Over the past few months, if you’ve hung out with me (especially if I’ve had a few glasses of wine), you may have heard me begin to wax idiotic about something called 4chan. Rather than continuing to bore my drinking companions, I thought I’d record what it is I’ve been raving about in a more coherent manner.

For those of you who are unaware, 4chan (very, very NSFW) is an online image board with two unusual features: first, it is almost entirely anonymous, and second, posts are not archived, meaning that there is no permanent record of the behavior on the site. Its extremely fast-paced, foul, and transient nature have made it a hotbed of creativity – if you don’t mind scrolling through pages of racist, homophobic, sexist, idiotic humor. In fact, 4chan is single-handedly responsible for almost every major internet meme that has become popular in the past 7 years. If you’ve ever laughed a lolcat, you have 4chan to thank.

A few weeks ago the ever-excellent danah boyd wrote a fantastic article on the next-generation hacker culture that is 4chan, stating that:

4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy… these attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are. They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side). Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously.

In many ways, the accelerated, anything goes atmosphere of 4chan is an amplified version of modern online media. Advertisers often complain that it is getting more and more difficult to attract attention in a world in which consumers are constantly inundated with information, and even when something does manage to break through the clutter, its effects are temporary at best.

Users of 4chan – otherwise known as /b/tards – deal with the challenge of limited attention and unlimited information in a few ways:

• Repetition – check out 4chan a handful of times, and you’ll begin to see the same jokes, stories, and pictures repeated ad nauseum. This repetition establishes the shared culture that is 4chan by ensuring that as many people as possible experience the same messages.
• Insider jokes - A side effect of all the repetition is the creation of insider humor, in which users impress one another by referencing older or obscure messages in creative ways. Again, this is part of establishing a shared culture and common language.
• Extremes – This is where the offensive stuff comes in. Pornography, gore, racism, etc. are used so extensively to gain attention on 4chan that they’ve almost ceased to have an effect on regular visitors.
• Humor – A good joke always gains attention. Repeating the joke doesn’t diminish it, until the 100th repetition or so.

Interestingly enough, these tactics are very similar to those commonly employed by marketers. To me, 4chan is all about watching a disorganized community struggle to gain a voice in the face of unlimited chatter. Advertisers will have to continue to keep up with these skills if they want to have an impact in today’s media environment.

Based on my Twitter feed, it looks like most of the tech industry isn’t doing much this morning besides hitting “refresh” on the Apple store, trying frantically to pre-order the iPhone 4. While we wait (and remember it’s only 8am in Cupertino folks), here are some thoughts about what’s important about the iPhone 4.

Given the fact that the iPhone 4 was famously deconstructed by Gizmodo a month ago, what was surprising about Steve Job’s WWDC keynote last week was how many surprises there were. Here are the three announcements that have the most potential impact on how we interact with technology and communications:

• Gyroscope – Previous versions of the iPhone have included an accelerometer, which is what allows the phone to recognize tilting and shaking the device as an interaction (used to great effect in many games). Now, Apple is replacing the accelerometer with a gyroscope, which will allow the phone to identify movement in three directions instead of two. I suspect that is one of those additions that is hard to fully appreciate without trying it hands on, but I think it shows how strongly Apple is gunning towards the games market. With rapidly improving processor speeds, screen quality (more on that below), and interactive capabilities, the iPhone is strong competition for the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP.
• Retina display – One of the sexiest surprises is the Retina Display, which essentially quadruples the number of pixels on a screen of the same size, making the resolution equal to print quality. This enhacement supports the play Apple is making with its iBooks app. The Kindle’s screen has been one of the only advantages it has vs. the iPad/iPhone, and this hurts that. I’m fairly certain that all the hardware enhancements we’re seeing on the iPhone 4 will be rolled out onto the iPad in the next year or so.
• iOS – In what seemed like a minor development, Jobs announced that the iPhone OS (operating system) is being renamed to iOS. This makes sense – it was a little confusing that the iPad was running iPhone OS. However, I think that the name change signifies a lot more – it opens Apple to create a series of mobile-esque devices all running the same OS. I think that Apple TV will be reborn with iOS in the next few years.

Apple continues to be one of the smartest tech companies in terms of futuristic hardware and software, with keen insights into what the barriers are to product adoption among common users. iPhone 4 is another great step for them. In short – I’m frantically refreshing the Apple store with the rest of you.

And a side note: the fact that Gizmodo couldn’t predict the Gyroscope and Retina display based on their deconstructed iPhone 4 prototype doesn’t speak highly for their detective skills, does it? Steve Jobs must have been secretly pleased that the coolest stuff didn’t leak.

Snow Crash – like Neuromancer and many other seminal sci-fi works – assumes that the future of technology and information consumption is through the creation of virtual worlds. This conceit was paricularly powerful through the late 80s to the early 90s, when the advent of video games with increasinly advanced graphic technologies made the creation of a 3D, interactive, info space seem inevitable.

Second Life

From a technological perspective, creating such a virtual world is no longer problematic. Such systems already exist in a variety of formats. In The Sims, players can “play God” with a series of characters (something like dolls in a doll house). The military uses virtual reality stations for everything from flight training to preventing post traumatic stress disorder. And, famously, Second Life allows players to navigate a virtual world and socialize using avatars.

However, despite the availability of the technology, the predictions of science fiction writers – that massive exodus to a virtual reality is imminent - never really came to fruition. Instead, interfaces that are primarily text and image based still prevail. This is because, outside of entertainment and training systems, there is no real benefit to navigating information through a physical metaphor. In fact, physical bodies are detrimental to navigating information – it’s much easier to click a series of links on Google than it would be to walk across a 3D library.

Nokia's Future Vision concept

So, instead of replicating a physical reality, we are beginning to see technologies that use our information spaces to augment it. Augmented reality has gotten a lot of press over the past year, but I’d argue that we have yet to see the most transformative examples come to life. General Motors is testing an augmented reality dashboard that would show information about the driver’s environment and route in real-time (think Terminator vision). Contact lenses that show digital data on the eye are being tested on animals. Nokia’s future vision concept video shows how eye movements and glasses could be used to display contextual digital information in the real world.

Beyond augmented reality, we’re seeing technologies that make physical devices easier to manipulate. There are prototypes for a gesture-activated faucet, and hotels are beginning to replace key cards with cell phone applications. Project Natal, the Wii, and the iPhone have gone a long way towards making gestural interfaces not only intuitive but expected (after showing a two-year-old my iPad, he tried to zoom in to a newspaper by pinching his fingers on it).

I doubt this is an original observation, but I believe that the mega trend here is integrated reality – machine-enhanced information and interactions that are seamlessly integrated into real life contexts.

I, for one, cannot wait.

Over the past few weeks my RSS feed has been clogged with articles bemoaning Facebook’s changing privacy policy.

To summarize the situation for those who may not have been following it: since its launch in 2004 as a closed college network, Facebook’s settings have increasingly favored making knowledge public rather than private. The definition of “public” has also changed (information that used to be available only to one’s social network can now be accessed by anyone). Facebook has also made a series of questionable design decisions that make it more difficult to change one’s settings. For a good summary of the privacy changes, check out this visualization.

There’s absolutely no doubt that information on Facebook is increasingly public. But what I find interesting is the almost universal uproar that these changes have caused. The word “privacy” has become a sacred cow – it is equated with “good”, and the word “public” has become equated with “bad”. I think this is a simplistic view.

Everyone deserves to be in control of their personal information, and Facebook has done a particularly poor job of empowering people to take this control (danah boyd outlines several aspects of the problems with Facebook’s privacy settings in this article). However, I’m not sure that universal privacy is the answer here.

Sharing information – both about our surroundings and about each other – is one of the most critical and useful parts of being human. We routinely applaud the social media revolution for requiring companies and celebrities to be more honest, transparent, and responsive. Why wouldn’t the same apply to individuals?

Facebook certainly deserves to be chastised for their lack of transparency in making the changes to their platform. But I am routinely inspired by the ways in which society, commerce, and communication are enhanced by open communications. To me and my social circle, Facebook is an important part of that inspiration.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

On Tuesday this week I attended a session of The Intelligence Group‘s Trend School here in New York. If you haven’t heard of them, the Intelligence Group is a company that conducts detailed research on younger generations (at the moment that’s Gen Y, although they also look at X and Z) and identifies trends that affect marketing. The entire content of the day was really great, but there were two phrases that really resonated with me that I thought I’d share:

• Accelerated Nostalgia – Exactly what it sounds like. We (and younger people in particular) romanticize a past that is more and more recent. Nostalgia used to be reserved for something 10-20 years in the past; now people talk about the good ol’ days of 2005. I believe that this is a side effect of an accelerated culture, where the amounts of information we consume and the speed at which we consume it increases every day.
• Entertainment Debt – I really identify with this one. Because of all the information we consume, most people have a reserve of content (movies, music, books, etc.) that they want to consume but haven’t yet gotten to, and that’s a source of guilt. For me this extends to web sites – “Have you checked out x.com?” “No, but it’s on my list!”. It’s becoming harder and harder to keep up with what’s relevant in culture because there’s simply so much of it. 10 years ago I had seen almost every Oscar nominated movie each year. That’s not true anymore, and yet the number of movies I see annually hasn’t decreased. There are simply more choices available and it’s impossible to get to everything.

Interesting stuff. The Intelligence Group also offers an excellent daily post/email highlighting a current trend, subscribe if you’re interested.

Quite comfortable, actually. Everything from the in-store experience (you are greeted by a personal sales assistant and a line of clapping employees, cheering your valiant efforts standing in line – only 5 minutes long, incidentally) to the experience of typing this blog post has been surprisingly easy and smooth. That’s not to say that it’s without flaws, of which there are many (and to which any typos in this post will attest).

The Positive

As mentioned above, almost everything about the iPad experience is smooth. It shows that Apple has put a great deal of thought into both the device itself as well as all the experiences that surround it – the App Store, the packaging, in-store. The physical device is technologically impressive; the screen is crystal clear and the processor response is snappy. In fact, an unfortunate downside of the iPad is to instantly make one’s previously treasured iPhone feel clunky and old.

Another successful aspect of the device is, of course, the interface and usability. The OS works much like the iPhones, which is to say that it’s highly tactile, elegant, and easy to understand. It is entirely possible to hand the device around the table and see every single person use it and play with it without confusion or hesitation. I compare this experience to when I got my Kindle and took it out at dinner with friends; no one was able to find the book store or navigate from my open book to the home screen (in fact, most people intently pinched and rubbed the screen, expecting an iPhone-like touch interface).

There are a few excellent apps out for the iPad. My favorites so far: Instapaper, Twitterific (TweetDeck is gorgeous but its data connection has been inconsistent for me), Keynote, Brushes, Touchpad, WordPress (on which I’m writing this), Epicurious, Weather HD, and Netflix. However, one area that I am really impressed and surprised by is the quality of the games. I probably should have expected this, but WOW – gaming on the iPad is amazing. As a gaming device alone the iPad more than justifies its price point.

The Negative

Okay, enough of the Kool Aid. Not everything works perfectly; some of the apps seem downright buggy, and I’ve received a few “out of memory” warnings (fixed for me by deselecting the “fill my remaining space with music” option in the sync settings). The lack of multitasking is a real pain in the ass, and I’ve had some issues copying/pasting across applications (which, again, might be the fault of the app developers and not Apple). While I’d argue that the iPad is already a superb entertainment device, the lack of multitasking really hinders any serious attempts at productivity. Also, I’ve experienced some of the WiFi spottiness that others have reported – this is the only part of the above that feels like it could be a serious bug.

Beyond functionality, lots of folks have raised some serious concerns about what the iPad means for technology. Cory Doctorow wrote an impassioned argument against the iPad due to Apple’s fondness for tightly controlled, closed systems, and he makes some very valid points. In the long run I think that open systems will win out over closed. In my mind Apple is something of a sherpa; they create and lead with new technologies, ecosystems, and devices, opening the possibilities for open systems to follow and flourish in their wake. An advantage to the closed system is the high level of quality control it allows, which is what makes the iPhone and iPad app stores so much more pleasurable than, say, the Android’s. So I guess I’m less moralistic about the topic than Doctorow, although I do understand and ultimately agree with his point.

The second big concern I’ve heard about the iPad is that it reverts our interactions back to passive consumption, rather than active creation. I think that this is mostly, if not entirely, true. First of all, it is fairly convenient to create content on the iPad; I’m quite happy writing this post on it, and last night I made the first of what I hope to be a series of “paintings” with the Brushes program. It is much easier to create content on the iPad than it ever was on the iPhone, and I’ve never heard the active/passive criticism about that device. Secondly, we are still in early days – I fully expect content creation to improve as more apps are created. But with those caveats, I do think that the iPad’s primary usage is for content consumption. What the iPad excels at is not work but entertainment – and what’s so wrong with that?

The Potential

As I wrote in my post reacting to the iPad’s announcement, the most interesting parts of what the iPad means are not going to be apparent for some time. The first potentiality is for a massive media ecosystem that includes television, books, and movies. Right now, all three offerings are rather anemic, but this can only improve. When it does, it will be another strong death blow for the publishing and advertising industries in their current incarnations.

The second potentiality, which I find the most interesting, is how continuous, portable, and usable access to data will change the ways in which people interact with communications and technology. In my group of friends, it is already very common for someone to pull up Wikipedia on their phone to settle an argument. Data access is no longer a luxury; it’s an accepted part of our social routines. As these capabilities become more common place we will have to reevaluate what this new behavior means for communication and socialization.

First and foremost, Apple itself released a series of videos showcasing various applications. For the most part they work just the way you’d expect, although everything looks pretty seamless and the interactions are slick. The Keynote and Pages demos are great places to start, as they show how the iPad could go a long way towards replacing laptops for day-to-day tasks.

The iBooks demo highlights the eBook reader, which is going to be pretty huge competition for the Kindle. They also give us a glimpse of the Books store, which, as predicted, works much like iTunes music. As I’ve mentioned before, the real potential of the iPad is not its technology, but its potential for creating a new ecosystem for media consumption – books are where we’ll first see this play out. Fastcompany is already predicting that the model will revolutionize publishing for smaller companies and unknown authors.

Aside from Apple’s offerings, we’re starting to see screenshots of independent developer apps for the iPad, and they look amazing.

The other big news so far this week is Apple’s rumoured announcement of iAd, a mobile advertising platform that would directly compete with Google’s offering. Rumor has it that the platform would be highly location-aware, which at the moment is a technology that seems to be largely untapped by mobile marketers. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

danah boyd‘s keynote on privacy and digital culture

Web Video Thunderdome, by Mike Arauz and Bud Caddell

Program or Be Programmed, by Doug Rushkoff

The inimitable Gary Vaynerchuck, talking about companies and love

Clay Shirky‘s presentation would definitely be here too, if I could find a video of it online.

Enjoy!

I returned from SXSW last Wednesday, and I’ve just now reached the point where I can sort through all the panels, BBQ, tex-mex, and alcohol I consumed and come to some semi-salient conclusions. Read on!

So much has been written about the incredible atmosphere of SXSW that it’s almost pointless for me to recap here, but I’ll try anyway. The simplest way to put this into context is just to imagine that all your Twitter friends – people you engage with but never met offline, old friends from real life, people you admire and would love to meet – are congregating within a 6 block radius. This provides immense opportunities for interaction. As one might expect, the audience at SXSW is generally young-ish (late 20s, early 30s), tech-savvy, hipster-esque, with iPhone and Macbook constantly in tow (I can’t wait for next year when I can give my back a break by toting around my iPad instead of my Macbook). This environment feels simultaneously electrified and jaded, but it’s something I wouldn’t miss for the world. It’s the single most important technology event of the year, and the only one I know I will be attending annually.

The panels, however, are a different story. It’s shocking and disappointing to me that so many of the presenters – chosen by a social media voting process earlier in the year – seem completely unprepared. Panels with more than 2 people tended to be completely disorganized, and one session I attended was nothing more than the capabilities deck for the company the presenter works for. It seemed like most folks were afraid to commit to anything other than what everyone already believes in, but at the same time, did their best to avoid touching on a topic that even one person in the audience was already familiar with. This, to me, was sad, and shows a negative effect of the Twitter echo chamber and cliquey-ness that we see in social media.

(Note: based on my experiences this year and last I am committed to submitting a panel for next year; I may not be the brightest digital rock star out there, but I know how to prepare a non-trainwreck presentation. Get in touch if you’d like to collaborate.)

Aside from some of the duds, SXSW offers the opportunity to see some of the best digital thinkers – Clay Shirky, danah boyd, Moot of 4chan – in action. I’ve read much of their work online, but it’s a pleasure to see them bring their stories to life. But even more valuable is the opportunity to interact with peers and leaders who work all over the country in a variety of capacities.

“The evocative pipes of Elvis, lingering shots of five impossibly pulchritudinous young ‘uns in underwear wafting around an impossibly beautiful house. A cross between Idol and Big Brother, the show–the first to be streamed via the Internet on Hulu– follows a wannabe model, three actors and a musician as they try to make it big in the town of Tinsel. The social media presence is overwhelming. You can tweet, FB, MySpace, blog and sms the quintet and, if one of them should make it big, vote to choose their replacement.”

What’s interesting about this show is that, at the moment, it is entirely digital. In addition to episodes airing on Hulu, it has a highly interactive web site that allows you to watch the house live, 24-7, from the point of view of over 50 cameras. You can track the individual cast members and dynamically follow them as they move throughout the house, focus on a single room, or just watch the producer’s selection of the most interesting things happening at the moment.

So what does it mean?

The world’s becoming digital

Five years ago, or even one year ago, there’s no question that this show would have been launched in partnership with a major television network. But as all forms of entertainment become increasingly digital, it makes more sense to publish the show online. Producer Michael Herwick breaks it down:

“[Young people] digest the internet, they’re socially interactive, and they’re shooting their own videos on YouTube and getting discovered. We’re just saying that’s where it’s at right now, and we’re creating a project around that.”

This approach seems to resonate with the target demographic. A few commenters on a Perez Hilton post discussing the show say:

“I always watch American Idol on line.. These days people don’t watch TV.. Unless there’s no internet..” -evancalo
“I fucking LOVE HULU! Down with paying for cable!” -holyfuck

Celebrity requires interaction

“Someone tweet me and tell me what I should do” – Giglianne, the aspiring model.

I am not a fan of reality shows, but because of my husband’s involvement, I’ve been tuning into the site periodically. And the moment that hooked me was when, on the day the cast moved in, they all sat around a television that was showing live Twitter comments and questions directed at them. The cast immediately began to interact with the fans – making shout-outs, answering questions, and just chatting. This level of interactivity allows for fans to be more than just a passive audience, and that decision was made by design:

“I am determined to continue challenging convention and pushing the boundaries of mainstream entertainment. The next frontier is the video world of authentic real-time interaction. ‘If I Can Dream’ experiments with technology to provide for the first time a complete open-door opportunity that allows the viewer to experience reality in a way never before attempted.” – Simon Fuller

Modern day celebrities are increasingly interacting with their fans – just look at all the celebs on Twitter. It’s interesting to think that, in years to come, this type of interaction and a sense of responsibility towards fans might become standard.

Always-on entertainment

Another interesting aspect of the show is that it’s always on. The 30-minute Hulu program is really only a small piece of the overall effort. Producer Michael Herwick describes Fuller’s vision:

“I think Simon’s vision was to give people complete access into what it really takes to try to make it in Hollywood. He said that nobody’s ever shown that world in a legitimate sort of way, and he wanted to give complete access to it. I also think that he really loved the idea of video communication and that the whole world is so interconnected, everyone’s video chatting. It just felt like a natural fit for modern technology.”

In advertising, we talk a lot about how digital has shifted from initiative based efforts to always-on platforms. It’s interesting to think that this shift might be happening in entertainment as well.

What does it all mean?

When I was watching the site on Tuesday evening, I started to get a strange feeling. The voyeurism of watching the cast in the house- live, unfiltered- combined with their interactions with viewers on Twitter felt slightly uncomfortable (and very unfamiliar), but it was also extremely compelling. I couldn’t turn it off. It felt completely and utterly new. To throw some marketing speak into the mix, it felt like I was watching a paradigm shifting. And that’s not a feeling that I get often.

We know that digital technology has changed the ways in which we connect with one another. We know that it changes our behaviors. Now we’re seeing how it can change our very definition of, and expectations from, entertainment.

Full disclosure: My husband, a partner at Poke, led all the digital for this project. So I’ve been hearing about the show for over a year (and ate a lot of dinners alone while he worked late on it!). However, any opinions expressed here are, as always, my own.