Is The Man Alive?
Generosity: An Enhancement (Powells)
by Richard Powers
Has he ever fallen in love with a fictional character? I might as well ask: Is the man alive? He’s just a few genes away from those famous rhesus monkeys, clinging to their terry-cloth mothers as if life depended on it. The trait has all kinds of value: the ability to get warm from the mere symbol of smoke.
End of excerpt.
On Mutant Enemy And Social Media
The original incarnation of this commentary, not previously published, was written prior to the sequence of events which started with Dollhouse being taken off the air for November sweeps month and ended with today’s news that the show has been canceled.
I’ve not made any particular effort to rewrite what follows to place Dollhouse into the past tense, and so some instances of urging action might no longer be directly or immediately relevant at present. I simply trust the reader will take into account when this was written, since the case study provided by Dollhouse in a social media context remains valid as an example, as does (I believe) the overall argument presented here.
This is not meant to be a comprehensive examination of Dollhouse-related social media activity. Examples and comparisons provided along the way represent my own contributions in that regard primarily because they were the examples with which I am most familiar.
It is entirely possible, of course, that there are convincing reasons why the below is not already happening. It also is entirely possible that in fact there are plans and intentions about which none of us have heard. Whatever the case, I thought I’d offer for perusal my take on Mutant Enemy and social media.
An Intro
In the age of social media, traditional “marketing” must adapt not only to providing information, but to engaging in discussion and problem solving as well. In a very concrete sense, marketing must become customer service, which increases both presence and reputation — core goals of marketing.
In most, if not all, of these newly-necessary activities, FOX Broadcasting has fallen down on the job when it comes to Dollhouse.
It is my assertion not only that Mutant Enemy can step in to fill that gap, but that it should, in part because Dollhouse needs some sort of official social media presence, but also because it will establish a presence for Mutant Enemy itself, benefitting it in the future for other projects.
What follows describes what I believe should be possible, not necessarily what is possible within the contractual rules and obligations of Hollywood (an issue mainly raised by the YouTube section). For me, it’s always been best to start with “in an ideal world…” and work my way back to the real, rather than artificially restrict ideas from the start.
Read Full Entry →
Twitter’s Engineers Gone Wild
Back in August, Twitter outlined their proposed solution for institutionalizing the “retweet”. The company received a good amount of criticism over the direction they had chosen to take, mostly due to that direction completely delegitimizing the way in which Twitter’s users actual engage in retweeting.
Last week, Twitter began a limited rollout of their retweet function, and already it’s clear from early chatter that Twitter took into account absolutely none of the criticism it received in August. Shortly, then, Twitter itself and then various third-party applications will present users with a retweet function that suffers from at least two major flaws.
- No comment. Currently, users frequently add a comment of their own to something they retweet. At the very least, this helps mediate against Twitter becoming a sea of duplicate tweets. More than that, users often retweet something in order to argue against it, something the new Twitter retweet function disregards completely and renders impossible. Twitter is rescinding the ability of its users to provide context for comments and links they pass along to others.
- I don’t follow. In the new retweet feature, retweets will appear in a user’s timeline as if they came from the originator even if the user doesn’t follow that originator, with some sort of indication as to who amongst the people you follow retweeted it. In other words, users in essence will be seeing tweets in their timeline from people they don’t follow.
Regarding that second flaw: Once upon a time, Twitter removed a feature wherein a user could display to their followers all of the replies they sent, even if a given follower did not also follow to person to whom the user was replying. According to Twitter, users were “confused” by this behavior. (It’s more likely that the reason was to limit use of system resources, a constant problem with the service. But apparently Twitter found it easier to publicly blame the alleged stupidity of its users.)
Somehow, it seems, Twitter would have us believe that users were confused by seeing tweets from people they follow, merely because they were directed to people they did not follow, but at the same time would have us believe that users will not be confused by seeing tweets that themselves, from almost all appearances, are from people they don’t follow.
All of this seems as if Twitter’s engineers decided they had an awesome new idea, and everyone was so in love with their spirited engineering prowess that they simply didn’t give a shit about how their users actually used retweeting as a conversational tool.
More likely, there is some specific reason why Twitter has decided that retweeting ought to be conducted in a manner that places an artificial restriction upon how one references and discusses the comments of another. Some reason that Twitter simply isn’t telling us. Which itself is an artificial limitation on conversation.
Much as Twitter fed us horseshit when explaining why they disabled a useful feature regarding how a user’s replies were displayed to their followers, they appear to be feeding us horseshit on retweets.
Any decision made by the provider of a popular service will be met with some resistance, or at least criticism. Ultimately, that shows how strongly users have come to feel about that service.
But when decisions are made which change the ways the service is used, especially in a manner which devalues the service, the resistance only is made worse when the explanations given obviously don’t pass the smell test.
In the end, for as long as Twitter itself and any third-party tools permit it, I will be making no use of Twitter’s imposition of conversational retweet restrictions. Hopefully, makers of third-party tools will give us a choice between the longstanding real solution created by the users themselves and Twitter’s engineering “solution” in search of a problem to solve.
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