Slices of soup – towards a new definition of local media

Back when I was reviewing and distributing zines and other self published paper objects I had a saying. Never think you have a handle on what’s going on or a sense of the scale of the “scene”. There’ll be huge seams of activity going on under your radar, in networks just a few degrees away from yours. The only reason you think you know it all is because you’ve stopped looking.

Stopping looking isn’t a crime. If you’re trying to actually do something drawing a line in your explorations is a good way to start. But if you’re in the business of media in the current era when anyone can create a media platform in seconds you should always be aware of your limitations.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last year. When Twitter first broke out in the UK I could have confidently told you how it was being used because I was part of the relatively small community that was using it. As Twitter adoption grew my knowledge changed. I could no longer tell you how people were using it because the number of uses were becoming huge. All I could do was help you understand the nature of the Twitter model.

It’s probably best to think of engagement through Twitter in terms of slices. I give Twitter some variables (these are the people I want to follow / this is the search query I have) and, after adding some more variables (these are the people who have mentioned you) it returns a slice of Twitter based on who’s posted recently. This slice is pretty much unique to me. The connection is has with other people’s slices is merely how much it overlaps (mutual followers, etc) and these connections will shift and change over time.

Watching people I feel I know well use Twitter can be fascinating. Because their slice is different their whole perception of Twitter is different to mine, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically. I don’t want to play down the importance of the overlaps – they are the glue that makes Twitter work – but I think the differences are often under-appreciated by those who celebrate the power Twitter has to bring people together. It’s these these effectively infinite differences between the slices that enable messages, ideas and links to thinks to spread across the network so quickly and effectively.

The other great thing about the Twitter model is it’s a good way of understanding how the Internet works. One of the great early works about the Internet was David Weinberger‘s book Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It’s a very seductive phrase and one that I’ve returned to again and again over the last decade as it seems to be the fundamental difference between old media and new. But it also seems to me to be an accurate reflection on how society works.

In other words, what we’re seeing as a digital phenomena is more like the normal way of things. When Weinberger says in his introduction:

Then we go on the Web, and the pieces are so loosely joined that frequently the links don’t work. [...] But, that’s ok because the Web gets its value not from the smoothness of its overall operation but from its abundance of small nuggets that point to more small nuggets. And, most important, the Web is binding not just pages but us human beings in new ways. We are the true “small pieces” of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we’re still inventing.

I’d say yes, that’s true, but what’s also happening is we’re rediscovering the power of that loose joining that our great-grandparents knew well.

Maybe.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But it makes sense to me. Big media is only 3 or 4 generations old and something must have held society together before then.

My motivation for writing this post came from a couple of posts. The first by hyperlocal guru Will Perrin about the Shott review of economics of Local Television where he argues “For me the overarching question is why do local video programming on TV rather than the internet? The internet does almost everything that small audience local TV can do but far cheaper and more flexibly.”

The second is a followup from social media for social good hero Nick Booth where he asks his network What would you show from Birmingham to demonstrate how the web can do local better than local tv? Now, I think I know what Nick’s trying to do here but I think he’s falling into the trap that appears whenever this sort of thing is discussed. It is very hard, if not impossible, to do x=y comparisons between big media models and the way the social internet operates.

He asks “if he were to come to Birmingham who could [Secretary of State] Jeremy Hunt meet and what locally grown bottom up Big Society media goodness could we show him to help demonstrate an alternative beyond Local TV?”

The implication being that what we have in Birmingham is a viable alternative in scope and reach to that put out by a local television station. And, as Dave Harte points out in the comments, it doesn’t quite measure up.

Overall, I can’t help feeling that even with all the sites mentioned there isn’t really much here that yet adds up to a viable local media scene.

No, it doesn’t. And that’s not to detract from any of the efforts out there because, with some exceptions, I don’t think they’re trying to be part of a vibrant local media scene. Either their not capable or they’re not interested or they have another agenda for doing what they do.

But there’s a more fundamental point. These sites Nick rolls out are, I think, aberrations. While they might be distinct from big media models they still share more with them than we might like to admit. If we’re talking about a media landscape it’s a bit like Houston (where my Dad used to live and which I’ve visited a few times).

This is Downtown Houston.

It’s about a mile across and contains lots of big tall buildings. It’s the skyline that Houston is known by.

pic by telwink

But Houston as a whole doesn’t look like that. I picked Houston because when I visited it I was struck be how spread out everything is. Land is relatively cheap in Houston and the motor car rules so the city sprawls in a way that boggles the mind of this walk-everywhere Brit. Here’s Houston as a whole with the Downtown bit marked in red.

And from the side:

pic by Jason McELweenie

This idea of a effectively infinite space housing a sprawl of relatively small buildings is what I perceive Birmingham’s local online media scene to be like. Sure, there are some striking things in the middle there which many people will point to as a shortcut, and yes they are impressive and important, but they do not and cannot and should not represent the whole.

The problem for the policy makers is they’re thinking in terms of things they can get their heads around, things that fit into the old models of doing things. There’s this attitude that because a model worked well in the past it’ll work well in the future and so we see bizarre projects like this Local TV thing (something which I’ve only ever seen supported by grey haired people who used to work in local TV back when it was a commercially viable model).

And so the danger for those who are trying to talk to policy makers is falling into the trap of comparing the old and the new within the framework of the old, to give the impression that these new things can fill the gap perceived to be left by the withering old things.

As Jon Bounds said last Spring after talking to a reporter about the decline of local newspapers:

He wanted to talk about whether blogging would “fill the gap” that a demise of local papers would create and kept trying to get us to say that we were waiting and wanting to do it commercially. We’re not. We said so a number of times. In my opinion it would be stupid, we’re already filling gaps and have been for years — the hole that “papers” currently fill isn’t a shape that blogging can be forced into (and papers themselves don’t fill the hole anyway).

There’s a tendency to see the shifts in the media landscape as a fragmentation of what was dominant into lots of smaller pieces. While I like the “smaller pieces” bit I do think the term “fragmentation” is a little misleading. It’s not that services provided by larger media outfits have been devolved – it’s more that the needs that those services were developed to fulfill are being serviced by something else entirely.

And, I would argue, that something will not be easy to identify as an entity. It’s a toolset, sure, and literacy in frictionless sharing environments like Twitter and Facebook are important, but it’s also an attitude, an understanding that this isn’t about using media in a broadcast way. It’s about using media without realising you’re using media.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that people like me make for the worst examples of social media usage. The early adopters and power users are too self-aware, too knowing in what they do online. Dubber calls Twitter “performance conversation” and I’ve been told off for playing games with my followers by posting provocative stuff for kicks. We’re the sort of people who are supposed to be pushing and tickling this stuff to see how it works. Everyone else is just using it, and that makes them a lot more interesting.

I think the examples Nick and his commenters gave are good and important things that are doing important work. I would not want to take anything away from what they’ve achieved. But I do not think presenting stuff like Created in Birmingham and The Stirrer as replicating the services of monolithic media outlets is doing anyone any favours because it’s too easy to say they’re not without addressing the real phenomena. That these online things are the anomalies in a rich tapestry of stuff, most of which which is too small or to temporary to get a handle on.

No-one should try and predict the future but in order to better define the present I’ll have a go. I think things online are going to get more atomised. We’re going to see smaller pieces reaching smaller audiences over smaller periods of time. I think concepts like hyperlocal will be seen as transitional stages between the big and the small where the small is effectively the personal. And I think we’ll see the importance of identity diminish as reputation is spread across networks and becomes a more fluid thing.

(As an aside I think Tumblr is a fascinating example of this and something I want to study in more depth)

In short I think the future of online media looks a lot like soup. There will be carrots and they will be important but on the whole it’ll be a murky and opaque and very hard to perceive as anything other than a whole.

And I think this will be a good thing.

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