Social Media

I was blown away when I first read about hypertext and the concept of rich documents in Byte Magazine (1988 - Volume 13 number 10 to be precise).  What a pity that one cannot access these articles easily anymore, and just another reason to support the move away from publishers owning content. 

Back to the story...  I remember that I was asked to talk in a small forum about technologies that I thought would change the way we deliver information content. This volume of Byte came as a revelation and shaped much of my thinking about situation awareness, of all things!  The article by J. Fiderio  “A Grand Vision--Hypertext mimics the brain's ability to access information quickly and intuitively by reference”  was so well written and made so much sense.  How would we thread these links in electronic documents to access the content in this natural manner?  Remember, this was before the days when Marc Andreessen’s Netscape hit our screens, and years before Internet Explorer!  Most people were using the internet to send e-mails around.  At best you could search for stuff in a static ‘online’ database like dBase III.

I remember telling the forum that having these hot links in documents that could even reside on the internet, we would be able to jump from one piece of information to the next relevant one without skipping a beat in our unfolding understanding of subject matter.  We would ‘flick the pages’ almost at random looking for the information we needed, weaving new information as we went, all based on current documents on other topics.  For me as a generalist, this was exactly what I needed to really do what I do well, and that is to integrate across boundaries.  I had no idea how this would be done in terms of the underlying technology, but I knew that once we had thought about it, and with the exciting emergence of the internet, it would only be a matter of time.

In 1992 I saw the first application of this technology in a simple product for the masses: The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was part of a bundle of software I got with a CD ROM drive.   Over time the hypertext links in documents just became part of the every-day experience.  These days I am constantly trying to convince people to accept the work I deliver in PDF or HTML formats, so that I can add links to other material in the document.  Why do we still want to print things on paper and have static documents?  I guess there may be reasons, but think about it.  You can get so much more, and I can even keep those links updated with new information at a small cost.  We can have real live documents.

How do social media applications fit into this discussion?  Well, FaceBook is just one big ‘hypertext’ mess.  Almost everything on the page is a link to something else, and then on to the next thing, and so on.  In Twitter we see the use of link shorteners in almost every post.  The post is almost just there to grab attention - the real stuff (or the fluff) is somewhere else.  Links appear everywhere, even ones to show where you are when you are posting something.  This truly represents how we interact with content, it helps us answer the what, why, where, how and when type questions on the fly.  Our search engines thrive on these links.  Our social media applications use this to sell us stuff, to find people, to share ideas.

My current social media favourite lives on my iPhone.  Instagram allows me to capture the emotions I feel with a picture in the instant I experience it.  I have to write very little.  I add the place where the picture was taken, some text to describe the moment and then the picture becomes the story.  This works for me as a visual thinker.  Chrissie asked the other day: “Who would want to see your snap shots?”.  I think Jan-Dawid answered appropriately by saying that it not just the picture, it is about the moment, the place, the hidden story.  He gets it.  The picture is the start.  Instagram allows people to 'Like' and add comments.  But often a 'Like' is enough - you know what was going down, you acknowledge that you grasped it, the moment became a common experience.  The art is to compose the message in the picture.  This is a long way from a static link in one document to some other content in another document.  However, it started with that Grand Vision that Fiderio talked about.  

Where are we going next?  I am not sure, but I do know that retakes on FaceBook will not do it, and Google+ is just not intuitive enough for me.  Twitter is good to broadcast with, but it seems to be a bit one-way.  Instagram may be the first of a new breed.  Live links in the pictures may be an obvious next step.  Links to where pics were taken, immersive experiences and ways to have tracks of pics, rather than just a singular timeline, may follow.  The closer we get to telling stories around the fire and learning from the discussion, the closer it comes to being natural.  I think that is the key.

My Instagram images can be seen at: http://instagrid.me/drhenkroodt/  It lacks the descriptions, etc.  You can also link to my stream if you have the Instagram app by looking for @drhenkroodt

Now, if only I can get that Byte magazine from 1988 in electronic format.....