long lost absolute control over how the information spreads online, and extirpating it from blogs is no longer a viable option. Instead, they fight back. It is no trouble to dispatch commentators to accuse a dissident of being an infidel, a sexual deviant, a criminal, or worst of all a CIA stooge.
The December issue of Prospect is available to buy in shops from Thursday 19th November, and subscribers can read the piece online at www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
Aaron Banks
Twittering Senators at dawn
The 4th annual Netroots Nation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is America’s most important gathering of liberal bloggers and activists. It wrapped up at the wekeend, but not before the heat of this summer’s political firestorms has already created some noteworthy moments, from a feisty appearance from a senior-senator-turned-junior-Democrat to a masters class in how to deal with hecklers from President Bill Clinton. We can only hope all those harried Democratic representatives and senators were watching.
Day 2 saw longtime Pennsylvania Republican and recently turned Democratic senator Arlen Specter make national news in a question and answer session, when he was asked about his friend, the lead Republican health care negotiator in the Senate, Chuck Grassley. Earlier in the week Grassley had accused Democrats of planning a “government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.” Specter said he would be glad to correct him, prompting the audience to hold their cell phones aloft and shout “call him now.” Senator Specter isn’t know as “Snarlin’ Arlen” for nothing and he seized the moment to point at the crowd and pointedly say “join me backstage and watch me dial him.”
True to his word, as soon as he was backstage, Specter called Grassley and left a voicemail message, as a group of bloggers and activists looked on and recorded video. Not yet satisfied, Specter took to Twitter, tweeting:
Called Senator Grassley to tell him to stop speading myths about health care reform and imaginary “death panels.”
And a moment later:
Had to leave a message – for now. I will talk to him soon.
Then the fight really began.
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James Crabtree
The future of journalism, sadly.
We’re big fans of Tom Tomorrow’s cartoons here at Prospect, but this one was especially fine—on blogging, lolcats, and the end of the mainstream media. Tomorrow’s website is here, where you can see his updates, while you can read all of his cartoons over at Salon. You can support his work by buying signed copies of the cartoons too.
[ps - having received a few e-mails, i should note that the irony of posting this here isn't entirely lost on us either..... jc]
James Crabtree
A suspicious twittering twory
Stephen Fry. Will Carling. Andy Murray. Who next? Apparently, David Cameron, says a message in my feed. The man himself is going to be exclusively unveiling his forthcoming reshuffle, line by line, on the web’s fastest growing new media platform. We know the conservatives are thought to be far web savvier than their slow-moving clunking opponent. Odd, at a first glance, that the normally techno-Tory leader would pick such an picture, while a few more “followers” might have been advisable in the popularity. Still, he has that 16-year-old-girl patois down nicely, which should go down well in the massed ranks of shire county voters who use twitter as their only form communication. Surely, with such communication, an election victory is but a few tweets away.
But, hang about….. wait a minute….. Perhaps someone else could be to blame?
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