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The love affair of the tech nerd with themselves

Monday, January 23, 2012

We in the technology world are a self-centred bunch of people.

I recently attended a training course where we were asked to complete Myers-Briggs tests to figure out our personality types. I’d never previously completed one and was initially sceptical, but after receiving my result I was a little more convinced. I’ll spare you the details of reading my psychological profile, but essentially, it described a person keen to work alone and formulate ideas with analysis, pragmatism and creativity. This is a persona I imagine many geeks, nerds and general technologists exhibit. It’s more than just a cliché to acknowledge the link between steps on the autism scale and attraction to computer-based roles. We all seem to have these aspects, to one degree or another.

There are no shortage of famous modern tech geniuses who exhibit these characteristics: Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are amongst the obvious names that come to mind, with their famous alienation of others and singular focus on their ideals. The other common factor here, though, is the obsessive adulation these type of figures are laden with, and the wider tech society enjoys describing itself in similar terms.

Our community has a tendency to talk itself up. Paul Graham’s widely-read Maker’s Schedule essay refers to the reasons programmers struggle to work in traditional business setups, and describes the annoyances and challenges caused by interruptions like meetings and other “process”. Graham writers:

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

I don’t disagree with anything Graham says here or in the rest of the essay, and indeed, I’ve felt frustrated at interruptions disturbing what I’m working on. But this self-worship concerns me too. Developers (“makers”) aren’t some special race of superhumans, whose every sensitivity and quirk needs to be preciously catered for. We’re normal people and shouldn’t be made to feel otherwise. Developers love to scoff at project managers and HR people, clogging up important coding hours with pointless meetings and busywork. Again, while there’s some truth to that, it’s also supremely arrogant to label ourselves as somehow above the systems everyone else works with (grudgingly or not). Without those people and their work, what’s left? Who does the often-unpraised legwork in putting the right people together, rescuing failing projects and facilitating disputes? It’s not the maker.

It’s not just Graham either. Michael Lopp (aka “Rands”) has written several times on nerds and “the Nerd Handbook“. In that essay, designed to guide “the nerd’s companion” through life with them, Rands discusses the unique nerd temperament. Here’s an extract:

First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.

As with Paul Graham, Rands isn’t wrong here, either. But it’s another step along the road of self-aggrandizement. By again implying that nerds and geeks are, in some sense, intellectually superior, Rands runs the risk of not only alienating non-nerds, but overloading his poor subject matter’s brain with delusion. Any nerd reading the article will immediately nod knowingly, thinking “Yeah, I do that”. Great. Aren’t we geniuses for knowing what binary code is? But what are we doing with that knowledge? Feeling smug for amassing trivialities is ridiculous, whether those trivialities are cutting-edge and current or thousands of years old.

Finally, we have the god complex once more. This is where Steve Jobs’ legion of followers have form. I spotted this tweet only today:

Earth is indifferent to Design. It’s existed mostly unchanged for thousands of years. Designers do not change the world. We change *people*.
January 20, 2012 3:20 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@nathan_ford
Nathan C. Ford

Once again, the sentiment of the tweet is sound. But the accreditation it assigns, again, to tech nerds, is hyperbole. If we continue to sit around and pat ourselves on the back for “changing people” or “knowing how the magic works”, we’ll lose sight of the fundamentals: we should be making stuff.

Of course, Jobs, Zuckerberg and co — they all “made stuff”. But maybe they wouldn’t have had the creative breakthroughs they felt if they’d been surrounded by smug yes-men, echoing praise and grand compliments while forgetting the whole point of being a “maker”. We’re not intrinsically special or gifted, whether we’re INTJs, ESFPs or WTFs. We’re simply given the opportunity to collaborate with others and build on their skills and output to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. Let’s not lose sight of it.

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Why Private Eye’s scepticism of “new media” is as unreliable as Glenda Slagg

Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Private Eye the First 50 Years: An A-Z

Private Eye the First 50 Years: An A-Z

I’ve been an avid reader of Private Eye since I was a teenager and my dad brought a dog-eared copy home with him after a trip to London. From that point on it was my connection to a wider world outside of my hazy Midlands youth; a cynical window on the grimy London media and political worlds.

In the years since then I’ve moved to London and started working for a media company myself, and although I still buy the Eye fortnightly, I treat some of its stories with slightly more scepticism now that I work in some of the environments it writes about. I think it’s a great publication, and I always secretly enjoy skipping straight to their “Street of Shame” section to see what drubbing they’ve handed out to the Guardian this week.

I bought their 50th anniversary tome, Private Eye: The first 50 years before Christmas, and gradually devoured it over several weeks. It’s a hefty wedge of scrapbook-esque A-Z notes on the mag’s history, and quite an illuminating read. A couple of entries caught my eye, though.

The Eye‘s scepticism of everything digital is well-documented, and indeed, there was an entire entry titled “Not.com”. It ran like this:

As a result [of its unwillingness to put content online for free], the Eye was celebrating its highest circulation figures in eighteen years in 2010, while newspapers like the Guardian which had spent the previous two decades enthusiastically seeking out new and expensive ways to give away all their content and more online have seen their sales drop by around a third in the same period.

Private Eye: The first 50 years, pp.207

Setting aside the justifiably bragging tone of the paragraph, the main point of the above extract is really quite a jump to make. The book suggests that the Guardian’s well-documented financial problems are the result of it “giv[ing] away all [its] content”, a statement that fails to properly examine the current media climate in any meaningful way. The Eye‘s unprecedented circulation success last year is commendable, but then, how many competitors does it really have? Punch hardly fulfilled the same function and Viz is laughably lowbrow in comparison. Private Eye could probably continue its current circulation if it was printed on the back of beermats. I know I’d still go out and buy it.

Old media’s obsessions with the medium mean they fail to remember the whole point of what they’re doing: the readers. A high print circulation is nice, but the Guardian (whose print sales figures aren’t much higher than Private Eye‘s) eclipses the Eye‘s 210,000 print customers in less than half a day, every day, on the web. If the Guardian had chosen to go the Times route of a paywall, then those numbers would suddenly look a lot smaller. In a digital society where broadsheet print newspapers are struggling, is it any wonder that new, experimental models are being tried? I notice the Eye doesn’t single out the Evening Standard et al for giving away all of their content for free too – wonder why?

There was another entry in the book which caught my eye for similar reasons. This one was titled “Readers, mutually beneficial relationship with”. It reads as follows:

“Because our readers are about as tolerant as I am, they let you know if they think you’ve got a story wrong,” says Ian Hislop. “If it’s in an area they know about, you just get a flood of letters straight away. It’s like it’s their club.”

[...]

This is, of course, exactly the sort of relationship with readers that most media companies are investing millions in trying to create via their websites, Twitter feeds, and Have Your Say initiatives, and twenty-somethings with words like “Community” in their job titles are insisting is new and revolutionary concept. But it’s been going on at the Eye since the days of fountain pens and 6d first-class stamps.

Private Eye: The first 50 years, pp.243-4

Once again, we’ve got the schoolboyish boastful tone, but ignoring it once more, the wilful ignorance here is again quite profound. For one, criticising twenty-somethings for thinking they’re creating something “new and revolutionary” seems to ignore the fact that the Eye itself, hardly the first satirical publication ever sent to press, was created by, er, a bunch of twenty-somethings.

Secondly, I’d argue that the twenty-somethings I know with “Community” in their job titles would never claim that their role is particularly new and revolutionary. Rather, I think, they’d say that they’re playing a variation on the kind of role that used to take place when readers bothered to write in using fountain pens and stamps, and figuring out how it applies in the digital age. Even the entry itself proceeds to admit that most of the Eye‘s letters for publication now arrive via email.

I can understand Private Eye‘s scepticism of the web and free/open content, and agree that it would never work for them – they’re too clunky and conservative (small C) to keep up with it, and their only-updated-every-fortnight Twitter account bears this out. On the other hand, though, they should have the wit to recognise that their unique situation doesn’t apply to every other media company, and the ones that are daring to try new things or work out how to translate the old-fashioned rigours of print into the ever-varying world of digital are actually working with the same pioneering, anti-establishment spirit that the Eye itself is supposed to embody.

–

Endnote: Not an Eye reader? This page might clue you in on the origins of “Glenda Slagg” in the headline.

 

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The class struggle, revolution and Alan Sugar

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Lewis Roman, Young Apprentice candidate

“Are you a glory hunter, Lewis?”, Karen Brady asks a teenage scouser. “Yeah”, he quickly assures her, straightfaced. They sit across from one another in Lord Alan Sugar’s televised boardroom, as Lewis takes responsibility for his failure to adequately present their product to the buyers. Along the table, the perfectly-coiffured Harry M smirks with the self assurance of someone who knows they are a winner in life, if not in the context of this particular episode of Young Apprentice.

Brady corrects poor Lewis, right, clarifying what exactly “glory hunter” means in this context. He quickly denies the accusation and ultimately dodges the bullet, and we see the portly Dan, another regional accent (this time it’s a brummie), bear the brunt of another of Lord Sugar’s disappointed finger stabs as he’s fired.

Lewis should have been fired. His presentation to the buyers was horrific: he read most of it from a printout, stumbling over words and phrases like a junior school nativity play. His plucky scouse charm, on top form when caricaturing the plummy Harry M (below left), was suddenly nowhere to be seen as he visibly floundered when speaking in public. Waiting in the wings, visibly fuming as the presentation fell apart, was the sharply-dressed economics student Harry M. School prefect, polo enthusiast and with a cut-glass RP accent, he was everything that used car salesman-esque Lewis wasn’t. If he doesn’t end up winning the show, he’ll end up leading a company or making a killing in business. Why? Because he was born to.

Harry Maxwell, Young Apprentice candidate

The BBC, with its public service remit, can’t simply fill shows like this with rugger buggers and Sloane rangers, despite their proclivity to win in the business world. So of course, they throw in a few of the Lewises and Dans of this world. Gutsy, charming northerners, probably from a modest background but entrepreneurial. Probably won’t win it, but might get through to the final stages as a feelgood story, before the well-groomed rich kid steps in to win it. Now of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and the Apprentice is by no means the only route into business. Sugar himself is a rags-to-riches success story, and never shuts up about his less-than-glamorous origins. But it feels like something here is balanced in one particular side’s favour.

This same lack of balance has been present outside of the television screen, though. Around half a year ago, we saw a quarter of a million people take to the streets to protest against government cuts and the perceived wealth gap in Britain. The protest was peaceful (beyond the apparently rogue “black bloc” anarchist element, which the main body of the protesters distanced themselves from). Middle class white families came out for the day, shook their signs and placards, then went home again.

Three months ago London went up in flames as the social underclass had a riot of their own. Shoe shops were looted, electronic goods were robbed on demand and angry youths set their own shopping centres on fire. This wasn’t a dialogue or a political challenge: it was an inarticulated protest. This was a subclass of society unable to express itself at the injustice other classes were equally angry about. Even now we see similar groups to the initial ‘safe’ protest occupying St Paul’s in the City of London. They have information tents, lectures, formal demands and a kind of self-organising governance inside the camp. The kids smashing up Foot Locker felt the same sense of injustice, the same half-understood sense of being short-changed and walked over, but weren’t equipped to articulate those feelings in ways other than the primitive violence of their response.

This isn’t to suggest that every rioter in London this summer was merely a frustrated wannabe-critic, unable to find the words to protest against corruption; likewise I’m not suggesting everyone attending the protest march in early 2011 was a chai-sipping Guardianista marching in their Birkenstocks. But it seems to me that when the inherent class divide present in society is now playing itself out on TV for our entertainment, we need to take a step back.

Gbemi Okunlola, Young Apprentice candidate

The opposing team on Young Apprentice had a similar issue. Gbemi Okunlola, right, leader of the girls’ team, delivered some equally uninspiring pitches to the buyers. Two of the other girls on her team, both of them young, white, self-confident and well-spoken, wrinkled their noses in obvious distaste at Gbemi’s abruptness and brash attitude. What do they want from her? What do we want? Is the Apprentice aiming to adhere to all of the stereotypes of businesspeople: posh accents, generic suits, and the put-downs and one-liners of the privately educated? In what way is a black south London girl telling her team mate to (for example) “get stuffed” any less appropriate than the latter asking her why she doesn’t “reconsider her attitude”?

It made me despair a little for the state of the nation, as melodramatic as it sounds. The Apprentice is a business show and it’s perhaps safe to say that the lucky rich kids steaming ahead here would be at a loss when experiencing the kind of challenges I imagine kids like Lewis and Gbemi have experienced. But why do they have to have those kind of experiences to start with? The fact is that we can never affect real change in society while those two kinds of protests (for those two kinds of people) aren’t unified. When the university-attending students occupying London can share dialogue with the disaffected youth smashing up KFC, then we’ll see what the power of a pissed-off populace can achieve. Until then, we’ll only achieve a partial revolution serving only a part of our diverse society.

Hayley Forrester, Young Apprentice candidate

Hayley, left, one of the aforementioned team mates, “passionately disagrees with people claiming benefits when they could be working”. While it’s great for a 16 year old to have strong political views at that age, perhaps Sugar and his cohorts could take advantage of the situation they’ve engineered to get these kids to teach each other some lessons. Make them swap lives for a month and drop Hayley into Lewis’s Merseyside, an area of astonishing deprivation and joblessness. Meanwhile let’s see Lewis realise his brash confidence will fail him every time alongside the polished Toryism of the home counties. It might not teach him what being a glory hunter is, but it’s possible we’d all gain an insight into quite why our society seems to be dizzily tearing itself in two.

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When celebrities Tweet: a Ricky Gervais special

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Ricky Gervais rejoined Twitter in the last few weeks, having sworn it off almost two years ago with the verbal shrug of “I don’t see the point”. Now he’s back, gaining followers, and tweeting with the frequency of an out-of-work student. For me, it’s a mark of Twitter at its worst.

Now, I’m one of Gervais’s biggest fans, at least, in terms of the things he’s good at. The Office is my favourite television show of all time: perfectly cast and written, subtle humour and slapstick comedy mixed with character study and skillful observation. His radio work on XFM and later his podcasts were fairly innovative (or at least original) for the time, and Extras was almost as good as its predecessor, albeit too reliant on celeb cameos to raise audience sizes. But he’s awful at Twitter.

Why? Obviously he’s not to everyone’s taste, and in recent years his brand of comedy seems to have devolved to simply attempting to stir up controversy, then blithely playing the “pushing the boundaries” get-out card when anyone  suggests he’s been offensive. He’s a smart man who can argue the point when it comes to freedom of speech and the limits of creative expression, but along the way he seems to have forgotten how to actually be funny. His most recent stand-up tour (which I went to see and left particularly disappointed) featured an embarrassingly poorly-judged segment where he hilariously deconstructed, er, a children’s book about Noah’s Ark. Ha ha! Some children’s books have language that sounds a bit gay! And LOL! Christianity is pretty far-fetched! By pointing these things out, Gervais paints himself as some kind of modern day Renaissance Man – enlightened and equipped to challenge antiquated things like religion. He’s the same on Twitter: subverting the notion that our celebrities should be mysterious and aloof.

One of the most striking things about Gervais’s initial entry to Twitter was the sheer number of photos of himself gurning into cameras which he posted. This in itself was nothing new – he’d been doing it on his blog for years – but the frequency was worrying. Isn’t this guy meant to be writing a TV show? Worse still, even assuming he doesn’t spend 24 hours a day writing scripts, why wasn’t he at least filling his time with something more, well, interesting? I’m sure life gets a bit boring once you’re a megastar millionaire and can afford to do anything you want to do, but still.

After the gurning came the flaming: Gervais began tweeting links to articles by journalists (or “critics”, to use his childish, bogeyman-esque term for anyone with a contrasting opinion to his own) which criticised him. Predictably, the linked articles began to rack up comments from loyal Gervais followers, mocking the journalists in question for their perceived failure to appreciate Gervais’s genius.

And finally, of course, we got the debates on freedom of speech and ‘offensiveness’. Gervais’s repeated use of the word “mong” to describe his facially-challenged TwitPics was challenged by more than a few offended followers, and he began retweeting their complaints with attached responses, generally of the “the meaning of the word has changed” defences. It’s actually surprisingly pathetic to see someone of this status attempt to justify their own actions with quite so much smug and schoolboy-esque bravado. Gervais’s faux (?) arrogance is one of his hallmarks, but his interactions on Twitter make it quite clear that he thinks anybody disagreeing with him is simply too stupid to understand the fact of his correctness – at all times.

In his defence, nobody likes a boring celebrity tweeter. Gary Barlow, easily the musical equivalent of Waitrose, has also recently signed up and posted multiple desperate-sounding “retweet this and see if I follow you back!” promo efforts. At least Gervais is being challenging and “dangerous”. The problem is that, like with most celebrities on the internet, something of the magic and mystery disappears when you realise that they’re actually exactly like every other moron with an internet connection: eager to pump out their personality to an imagined audience whose interest is apparently tied to the frequency of amusing animal-related photos you can upload in a day. If it was anyone else you’d quickly tire and unfollow, but in Gervais’s case, his every “mong” pose is retweeted a hundred times and dozens of adoring fans desperately reply, hoping for acknowledgement from their hero.

Gervais wrote a blog entry for Wired, conceding he “may have been wrong about Twitter”. He peppers his article with quotes that half give off a “just googled” vibe, claiming that the central force behind his work is creativity, and thus Twitter is an arena for playful experimentation. I believe it. I believe he’s enjoying connecting with fans and followers in a controlled environment, and perhaps getting closer to his audience is a good thing. Is it a good thing for them, though? Do we want to see our heroes revealed in all their mundane glory? Do we want to be reminded every day that someone whose work we respect harps on about creativity and discovery while debating the semantics of the word “mong”?

It seems to me that when Twitter trivialises communication, we get so hung up on the power to share our thoughts with thousands of people, that the quality of those thoughts is the part that gets forgotten. Twitter teaches economy: 140 characters. Make what you’re sharing thought-out and interesting: creative. Like Gervais says.

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Facebook F8 2011: because everyone wants to know everything

Friday, September 23, 2011

 

Mark Zuckerberg at F8 2011

Mark Zuckerberg at F8 2011

Last night I attended Facebook’s annual F8 conference – their yearly chance to show off new features that will, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, “change the world”. I’d already had some exposure to the new features, having been a “partner developer” through my role at the Guardian (whose app you can check out here). While the things Zuck demoed for the audience weren’t new to me, the way they were packaged up and sold was quite an eye-opener.

First: Timeline. Already there are blogs and news sites praising and/or castigating it, and some even instructing impatient users to create fake developer apps so they can see it early. (ironic aside: I’m a “Facebook approved” developer and I still don’t have it, despite Zuck’s promises). There’s probably been more written, tweeted and discussed about this feature than anything else they’ve done this year and it’s only day one.

The end of Zuckerberg’s presentation on Timeline was the most telling. A video with a movie montage soundtrack was played, showing the years of a user’s life flash by in a whirl of scrollbars. We saw a young couple become engaged, married, then having a child, who then grows up and learns to walk and talk. Like Apple’s advertising, it painted this beautiful picture of how we’re all supposed to pretend modern life is. Look, Facebook was telling its users, now all those photographs you mindlessly take of everything you see can be neatly categorised and documented! Now when your instinctive response to grab your iPhone and record a video of your child’s first achievements kicks in, you have somewhere to upload it to! It’s been pointed out before, but Zuckerberg’s insistence that the ultimate goal of social media (or even the internet itself) is to turn ourselves into digital archives was hugely represented by Timeline.

Zuckerberg explained the evolution of the profile as a conversation: the wall was like a quick introduction, the expanded profile with apps was a longer conversation, and Timeline will be like sitting up all night and really getting to know someone. It sounds fantastic. Who doesn’t enjoy those kind of moments? But in all of those late night, setting-the-world-to-rights conversations I’ve ever had while getting to know people, none of it consisted of a back-and-forth chronology of “In 2006 I did this” and “oh, cool, in 1994 I went here”. Conversation, and by extension social interaction, is an organic medium and attempting to represent it using boxes and photos can only go so far.

Doubtless Zuck and his cohorts would claim that Timeline isn’t meant to represent your entire life’s achievements, summarised in neat Facebook livery, but instead it should give users a way to learn about who we are. To this I wonder whether its users will see it that way. A considerable portion of Facebook’s userbase are unquestioningly happy to fill in every input field it offers them; to document every inch of their lives till no mystery remains. Once Facebook offer them a way to painstakingly record every significant event that’s happened to them, what more is left? Why bother with a heart-to-heart conversation when I can just look at your Timeline and know your entire character without exchanging a word or sharing a joke together? I can imagine millions of people proudly filling in Timelines and amassing tons of information, ultimately contributing nothing and serving only to make themselves less interesting. It’s an interesting thing to consider the diversion Facebook have taken after the challenge from Twitter: where Twitter forces users to economise and communicate with brevity and (hopefully) a consideration for relevance, Facebook is saying “tell us everything – whether people want to know it or not”.

Onto the second new feature: the Open Graph changes and the Ticker. This was the part I was most aware of, since the Guardian app I worked on uses these new features to share what you’re reading.

Again, privacy implications are high, but I imagine that this will have a marmite effect – younger people don’t tend to be as concerned with the notion of sharing everything they do, whereas older members tend to be more reserved and concerned. Like the Timeline, here again Facebook encourage users to increase the signal to noise ratio. Zuckerberg acknowledged in his talk that some friends post too many status updates, or end up “spamming” your feed. The Ticker aims to solve this by moving the spammy content to a designated place. What I found interesting here was that after recognising that a significant portion of their userbase use the site to overshare, rather than attempt to educate them and emphasise the sharing of things of value, Facebook have introduced a myriad new ways to allow users to spam one another.

Zuckerberg spoke at length about music sharing in particular, highlighting the Spotify app as a great way to listen to new music. I’m a wholehearted devotee of social discovery for music – some of my favourite artists are recommendations from friends – but this is different. Sure, if every song my friends are listening to appears in my Ticker, then statistically it’s more likely that I’ll click on one I like. But music and sharing aren’t statistics, Mark. I don’t want to tell my friends about every single song I’m listening to. I listen to a lot of weird music. My family and friends don’t want to listen to Throbbing Gristle records or experimental Norwegian jazz (ooh, check me out). If I hear a song that makes me think “hey, Sarah would really like this”, I’ll drop her a line with a link to the song.

As Ticker develops and more apps begin to write stories to it, I wonder what Facebook’s response will be. Will they invent a new overspill function to take the run-off of spammy stories? What happens when Farmville and the rest begin to use it? Where does that funky video of people discovering new recipes go when every other story is “James just gave you a unicorn!”? In that video clip we saw users cooking meals and seeing each others’ activity. Is this the end goal of this communications network we’ve developed? As I cook a meal with friends should I keep my iPhone in one hand constantly so I can make sure the world knows I’ve just cooked Rainbow Chard? Or eventually will there be an app that can automatically determine what I’m making based on my grocery purchases and kitchen temperature? Facebook probably hope so.

As you might imagine, I’m something of a Facebook sceptic, leading to me deleting my account earlier this year. These new changes are interesting: the potential for new and cool apps is quite high, and it seems to me that Facebook’s userbase is the real product owners: they determine how these things get used. But there’s still something underlying about all of this which gives me a certain sense of unease. When we become so ‘social’ that everything we do is digitised the instant it happens – or even while it’s occuring – what are we emulating? Facebook began as a way of simulating a conversation, Zuckerberg told us. What is it simulating now?

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The only thing mindless about the riots is the response

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Boarded-up shop in Clapham High Street

I’d just walked out of the cinema in Clapham, South London, on Saturday 6th August at around 11pm, having sat through Spielberg’s Super 8 and found it pleasant enough. Idly checking my Twitter feed as the lady did the customary bathroom trip, I spotted some of the journalists I followed tweeting links to images of parts of North London seemingly on fire. I showed Maddy when she returned and she was mildly surprised. “It’s like 28 Days Later“, she commented, making me ponder for a moment just what it would be like to emerge from a movie theatre to find society totally broken down and full of screaming maniacs.

Cheap analogies aside, this was a real breakdown in society. Three days passed and the riots had become social media royalty: they’d been granted their own hashtag. And yet they were still happening before our eyes, even as media pundits began the shitstorm of social commentary which continues even now (within this very blog entry, even).

I ventured out into Clapham High Street on the following Wednesday when rumours suggested things were really going to kick off. David Cameron had duly flown home from his Tuscany holiday to announce more police would be on the streets and the government had already announced prisons had plenty of available space. The atmosphere around central London was tense: shops had closed early and some were barricaded shut. We walked past an Indian corner shop which was completely boarded up with seemingly anything wooden the owners could get their hands on. Outside sat 4 or 5 middle aged Indian men, ready to defend their livelihood if the “rioters” came knocking again. One restaurant owner let us inside, quickly locking the door behind us when we walked in, and told me he was “scared” when he saw me taking photos of the boarded up newsagent across the road.

It’s an odd feeling to feel invaded in your own city. Terrorist threats are the thing we’re supposed to be blindly terrified of, not the youths from the council estate. The idea that the teenagers you brush past outside the entrance to McDonalds could become an organised threat, mobilised on the streets, is almost unreal. I caught myself feeling panicked as I cycled home, with vague recollections of reports of people being “bikejacked” whirling through my mind. Having my bike stolen could happen at any time, I told myself, but this felt different. Somehow it was as if an entire generation’s disaffection had been unified and made homogeneous.

A few days later it had calmed down and I wandered along Clapham Junction to survey the damage. Debenhams had only just reopened and almost every shop around it was boarded up or in the process of re-opening. Debenhams’ wooden boards were covered with scrawls of support from locals. Some of them were of the proud, hopeful type that were represented by the public cleanup efforts that immediately followed the rioting. “Our community will repair your damage and we will be stronger together”, or words to that effect. Others were more challenging, or even threatening. “What goes around comes around” read one marker-scrawled warning. Others spoke of revenge.

We’ve all seen the footage now. Classroom assistants looting TVs; kids queueing to steal jewellry; men in hoodies helping an injured boy then calmly robbing him as he bled. It’s painful to watch, and eye-opening, perhaps. But not shocking.

Chavs, a recent book by former trade union lobbyist Owen Jones, almost predicts the events that hit London and the UK’s other major cities this August. In the book, subtitled The Demonisation of the Working Classes, Jones argues that decades of Thatcherism, consumer capitalism culture and the Labour Party’s insistence that “we’re all middle class now” and emphasis on “social mobility” (as though being working class was something inherently devalued which one should strive to escape) have led to the alienation of the white working classes, commonly denigrated to the status of “chavs”. Jones ultimately suggests that media portrayals of the working classes as “dole scum”, “benefit scroungers”, and other right wing tabloid catchphrases are simply tools to reduce the status of the working class to almost farcical, sitcom-esque levels. Turn the idea of the working classes into a joke, a Vicky Pollard, and it becomes easier to ignore the difficult problems of social cohesion, racial tension and poverty. This is an aspect of what happened in London this month.

Much of the media coverage of the rioting suggested it was predominantly black youth. This has been proven to be inaccurate, particularly when images of northern cities hit the news and streets full of disaffected white youth in hoodies claiming the streets of Manchester were broadcast. The fact remains that the uprisings happened in poor, neglected locations – the people who rose up were the people who lived there, black or white. But how does this fit into Jones’ theories about the white working classes?

Britain is a country still struggling to identify where black culture fits in its social and ethnic makeup, as demonstrated by David Starkey’s disastrous efforts on Newsnight to lay the blame for the rioting on “whites becoming black”. Young black teenagers grow up into a society where Tory governments are keen to demonstrate their understand of inner city issues, yet struggle to do more than point the finger of “mindless violence” at the scenes their policies result in. If Jones’ white working classes are the butt of the joke in modern Britain, then the black working classes aren’t even in on the joke.

The footage of young people kicking in the windows of a local corner shop or raiding FootLocker to get the latest trainers are indicative of the values they’ve learned from decades of being ignored, unchallenged and unlistened to. Politicans and commentators can hand-wring and pontificate on the lack of strong father figures, role models, education or aspirations. But beneath these observations (and not necessarily causes), there is a deeper issue. What kind of society produces citizens who lash out at it? Citizens who feel that their lives cannot be made worse by smashing up the local shop? Citizens whose immediate thought when they hear of social injustice is to go out and take whatever material benefit they can get for themselves? We have a serious breakdown in the fabric of British society and we’re fucking around blaming it on the kids looting the shops? There are bigger fish to fry.

As a society we have collective responsibility. We’re not a bunch of people who elect a government once every few years then sit back while they clean up after us, organise us and educate us. Maybe we could be, in some utopian dreamworld, but this is 2011 and we’re in the global recession. The government can barely legislate to handle big business and banking: things controlled by the state and closely observed and organised. How can it be expected to figure out the youth of the day? It’s not impossible, but it’s damned sure not easy, either. Labelling them “feral” and “mindless” is not only missing the point, but wilfully ignorant of it. These children aren’t just the worst of a bad bunch; wasters; a minority. They’re the offensive, ugly faces of what our society is heading towards if we continue as we are. These arguments are the intellectual equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and humming “I’m not listening”.

Many people’s early responses to the violence were to meet it with more violence. “They need to send in the army” was my own father’s response. Other friends suggested that “if these lads want a fight, send them off to Iraq”. Politicians promised retribution and militant Sikhs threatened to hurt anyone approaching their religious buildings. This response is the reason we’re experiencing these issues. Complain about the kids hanging around on the street, then close down the youth clubs. Blame gang crime on video games and rap music, then fill everyone’s televisions with mindless celebrity dross instead. Insist that better education would prevent these crimes then shut the local library. The list goes on. When you’re met with indifference and insincerity every time, is it any wonder you feel abandoned? Is it any surprise you’ll go out and take anything you can from a society that’s already swept you under the carpet?

Understanding isn’t the same as condoning, and listening isn’t the same as agreeing. The youth of Britain — our next generation — have spoken up clearly, in perhaps the only medium left to them. Are we going to listen? Or will we keep our fingers in our ears?

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The user experience of flathunting

Thursday, June 30, 2011

As followers of my London blog will know, I’ve currently been in the process of moving flat. It’s been a fairly lengthy effort and it’s well-documented on the other blog. What this entry will cover is the mind-numbing frustration the websites of estate agents caused me over the last two months.

Flathunting in London is even more painful than in other cities – the market moves ridiculously quickly (even for renting) and estate agent websites are notoriously out-of-date. Call up for a viewing of a flat and it turns out it was let weeks ago – but still listed on the site. But that’s the last of your frustrations. Almost all of the sites I encountered made browsing painful. Other sites like RightMove and Globrix exist to ease this pain, but their problem is frequency of updates – often they’ll take a day or two to pick up changes on the estate agents’ site, which, as we know, is probably a week or more out of date itself. All of this adds up to produce misery.

Here is an illustrated guide to some of the more frequent frustrations I’ve felt over the past few months of browsing property websites.

Figure 1: the mystery price range

A surprisingly large amount of sites make the fairly basic error of not specifying the price range on the property search form. Most sites list rentals in both weekly and monthly denominations, but James Pendleton here decided that the user didn’t need to know what they’d be paying. The cynic in me suggests that this is deliberate, so you erroneously end up browsing stuff over your price range, but that’s silly.

Figure 2: the impossible-to-remove “let agreed”

A frustratingly frequent problem, some sites didn’t offer any way to exclude “let agreed” properties from the search. Some of them featured results listings where literally every house was let. While this is perhaps symptomatic of the London rental market, the fact remains that this decision is for the benefit of the estate agent and to the detriment of the customer. If Oliver Burn‘s  search above returned fewer properties there might be a risk they’d appear sparse and unpopular, so instead they spam you with tantalising “here’s what you could have had” displays.

Figure 3: the invisible photo gallery

This one boggled my mind. If you’re selling a property and the user can’t physically see it, then you are completely reliant on imagery of the house to sell it. Why make it difficult to see the images? In the example above on Aspire‘s site, there were actually six photos – these were only revealed when you click the plain-looking “photo slideshow” link to the left.

Other sites featured irritating “zoom” effects on their photo galleries, using flashy javascript to animate the photo on the page. This frequently resulted in a crash zoom into a floor tile or fridge door, with the user unable to control the effect and view the image in full. Looks great when being sold to the estate agent by a cowboy web designer, looks awful when actually using it.

Figure 4: hey, who needs a search form anyway?

Two enormous menu buttons on Oliver Finn‘s site: “Sales” and “Lettings”. Click either one, however, and you end up on what looks suspiciously like an SEO-enhanced landing page with no search form to filter the lettings. If you even stick around long enough to click the ‘Search to rent’ link, you’ll get a form where you still can’t filter by price or bedrooms. Fail.

Figure 5: the dreaded Google Maps API key error

This one was profoundly irritating. For one, the newest version of the Google Maps API doesn’t even require a key any more. This was quite an obnoxious decision on Google’s part too, to use the alert() function to tell the user the key wasn’t valid, but I digress. The error in question only manifested itself when visiting Keating Estates via a third party service like RightMove, rather than using the site directly, oddly. Also, from the landing page where this error appeared, there was no way to click through to the property page itself, instead only showing you a broken Google map. No rental for me, thanks.

Figure 6: we don’t need no stinkin’ copy!

Hopefully the size of this screenshot won’t make the text too hard to read, but essentially, every property on Duck & Hedges‘ search result consisted solely of text like “New property fresh on the market!”. If this was true you’d believe they refreshed their entire property portfolio every day. Text is a great opportunity to sell (especially when filler images of, er, the agents’ offices, are the only photos on display) so it seems odd to misuse it. Above all, clever agents use terms like “modern detached flat” to describe what actually turns out to be a tower block (technically, I guess it’s true). Don’t be generic.

Figure 7: pagination’s too good for you

This site (incidentally, my old estate agent’s Atkinson McLeod) featured a large amount of search results, but chose not to bother displaying the pagination links underneath the results (you know, where you end up when you scroll down through a list), instead opting to place them at the top of the page (you know, right when you’ve just started to look at a long list of stuff). Come on guys. The first few times I used their search I didn’t even realise there was a second page of results. I wonder how many clickthroughs this loses them every single day.

—

The tragedy here is that there are a number of sites aiming to solve all of these issues – Globrix has a fantastic search, super-customisable and very intelligent. It organises images into clearly-visible galleries, lets you filter very powerfully, paginates like a dream (even via ajax) and always uses Google Maps (not the godforsaken Bing ones some sites are besmirched with). It also has a great mobile site, something a few of the other property sites I used actually had too. This was great. Sadly, as noted above, it lags behind the sites themselves so disappointment is often the result of calling up about a property found there.

I don’t have any smart ideas about how to solve the usability nightmare of estate agent websites – they’re too concerned with flogging overpriced box rooms in Camden Town to bother sorting it out. But perhaps smart third parties can find ways to become even smarter, and eventually we can just do all our searches through them. Good hunting.

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On student journalism and “digital first”

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Since graduating from Leeds University I’ve followed the path of the student newspaper, Leeds Student, with keen interest – I spent almost two years of my time at Leeds working on the newspaper and owe my current career to the experience gained writing and designing for it. In the era of “digital first”, though, I’m starting to re-examine how student journalism fits into the bigger picture of newsmaking.

Here, broadly, is how a typical issue of Leeds Student (a weekly tabloid-style paper) was put together:

  • Monday: Not much to do production wise as most commissioned content wasn’t written yet – some basic page layout work done in preparation.
  • Tuesday: A few early things had usually come in at this point and stories were being chased by the news team.
  • Wednesday: Last full day of production before going to print. If articles hadn’t come in at this point it was usually time to dash off a quick piece on Israel vs Palestine or something to fill the extra pages.
  • Thursday: Deadline day. Always manic, we’d be up in the office wrestling with Quark Xpress with the vain hope of finishing before the pub quiz started at 8:30pm, but sometimes taking until the early hours to finish.
  • Friday: After a nice lie-in, distribution of the new issue around campus began, followed by production planning for the next week’s edition. Interested writers would come to the evening meeting and we’d hand out stories to write and photos to take. We’d write down the plan for next week’s issue and go to the pub.

The finished product looked something like this:

It was a huge part of my student life and I loved every minute of it. After finishing university I moved on to work as a designer at a local magazine in Leeds, and from there moved to the Guardian where I work on the website.

With the Guardian’s recent announcement that it plans to be “digital first”, I began to wonder about how this would affect the students still working on Leeds Student. I knew from conversation with former editors that the paper costs the Student Union a fair amount of money to print, and the number of issues per academic year continues to decline as Leeds University Union (LUU) reduces its budget. I also know that the paper continues to use fairly old copies of Quark Xpress for layout, rather then Adobe InDesign which seems to have won the battle to be industry standard a fairly long time ago now.

Every year, the newspaper’s editor is elected from the student body, and every year (that I was around for, anyway) the potential candidates (myself included) promised to “improve the website”, with more recent campaigns including promises of mobile sites and apps. What tended to happen, though, was that the website was gradually relegated to a lower priority than the print edition, which took far longer to produce. Stories were originally only uploaded the day the print edition came out, meaning none of the web’s advantages for breaking news were taken advantage of. In more recent years this was improved with an upgrade to WordPress blogging software and more frequent updates (and even that mobile site) – fantastic.

This is what the current website looks like:

My concern today is that Leeds Student, and other university newspapers like it, aren’t preparing young journalists for the future career paths they might follow. In handy bullet point form, here’s why:

  • Most journalists for larger media companies don’t tend to use page layout tools personally, leaving these to trained designers and specialists.
  • Even the most dedicated teams would struggle to produce anything more frequent than a weekly newspaper – the comparative amount of time spent producing the print edition reduces the amount of time available to research and develop stories.
  • As print consumes time and money, journalists have little time or energy to not only put their stories online, but to curate them and promote them – content is often left as an afterthought.

Are student journalists missing out on the most important aspect of journalism – breaking news quickly and creating dialogue? I think so. When Leeds Student went to print, we’d all get huge satisfaction from seeing students around campus leafing through that morning’s copy. The first time I saw a real debate being fostered in the comments section below the line on the website, however, I felt totally vindicated. Students inherently understand the internet and social media in a way many professors of journalism and veteran hacks struggle to do. I remember avoiding work in the library, reading Facebook, playing with my phone, anything to avoid actual work. The news needs to reach people where they’re already looking, not depending on them having physical access to a limited number of printed copies.

To check this wasn’t just my digital bias talking, I recruited the opinions of several of my former Leeds Student colleagues, most of whom are now working in the media since graduation. Here are a few of their comments.

Rob Heath pointed out the case of The Yorker, a spin-off publication from York University students:

York Uni have a very restrictive stranglehold over the editorial policy of their two newspapers (Nouse and Vision, last I remember) so some disgruntled students who wanted an independent paper set up The Yorker. I believe it worked *very* well, and had a pretty good readership across campus even though it was independent. It was nominated for a Guardian Student Media Award in the first year it ran, which is generally a good sign. The reason it was popular with students, I think, was that it was updated as stories broke, meaning there was continually new content, unlike the once-weekly updates we had on the Leeds Student website back int’day.

This reminded me of a famous story in the Leeds Student annals from a couple of years ago. The paper published an interview with a Palestinian journalist who answered a question on supposed pro-Israeli coverage in the mainstream media by saying “you have to ask yourself who controls the media”. A student working on LUU’s student executive took offence to the anti-Semitism he felt the comment contained, and locked all of the copies of newspaper in his office, refusing to allow distribution until the offending line was crossed out. After a bitter squabble which ended with the officer resigning his post, the paper was released for publication.

The point here is that when working with academic institutions, students are as bound to their “proprieter’s” whims – if someone from the top decides the content is inappropriate, then it’s gone. This has potential to be abused – what happens when the paper wants to report critically on the university or the union?

The website is effectively outside of the control of these bodies – it’s hosted on external servers (in the USA, I believe, for good measure) and access is controlled by the journalists themselves. Shutting this site down at the first mention of controversy is not as easy as locking up a pallet of newspapers. Rob’s point above suggests that Leeds was not the only university to experience tension between student journos and those in authority – the web is the answer to this.

On the flipside, former editor Laura Mackenzie disagreed with my feelings on the issues facing student papers:

Distribution isn’t really that big a problem – so long as you remember to keep filling the stands they always go and it would be a shame to get rid of papers in an environment where the concept of a physical paper actually still works!

Laura’s tenure saw increased usage of the website and even the early stages of development of a mobile app to complement the mobile-friendly template the site had introduced. I remember one of my favourite Friday morning rituals at university of coming in early to grab a freshly-printed copy of the newspaper and sitting down with a sandwich for a read. It would be a shame to lose that, and I understand people’s attachment to the physicality of the output – certainly working as hard as we did to produce it, it felt a lot more tangible seeing the results in print than it did on a screen.

After consulting my former colleagues I decided to turn to Twitter and asked the following vaguely-worded question:


Quick poll: would you be bothered if “your” newspaper dropped its print edition to focus on website, mobile and tablet versions? How much?
June 17, 2011 12:40 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@mattpointblank
Matt Andrews

The responses I got were interesting – most people suggested that they stopped buying print editions of newspapers years ago, but a few gave reasons for continuing to want a physical edition:

Paul said “I tend to read a physical paper when I go out for meals. I’d take a magazine or book before an iPad”, which I agree with. Neil offered “Mostly, I read the paper on the commute. I also like the format of hard copy better; easier to find everything”, which I again agree with – I think this stems from the ‘infinite’ nature of online. A print paper has a discernable start and end; online, you could read for a year. Some papers offer ways online to read that day’s print edition cover-to-cover, but perhaps this misses the point of breaking news (or anything published since the previous night, really).

So what’s the solution here? If Leeds Student dropped its print edition, what would happen? Let’s weigh it up:

Pros:

  • Journalists can stop wasting their time learning outdated page layout skills they (probably) won’t need anyway
  • “New media” has the opportunity to shine as video, audio, data and more formats gain inclusion
  • The chance to really break a story and encourage debate becomes much more attainable
  • Readership analysis becomes hugely simplified as web analytics allow fine-grained data on what sections readers enjoy (or hate)
  • Money saved by cutting out print can be spent on computer upgrades, website design, and other resources

Cons:

  • The loss of the euphoria associated with a 2am sign-off for the print edition and the following morning’s elation
  • No experience working with print and thus a lack of awareness in its rigours and limitations
  • Harder to publicise an online edition if it isn’t literally in front of the students’ faces when they walk into the university

I think I know which side I’m coming down on, but it’s certainly not clear-cut for everyone.

Nobody knows exactly what the future of print is, but for forward-looking publications like The Guardian, where print sales are rapidly falling, digital seems to be the direction of expansion. If you’re a journalist, why wouldn’t you want your articles to be read by more people on more platforms? The nostalgic attachment to print can be somewhat misplaced – the format is just a format and one isn’t inherently better than another, it’s about context.

With that in mind, digital works best for students. As consumers, students are already web-savvy and are used to looking for their information online first. As journalists, students should be graduating having learned the skills of crowdsourcing information, responding to their (often irate) readers, using web analytics, SEO and social media. Print experience is a bonus, sure, but in 2011, perhaps it’s time that we view it as an outmoded skill from a time when there was only one way to make news.

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How not to make me download your mobile app

Monday, June 6, 2011

Earlier today I was checking out app recommendations over at reddit‘s Android community. Someone suggested an app called Glympse, which allows users to share their location, Google Latitude-style, but falling back to SMS when the recipient doesn’t use Glympse. Cool, I thought.

I checked out the site and was greeted with this fancy intro page:

 

This intro shows a lovingly-built animated map that shows the user how the app works. Below are some nice stock images which occupy that kind of design filler space where I mentally think “great, some content I won’t ever read”. So far, so predictable.

I was sold on the description before I saw the site, so where do I get the app? Um… the link in the header area marked “Get Glympse”. I was initially scanning the page for the word “download” (or even “app”) or some sort of Apple Store / Android Market icon, but got nothing.

Okay, no worries, I’ll click the link to find out where to get it from. I did so and was greeted by an even more bafflingly-constructed page:

I’ve annotated the above screenshot, but you can see the page in question here. I saw the Android image, hovered my mouse, and was rewarded with… nothing. Tried the large bold heading link above. Nada. Saw the “iTunes App Store” link and assumed there’d be a link under the Android image. Nope. I have to search.

Dear Glympse: this is the internet, not a billboard. You can point me to exactly the right place to download your app. I don’t need to guess. The Android Market has a pretty fantastic website where I can click a large, prominent ‘INSTALL’ button to send the app to my phone, on demand. Take advantage of this. Link to that page. Your app has one. If I have to get my phone out, unlock it, load up the Market, search for your app and download it, I’m gone. Web users (not least me) are lazy. I was interested enough to click your site but when you make it this hard for me (and other phone platforms) to get to your app, you lose me. You have a button and a link for the iTunes / Windows Mobile apps – why aren’t the images links too?

These criticisms may seem like minor complaints, but when you’re competing against short attention spans, rapid-fire browsing, and other apps, you need to make the path to downloading your app as fast as possible. Consider putting your download links on your front page, if not everywhere on your app’s site. One click.

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Portal 2: Missed opportunities?

Monday, May 16, 2011

I’m a fairly big Valve nerd, having played even the slightly less good outings in their Black Mesa universe with vigour and enjoyment. It was essentially a foregone conclusion, then, that I’d be checking out the recently-released Portal 2 within a few weeks of its release.

You’ve seen the trailer and know the premise so I won’t bore you with a writeup of the game itself – suffice it to say that it’s addictive, creative, challenging and even better than the first one. Stephen Merchant as Wheatley the robot is a great casting choice and the game is even quirkier and, well, “funner” than before. A few standout issues for me, though.

It’s not very hard. Let me clarify. I’m far from a seasoned gamer and don’t tend to enjoy things that require more than three or four attempts to get through. I’m not trying to claim internet gamer points by acting like Portal 2 was too easy and I finished it in 20 minutes (more like 6 hours). The problem is that once you work out how to complete a level, you’ve basically extracted all of the fun you can from it. It’s over.

There was a level in Half-Life 2 that required you to reach a raised ladder to climb out of a room, where the ladder was beyond your reach. The ‘correct’ solution was to pull a lever which flooded the room, allowing you to swim up to it. I remember struggling for almost half an hour to stack barrels and crates on top of one another to form a rudimentary bridge to the ladder so I could climb out, only discovering the flooding option afterwards. Instead of feeling frustrated, I felt quite pleased – the game had a non-linear approach to problem solving and would allow multiple ways of achieving your goals.

Now, Portal 2 is based around the notion of solving puzzles and finding solutions – I get that. The sad part is that there’s almost no replay value once you’ve figured out the solution. Shoot a portal over there, run up the tunnel and jump here, fire the other portal there. You can do it by numbers after that. Perhaps to compensate for this, the game provides dozens of levels, aiming to keep the mix interesting. Here are two ways they could have improved this:

  1. Allowed a kind of “replay” mode where upon finishing the game, you get access to a “gel gun” or something, allowing you to place the coloured gels (or the light bridges) and find new ways of solving the earlier levels (or just having fun).
  2. Offering more puzzles requiring user dexterity. Most of the test chambers were solved by smart thinking and methodical portal placement. I’d like to have seen more examples of precise timing and quick reflexes – quick, you’re on a moving platform, shoot a portal and jump through it, now fire some bouncing gel to reach the moving bridge above you, then bounce on the spring and shoot another portal before the door closes. Something like that.

Now, I know there’s the co-operative mode which is meant to make all of this single player nonsense obsolete. Fine, cool. But for the amount of development it could have cost them to integrate point 1 above into the game, it seems a shame to have ignored it. Likewise, something like a level editor (like Half-Life’s unofficial Garry’s Mod) would at least mean generous internet denizens could provide their own more challenging chambers to play with.

I hugely enjoyed the game and would buy Portal 3 in an instant if it existed (although not before Half-Life 3, please, Valve). I just wish I felt much desire to try the singleplayer mode again sometime in the next 3 months, before my brain forgets the sequences I now know by rote.

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