THE GREAT INCOMPLETENESS
What sets a blog apart from a book, or say an article for a magazine? I’ve long argued it is incompleteness. At their heart – however long or small – a blog post ultimately aspires to be a conversation — and a blog a conversation starter. That the technology we use connects, categorizes and distributes our content give these conversations legs.
Our medium also provides us with an out. We can be wrong. Right. Or, somewhere in between. But the onus isn’t necessarily on us to be complete or accurate. Every conversation represents a point in the evolution of the thought or idea. In fact, the quality of the circle with who you are conversing can illuminate and enhance our words. If you don’t value the conversation, you’ve switched back to transmitting content, becoming a web publisher.
I was struck by Malcom Gladwell’s view of his writing in a recent New York Magazine article (about his new book Outliers). He appears to view his work much in the same way as we might view a blog post:
When Gladwell’s critics themselves are world experts—as was the case when New York Times business writer Joe Nocera went after Gladwell for “conflat[ing] fraud with overvaluation” in a New Yorker article that argued that Enron’s misdeeds were hidden in plain sight—Gladwell retreats to the defense that his writing is merely meant to be provocative. “I don’t think it’s proper for someone in my position to be a definitive voice,” he says. “These books and New Yorker articles are conversation starters.”
How do you enhance a book and embrace the conversation? For most authors it appears impossible – without publishing it as a blog or wiki. For most they start the conversation but aren’t present for it, reinforcing the romantic notion of the isolated writer, lonely at work.
Clearly there are many opportunities to ignite a conversation – and many vehicles by which to do it. But to not participate seems like an opportunity lost.
Is the intent to start a conversation enough? Especially when your medium isn’t fostering participation?
Bloggers gone wrong
Here’s The Economist on bloggers going wrong.
On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. On November 3rd BA began investigating the behaviour of several employees who had described some passengers as “smelly” and “annoying” in Facebook postings.
Funny, wasn’t it Virgin that sponsored the Delta Airlines blogger that was fired for inappropriate behavior?
It’s still stunning to me that most want to prevent this kind of behavior. Ok, I’m all for not for stereotyping customers in public forums – give them some coaching here. But if I was an executive at Virgin I’d rather hear about cockroaches on planes rather than not at all. And it would tell me something about my culture if this is where I had to go to learn about this stuff.
The irony is that these same companies – who are so concerned about what their employees are saying online pay near no attention to what their customers are speaking about. Here’s a stab on American Airlines who I travel with every few weeks:
- The food is disgusting. I dare you to try and get your children to eat it.
- Your entertainment system is close to worthless. Go check-out Air New Zealand, Virgin and others. Fix it.
- Your employees run on board service in a slightly less friendly way than hospital receptions. Tenure seems to qualify their role, not customer satisfaction.
Lets see if anyone is listening. In a recent blog in which I complained about Air New Zealand and the way they handled loosing my baggage I got a call from their head of baggage services who apologized and explained which of my ideas they were going to implement. Strangely his company policy prevented him from replying to my blog post – I suggested he break the rules and do so – and all credit to him, he did.
At least Air New Zealand was listening. The point of monitoring forums isn’t to prevent employee and customer dialog online but rather to take appropriate action on it, which only in the rarest of rarest occasions will warrant firing someone. BA and Virgin have it wrong. In fact – you want the conversation!
Why in an age of transparency are so many companies looking to muzzle employees rather than unleash conversations? Insight and innovation happens at the edge – and to get at it you have to let the dialogue flow.
Social Media Is Organic…
Launching a blog is like growing tomatoes. At the earliest stage it’s anyones guess as to what might grow. And, even if you get a plant out of the ground there is no guarantee it will bear fruit…
Hugh gets at this when speaking to our Digital Nomads blog. We’ve got it off the ground and we’re watching it grow. Conversations are blossoming. Hopefully it will bear fruit in terms of ideas and information that benefit digital nomads. But who knows. He says it well:
The blog is still in its early days. I can see it still struggling, like all new blogs do, to “find its voice” [Hey, if a blog can find its voice in under twelve months, I consider that good going]. Of course, it’s going to have the same problem that ALL corporate blogs do i.e the problem of balancing BOTH the needs of the perennially kvetchy, perennially skeptical, perennially dissatisfied blog-reading public, and the commercial interests of the company. Harder than it looks. The fact that they are giving it a go AT ALL I find encouraging.
And herein lays the rub for so many of us in the communications profession. For the decades we have been doing what we do we’ve been trained, brainwashed and beaten into delivering perfection. Perfect press releases. Perfect press conferences. Perfect press clippings.
Suddenly we’re confronted by a medium that is inherently imperfect. We don’t control the conversation. Topics come and go. You allow others to publish where once you built walls. And, to work, we need to work quick which means publishing, warts and all… And that is what makes it exciting…
I’ve been part of the creation of more blogs than I care to remember. Some worked. Some didn’t. The main learning along the way is that success correlates closely with the willingness of the communicators to take risk and embrace the spirit of the medium. And that means letting go.
the Internet makes us superficial
Definitely plan to write more on this… Nick points to A recent edition of Science featured a worrying paper by University of Chicago sociologist James A. Evans titled Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship.
Seeking to learn more about how research is conducted online, Evans scoured a database of 34 million articles from science journals. He discovered a paradox: as journals begin publishing online, making it easier for researchers to find and search their contents, research tends to become more superficial.
Evans summarizes his findings in a new post on the Britannica Blog:
[My study] showed that as more journals and articles came online, the actual number of them cited in research decreased, and those that were cited tended to be of more recent vintage. This proved true for virtually all fields of science … Moreover, the easy online availability of sources has channeled researcher attention from the periphery to the core—to the most high-status journals. In short, searching online is more efficient, and hyperlinks quickly put researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but they may also accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas grappled with by scholars.
If part of the Carr thesis [in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”] is that we are lazier online, and if efficiency is laziness (more results for less energy expended), then in professional science and scholarship, researchers yearn to be lazy…they want to produce more for less.
Ironically, my research suggests that one of the chief values of print library research is its poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within journals—likely had the unintended consequence of actually helping the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers into a wider array of articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and scholarship.
Moderating comments…
Here’s how the New York Times moderates comments… Marci Alboher, NYT blogger, explains her responsibility — here is the Times’ official policy.
