I’m sketching out the next Metapod Connect course with Helga Henry at the moment. We’re thinking of calling it “Internet Fluency for Arts Organisations” with an emphasis on shifting their use of online tools from promotion to real engagement. More on that as it develops but as part of my prep I’ve been catching up on my reading. Here’s three things I think will be useful.
Everything you need to know about The Internet by John Naughton.
Naughton notes that while The Internet has become a utility in many societies we don’t have a good collective understanding of it.
So how might we go about getting a more balanced view of the net? What would you really need to know to understand the internet phenomenon? Having thought about it for a while, my conclusion is that all you need is a smallish number of big ideas, which, taken together, sharply reduce the bewilderment.
A good, long article well worth dwelling over.
It’s more a preamble to a manifesto but it manages to articulate that which I’ve had trouble articulating about “social media” over the last two years. Maureen, an author of books, recounts sitting on a panel next to the classic social media consultant archetype.
My neighbor had a lot to say. She had a MESSAGE. She talked longer than anyone, and over everyone and through everyone. Her message, as far as I could determine, was that the internet is all about getting out there and SELLING yourself.
[...]
She was certainly not the first person I’d heard this from. I hear this almost everywhere I go where there are people talking about social media, and I feel that it is time that I rise up against it. In fact, I did, right there and then. I grabbed the microphone from her grasp and said, “I am not a brand.”
Read the post for the manifesto itself. I think I have plenty to add to this, mainly on the notion of brands and what they mean in this space. We talk about online personas, or I do anyway because I have a fair few, and from a marketing perspective these are brands, only not in the same way as Persil is a brand. It’s complicated, of course, which is why those with the simple “you are a brand” message can shout loudest.
4chan is hacking the attention economy by danah boyd
If you want to understand how culture on the Internet functions you need to understand 4chan. Boyd’s overview is good but I’m particularly interested in replacing “attention economy” with “culture”. To tie this into my winning at culture post I think hacking culture, in the sense of “re-purposing or re-configuring of stuff to make it do something it wasn’t originally intended to do” (via), is one of the more interesting things the Internet enables and accelerates. It’s also something arts organisations need to understand if they’re going to be fluent online.