Tag Archives: 5by5

The Magazine and Social Media

Megaphone red
Megaphone red by Adamantios (via Wikimedia Commons, (GFDL, CC-BY-SA)

The following is my App Store review of The Magazine, a Newsstand offering by Instapaper developer Marco Arment.

Though I like Marco Arment’s work and there’s nothing specifically wrong about this implementation of the magazine model, I don’t find the magazine model particularly useful, at this point. And, make no mistake. The Magazine is indeed a magazine.

Oh, sure, this format overcomes several of the limitations set by advertising-based models and hierarchical boards. But it maintains something of the magazine logic: a tight bundle of a few articles authored by people connected through the same “editorial intent”. It’s not a conversation with the public. In this first issue, it’s not even a conversation among co-authors.

The “linked list” aspect of the “Fireball Format” (from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball media property) is described in one of the pieces in this first issue. Other distinguishing factors of the “Fireball Format” aren’t discussed in that same piece. They include a “no comment” policy which has become rather common among high-profile blogs. Unlike most blogs of the pioneer era in social media, these blogs don’t allow readers to comment directly.

A justification for this policy is that comments can be posted elsewhere. And since most of these bloggers are active on microblogging platforms like App.net and Twitter, there’s a chance that a comment might be noticed by those authors. What’s missing, though, is the sense of belonging which bloggers created among themselves before MySpace.

In other words, now that there are large social networking services online, the social aspects of blogging have been deemphasized and authorial dimensions have come to prominence. Though Arment dislikes the word, blog authors have become “brands”. It still works when these authors are in conversation with one another, when there’s a likelihood of a “followup” (FU in 5by5 parlance), when authors are responsive.

None of that interaction potential seems to be part of the core model for The Magazine. You can scream at your iOS device all you want, Jason Snell will probably not respond to you in a future edition of The Magazine. You can attempt dialogue on Twitter, but any conversation you may succeed in starting there is unlikely to have any impact on The Magazine. You’re talking with authors, now, not with members of a community.

With The Magazine, the transition from social to authorial is almost complete. Not only are posts set apart from the conversation but the editorial act of bundling posts together brings back all the problems media scholars have been pointing out for the past several decades. The issue at stake isn’t merely the move to online delivery. It’s the structure of authority and the one-to-many broadcast-style transmission. We’ve taken a step back.

So, while The Magazine has certain technical advantages over old school magazines like The Daily and Wired, it represents a step away from social media and towards mass media. Less critical thinking, more pedestals.

A new model could emerge using the infrastructure and business model that Arment built. But it’d require significant work outside of the application. The Feature might contribute something to this new model, especially if the way posts are bundled together became more flexible.

So, all in all, I consider The Magazine to be a step in the wrong direction by someone whose work I respect.

Good thing we still have podcasts.

Early iPhone Rumours

[The Lar.me/2ke link originally pointed to Mike Davidson’s 2005 piece. More explanations here.]

[Update, a bit later… Added some thoughts, links, and tags…]

While listening to the Critical Path podcast on 5by5 with Asymco’s Horace Dediu, I got stuck on Dediu’s comment that there weren’t iPhone rumours when Google acquired Android. After a quick search, I ended up on this 2005 piece by Mike Davidson (written eight months before the Google purchase), so I tweeted to @Asymco with a link to Davidson’s post. Several people, including Dediu himself, tell me that this wouldn’t qualify as a rumour (though my own definition of rumour probably differs from theirs). Still, I’ve received some comments about how insightful this piece was. It was partly based on a November 2004 piece by Russell Beattie, which was itself a partial reaction to a short Ross Mayfield post about a “WiFi iPod”. In comments on Davidson’s piece, Ste Grainer mentioned a Robert X. Cringely piece about a Mac Media Centre.

I later found a NYT piece from 2002 which contained an actual rumour about the “iPhone”, including the name:

industry analysts see evidence that Apple is contemplating what inside the company is being called an ”iPhone.”

This, I think, would qualify as a rumour in most people’s definitions, though it didn’t include “leaked prototypes”.

But back to this Davidson piece, which might have been more insightful than the NYT’s one or even Beattie’s…

In hindsight, Davidson’s piece was both prescient of what would actually happen and telling in what didn’t happen. He talked about satellite radio, Plays for Sure, and WiMAX none of which panned out as planned. Also, Davidson surmised some things about Apple’s “content play” which were both less ambitious and more impactful (on Apple’s bottomline) than what actually happened. Apple’s 2007 move against DRM might have been surprising to the 2005 Davidson. And it’s funny to think back to an era when high prices for flash storage made it prohibitive to build a mobile device… 😉

Basically, though, Davidson was speculating about an integrated device which would replace several devices at once:

It won’t be long before the cell phone is your camera, your music player, your organizer, your portable web client, your remote control, and your digital wallet

[We could argue about Android’s NFC play being closer to the digital wallet ideal than Apple’s passbook. The other parts are closer to a Treo anyway…]

In the abstract at least (and in Steve Jobs’s way of describing it), the iPhone has been this integrated communicating device about which people had been talking for years. So, kudos to Mike Davidson for predicting this a while in advance. He was neither the first nor the last, but he painted an interesting portrait.

Now, there are other parts to this story, I think. Given the fact that work on what would become iOS devices (iPad first, we’re told) hadn’t begun when Charles Wolf told the New York Times about a device called “iPhone” internally at Apple, I get the impression that the rumours predated much of the actual development work leading to the device. Speculation happened later still. It seems to relate to a number of things demonstrated by STS generally and SCOT specifically. Namely that technological development is embedded in a broader social process.

I also find interesting some side notions in all of these pieces. For instance, ideas about the impact the device might have on people’s usage. Or the fact that the move from the Treo to the iPhone ends up being quite significant, in retrospect. Even Davidson’s points about headphones and retail stores seem to relate to current things. So does the existence of the iPod touch and Apple TV in Apple’s lineup, addressing Mayfield and Cringely, respectively.

I also end up reflecting upon the shift from the “digital hub” strategy (peaking around 2007 or so) to the one revealed with iCloud, “Back to the Mac” and, yes, even Apple Maps. Dediu devotes much time to his mentor Clay Christensen’s notion of “disruptive innovation” and spent part of this latest Critcal Path episode talking about the risks behind Apple not being disruptive enough.

All of this makes me think…

Not that I have a very clear idea of what might happen but, recently, I’ve been thinking about the broader picture. Including the Maps kerfuffle. The importance of social disruption. Apple’s financial state and market presence. The so-called “Post-PC” era in relation to other “post-” notions (post-industrialism, post-colonialism, post-nationalism, post-modernism…). The boring nature of the Google/Apple conflict. The recent financial crisis. The tech world’s emphasis on Apple. The future of academia and education. The iconicity of Steve Jobs…

As Mike Wesch has been saying:

We’ll need to rethink a few things…