Disqus - Latest Comments for tomewing

Re: Blackbeard Blog: Millennials: Marketing's Mary Sues

tomewing — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 12:20:10 -0000

Well, yes, attitudinal segmentation is baloney, you'll get no argument from me on that one. But most attitudinal segmentations are a bit more nuanced than "millennials" - AND, most importantly, most attitudinal segments are humble creatures happy to be wrong and silly only in their native corporate environment where they can't do anyone sensible any harm. Generational cohorts are the segments which escaped and ran wild across the culture.

Re: Blackbeard Blog: Millennials: Marketing's Mary Sues

tomewing — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 12:18:08 -0000

Behavioural differences - like by agegroup - are certainly real. But we already have a way of describing differences by agegroup, i.e. "age" (which has the benefit of being a bit more granular too). This is another problem - it's not that the differences identified in "millennials" surveys are wrong, it's that to explain or find them you very rarely need the idea of cohorts at all - let alone needing the idea of cohorts to be your default lens.

Re: http://perpetua.tumblr.com/post/3770643052

tomewing — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 09:33:38 -0000

I tried to get a "£esha" joke into the article but to no avail.

Re: Cleaning Up Online Conversation - HBR Agenda 2011 - Harvard Business Review

tomewing — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 13:11:54 -0000

I think Nick has hit on something important. In my experience people take their cues in the comment boxes partly from the behaviour and tone of the site owner. A minor and personal example: several years ago I started two music blogs. One was in my name, and involved my reviewing records in what I hoped was a tone that would encourage conversation about them. The other was under a pseudonym, and involved pointing out the failings of records in a tone that was sarcastic and vitriolic. Same filter system, same commenting system (open-to-all), same domain even. But the "nice" blog has built a long term community of wonderful and enthused commenters and the "nasty" one.has attracted death threats, abuse, trolling, etc etc. in the comment box. This convinced me that there's possibly no such thing as a 'natural state' of commentary, just different sets of stylistic cues.

When this collides with an environment in which writers are told to be punchy, controversial, use short aggressive paragraphs, etc. you run into problems. Punchy is great but easy to do badly, and will send cues to its readers to respond in kind.

In the case of news sites in particular, there's another dynamic which isn't even there in blogs and which I've really noticed since I started writing for newspapers. There's a separation between writer and commenter which isn't there in most blogs: we the writers are getting paid, you the readers aren't. So the urge to disagree, to prove that the site is wasting money employing this chump, seems higher. News sites' problem with comments is that they want a comment culture without the (perhaps illusory) egalitarianism that entails.

Re: Conference Report: MRS Social Media Research 2010

tomewing — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:34:26 -0000

Massively agree with the context stuff too by the way!

Re: Conference Report: MRS Social Media Research 2010

tomewing — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:33:40 -0000

Yes, I should clarify about Keen. I think this kind of perspective has been pretty invisible in amongst the marketing hype around social media, you're right - but in the wider conversation there's been a lot of talk around personalisation, individualisation, in both a positive and negative sense. The end-of-privacy/panopticon stuff is a generally hot topic currently (danah boyd has written about it). What Keen is saying about individuals controlling their in-flows of information isn't too far off Cass Sunstein's worries about "flocking" online. The point about inequality was being made (brilliantly, though his books don't dwell on it now) by Clay Shirky in his classic essay on why weblogs have an A-List.

This isn't to say Keen's wrong or anything! He's a smart guy and I think he is in a great position for synthesise a lot of these ideas into a Gladwell-style book which will help kickstart the backlash he sees as inevitable. His general thrust and follow-the-money cynicism/realism reminds me a bit of documentary maker Adam Curtis, a huge favourite of mine.

The big thing he's bringing to the table - the emphasis on individualisation and the transitory nature of web "community" - is his weakest bit of thinking (at least as explained on Thursday!). He glosses over the differences between networks and communities - the individualised nature of a network is at the heart of his argument, but the web is also full of more centred communities. And while he makes an argument about binaries between online/offline, public/private, left/right etc collapsing his whole argument rests on a distinction between "communitarian" and "individualistic" which doesn't quite seem to fit any of the phenomena he's talking about.

Re: My Problem With Facebook

tomewing — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:03:21 -0000

I have plenty of other reasons for not likingf it too - I dislike the way there's so much emphasis on "interests" and "likes", this reduction of people to the set of cool stuff they're into.

Re: My Problem With Facebook

tomewing — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:01:40 -0000

I don't think it's going away in a hurry, even if the nomadic types move out (or cut down their presence). The big thing for it now is that the average age of members is something like 39 - on the one hand that shows how universal it's become, on the other it underlines how mainstream it is. Even more than the privacy thing this is the reason it needed to sort out its friend groups stuff: there simply isn't that much people want to share with EVERYONE in their life.

Re: My Problem With Facebook

tomewing — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 10:53:05 -0000

Yeah, thats what I was trying to get at differentiating "social" and "content" networks. As an introvert I don't like that feeling of increased closeness at all really, but of course I'm well aware that's a big part of its appeal.

Re: My Problem With Facebook

tomewing — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 10:48:49 -0000

That's great - that's exactly the kind of thing I wanted to know about!

One of the things w/facebook is that there's no centre to it, so it's entirely possible for creative communities to flourish entirely unnoticed.

Re: how to listen to music: Pop quiz.

tomewing — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:33:35 -0000

Is the Kirsty MacColl song (originally a Billy Bragg song) I posted the first example of the image>?

"I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them but they were only satellites
It's wrong to wish on space hardware
I wish I wish I wish you'd care"

Bathostastic!

Re: http://hardcorefornerds.tumblr.com/post/937296614

tomewing — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:21:15 -0000

You're completely right about his conclusion - I had an ambitious 3rd paragraph in mind about algorithmic utopias but I had to go to a real-job meeting so just posted as was.

I also wondered how much the extreme localism Spufford describes relates to similar/current conditions in post-collapse, Oligarch-era Russia. But I don't really know enough about either.

Re: 30 Day Book Challenge: Day 10

tomewing — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 05:37:48 -0000

Hooray! This would be my 'first' novel too I guess, assuming the Narnia books don't count. There is a picture of me age 4 1/2 with a paperback of Prince Caspian, glaring into the camera at the presumption of my parents for interrupting my reading for something so trivial as the return from hospital of my new younger brother.

Re: http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/904404719

tomewing — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:54:00 -0000

Fine! But then the original "walk a mile in his shoes" criticism falls apart - if you need to hang in the Actual Specific Suburb to understand where he's coming from then the generalism has failed surely.

Win can't win ;)

Re: Another Column Question

tomewing — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:02:21 -0000

Haha I've been away from comics for almost 2 years and even so I could still reflexively head-desk at half the things in that comments thread. Love the idea of "conversations we SHOULD be having" too - I sort of think at Pitchfork Nitsuh's column is doing a bang-up job providing that.

Re: Graphs

tomewing — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:56:05 -0000

As people's awareness of their graphs and the importance of them grows I suspect one of the next developments will be giving users more control over them - not just at the "who I follow" level but at a more macro level too.

For instance, privacy controls are a way of managing a social graph, but they only affect transmission of information. In a more graph-literate culture though it's easy to imagine tools that let you manage reception better: not just via filtering, groups, recommendations but by eg. letting you adjust the noise/serendipity level of a flow of info, or the ratio of information to personal updates, or even the mood of the updates you're getting - a kind of social thermostat.

Re: Realism In Research: Why Is A Survey Like A Dalek?

tomewing — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:36:55 -0000

I think it WAS how researchers thought - you don't see it quite as often now I think.

Re: http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/630781045

tomewing — Fri, 28 May 2010 05:28:40 -0000

Tumblr has recently changed its method of reblogging conversations so that you only get a very small fragment excerpted from the original poster. So to get the context of the full conversation you either have to:

- cut and paste and format it all yourself into your post
- get people to click back to the other person's post then go back again and read yours

It's designed to remove an unwieldiness (the cascades of replies) but creates a worse one, and also it's very inconsistently applied - only to certain types of post.

Since Tumblr conversations are notoriously hard to follow outside the main Tumblr interface anyway I'm counting this as "getting increasingly awful" but yeah 'encouraging' not 'allowing' would have been more accurate.

Re: http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/610561710

tomewing — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:00:28 -0000

Yeah in retrospect I should have made clearer that I find Amy a fascinating and very watchable and interesting character - I meant not "likeable" in the sense that the series took pains to make previous new series companions likeable (well, aside from Runaway Bride era Donna) - not overtly sympathetic like that. She's no Turlough* (who is pretty much the ultimate in like but not LIKE characters)!

This Doctor seems very task-oriented: he wants to know what's going on, he wants to sort it out, he's happy to think aloud and make mistakes on the way, if his companions are in the way he'll tell them to sod off. In fact we've not got any sense yet as to why he NEEDS a companion - one of the things that differentiates each Doctor is the role companions play for them.

*plotwise this statement is still very much open to question, of course.

Re: http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/610561710

tomewing — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:46:51 -0000

Hahaha I had TOTALLY BLOCKED the humang bomb resolution from my brain. You're right of course but even there it's followed up (like the Star Whale empathy) with "well I understood him because OF YOU DOCTOR YES YOU"

Re: Sleigh Bells as guilty pleasure

tomewing — Mon, 17 May 2010 10:33:08 -0000

This is a really good, thoughtful, take - I'd be wary of equating "emotionally blank"/"nihilistic"/etc with disposable tho. After all emotionally affecting or meaningful music doesn't last in my experience - you leech it of use until the buzz you get off it is primarily nostalgic.

Re: Long Live The New Niceness

tomewing — Thu, 13 May 2010 06:43:15 -0000

I don't think I am saying those things - I don't think negative criticism is pointless, and I don't think "resistance [to Pitchfork] is useless", though defining yourself against a website seems a bit silly. I'd be a hypocrite if I did say those things - the blog I used to run was snarky and called P4K out a lot. If anything I'm saying that hoping negativity will vanish is pointless.

Ripfork IS actually pointless, though - miserable, negative nitpicking. His examples of bad writing are indeed bad but you get the feeling he'd only really be happy when metaphor and imagery and flights of fancy are purged from music writing for ever. He's a good editor in one sense - pushing for directness - but a very bad editor in that he values simplicity over ideas, curiosity, often over flow. There's no joy in what he does, and I also lost sympathy when Eric Harvey wrote a long, patient, generous reply to some Ripfork dismissal of academic music writing and got a sneery "LOL tl;dr" type response back.

A much much better Pitchforkwatching blog is pitchforkreviewsreviews on tumblr, which is often insightful and funny in its own right and seems to be the work of someone actually enthused about music, writing, fandom etc.

Re: Strength, Stability, and Supermajorities

tomewing — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:21:30 -0000

Yes, if my initial interpretation is right (and it might well not be - see update) this has the ironic effect of making something like the 'rainbow coalition' more stable too.

Re: http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/486440024

tomewing — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:13:59 -0000

The song or the video?

Re: http://flashesofquincy.tumblr.com/post/485050993

tomewing — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:53:29 -0000

I thought it about the single version, but the album version (and indeed the "Disco Mix") is my favourite too, which makes it BETTER THAN THE BEST RECORD EVER omg.