Public Lives, Public Deaths: What will your online legacy be?

Mourning for Princess Diana centred around the royal palaces.
(Photo credit: betsythedevine)

My first instinct, on hearing that Whitney Houston’s funeral would be webcast live around the world was one of mild nausea.   How could that be appropriate? Something about it was so, well, cheap.

I’ve thought about it though, and I’ve changed my mind.  Hers was a very public life, and because it reached so far I can see that it makes sense that there should be the opportunity for those who were in some way engaged with it to share in the grief of those closest to her.  After all, we all have the choice to watch, or not watch.

I'm reminded of the approach to mourning when Princess Diana died in 1997.   Millions of people grieved across the nation, many travelling hundreds of miles to visit memorial sites.  Back then, Internet technologies were developing, but were certainly not the mainstream and the infrastructure of social networks was certainly not there to facilitate this activity in the way it is today.  What would have happened today?  Well, the more recent deaths of celebrities like Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, and Michael Jackson may provide some insight. 

Whereas a funeral and obituary in a newspaper were the standard approaches in the past, the Internet has provided us with seemingly infinite opportunities to share grief and create memorials to the dead; and it’s commonplace already, of course, with memorial pages on Facebook replacing the laying of flowers at a graveside or accident site, enabling those who can’t physically ‘be there’ to contribute digitally.

What we seem to be experiencing is a transition, a developing online culture of mourning, and this isn’t just an issue for celebrities.  As our lives become increasingly public, through the way we publish and share information online, ordinary people like you and I need to consider our digital legacies just as much as celebrities do.

With this cultural shift comes an important set of questions for our society.  How should digital publications be dealt with after death? Should every tweet, wall post, blog entry exist for all time, as a perpetual memorial?  Should usernames and accounts be ‘recycled’ or returned to prevent fraudulent use?  Should we all create a ‘digital will’? How can we manage this in the future?  Will the Internet become clogged up like an overfull graveyard with dead people’s accounts?  

A macabre set of questions I know, but a real issue, and one we can’t ignore.  We seem to see our digital lives as ‘throwaway’ because we can’t see, touch, feel, or put them on a shelf like a book; but they are just as important socially and culturally.  As our libraries struggle to keep up with the recording and management of digital sources (how many of us have backed up early versions of web sites we owned, and how useful would these be to researchers in the future?), this is something I believe anyone who is publishing on the web should at very least give a little thought to.

So, my questions for you are – what would happen to your online legacy if you died?  What would you like to happen?  Who would be able to access your accounts?  What should be kept, where and how?  I know you don’t want to think about it, but have a care for your family – the people who would have to deal with this issue for you – and while you’re at it, you might want to think about those generations who, in a century or two, might be researching their family tree.  

What do you want them to find?

2.0? Just Say No...

Yawn...
Image via Wikipedia

Why oh why do people keeping adding '2.0' to everything?

I appreciate that it may have become a way of saying 'new' without actually saying 'new', but when does 'new'  become 'old'?  When do we get to 3.0?  Who decides?  And what if there is a whole lot of 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 etc. going on in between?

Tim O'Reilly and Tim Berners-Lee at the 2009 'Web 2.0 Summit' View the video.
(Photo credit: LMarino)

Since the first O'Reilly Media 'Web 2.0' conference way back in 2004, this term has become the standard way of referring to web technologies that are dialogic and interactive, but these approaches didn't suddenly appear in 2004, there was no seismic shift in the way the web worked.

In fact, it so irritated one of the fathers of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, who created the web with exactly this sort of behaviour in mind from the very start, that he refers to it as mere 'jargon', saying in a 2006 interview for IBM:

Tim Berners-Lee...talking sense. 
Image via Wikipedia

"Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."

Sadly, the '2.0' suffix has caught on, to the point where even Berners-Lee somewhat reluctantly acknowledges its popularity in a later interview. But now we are seeing it tagged on to every subject or issue imaginable. Google any macro issue or academic subject area along with '2.0' and you're likely to find a whole heap of Slideshare presentations, conference papers and journal articles, all singing the praises of 'new' versions of old ideas (try "Society 2.0" for example and you'll get around 148,000 results).

But ask yourself, have we really seen a shift from 'Version 1' to 'Version 2' in every subject that has been given the '2.0' treatment?  Doesn't the relationship to software releases imply some sort of major upgrade?  How many elements of society have really had a wholesale renewal and replacement in recent years?

Well, if we take the Internet as a case in point 'Web 2.0' is surely not a new release, in Internet terms it's pretty damn old now!  Surely the development of the Internet is a classic example of evolution rather than 'sea-change'.  It is a medium that has developed incrementally, fractally, in all sorts of directions.

If you are a regular reader you'll be used to these occasional rants about poor use of language, and although some points of spelling and grammar may irritate me, they are not really that important as long as meaning is conveyed.  For me, it is disingenuous use of language that really riles.  When there fakery is afoot, it really gets to me, and this is why '2.0' makes me angry. It's a cop-out - and one I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with both in academia and on the 'professional' conference circuit.

Using the sorts of sales techniques that give us marketers a bad name to repackage old ideas, but with more fashionable language and a new mnemonic, in order to sell a book or journal article is more and more common it seems.  Delivering conference presentations that have less substance than your average stick of candy-floss, but dressed up with a beard and delivered with fine, dense words is even more prevalent.  There is so much insubstantial work out there - but hey, if the language is right, the credentials look right, and you're a white male over fifty (in academia) or under 35 (in the tech world), the chances are you'll get away with it anyway.   More fool us for falling for it though, eh?

But I digress; what I really mean is that Web 2.0 is nothing new, it's merely a buzzword that has become bigger than anyone ever intended.  So please, can we drop it now, and instead start looking beneath the glossy veneer at what's really happening in our complex, incremental, mixed-up messed-up world?  We don't need a name (or number) for it, we just need to be clear about what it is we mean when we talk about change.  How liberating would that be?

Why I Love the SuperBowl...but I don't care who's playing

Superbowl weekend; I love it.  The anticipation, the excitement, the build-up interviews, the leaks and the competitive spirit...but I'm not talking about the game.  In fact, I don't even have a clue who is playing, and if you ask me on Monday I won't know the score.

I think this man supports one of the teams playing...
cc @bostonglobe  (Photo credit: stevegarfield)

What I will be able to tell you is which ad I thought was the best.  Yes, it's the advertising I'm interested in and not the game. Staying up all night to watch a few ads? Sad?  Mm, maybe, but it has become a bit of a ritual.

Of course I know advertising is often sneered at as an industry of money-grabbing, fickle and manipulative 'media -types', and in some cases that may be true, but it's also one of the great creative forms of our time.  I deliberately don't say art as I think there are important distinctions, but the creativity displayed by those in the advertising industry is incredible, and there is no better showcase of this than the Superbowl.  Creating the most memorable Superbowl ad has become a competition between the top agencies that is so fierce it rivals that taking place on the pitch, and I thoroughly enjoy making my own judgements about the quality of the work and posting my reviews on the BrandBowl site each year.

I'm expecting to see lots of macho, male-oriented ads of course (this is the prime TV slot of the year for beer, cars and snack foods), and don't get me wrong, I despise exploitative advertising as much as the next person, so will be giving any 'sex sells' laziness short shrift; but I'm also hoping for some less formulaic, more thoughtful gems like the mini Darth Vader from VW last year (which now has over 50million YouTube views and counting). 

As a marketing lecturer it's part of my job to keep up-to-date with the industry, and I wouldn't be a teacher worth my salt if I wasn't fascinated by my subject. So, tomorrow evening I'll be sitting up with matchsticks holding my eyes open, assessing the likely impact of the big budget productions from the likes of Honda (Matthew Broderick reprising Ferris Bueller) and Chevrolet (the band 'Ok Go' doing some crazy stunts) and picking my own winners and losers.

I'll let you know on Monday...after I've caught up on my sleep...

Celebrity Tweets and Fake Reviews - Further Proof that we need Higher Education to Foster Critical Thinking Skills

Rio Ferdinand, recently involved in 'Sponsored Tweets' debate. Image via Wikipedia

Last week a chocolate bar maker was heavily criticised for sponsoring celebrities including Rio Ferdinand, Katie Price and Cher Lloyd to post Tweets which were part of a campaign to promote their products.  The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones raised concerns via his blog, citing the recent ruling on the activities of 'Handpicked Media' by the Office of Fair Trading that ' "consumers should understand when they are reading paid-for promotional content"(OFT, 2010).

Add to this today's news that the online travel advice company Tripadvisor - one of the pioneers of Internet business models based on User-Generated-Content (UGC) - has been criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority for using marketing copy that suggested that reviews were genuine and 'concluded that the claims were misleading' (ASA, 2012), and by recent criticism of Amazon's policy regarding rewards for customers for positive reviews (Time, 2012; New York Times, 2012).

Not only does this raise ethical and  legal questions, but it also has broad implications for businesses, consumers and, I would suggest, for educators too.  The  problem could be tackled in a number of ways.  Industry regulation (as provided by the ASA) and government intervention are, of course, important to consider, but so are the issues of the ethical responsibilities of marketers and our abilities as consumers to determine the validity of the messages we are presented with.

This, for me, is further proof that we need the skills developed through Higher Education more than ever.  Final year undergraduate students and postgraduate students across the country will be only too familiar with the phrase 'critical analysis and evaluation' - this is one of the key abilities we seek to develop in our students, and it is a crucial life skill for understanding and surviving in a consumer society.  We need to make sure students can tell the difference between fakes and the real thing, we need them to be able to make sound judgements based on the evidence they have and to have an understanding of their own biases and those of others.  The link between these thinking skills and our ability to decode and understand the marketing messages we receive is important, and in the context of the latest figures from UCAS showing that applications to Higher Education are down 7.4% so far in this recruitment cycle (UCAS, 2012), (although these figures need to be contextualised - or critically analysed if you prefer!), it is worrying that we may find ourselves with fewer people who have highly developed critical thinking skills.

There is no quick solution here (without a damaging knee jerk), and I do believe we need to consider putting in place the policy and regulatory environments that encourage businesses to tackle these issues - without censorship - but don't forget that we as consumers should also be able to make sound judgements about our purchases, and have the freedom share our views with others.

This is where Higher Education can help...