I thank the suffragists and founding fathers who worked to the death so I have a voice today. These people worked to empower states the power to protect us from the State. The protected us from a monarchy and gave us the right to assemble. Because of their labors I have a right to speak for or against my government, I can enjoy a free press.
I am a woman. I am a minority. I am of immigrant parents. I am a newly registered voice in California. For me, voting is a gift, a right and a responsibility.
In journalism school, we were taught to think of the news profession as the fourth branch of government. The The Executive, Judicial and Legislative check on each other and the media, the news, the people, that is, checks on the government.
The government was supposed to be for the people, by the people. The press is supposed to be that too. But as the little guys get swallowed up, major media does not feel like us, the people. Then there is civic journalism, which has maybe evolved into our blogosphere. But now, unlike ever before, each individual (with an internet connection) has a media platform, a voice–an opportunity to exercise their first amendment right to speak, which I discuss in my conversation about David Nord’s book Communities of Journalism.
A free and prospering press shall offer multiple voices and perspectives, thereby checking on each other. We can debate whether or not that is still happening, but that conversation is tied up in discourse about ad revenue and reader apathy.
This conversation is about empowerment. I want to celebrate the democratized internet and the power to empower. I have the luxury and honor to work on a product that empowers people to build, make, enterprise, innovate and design the world in which we want to live.
When I turned 18 registered to vote and signed up to work at my local polling place. I took classes on foreign policy , journalism writing and newspaper layout. I worked on election day again, but this time from the newsroom and I had the honor to be the voice of my community. Thankfully, I still get to make something that empowers a community. Today I celebrate my voice as a designer, a writer and civic participant.
Thank you to all the candidates running today who also believe a better society starts at home. Today it is my right and my honor to celebrate a most American holiday: Election Day!
During the second and final year of graduate school I worked on a research and design project related to news, design and storytelling. I created Newskite, a platform to engage people around the world about major global current affairs. I presented my capstone (that’s like a design thesis) to my faculty and peers at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana last night and to alum and friends via ustream.
Presentation Video
Scrub to 01:02:00 for my 15 minute talk. You can follow along with the slide deck below.
Slidedeck
Audio Stories Edited collection for presentation
Full stories
Poster
Gratitude
Thank you to very many many people but especially to professor Hans Ibold who pushed me hardest and mentored me more than anyone else at Indiana University.
Feedback
I also received constructive feedback written commentary.
There’s lots of news today about the Russian region that’s worth your attention. The above is the image on Google.com of “Russia’s Yuri Gagarin on Tuesday, replacing the logo on its homepage with an image of the first man in space and a rocket that a visitor can launch with a cursor.”
Celebrating Space Exploration The BBC reported Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says space exploration is still a priority for Russians. For the international community, we can argue important attention to further the sciences is good news. Celebrations for 50 years of space exploration. Great. However this anniversary for Russians comes with unfortunate reports from neighboring Belarussians.
Bombs in Belarus
In Belarus, security is extra tight today after a bomb killed 12 and wounded 150 people in a Subway Blast, a country otherwise known to be a relatively peaceful place. For those skimming past the little sister of Russia, attention is back on Chernobyl in the Ukraine.
Eyes on Chernobyl The severity of the nuclear crisis rating in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant has risen from 5 to the highest level 7 today. This level has only been reached once before in the 1968 Chernobyl (now Ukraine, then USSR) disaster. Though, the amount of radiation leaks is on the decline, it’s unknown if the case is as severe as in the then USSR.
On Design So how do these smattering of news stories fit into this blog? Each bit in this roundup poses a design challenge. These are a serious, big, enormous design problems that really mean something. Industrial, communication, travel, information, experience, interaction, graphic, material design. All of that and more. Well designed user experience is essential here. It counts–maybe even more–in a high risk scenario. Good design is not always making people “feel good” but a holistic, felt understanding of complex individuals, groups, politics, constraints and environments we must consider when design something that effects people.
Designers, engineers, techies and media people alike, I bet something above has something to do with what you’re working on today. It’s your job to think about it even if the Soviet Empire’s fall lives in your history books. How unfortunate would it be if we closed our eyes to the rest of the world and dipped into a Rooseveltian Isolationism? *sniff* Do I smell a New Deal? Designers working on policy is a whole different (exciting) conversation. Food for thought. I hope I didn’t ruin your Tuesday.
The Chemical Brothers track Leaving Home just came on my Last.fm radio. What timing.
There is an remarkable amount of opportunity to do game changing work in the journalism space. There always has been and there always will be. Why? Because there will always be uncovered stories, truths and narratives to be told. There are always people, problems and more than two sides to an issue.
I’ll start by telling you about my transition from being a news designer to interaction designer. Then I’ll talk about visual.ly at large.
I’ve been asked how I made the leap from one field to the other. Really, folks, they are one in the same to me. Both roles share the same toolbelt: sketch, iterate, prototype, reflect, tell stories, interview, explore, think big, collaborate, write and design at all fidelities.
People ask me why I made the leap
Why did I jump the journalism ship? For me, there really was no other choice. I wanted to improve the quality of how we learn about what’s happening in our world, what I think news does. To do this, I needed new tools in my tool design belt. So, I went back to graduate school to study HCI.
The other reason I jumped ship is actually quite sad. I tried and tried and tried to motivate digital approaches at various media organizations I worked for–not just one in particular. And my freshly graduated tech savvy peer/colleague journalist friends were all trying to do the same thing. Some have been successful. But most of us realized weren’t going to get anywhere until publishers were willing to invest in the future of digital, in a real, thoughtful, way.
Sure the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and other major news hubs pump out fantastic digital work. But we don’t talk as much about solutions for readers of all the gazettes, journals and couriers across the country. That’s why creating a platform can be so powerful.
I wasn’t going to make progress any time soon in the old boys club, so, I jumped. I didn’t want to spend any more time commemorating the good ol’ days, I wanted to design for the future.
Do I look back? Of course. Do I want to go back? No. Am I obsessively grateful for all of the brilliant mentors and experiences I’ve had? Of course.
People ask why I went to graduate school
In my grad school application I said I wanted to work on the news problem. I said I would graduate and leave the traditional news community for a while and arm myself with education and experience at smart tech companies. And when the timing and opportunity is right, I would work in this opportunity space again. I had a really nice metaphor with light and darkness.
People are doing things outside journalism that benefit media
I’m writing this post today because it relates to visua.ly which has me oozing with excitement.
Watch their demo at 500 startups. Scrub to about 34 minutes in.
The cofounders, Stewart Langille and Lee Sherman come most recently from Mint.com, the infographic heaven for visualized data about your money. They are taking advantage of a space and area that has never been more important and had more opportunity. Watch the video and see how they view the future.
They are trying to solve the problem of “big data” and are “targeting publishing and advertising.” A publisher has a monthly with subscription with Visual.ly which connect them with third party data sets, designers, analysts and an an editor who oversees the creations of these visualizations.
I’ve said this many times before, and I’ll say it again, if journalists in newsrooms don’t take serious, thoughtful action to move the news industry forwards, other people will. Quoting myself:
Newspapers, radio and cable television should be taught in media history classes. Students should be taught to produce for and think about Mobile apps, Google and Apple TV, Ubiquitous Computing, Virtual Environments, Chat clients, Facebook, Twitter, Bloggers, GPS devices, etc. The list goes on and on. If the medium is the message, it’s time to open our eyes to everything else out there.
We should have invented Twitter. We should have invented RSS feeds. We should have invented Craigslist and Groupon and Youtube and the iPad and Google Search and Yelp. It’s okay to hire developers. It’s okay to take a risk. If people inside the news industry don’t change the model, people outside will.
10 August 2010
Visual.ly “gives publishers the horse power of a New York Times visualization team without the cost; New York Times has 40 people on their visualization.” It’s curated crowdsourcing. ”Using our data, or their own, users can grab-and-go making amazing visualizations” the founders say.
So, to my dear friends in newsrooms, fighting the good fight, every day, whatever you do, keep moving forward. If your editor is not taking advantage of your potential, work for someone who will. If no one will, start doing whatever you think needs to be done, yourself.
Thoughts to tuck in your brain for the next time you’re thinking about intuitive, easy-to-use design. Print design is old. They have been iterating for a while.
A great post from thingist with an articulate reminder that we are all in this together. When we lose sight of what we’re doing, the people we make things for often suffer the most–and isn’t that contrary to the whole point to begin with? Helping each other out rather than ripping a new one every here or there can’t hurt.
My fellow nerds, geeks, hackers, designers, makers, builders, and DIYers, there is something very very wrong with out culture right now. We’re jackasses to one another.
…
Except nobody told me that I sucked at skateboarding, or that my form was terrible, or that I should give up on it. In fact quite the opposite. One day at the skatepark I was sitting off to the side just watching everybody else and kindof wishing that I wasn’t there. One of my best friends, Steve, came up to me to ask what I was doing.
“You’re not going to learn anything by just staring at that thing. If I ever catch you sitting on this bench again, you’re not invited to the skatepark anymore.”
However, there is also a place for tough love and an honest, constructive critqiue.
There is an upside to having your taste (and clicks) monitored by advertisers, Johanna Blakey of University of Southern California says. It’s being respected, not presumed. Old media looked at age, gender and income to guess what you would like. You are not your demographic. You are your values, interests, beliefs and so much more. That is how you connect with people and new tools–social media–let you do the connecting with people on your own terms.
We use these tools to connect beyond gender, age and income. Now digital tools see who we are, what we like and what we want to do.
Blakely shows that women, by far, outnumber men in use and time spent on the social media space. If women control social media and social media is overtaking traditional media, will women overtake traditional media? If so, then are we going to start seeing more women in media? and more chick flicks? No! She predicts more women working in these fields will mean more interest and value driven media. No more ‘lame’ movies. Better content and smarter targeting, not for women, not for men but for all people. We cannot say whether or not women will ‘take over’ the media, but Blakely makes a good guess that they will drive the future of the industry.
Entertainment influences our beliefs, our work, our play and values. Designers, developers and managers must consider, explore and practice this. At a newspaper, we call our users ‘readers’ and in radio they are ‘listeners’ and on tv they are ‘viewers’ which were all valid titles because the communication and content went one way. But as soon as these people could interact with content, they came ‘users’ which is a shred more respectful than reader because it at least empowers them with the ability to use and interact.
Meaning, implication and tone get tied up in our language. ‘Users’ is a firstwave HCI term from the 80s, at least, that dehumanizes the people we are talking about. The word came about when ‘interaction designers’ were concerned with usability, efficiency and – well — use. As we consider the values, beliefs, ideas and interests of the people who use the things we design, our language needs to change too. What should we call these people? I don’t know yet. But thinking and talking about as more than users or humans, but as people will likely change the way we work.
Twitter did not go to Tunisia and tell people to revolt. Last September I asked about power in the information age. Who has it? And what is it? If we can get access to nearly all common and not-so-common knowledge, instantly, is knowledge power? Indulge with me for a moment, and let’s say no, knowledge is no longer power. Then is our network the power?
Someone who is connected to a listening audience, who is connected to a listening audience, who is connected to a listening audience is quite powerful. That has always been powerful, but now nearly anyone with a tether to the digital world can be any of those someones. And they have the potential to be quite powerful figures. Save of course that these “powerful figures” are not always recognized as such because they flow in and out of the role as a leader if you consider Ben Schniederman’s theories about consumers and producers online.
The revolution was not tweeted. The revolutionaries in Tunisia were just on Twitter. They spread their ideas fast which got them up, out and in the way faster. Twitter just made it easier for the People to say, “Listen to us, now.”
But is anyone really arguing that Twitter and Facebook caused the revolutions in Tunisia or Egypt, or even the earlier public uprisings in Moldova or Iran for that matter? Maybe cyber-utopians somewhere are doing this, but I haven’t seen or heard of any. The argument I have tried to make is simply that they and other social media tools can be incredibly powerful, both for spreading the word — which can give moral or emotional support to others in a country, as well as generating external support — as well as for organizational purposes, thanks to the power of the network. As Jared Cohen of Google Ideas put it, social media may not be a cause, but it can be a powerful “accelerant.”
Did Twitter or Facebook cause the Tunisian revolt? No. But they did spread the news, and many Tunisian revolutionaries gave them a lot of credit for helping with the process. Did Twitter cause the revolts in Egypt? No. But they did help activists such as WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum (known on Twitter as @ioerror) and others as they organized the dialup and satellite phone connections that created an ad-hoc Internet after Egypt turned the real one off — which, of course, it did in large part to try and prevent demonstrators from using Internet-based tools to foment unrest. As Cory Doctorow noted in his review of Evgeny Morozov’s book, even if Twitter and Facebook are just used to replace the process of stapling pieces of paper to telephone poles and sending out hundreds of emails, they are still a huge benefit to social activism of all kinds.
In October, Gladwell said the revolution would not be tweeted. He said our thousands of weak ties won’t make change happen. Soon after, I questioned the power of (Facebook’s) algorithm that aims to reduce information overload and weed out irrelevant content. Doing this, however, there’s no way to protect yourself from over tweeting. The conversation is always streaming and always linear. So then, if you tweet often are you more likely to get ignored or at least get some views.
It depends if you’re a loud, verbose person at a loud party or a quiet person, at a quiet party, saying one, striking thing every so often. The problem here is that everyone is at a different party. Then why, if everyone is at a different party, did the demonstrators catch word so fast?
It’s the two-step flow, 2.0. The beautiful flow of information that embraces the idea of human agency to share knowledge and information. But now, unlike ever before, anyone has the potential to have the power the mass media once had.
We can’t help but keep asking if participating in social media is activism. Does changing a Facebook Status or Twitter profile picture make a difference? Some argue it brings awareness to an issue. But it’s passive activism, it’s enough to get points for “caring” about an issue for a fleeting trend.
Why then is a riot, a protest or a lunch counter sit in considered considered activism, when it too, is also just spreading awareness about an issue? Because it causes disruption. The actions do not ask the community to stop what they are doing and pay attention, they require it. It gets in the way, it upsets people and it makes people talk about the problem.
No. The revolution will not be tweeted. No the revolution was not tweeted. But yes, our new tools inspired conversation that empowered people to put the problem in the way. Whether or not that is Good is another question.
Broadcasting stories to social media has led to the emergence of social journalism.
Social Journalism (definition in progress)
Social Journalism is the practice of broadcasting a news story with commentary to a social network. The social journalist practices writing, editing, judgement, authority, attention to audience .
Argument The social journalist does not necessary practice news gathering and fact checking like a news journalist does. This person scrutinizes text and through their horizons, interpretation and the context of their lifeworld, they comment on the content in the context of ‘convention, reception and interpretation’ in a social way, as Barnard says in his book Visual Culture.
Commentary I’m in the process of brainstorming for a paper I am writing. In my research, I have found that people who share and comment on news stories to their social networks and news journalists have many things in common. This paper will argue for the emergence of the social journalist and will explore how sharing UI on news sites have enabled this emergence. This paper will also acknowledge the differences between news journalist and social journalist. Social media and its integration with news media, for the first time ever, has empowered the lay person for to be not only a consumer, but also to produce content and easily broadcast to mass communities.
Sharing a news story usually seems like simply flicking a click of a button, scribbling out a quick thought and going about your merry way.
But news consumers, who once, were only news consumers are now also producers. Beyond the blogger, only recently has design and technology facilitated the tools to empower the lay consumer to interact with content in a creative way. They are now work as editors, writers and broadcasters, in their own social right.
John McCarthy and Peter Wright compose a fantastic book on experience design, Technology as Experience. “Experience is ever present,” they say. “We are always engaged in experience even when we are trying to stand back from it to describe it.” McCarthy and Wright reaffirm how it important it is to think about and the holistic experience of anything when designing, and in this case, sharing a news story.
Browsing through news stories is absolute active participation. Unlike watching news TV or even reading a print publication, the reader has choice more choice between on and off or skim or not skim. In the current content consuming paradigm, beyond a news summary, the reader must actively decide to click, and almost navigate to a new page to get immersed into a story. It takes a significantly greater commitment. The reader then must actively make a judgement, “do I want to consider reading this article?” If yes, they click, if no, they keep skimming headlines and photos.
This is the first step of what I’m referring to as an editing process, where the reader is flexing their judgement skills. Moving forward, they continue to do this when they’ve consumed enough of the article or graphic and decides to share it. Only now, after all of these hurdles, have they come to the act of sharing something. That standing on the assumption that the sharing interface (and logging in process for that matter) is seamlessly easy to understand.
If the article inspires and resonates with the reader, it’s likely it has a high share-ability. That or it speaks to the readers’ audience, the audience that is comprised of their network. Of course, considering, most people don’t think about the Facebook News Feed is developed in such a way that it’s difficult to overshare to your network, according to Aditya Agarwal, Facebook’s Director of Engineering. Though, they are hoping people will learn and stop worrying about overshare.
In Erik Stolterman’s book, Imagination and Communication, he talks about imagination and communication. The reader takes ideas from their minds eye and must make it communicable, he says, which is part of the creative process.
Once the reader has read the article and formed some kind of thought and new meaning, it still exists in their mind, in their imagination. Once they have taken that vision, explored and then written their thoughts, they have led to “new truths” cited to Erik Stolterman. Their new truths, that are “possible to share with other people.”
And beyond all of this, conscious or not, these readers are engaging in civic and cultural participation, which Jean Burgess, author of Vernacular Creativity cites.
Culture is the means by which we, as individual citizens and communities, experience what the world is like, how we fit in it, and importantly, how we relate to others who are different from us at the same time as we seek out opportunities for belonging.
Where participatory media opens up space for us, as ordinary citizens, to speak and represent ourselves and our ways of being in the world, and to encounter difference, then it’s also a space for the everyday practice of cultural citizenship in that context, everyday creativity is civic engagement, in a sense.
It is not even the writing process itself here that is creative and expressive. It is the development of new truths, personal meaning and broadcasting in a cultural context to an audience, especially at such a mass scale, that has never been done before. Participating in every day media, like Burgess says, helps us develop our own identities, how we see ourselves and how we fit into our worlds. All the while we are making judgements about the what the people in our networks share, say do, and don’t do and how they fit into the world. That has always been a part of civic engagement.
When designing a share UI, designers must consider:
The overall experience from arriving to the article in the first place. How did the reader get here? RSS, Website, another shared link? Think about where they are coming and possibly where they are going afterwards.
Consider when they are likely going to want to share.
Design the UI with enough space that supports an emergent writing and editing process, like a resizable window.
Think of the reader as a media producer. Is your share UI a pop up or modal dialoge? Will they lose everything they wrote if they go to reread a section of text, navigate to a new site to get some information or another link or copy and paste something?
Reduce the amount of choices they must make. The New York Times does a nice job giving commentary a high position in the visual hierarchy, while still giving their consumer/producers the autonomy to hit recommend without saying a word, which still says something.
