Thinking About Twitter

Ahead of my talk at the AMA Tweet Meet on Wednesday, I’ve done some thinking about how corporate accounts can be better at Twitter. As there are 2,125 words of thought process here, you might want to skip to the final paragraph. Between time, there are some allusions to Jung, petting zoos and talking objects.

Why I Like Twitter

The thing I like most about Twitter is the fact that it offers a glanceable brain probe into the 700-or-so interesting people, things and places that I follow. A physical articulation of thoughts. On a good day (when, for instance, there are no people tweeting from conferences), it feels as if Twitter has created a collective preconsciousness, actualising hundreds of thousands of thought bubbles that would otherwise drift away. And at its best, Twitter allows these thought bubbles to crash into each other – become dialogue, create coincidence, generate meaning.

In the last few weeks, I’ve done an almost unprecedented number of talks and guest blog posts. This means that people who might be interested in my thoughts on, say, how arts organisations can most effectively use video, might start following me on Twitter. I haven’t formally analysed it, but I would imagine that about 0.1% of my tweets in any given year are related to that. Partly because it’s front of mind stuff – things I do at work that are so blindingly obvious they don’t need to be said. In which case, it’s probably quite annoying to hear me witter on about dressing up as a pilot and having a crush on Nigel Havers, which is the sort of thing that I do tweet all the time. On one level, it may well feel as if I’ve broken some kind of service agreement: I’ve given you my Twitter name on the last slide of a talk about making good video content, and then I’m telling you about my thoughts on petting zoos at airports.

Now – thinking about it – unless I knew you really well, I wouldn’t be telling you about my thoughts on petting zoos at airports. I’d be a bit embarrassed, and it would probably also be difficult to shoe horn into most normal conversations. I’d have to wait till someone said “what would you do if you could design your own airport?”, which – in all probability – would never happen. But the reality is that I have a more intimate relationship with my phone than with most of the Twitterverse. It’s never far from my hand, so it’s a tiny step to put that, almost preconscious, thought into the world – watch it float away, and perhaps be bounced back to me, or responded to in a surprising or funny way.

Importantly, my Twitter universe has many facets. There are some dear, close friends; some people I know less well – either through my work or personal life; some people I don’t know; some brands and organisations. When I’m sending that tweet about petting zoos, I’m probably intending to send it to the bull’s eye – that small group of close friends to whom I could say anything. But in reality, I’m saying it to whichever proportion of a randomly accumulated follower base of 1,031 people that happen to be reading at that time. Some of these might be people I want to impress, some might be people I want to give me work. Yet my intimate relationship with my phone means that I don’t think about that. I press send, do the deed. And in doing that, I also start to change my relationship with people I hardly know at all. I might be annoying some people to distraction, but I might also be finding a tiny, shared kernel of interest with someone I once sat next to at a conference.

And I’m not concerned about privacy here. Not least because I rarely say anything very important. But also because I’m aware that my tweets tend to form in that preconscious moment – they’re a glimpse of a proper thought or an idea. Not the entire thing. They’re a safe fragment to give away.

Obviously, not everyone uses Twitter like this. In many ways, I guess I use it in the slightly dreamy and pretentious way I used to annotate the margins of library books when I was a teenager. I am not a natural networker. I’m quite shy, and I have some quite unusual interests that may not be shared by a single person in my bit of Twitter. However, it’s probably a more or less accurate representation of me, and I’m fairly comfortable with that. I mean, if I wasn’t, I’d stop Tweeting.

Why Are You Going On About This?

Because I’m giving a talk tomorrow on Twitter crisis management, that was going to be based on a blog post I wrote earlier this year. This post was reflecting on my experience of dealing with what I called “a Twitter storm” at the Royal Opera House. And I was just going to go and talk about that. Talk about the five sensible things to do if you find that the sweary stick of Twitter mono-opinion is being waved in your direction.

But I realised that would be a mistake. It’s shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

I like how Twitter can be very genuine. I tend to unfollow people who use it as a megaphone to announce every single meeting they’ve had that day. And yet, this morning, I was pleased and intrigued to see a group of four clever and interesting people let each other know they were late for a meeting. That sounded like it was going to be a good meeting, the sort I want to hear more about when they’re ready to tell us.

And corporate Twitter accounts tend not to be very genuine. They’re the sort you can swear at, or retweet generic abuse to, because they’re robot corporate PR accounts that don’t have feelings too. Everyone gets very excited about Betfair and Shippams Paste because it seems like a real person might be nestling somewhere within. Likewise, Tom Armitage’s Tower Bridge tweets were a thing of wonder because they gave a beating heart to a building. And there’s outrage when these things get closed down, because there’s a feeling that the Shippams Paste Intern and Tower Bridge have feelings too.

This is also slightly on my mind because I’ve started a new agency, that I co-run with Katy Beale. We have an agency Twitter account, and I’m not yet sure how that should sound. What’s our voice, what do we want to say? Because there are only 2.5 of this, this should be extremely easy, but it’s not. My voice is not Katy’s, Katy’s isn’t mine. A lot of people want to work with us because of the mix of those two voices. Thinking about an audience is a bit paralysing. The moment I’m considering “what do people want to hear?”, the moment it risks becoming a bit boring – contrived, scheduled, headlines from previous activity. It slips from preconscious to conscious. This is partly because our legendary website is not yet live – we’re not yet giving any context – but partly because we’re in that very exciting stage of emerging and growing. Tom Uglow was recently telling me about a book he’d read about the importance of thinking like a child, and our agency is a child – it’s five months old and is changing in exciting ways all of the time. I want to capture that, while also giving out the unambiguous message that we’re doing interesting work and people should definitely hire us. Which is quite difficult, as it turns out.

Humanising the Corporate

In my old job, at the Royal Opera House, I was continually worried by our Twitter account. Luckily, one of the last things I was able to do was make sure we hired a community manager, and it turns out that the saving grace of that account has been a single, sympathetic and interested voice. Previously, we’d done some quite interesting things with it – such as writing an opera, which was fairly cool – but we’d always struggled with the tone. What does the Royal Opera House sound like? was a perpetual nagging question at the back of my mind.

And it was so for all the wrong reasons. A theatre – no matter how slick it’s marketing and branding strategy – is still, essentially, a collection of people. Real people. The ROH has a staff of around 1,000, and capturing a voice that might reflect that is pretty bloody difficult. Also, many of those 1,000 are not – or do not want to be – public voices. And it gets more difficult when you start to think about the audience.

The ROH has three artistic companies and an orchestra, world-class technical and production teams, fundraisers, educators, caterers, marketers and PR people, and – importantly – a whole lot of tickets to sell. And the audience is just as segmented. Some people only like ballet, some only like contemporary dance, some only like the work of Wayne McGregor. Some people like everything. Making a relevant fit between what the audience likes and what the organisation wants to tell everyone seemed to be impossible. Taking away the shiny patina of corporate communications and letting the real people through is the most difficult of all. Having a single voice that talks to the audience like they are real live people, with a range of different interests, appears to be a much better route to go down.

Twitter for Things

And yet, and yet – there is all this other stuff. The life of that organisation is a complex ecosystem of people and things that inter-relate on an ongoing basis.

There are processes and performances and thousands of surtitles that appear above the stage nearly every day that are dying to get out of that building.

In fact, Tom Armitage once suggested we do a Twitter feed for the red velvet curtains, which would have been a very beautiful thing – an understated articulation of the rhythm of the stage, the beating heart of the theatre.

So it seems that the voice of the things and the systems are as close as an organisation can get to a preconscious thought. The things the building and the people and the objects they contain do without thinking about them are the core of that place, the centre of gravity for the brand – hopelessly authentic, because they are real and constant.

(Funnily enough, at the exact moment I was thinking about this earlier, Matt Jones tweeted Usman Haque’s comment from today’s NESTA IoT event saying that Pachube is “Facebook for machines”. This is interesting.)

But if you’re only interested in C19th Italian Opera, you might not want to know that other stuff. But really, it’s the other stuff that makes it charming, makes it real. The life of the building is one of the most exciting and vital things about many arts organisations, yet it is rarely given an opportunity to speak.

Being Simple and Complex at the Same Time

In a way, I think The Guardian has got this the most right. I don’t know how much of this is a strategy, but if it is, it’s a good one.

I have numerous touch points with the paper on Twitter, through both (I assume) automated accounts that highlight articles I might want to read and journalists I follow who say interesting things. I don’t follow the main Guardian account, but I do follow a mix of information-based books, culture and tech accounts, that tend to provide links, which are then augmented by the personal accounts of columnists or journalists. Now The Guardian is obviously different to a theatre – you would hope that a group of paid writers would be able to rustle up enough interesting 140 character snippets – but the best thing is that I’m untroubled by the Sports headlines. It’s not a monolith that gives me everything, but the strength of the brand is such that it’s able to support these separate accounts under the purely notional umbrella of my relationship with the brand. Even when I am beyond incensed by something that has appeared in the newspaper, I would be unlikely to heap reprobation on the @Guardian account, because it’s the wrong one. It’s not the entirety of The Guardian that I’m annoyed with, it’s probably a single journalist or editor.

So?

I suppose what I’m saying is that Twitter is at its best when it’s playing in a multiple space. If your feed is full to bursting of Foursquare updates, you’re probably being tedious as hell – but if those check-ins are just a part of the varied fabric of your life and your thoughts, then they might be a compelling component.

If you can allow your corporate account to be multiple, in touch with the preconscious elements of your organisation, you would be unlikely to ever be at the centre of a “Twitter storm”, because you would be human and vital and relatable.  It might also be some of the best, accidental, marketing you ever did, but to do that you would have to stop making it like a brand manager and start like a caretaker or a conductor – checking that the multiple moving parts are doing their job, and allowing them to communicate with the wider world outside.

Does The Guardian Hate Successful Women?

(The title of this post refers to an episode of 30 Rock called “TGS Hates Women”. You should watch it if you haven’t – it’s funny.)

Today’s Guardian features an interview with Kristen Wiig that I just can’t stop being furious about.

The Guardian regularly runs bizarre and demeaning interviews with women. My recent least favourite is Decca Aitkinhead’s relentless investigation into whether or not Louise Mensch has had plastic surgery. This piece places Mensch’s appearance under quite extreme scrutiny – presumably exacerbating Mensch’s feeling that she needs to look perfect, increasing her likelihood of having surgery in the future.

Even in the Weekend magazine, I would have expected more emphasis on Mensch’s unusual moral framework and opinions and her impact as an MP, but instead we get lots of speculation on the scars behind her ears.

Emma Brockes’ interview with Kristen Wiig is a rambling passive-aggressive put down and a lazy piece of writing. I can think of no circumstance in which a man would receive the same treatment, and I can’t understand why it was published without more editorial diligence.

As is mentioned twice in the article, rather self-consciously, Wiig is 38. She’s been an actor for around 20 years, has made a massive hit movie and is a great success. She should be considered as someone who’s made it – as established in her chosen field. And yet Emma Brockes’ piece isn’t concerned with that; it’s concerned with pigeon-holing Wiig as a woman. It’s accompanied by a slew of photos of her in which she’s been primped and preened beyond all recognition. And despite the fact that she’s off to work all night at Saturday Night Live and has written a scene that involves “shitting in the street” (Wiig’s words), she is described as being “slight … with an eager tilt to her body language”. All the evidence points to her being robust, funny and confident, yet Emma Brockes seems to spend most of the piece trying to bring her down.

There are three particular things that make me very cross:

1) The headline of the article is “My next movie – it’s a Porkie’s prequel”. This is accompanied by a picture of Wiig wearing a top slashed down the middle of her torso and come hither stare. When you actually read what she says, it’s:

“Raunchy means like Porky’s,” she says and smiles. “Which is my next movie; it’s going to be a Porky’s prequel.”

Which is a joke, for crying out loud. She’s a comedian making a joke in an interview. Perhaps Brockes doesn’t have a sense of humour, because it’s not picked up on. Instead, it’s the headline of the whole article.

2) The following comment:

“Her understatement is fuelled perhaps by the inevitable and awkward comparisons she has gained with other women in her business, as if the culture can sustain only a couple at a time.”

As I’ve already said on Twitter, if journalists and commentators stopped saying things like that, perhaps people would be less likely to perceive women who are good at things as being tokens or as competing with each other.

3) The non-sensical conclusion:

Wiig is riding so high at the moment that when, as we leave, I ask her to confirm her age, I’m surprised when she grimaces. Yes, she says, she’s 38. Why the face? Under her breath, like a dangerous heresy, she says, “I feel like women are asked their age more than men.” And she snaps on a smile and leaves the restaurant.

The first sentence makes no sense: why is her age in any way relevant to her status? I can think of no corollary between the fact that “Wiig is riding so high” and the necessity of her confirming her age. Perhaps it would be relevant if she were a 20-year-old ingenue, but she clearly isn’t, so why bother?

I need to declare a conflict of interest, I’m 38 too – but it’s not all that. I don’t feel it means I’m either one thing or another. I just am – I’m a woman midway through her career. And while age and background are often mentioned in celebrity interviews, I can’t help but feel there’s some kind of judgement here that I don’t understand. Rather than it ending on a note about Wiig being on the verge of another great project or going off to write gags for a brilliant comedy show, it ends on a point about her age that seems somehow damning or significant, and which is supported by Wiig’s reaction. She clearly thinks it’s irrelevant too.

Finally, and most entertainingly, the comments on the article seem dominated by rage that Wiig is referred to as an actor and not an actress. As if she hasn’t already been put in her place.

I’ve Never Seen Blade Runner

Yesterday I tweeted that I had “never knowingly read any science fiction”. I was quickly, and entertainingly, proved to be very wrong, but I stand by the “knowingly” part of that sentence. I have never knowingly picked up a book and read it because I thought it might speculate about the future.

In fact, I’ve spent most of my reading career stuck in the past, excavating evidence about obscure lady novelists, hanging round the Charing Cross Road and, latterly, ordering unloved paperbacks from Abe Books. I’ve not become a wholehearted ereader yet, because lots of the things I want to read aren’t available there – and I probably won’t until I can digitise my own library and hang around the second-hand Kindle stalls. In short, I’ve got a reading crush on the minor novelists from the mid-20^th Century that I don’t feel inclined to cure.

But yesterday, I was working at my dining table, listening to the echo of the Playful Twitter stream. Someone was talking about the way my generation has been shaped by 70s sci-fi – jet packs and hover boards. And there was I, sitting at home surrounded by book cases filled with the hundreds of books that an English graduate collects along the way, and I couldn’t – until it was pointed out to me – think of a single book that I had read that might fall into the category of sci-fi.

Despite the fact that I was born in 1973, the thing I liked most about the Star Wars trilogy was the Ewoks. I was probably nine or ten when I saw Return of the Jedi, and I thought those bears were really cool. But I stopped caring about bears shortly after that – by 1985, I was putting up Michael Jackson posters and learning the words to “Get in to the Groove”. It just didn’t hit a sweet spot. If I’d spent my teens mooning over the Ewoks, it would have been likely that there was something wrong with me.  So that was that. I moved on.

And during my teens I read books by the bucketload – consumed the contents of my local library in an attempt to find out who I might be, did a degree that surveyed English literature from 1300 to the present day. So it turns out that I’ve read lots of the classics of future gazing – I’ve even sweated academic blood over Mary Shelley’s futurology – but the thing I’ve found attractive about them has never been the glimpse of the future they’ve shown. It’s been the turn of a sentence, a sentiment, an idea, the world (filled with people) they have created.

The reason I mention this, is that I spend quite a lot of time feeling puzzled by the Hipster Tech that emerges from the offices round Old Street, made by young-ish men preoccupied by Making the Future Now. And I’m aware that there’s a reference point I don’t share – a reference that I imagine comes from the pages of Neuromancer or the mind of Philip K. Dick.

And I’m bothering to write this down because I think I’m one of the many. Perhaps not one of the many who seeks out inter-war comedies of manners, but one of the many who doesn’t spend their life gazing into an imaginary future-past. And if we’re supposed to be making the products of the future, they need to be things that matter to people who’ve never seen Blade Runner. So I guess what I’m saying is that Hipster Tech is the imaginary future of the few, and there’s another – more useful – technology that is the future of us all.

(And yes, you did read that right. I’ve never seen Blade Runner.)

Culture Hack North – Speakers Wanted! (Updated)

Updated: Tuesday 18th October

Thanks for all of the brilliant submissions. I’ll be announcing the talks list this week and opening the ticketing. Meanwhile, if you still have a great idea for a talk but just didn’t have time to send it in, drop me a line on hello@wearecaper.com and I’ll see if I can squeeze you in!

—————

I’m organising the talks strand for Culture Hack North, which is on Saturday 12th November at the Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. Culture Hack North is about bringing arts and technology together in new and interesting ways – an opportunity to make stuff and meet new people, while also helping to shape the future of the arts in the UK.

The talks will be open to anyone who wants to attend, but they will be most interesting to you if you work in or with the arts or technology. We’re looking for ways in which the two can start to overlap more – what can open data do for museums? how will smart objects change archives? how can glanceable technology change performance? That sort of thing. The sign-up for the event will go live next Monday, so save the date now, but don’t try and sign-up yet.

Anyway, I don’t live in Leeds, I live in London. Luckily, through the magic of the Internets, I know some very cool people who do live in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield* – but when I started pulling together the agenda for the talks, I realised most of them were men. So I put a call out on Twitter for inspirational women in Leeds/Manchester/Sheffield who work in technology and the arts and got completely overwhelmed. SO, rather than doing it like that (because I’m definitely going to miss someone amazing), I’m going to do it like this:

I’ve got 6 spots to fill (out of a total of 9) at the Culture Hack North talks. If you (man or woman) would like to speak for no more than 7 minutes on a topic to do with art-meets-technology, then send a short synopsis to hello@wearecaper.com by 12pm on Monday 17th Oct. *All of the talks* (with no exception) will need to answer a question that starts with the words “What if…?” This is emphatically not an opportunity to talk about your portfolio, pitch your website or your agency – it’s a chance to say “What if the world was completely different and we did things like this?” And there’ll be a chance to talk about it afterwards with a load of completely brilliant people. Oh, and send a brief biog too, just to give some context.

And if you want some inspiration, then the talks from the London Culture Hack are all online.

ALSO, if you’re interested in running a workshop on the Sunday morning – some kind of collaborative making thing, whether it’s Arduino, paper prototyping, collective storytelling – then drop a line to the same address. Would be brilliant to have you.

At the moment, we don’t have any budget to cover travel costs, but if you know anyone who would like to sponsor the talks, then let me know and we might be able to sort that out! There will, however, be some beer. And possibly tea. And lots of brilliant people who will make it all worthwhile.

And thank you in advance. I have a feeling this will be awesome.

(*There’s going to be a separate Culture Hack North East, just so you don’t think I’m being regionalist.)

I Believe in Technology

My post about Edgelands was essentially a whine about people not getting it. In the last few days, I’ve read four things that helped me understand that a little more. This is a quick exercise in joining the dots that ends with some thoughts on religion. In doing so, there’s a chance I may have gone a little bit insane.

TWO THINGS ABOUT PEOPLE

The first is this speech by Ben Hammersley, the first half of which is a very eloquent explanation of People Who Don’t Get It and Why That’s Bad. It’s aimed at a different group of people – what you could broadly call The Ruling Classes – but it’s entirely extensible to all kinds of other sectors. My interest  is in the cultural world, and there’s a direct analogue between the two.

In summary, Ben says that our future planning isn’t taking Moore’s Law into account, so we’re looking ahead based on the capabilities of today, not even those of the near-future. Meanwhile, the people who make decisions just aren’t engaging, because they’re using a toolkit that they developed pre-1990 to make decisions.

Then, this tweet from Christy Dena popped up:

This rang a bell with me, because it’s not just transmedia. It’s the case across the entire digital landscape.

People are getting on in the middle of a continuum, and they want to go back to the start. People of my generation were educated to understand the history and mechanics of a thing before they made their own conclusions. Lots of educated people have a natural inclination to start at the start – to take things apart and put them back together again.

But, to Ben’s point, things are moving too quickly to go back to the start. So it looks like the world is starting to belong to the people who don’t question or interrogate, but who, instead, gladly accept miracles. And so it’s easy to get scared that Google is making us stupid and games are making us fat. Because it relates to what we know. And lots of people – by and large those born before 1980 – have to find a new way of judging and thinking that isn’t just really frightening. A new way to start in the middle without surrendering control.

TWO THINGS ABOUT THINGS

Friday was a good day for people writing clever things on the Internet.

James Bridle wrote this:

Digitisation makes something ephemeral, reproducible, robot-readable—and networkable. In fact, its capacity to be connected to other things like and unlike itself is its most insistent quality. It longs for it. The digital object is immanent in the network. It is where it is most truly itself, which is everything.

Immanent is a nice word. It’s a theological term, used to describe the being of God relative to the material world. It’s a useful reappropriation, giving a word to the fizz and the magic of connectedness.

And Mark Sorrell wrote this:

TV programs will become software … Shops are becoming software. Amazon is already software and a shop. Supermarkets deliver to your house when you order online. They are becoming software. You can’t fix your car anymore because your car is now software. Google themselves are developing quite capable self-driving cars. Drivers are becoming software.

Which is, essentially, the same thing, but in a different context. About things we feel we should understand, but don’t, because they’re software now. And we can all just close our eyes and pretend this isn’t happening: we don’t have to worry till the car starts flying, but by then it will be too late. And it will be too late because of the immanence of the object, and it’s profound being in the network.

SO

James’s point about immanence brings me to the idea (and this might be wrong, but it feels right as I explore this on a Sunday morning – let’s see where it goes) that the last time Western value systems were challenged so profoundly was with Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species. This questioned the certainty of peoples’ beliefs and undermined the myths they used to understand the world.

That also had the advantage of being a discreet moment, rather than a fast-moving continuum.It was an ideological Big Bang, so it was easier to understand, both at the time and with hindsight.

And we’ve spent the last 160-odd years coming to terms with this kind of rationalising, only for science to do it again: it’s created a whole new system of unknowables, that we can barely understand the potential of. Post-Enlightenment rationalism is now too difficult, and we’re back to dealing with an unconfigurable system that you can either believe in or reject.

For immanence to become acceptable to mankind, it needs a mythology – a religion – a point of easy access, with all the problems that entails. I wonder if that is where we’re heading next?

Without a Bible for our times that encodes a system of knowns and knowables, our ability to become critical and cynical will become exponentially reduced: we’ll either be bogged down in starting again or absorbed by the ease of unquestioning belief.

Both seem as perilous as the other. And the third option frankly insane. Let’s see how that goes.

Laptops and Looms: Decompressing

Inspired by Paul Miller’s great post, here are my thoughts on Laptops and Looms.  It’s very much an initial response – and I would imagine much of this territory has been discussed more astutely by a raft of social commentators. But anyway…

Age of Revolution?
I’m not enough of an historian to draw clear lines between events and offer interpretation, but our visit to Arkwright Mill in particular, made me wonder if we’re living through another revolutionary moment.

1789-1848 is an astonishing period in history, one of those moments when time speeds up: there were political revolutions in France and America and significant changes to shape of the British Empire, and an industrial revolution changed the way we worked and lived and (according to Eric Hobsbawm) set industrial capitalism in place.

Clearly history – the study of the past – needs some distance to be considered, but it seems as if we’re living through similar times now. After the Arab Spring (catalysed and amplified by peoples’ use of social media), we have had riots in the UK, and this morning the radio was cataloguing the uncertainty in Liberty.Libya.*

Against this background, there is a possible new future for manufacturing – a beleaguered and worn-down industry. It seems to good to be true – history repeating itself.

Our Parents’ Children
If our parents lived through the age of convenience, where are we now? I heard someone describe the back-to-luxury-basics crew as “Eco Snobs” the other day, and there is a sheltered middle-class emerging: downshifting, growing tomatoes that (once the terracotta pots and high grade compost have been purchased) probably cost £5 a vine, looking for stories and authenticity in their products. A whole lifestyle defined by this Waitrose advert:

The Eco Snobs (and I would, grudgingly, count myself as one) have cherry-picked from the labour-saving devices championed by our parents – turning up their noses at sliced bread and convenience foods with their iPhone4 in hand. I once went to Whole Foods to make my own peanut butter, FFS.  And I’m fascinated by what this is doing to the role of women in the home and the workplace; the reclamation of domesticity is threatening to make feminism a blip, a fad, as people who can make choices about earnings decide that it would be more authentic if one (female) parent stayed at home. More fascinatingly, this is a taboo subject – a lifestyle choice that can rarely be discussed or questioned.

There is also a connection between these things and our yearning for localism, making, the creation of a hands-on experience. This festishisation isn’t new: it was there during the Industrial Revolution too, Thomas Carlyle commenting: “In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.” Now we can even manipulate games with gestures, the idea of our personal agency is increasing. To be twee for a moment, it’s like we’re reaching out to touch the Information Age – martial it by turning it into objects.

And so 3D printing and personal manufacture emerge. The idea that a small personalisation is an act of creation. But also, the emergence of truly connected objects that personify this yearning. I was thrilled by the idea of the MakieLab’s ‘data freckles’ (random face markings for dolls, that carry information in the same way as dreaded QR codes).

So we are in a time of convenient, or connected, pastoralism. Lots of the attendees at Laptops and Looms owned or worked in small businesses, and we talked a great deal about very localised change – but I’m intrigued by the points in Paul’s blog about large-scale transformation.

To that end, briefly, I went to a talk by Julian Baggini yesterday, at which he outlined the idea of “rad hoc” (or Radical Ad Hoc) interventions, small things that tilt and calibrate the world in a different way. If we are, as Dan Hill proposed, setting out to make suggestions to David Cameron, then I think we should do that with a sense of responsibility: an idea of what those rad hoc changes might be, that will set component parts of the economy on a different course.

Skills
I’ve been spending a lot of time talking and thinking about skills lately. Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman (which is next to read on my bedside pile), offered (before Gladwell) the following thought:

By one commonly used measure, about 10,000 hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician. As skill progresses, it becomes more problem-attuned, such as the lab technician worrying about procedure – whereas people with primitive levels of skill struggle just to get things to work. At its higher reaches, technique is no longer a mechanical activity; people can feel fully and think deeply about what they are doing, once they do it well.

I have a terrible niggle that the combination of the Convenience Economy and the Information Age has changed our attitude to acquiring skills. For me, the constant debate that the Internet is making us stupid seems to fix on the wrong target: if the Internet is changing the intellectual skills we need – we’re analysing information rather than storing it – then what is it doing to our store of physical skills? If you can look-up how to do anything on eHow (and then, possibly, do it slightly badly) you’re on the one hand benefitting from the collective store of information, but on the other you’re losing the necessity to do something more than once or five times (let alone acquire a skill over 10,000-hours of practice).

To develop an instinct that connects your hand and your eye and your gut is an extraordinary thing. It’s something that the Dads of my generation have in spades, and that they have been honing in their sheds over decades. The flipside is that everything seems easy now – so there’s a bullish enthusiasm, less fear that we might get things wrong. We’re all enthusiastic amateurs now. Both Matt Edgar and Phil Gyford made some very thoughtful points about the previous role of the hobby – an outlet for creativity that might be stifled at work, preparation for a long retirement – and we’re blurring those boundaries, engaging in professional hobbyism, expecting to earn money for our doodles.

But how can we progress from being enthusiastic amateurs to manufacturers? Matt Cottam was particularly inspiring and interesting in his discussion of the continuity from hobby through to craft to craftsmanship and industrial design and engineering. I’m wondering if, at a baseline, we want to develop new ways of exploring that continuum – circumvent the 10,000 hours with our stores of collective knowledge and collaborative working practices. “Connected pastoralism” keeps humming through my mind. But this is essentially a move for the middle-classes, and the real responsibility is identifying the “Rad Hoc” interventions that might cascade that change throughout society.

On consideration, that seems an extraordinary agenda for a group of people in a meeting room in a disused mill in the Peak District. But on the other it’s not remarkably different to the change inspired by the kids who were looting outside my door two weeks ago, so perhaps we should think about making it happen?

*horribly revealing Freudian Slip

On Edgelands, art and technology

I gave a short talk at Edgelands yesterday, convened by the wonderful pairing of  Hannah Nicklin and Andy Field and described as ‘A conference from the borders of performance, about the state of the world’, and a part of Forest Fringe at the Edinburgh Festivals.

There was a group discussion afterwards during which it seemed like technology was too quotidian to be inspiring: that some of the people in the room couldn’t, or didn’t want to, regard a set of networks that enable Internet banking and people liking things on Facebook as anything more than mundane. That it was too connected to the stuff of life to be able to offer up the transcendent possibilities of art. My notes on that part start about halfway down (I can’t remember how to do anchors – do people even do anchors anymore?) and you might just want to skip to that. It was an interesting and perhaps even troubling conversation, and I’m writing about it here in the hope of extending that conversation further.

During the day, we addressed four questions – covering capitalism, audience, the importance of the arts and ‘What is digital innovation in the arts and why is it important?’ My provocation addressed this last question, along with  Matthew Somerville - who talked about the wonder of  Geocities and the importance of living archives – and Matt Adams from Blast Theory, who stressed the importance of risk taking and collaborative practice as a means to creating innovative work. Tom Armitage also wrote a nice piece about creating work with the affordances of technology in mind., that I think will be online soon.

This is the text of my talk:

Walter Benjamin commented in ‘Some Remarks on Folk Art’ that, ‘Art teaches us to see into things.’ If that’s the case, then technology can do two things:

•  it can give us tools to see, quite literally, both close up and from a distance – allowing us to see new patterns and forms
• it can provide us with new forms and media

But we should remember that until – or perhaps – unless – we achieve The Singularity, technology is no more or no less than the people who use it and make it.

So ‘digital innovation in the arts’ is no more or less than the effort and ingenuity of people who are working in the field. It’s the things made by the people standing in this room.

There’s no magic or alchemical process. It isn’t a single activity – “leave me alone, I’m innovating now! With technology!’ It is the things that people do and make. And as we do new things, we will do them with technology in mind.

So I wouldn’t say that it’s important, so much as inevitable.

But there is always a BUT, and I have two of them:

1)   We shouldn’t assume that digital innovation takes place on a screen. Or only on a screen. We shouldn’t assume it’s a digital version of an analogue experience.

2)   We should think about the difference between art (the creative product) and The Arts (the formal network of arts organisations and funding bodies)

The Arts is a system that needs all the help it can get. It’s an infrastructure that needs trustworthy services to make businesses run and deliver services to patrons. Rather than making innovative ticketing systems, brand new video-streaming platforms or bespoke social networks, The Arts should make the most of its limited resources and stand on the shoulders of giants – use the best technology and services from the wider world, and deploy them in the best way possible.

But art is another matter. Art is about disrupting and subverting – changing and challenging the norms. “Art teaches us to see into things.” And this is the area we’ve been tentative in.

So I would leave you with a question – and a challenge: can we make technology the way we make art?

As provocations go, I think this is fairly unremarkable. In fact, I’ve been thinking I need to get a new schtick and stop going on about what is, essentially, the difference between form and content (or The Arts vs art), but there seems to be such a looming feeling of disappointment about how the cultural sector has  failed to grasp the nettle of technology that it still seems relevant.

However, I was quite surprised by the conversation that followed. I think this was because I hadn’t quite clocked the make-up of the audience; because, perhaps, for a group of people who describe themselves as artists, the idea that we can make technology in the same way we make art might be quite tough, quite threatening. I meant it as a call to arms, I guess, but I’m not sure it came across that way.

Everything below is a paraphrase – based on my impressions and reflections of the conversation.

• The first assertion was that “there was no good Internet art” – that after the invention of the Gutenberg Press it took the first novel, Don Quixote, 150 years to appear, so perhaps we should be a little bit easy on ourselves. There isn’t a canon of telephone art from the 1950s, so perhaps the Internet isn’t all that as a medium for producing new art?
• There was a tension and anxiety about ‘normal people making stuff’ – are there people (young people, even) who are more familiar with the affordances of technology than people who perceive themselves as engaging in artistic practice? One example of this was a chatbot who has become an exquisite study in loneliness and unrequited love, because the only people who speak to it are lonely and sad – an accidental artistic by-product of life, rather than a mindfully created Work of Art. I think there was some anxiety about irrelevance; I don’t know, I might have made that up.
• There was a strange (I thought) discussion about the anonymity of online contribution, which on reflection I think means facelessness – because private identity is the big sacrifice of our connected world. And the idea that comments on Twitter are ‘beautiful apparitions’ not substantiated connections.
• A debate about skills and engagement: do you have to be a great HTML5 developer to make digital art or simply be engaged and have rudimentary capture skills, e.g Eva and Franco Mattes’ Chatroulette piece?
• The feeling that stuff takes place on screens prevailed and no one seemed that bothered by either ubiquitous or ambient technology as an artistic medium, or aware of the seething mass of AI that lurks in every day life. Since hearing both Leila Johnston talk about ATM hacking  and James Bridle on the pathos of the hidden robot world (which isn’t online but was brilliant, and well worth hearing if he reprises it) I’ve been thinking about the possibility of this a great deal, and it seems like an extraordinary artistic opportunity that I’m not sure is being exploited or explored.
• There was also a question about whether or not artists were online; everyone in the room, I think (besides me), identified themself as an artist and although they were “online in every day life” they didn’t regard any of those networks or media as being a part of their practice.
• I asked a fatuous question (which I’m fascinated by) about what the online equivalent of applause might be; someone said – rather marvellously, I thought – that they didn’t like clapping and that we cleaved too much to the traditional idea of things. On reflection, I would have liked to explore that further; it seemed to be the crux of it.

And that was that. I still feel slightly troubled by the conversation –  by the sadness of the limitations, the fact that things seem to fall in and out of the scope of “artistic practice” (I’m not sure how this differs from art), and also the idea that the world is changing at a rate of knots and people don’t seem to be noticing. The beginning and the end of the conversation about technology and art still seems to be about free vs paid (in fact, there was a debate about it yesterday, at the Ed Book Fest) and it doesn’t yet seem to be a part of the material of life. But everyone with a smartphone in their pocket is living a networked life, filled with touchpoints to their parallel online life – which is no longer partitioned, and which is seeping into the real, so that the two are more overlapped and connected than many of us seem to realise.

I’ve written this all down to get it off my mind, as it’s been niggling since yesterday. But also because I want to extend the conversation: I don’t think we can wait for the future to come along and solve our problems. And I’m struck by the thought that we’re living in more of the future than many of us know, so we’re overcomplicating and limiting our experience – externalising technology rather recognising the extent to which we’ve absorbed and assimilated it.

White Space

I’m writing this in the Tate Britain cafe. Tate Britain is my favourite Tate. Even today – in August, when it should be peak school holiday – it’s relatively empty. Not just of people, but of things – it’s an emptyish space. There’s room left on the walls, there are places to think. It’s, first and foremost, somewhere to see art and think thoughts. By contrast, Tate Modern seems like a supermarket of human existence. Everything there fizzes and pops and distracts. People even seem to eat their sandwiches more slowly here.

I suppose some of the things I like about Tate Britain are things that, once (or even now, were I a different sort of person) would have been fulfilled by a church. I’m hesitating to use the word, but it has a spiritual quality. A quality that’s missing from many other things I do in my life – and I think this is something I want to see more of as the arts get to grips with technology. More white space and less noise.

Since I started Culture Hack Day, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about “hacking culture” – which has nothing to do with hacking, really, but is about taking culture apart – subverting and reinventing it. ‘Culture’ is a set of systems we’ve invented to understand art; it’s the museums and galleries and series of Proms that have been put in place to allow us to navigate, and make sense of, all this stuff. And fair enough: we need all the help we can get.

But we’ve not yet thought enough about changing those systems, inventing new paradigms. By and large – like, say, many newspaper publishers – we’ve been trying to replicate the physical object as a digital thing. We’re preserving rather than developing. And while they may be relatively small leaps, other sectors have made them: telly has the iPlayer, publishing has the ebook. They are made with the affordances of the platform in mind, not as a desperate attempt to recreate the thing that they might be replacing.

The arts, meanwhile, tends to talk about online museums and digital performance. There are thousands of beautifully formatted PDFs on websites and lots of those turny-page online books to replicate the experience of a magazine on the screen. There is a hoving to the bricks and mortar, a reluctance to accept the slight and ephemeral qualities that technology can allow. And this is fair enough: most art is about the tingle of experience – an intangible feeling – so we substantiate it, make it real. Buy a programme, save a ticket. Without those things, we worry that it might all drift away… and, I think because of that, many arts websites become so chunky, so substantial, it feels as if you could almost reach out and touch them.

This brings me to Your Paintings. Your Paintings is an amazing thing. It’s an heroic, gargantuan effort; a literal, digital version of the National Gallery that seems bigger than all the galleries in London put together. But (and there is, of course, a but) it seems that whoever commissioned it had a think and then decided to make the Internet all over again, but make it just for paintings, in a time time before links existed or Wikipedia was written.

Obviously something of this size and magnitude was  made by a lot of very clever people who worked extremely hard and achieved great things. They will probably all win lots of awards and plaudits and not care about my opinion, which is entirely right and correct. But I think it’s really important, sometimes, to say why you don’t like things that are otherwise flavour of the month. And it seems particularly important now, when lots of arts organisations are rallying to submit their Digital R&D proposals to ACE and NESTA.

Your Paintings is a classic Field of Dreams project: a monolith, made for people to visit, by people who understand museums and galleries. It has none of the fragmentary, ambient quality that the best kind of technology (or the best kind of gallery) can deliver. And as someone who is neither in formal education or gripped by the desire to see every painting that was ever painted, I find it’s completism overwhelming. It’s almost boring. I don’t know where to start, so I’m just not going to. I want to be beguiled, enchanted, surprised. I might even want a curated experience and have the thrill and frustration of knowing there are pictures in the storeroom I can’t see right now, and that the ones in this room have been put there for a reason. But as I am also the only person in the country who didn’t enjoy A History of the World in 100 Objects, you can probably see a theme here – something like “give me less stuff, please, and make it less boring”.

I’ve been thinking about what I might say at Edgelands, and it’s this: arts organisations should stop building websites. Instead, I’d like them to tag their assets in useful ways and upload them to common platforms. Most arts organisations need a few WordPress templates – an object or performance page, a calendar, a collections search and a way to buy tickets – with a CSS that reflects their branding and the ability to make a mobile site. That’s it. There’s no big secret. Embrace the 98% of things you have in common with every other gallery and theatre and make the most of the 2% that makes you extraordinary and unique. Work with the Internet, not against it – let the tides of information come and go. Let the imagination in, and the audience will appreciate it.

Notes from the NESTA/ACE/AHRC Digital R&D Fund Day

Yesterday was the first of the Digital Days organised by NESTA, ACE and the AHRC to talk about their Digital R&D Fund. Here are my notes from the talks by Andrew Nairne and Jon Kingsbury, with some summary points at the top.

Overview

The emphases are on building and inspiring new audiences and driving new business models in the arts.

In short:
•the £500k will fund five to ten projects
•each successful project will be partnered with a research team (funded by the £200k research strand)
•projects must have research questions at their heart and extensibility for the sector – either knowledge or (in some cases) tools
•artistic innovation might be a facet of the project but not the be all and end all
•there aren’t certain amounts of money allocated for each of the six themes or for specific regions: make a good proposal and it will land where it may
•collaboration is key – what are the benefits to less digitally literate organisations? Who are they great technologists you can work with? What are the interesting (corporate?) partnerships?

Deadline is 2 September. Successful projects will be notified by 3rd week of September.

Sandpit Days – 24/25 September

Projects are envisaged to run from 15 October 2011 to 1 October 2012.

Andrew Nairne, Executive Director Arts, Arts Council England

Digital runs through everything ACE do

Fund is very much in the space of building and inspiring new audience and developing resilience for the sector , or: audiences and business models

Want to be transformative – support a step change for artists and arts.

ACE are aware of the need to create imaginative digital content that can attract audiences – this is all about reach and making publicly funded content available to all – but they are aware that is NOT just about handing a TV camera to a television company. Instead this is a moment to think, “how can it be new?”

How to build new relationships? ACE are aware that reaching new people is not an easy thing to do (as we would already be doing it) – need to be cleverer than that

Feeling increasing positive about gaming, ref recent visit to the Pervasive Media Studio: how can we surround our audiences with experiences?

National Portfolio – beacons of excellence, taking a leadership role. ACE want to enable them to use digital technology to help them accelerate what they want to do anyway

Also bear in mind that this fund is not the be and end all. There are also GFA and strategic funds (lottery money), specifically the £20m Digital Fund to be announced in the Autumn,

The R&D fund is about recognising the gaps – working in partnership – being a catalyst and an enabler – supporting both the pioneers and the digitally illiterate – arts pioneers who can then make amazing work.

Want to do this with many partners – and hoping to bring on more partners – stepping out of the comfort zone of the arts. Arts orgs tend to think about their natural partners as other arts orgs, but we need to get out of that space and think more broadly – think into the creative industries – out of the sector

ACE to lead on advocacy, e.g. support w/intellectual property

They are interested in OPEN DATA and the possibilities there – want ACE to be a useful partner for arts and culture – to extend and deepen impact in and of arts and culture.

Questions to consider: how can orgs exploit their cultural assets – what is about your org that is special unique and rich? What is extensible and reproducible? e.g.  The Faber Wasteland app is a breakthrough – could something like that be whitelabelled and rolled out to other organisations?

Jonathan Kingsbury, Creative Economy Programme Director, NESTA

Sees the fund as enabling use of digital technologies in the arts and cultural sector to engage audiences in new ways and create opportunities for new business models.

Supporting projects that bring important knowledge and learning to benefit the sector as a whole

Looking for evidence and insights that other orgs will find useful – not just looking to support projects but knowledge that can be transferred

Each proposal should have a very clear research question that the project activity will hope to answer – this is extremely important – generating knowledge is at the heart of this.

Eligibility criteria for this is much more open that is usually associated with arts funding – businesses can apply as long as they can deliver benefit to the arts and cultural sector.

Opportunity for arts and cultural orgs who want to experiment and prototype – want to be explicit about engaging, reaching new audiences and exploring new business models

Built on the AHRC and ACE research

Expects that there will be between 5 and 10 successful projects that will generate value for the sector as a whole

Arts and culture partners need a technology partner to collaborate with. Don’t mind you using your own tech team but want you to “spread the love” and give some of that effort to people who have less capacity

Arts and culture orgs will be leading the fund

Research teams will be at the two-day workshop to help refine the question – and will be there to choose which projects to work on – they want the findings and knowledge to be robust and believable; researchers will write up the final report – researchers shortlisted in parallel with the project selection

Focus on research element is crucial – what potential does the project have to deliver research findings to the wider sector – what potential does it have to extend learning

Collaboration – collaboration – collaboration!

Interested to understand the impact of teaming up with arts and cultural organisations who have less capacity – how you are spreading the value to people who are less advanced?

Want to understand how committed your organisation is to this project

Much more interested in something at the heart of the organisation that gives it potential to go farther than it has before – not interested in marginal activity

All questions are published as part of the FAQ

Artistic innovation might be a facet of the project but not the be all and end all

Envisaging that projects will end October  2012

No limit to the number of applications or associations you might have

Overlap between the R&D fund and the core digital fund is still tbc.

Applicants don’t need to know exactly how they will do the research but they need to know that it’s a researchable question – don’t need a PhD proposal e.g.

Weathering Twitter Storms

I’m a bit of a veteran of the Twitter storm, having weathered two or three at the Royal Opera House. Opera North are in the middle of a humdinger this morning. Having read Lee Hall’s piece online yesterday, it seems that they are trapped between a rock and a hard place with the school and the LEA – but, and this is the crucial bit – the emotive nature of this story means it will run and run.

Sadly, the escalating nature of the buzz will probably mean that more time is spent “dealing with the story” than actually sorting out the issue – and that can often be the problem with these Twitter storms. They’re so active on the surface of things that they often just become PR problems to be washed away, rather than recognised as actual problems that need solving.

It’s also the case that opera companies are generally seen as public-funded bastions of wrong thinking that are generally ripe for a kicking, which doesn’t really help.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, my five-point guide to sorting it out:

1) Twitter works different hours to your Press Team

I know this is obvious, but these 140-character lot are an impatient bunch. In the old days, your Director of Press had a 12-24 hour grace period to bend the ear of The Guardian Arts Editor – but now, if you don’t get a response out in 30 minutes, you’re an abject cowardly failure. The minute you see the storm gather, put a comment out. Not a comment on the whole thing, but something that recognises the fact that you’re not exactly flavour of the month and that you’re “working on” a statement. If you have to wake up your Chief Executive to do this, it’s probably worth it. You can’t underestimate the speed at which one or two celebrity tweets can – and will – travel.

2) Get a Proper Statement Out

Obviously, your proper statement has to be a lot more considered than all the general hoo-ha. It will be quoted in newspapers and seen by funders, audience members and people who used to be fans. It will be ridiculed by lots of people who generally have nothing to do with you, but have decided to make a snap judgement of everything about your organisation. So I would make it short and to the point. It’s okay to say more later, when you know more. The worst thing to do is to be equivocal. And if you can make it seem as if it’s been written by an actual person, all the better. Emotions are likely to be running high at this stage, so make it clear that your organisation is staffed by Real People rather than Press Release Robots.

3) Be Open and Transparent

If you’re talking or consulting, tell people. If you’re getting the right words together for an apology, do the same. If you’ve been accused of something you haven’t done, say you haven’t done it. If there’s a real story, then tell the real story. The angry mob mentality is quite an extraordinary thing to behold, but – crucially – it can also be spectacularly forgiving. I mean, the Internet is made up of people, after all – and the great thing about Twitter, particularly, is that it’s an outlet for a hundred million different opinions. It can get homogenous at times, but it can also disperse the same way.

4) Learn

This is the best learning experience you will ever have about how to deal with social media. Although you might want to cry/tear your hair out/other bad things while dealing with more senior people in your organisation, this is really the moment you’ve been waiting for. Suddenly, the senior management team will be very engaged.

5) Don’t Crow

If it’s not happening to you, don’t crow. If you work at another arts organisation that is made up of more than about, say, four people, then it is only a matter of time before it does happen to you. And when it does, you’ll want your peers to be supportive, not stab you in the back. If the company in question has made bad artistic or legal or other decisions, then fair enough – they deserve it – but if they just haven’t managed to rally in the nano-timescale that Twitter demands, then cut them a bit of slack. Offer some help. Wait for the full story to emerge. Because then you get to be full of righteous indignation with the full facts at your disposal, and no one ever looked stupid for doing that.