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The Silent Room Tone

I didn't actually get to see the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg interview yesterday at SXSW, but having read through about six thousand blog posts about it, I feel as though I've seen it. And, naturally, I have some thoughts about what happened, some of which connect to what happened the day before when I was on the same stage talking with Henry Jenkins.

Most accounts of the interview have talked about the role that the Twitter "back channel" played in the event. Clearly it was pivotal, and I think it sheds some interesting light on how face-to-face group events are changing thanks to communication tools like Twitter. 

I probably did more than fifty public appearances last year in front of crowds -- speeches, conversations, interviews, panel discussions, etc. And every time I get up there, the primary thing I'm thinking about -- more than the words themselves, most of which I've said before in roughly the same sequence -- is the room tone. In the words of our commander in chief: is the audience with me or against me? Are they having fun? Are they confused? Am I talking at too technical a level? Am I being condescending and talking down?

This can be very hard to gauge, because the information channels that flow back from an audience to a speaker are very narrow ones. An audience enraptured by a fascinating story is, most of the time, indistinguishable from an audience slumbering at a ponderous lecture. You can't read facial expressions in that environment, so all you have to go on is the sound, and the sound in both those cases is silence.

This is the main reason that I compulsively make jokes when I'm in front of a crowd. Not because I'm a ham (though that's no doubt part of it) and not even because the audience likes to laugh. The big reason to make jokes is because they're the best way to get a quick read on the collective mind of the group you're talking to. The volume of the laugh is important, but so is the lag time. You can tell immediately if they're on your side, and if they're really following what you're saying, by how quickly the crowd responds to your jokes.  And in doing so you open up the channels of information flowing back to you from the audience. If they're slow, you know you have to adjust, wake them up a little. If they're quick, you know you've got their attention.

In our talk on Saturday, Henry took another approach that had the same effect: he had a couple of "rallying cry" lines that set up the audience to murmur or applaud in endorsement. (A bunch were about Obama.) That's a great approach if you can pull it off; you really know you have your crowd if they're clapping mid-conversation.

But most of the time the crowd is quiet and unknowable. The room tone is silent. The one advantage you have as a speaker is that this unknowability extends into the crowd itself. Each individual might be sitting there quietly steaming at the absurdity of your comments, but unless they start openly hissing at you, they have no way of realizing that all of their neighbors are feeling the same hostile sentiments. And because people are more inclined to chuckle, laugh, or clap than they are to boo or hiss, the public signals that flow back to the center stage tend to be positive or indifferent, and not openly negative.

But backchannels like Twitter change all that. When enough audience members connect with each other, a consensus room tone can quickly form, with each member's personal outrage amplified silently by his or her neighbors'. Onstage, of course, you see and hear none of this. All you know is that the crowd is quiet Until something tips, and they start vocalizing as a group, having been empowered by the backchannel consensus.

And that's the irony of it: you have a thunderous room tone that is audible to everyone in the room except the people on the stage.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I think the overall system is on the whole better than the traditional lecture information channels. But I also think it has its quirks and points where it fails outright -- and given all that, Sarah Lacy probably had a case when she said she had a hard job up there. But maybe by thinking these issues through we can make it easier next time around.

Games and the iPhone

Two quick thoughts on the iPhone announcement today:

First, an open question: does this mean the only way you can do over-the-air syncing of calendar events and contacts (a feature I really, really want) is by connecting to an Exchange server? That would be pretty intense if Apple limited a crucial feature exclusively to users of a Microsoft product. Shouldn't iCal and Google Calendar users be first in line?

Second, I think by far the most important news today came in the form of those game demos. We knew the SDK was coming; we knew that some kind of enterprise support was coming. But you watched those games -- particularly with the accelerometer support -- and it was suddenly clear that the iPhone platform is potentially a serious competitor to the DS and the PSP. That's a whole new industry that Apple has NEVER seriously tried to be competitive in, but the touch and accelerometer hardware/software built into the iPhone means that they are -- literally overnight -- the Wii of the handheld gaming market: a platform where the controller innovation changes all the rules.

Brooks/Cheney

David Brooks writes about Obama and Clinton's Jefferson-Jackson speeches last November in his column this morning:

Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: “And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!”

For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands of individual decisions, this is a persuasive way of seeing the world. For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.

Nice. I don't know if Brooks has read Emergence or not, but one of things I take a little pride in is the connection between Jacobs and the world of decentralized software, Open Source, etc. People had obviously been thinking about those themes before I wrote Emergence but the whole concept of applying Jacobs' urban theories to the way we think about the web was something that hadn't been done before, as far as I know -- and now it's a much more familiar connection to people, so much so that Brooks can made an offhand reference to it without even walking though the logic. That's pretty cool to see.

While I'm patting myself on the back, I have some direct evidence (the details of which I can't reveal for national security reasons) that Dick Cheney read The Ghost Map over Christmas, and apparently enjoyed it. (I'm kidding about the national security, but not about the fact that he read it.) Obviously, I'm not the biggest fan of Cheney, but still, there's something very cool about the idea. It's one of the things that's so rewarding about writing books; I effectively got five or six uninterrupted hours to talk directly to the Vice President about my theories about cities, disease, progress -- even the anti-science bent of the current administration. I didn't get actual face time, but my ideas did.

Of course, all of this had made me think about how to get the next book into the hands of Obama... By the way, I have a new next book that I'm starting to write this month. More about that later.

Dawn of the digital natives - is reading declining? | Technology | The Guardian

A number of people wrote in late last year to ask what I thought of the NEA report on declining literacy, To Read Or Not To Read, in the light of my arguments in Everything Bad Is Good For You. I actually jotted down some pretty extensive notes about it, either for a blog post or an op-ed, but it was right before Christmas, and so they ended up sitting on my hard drive. But the other day, the Guardian asked me if I had anything to say about the issue, so I went back and wrote up this little essay that's running today in the Guardian. Here's a quick taste of it:

The NEA makes a convincing case that both kids and adults are reading fewer books. "Non-required" reading - ie, picking up a book for the fun of it - is down 7% since 1992 for all adults, and 12% for 18-24 year olds.

The subtitle of the NEA report - A Question Of National Consequence - would lead you believe this dramatic drop must have had done significant damage to our reading proficiencies as a society. And indeed, NEA chair Dana Giola states boldly in his introduction: "The story the data tell is simple, consistent and alarming." But then the data turns out to be complex, inconsistent and not really that alarming at all. As Giola puts it, in the very next sentence: "Although there has been measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level, all progress appears to halt as children enter their teenage years."

What was that again? There's measurable progress in two of the three age groups reviewed? Actually, it's more than just measurable: if you look at the charts, the single biggest change - either positive or negative - is the spike upwards in reading abilities among nine-year-olds, which jumped seven points from 1999.

But at least there must be an "alarming" drop in reading skills among those 17-year-olds to justify this big report. And there it is: the teenagers are down five points from 1988. But wait, this is all on a scale of 0-500. If you scored it on a standard 100-point exam scale, it's the equivalent of dropping a single point. Not exactly cause for national alarm.

Outside.In Lets People Use The Internet To Communicate With Each Other!

So we finally launched discussion boards at outside.in. It's taken us a while, but I'm really excited about the way we've put them together. As you might imagine, we've built discussion boards with state-of-the-art geo-targeting that happens pretty much transparently. My colleague John Geraci wrote a great post about this on the outside.in blog:

Discussion threads get associated with each individual place they reference.  So, say you’re talking about the evictions that just took place at 475 Kent Avenue in Brooklyn.  If that place has been referenced before in our system, the discussion boards will detect it and associate your post with the outside.in page for that place. If it’s not in our system, we invite you to give it a place manually (which takes about ten seconds), and thereafter it IS in our system as a place, with your Discussion post attached. All of these different levels of locality then stack up vertically - place, neighborhood and city all nested together. So if you post a question about a restaurant in Hayes Valley, SF, it not only shows up on the Hayes Valley discussion board, it shows up on the San Francisco discussion board, as well as on the page of the restaurant itself - where other people interested in that restaurant can find it and learn from it, or post their own response to it. In other words, the conversation gets indexed at all of the different levels of zoom that are relevant to it.

As John mentions, we're automatically detecting place and neighborhood names in the posts, and geo-tagging the posts appropriately based on those associations.  (And we built a brain-dead-simple UI for adding a place manually.) It's a pretty cool system.

Of course, online discussion boards take time to build, so we're trying to seed the conversation a bit by asking questions of the entire outside.in community. (We're calling these outside.inquiries.) The first one is pretty fun: "What local building would you most like to demolish?" (I went with the Atlantic Center Mall.)

So if you've got a chance, go check out our Discussions -- and even better, jump into a thread.

Outside.in and The Washington Post

This morning we announced our new partnership with the Washington Post: our buzzmaps for the DC area are now live on the Post site. As you'll see, these maps are variations of the buzzmaps we've created for all the bloggers in our system: they're tracking all the places that local bloggers are discussing in the DC area, and mapping the top ten places based on overall volume over the past week. But of course it's not just about the map; there are links to all stories from the blogosphere about each place, along with links to the place pages themselves at outside.in.

One thing that's important to note: we're also tracking Washington Post content as well. (If the Post has an article about a place in the top ten, you'll see an orange slice in that placemarker on the map.) So in this relatively simple page, a number of cool and interrelated things are happening:

First, we're strengthening the ties between the local bloggers and the Washington Post. (Our investor Fred Wilson talks about this a little today on his blog.) The Post gets a easy way of integrating blog content onto its pages, and the  blogs get traffic from -- and the fun of appearing on -- the Washington Post's pages.

Secondly, we're not just geographically organizing the blogger content -- we're organizing the Post's content. That's because our system is designed to track geographically pretty much anything that outputs a feed. So building a map like this for another newspaper, in another city, takes us about five minutes. (You can see where we are heading with this.)

Thirdly, it's an extremely distributed system. We're not just creating a page that shows you information about a neighborhood (though of course we do that at outside.in.) We're connecting stories from dozens of bloggers, from a newspaper site, from our own  database of places in the DC area, and from Google's map API -- and we're putting it up on someone else's site, not our own.

The other thing that's exciting about this deal -- and I hope it's just the beginning -- is that we're working with the Washington Post, which is not only one of the top newspapers in the country, but also a true leader in their local coverage online. (Their local explorer maps, for instance, are very cool.) So congrats to the team at outside.in and at The Post for making it happen!

New Hampshire

Absolutely fascinating. The one thought I had going to bed last night was that, for once, we New Yorkers (and Californians) were actually going to have a say in who gets to be our next President, given that the race is definitely going to be tight up through our primaries on Super Tuesday. That'll be a nice change.

One quick note on something that I found incredibly offensive last night: both Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews floated the idea that perhaps women voters had flocked to Hillary because they didn't like the way Edwards and Obama were "ganging up on her" in the debate. I thought that exchange was clearly pivotal, but it's just absurd to think that people vote for Presidential candidates because they feel sorry for them. Isn't it much more likely that the women voters liked the powerful and impassioned way she stood up to Edwards and Obama when they united in their attacks on her "status quo" campaign? She had a great set of counterpunches, I thought, and her later line about her likability ("Now you've hurt my feelings") was as deft and funny and original as anything that had been said in the debate.

Anyhow, this is going to be fun to watch. I've said all along that the best thing about this 08 Democrat field is that the roster of candidates across the board is very appealing -- they're all, in their different ways, top of their class. I'm pulling for Obama, and still think he'll end up winning. But if these first few days are any indication, it's going to be an extraordinary year.

Iowa, The Morning After

So far my predictions are looking pretty good. (I'd be enjoying it all even more if I didn't have a mean caucus-night hangover.) I imagine I'm not alone in getting a little choked up more than a few times during Obama's speech -- particularly during these passages:

I'll be a president who harnesses the ingenuity of farmers and scientists and entrepreneurs to free this nation from the tyranny of oil once and for all. And I'll be a president who ends this war in Iraq and finally brings our troops home... who restores our moral standing, who understands that 9/11 is not a way to scare up votes but a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the 21st century. Common threats of terrorism and nuclear weapons, climate change and poverty, genocide and disease.

Tonight, we are one step closer to that vision of America because of what you did here in Iowa.

... I know how hard it is. It comes with little sleep, little pay and a lot of sacrifice. There are days of disappointment. But sometimes, just sometimes, there are nights like this; a night that, years from now, when we've made the changes we believe in, when more families can afford to see a doctor, when our children -- when Malia and Sasha and your children inherit a planet that's a little cleaner and safer, when the world sees America differently, and America sees itself as a nation less divided and more united, you'll be able to look back with pride and say that this was the moment when it all began.

I love that temporal shift of projecting forward to our future recollection of the present -- "a night that, years from now, when we've made the changes we believe in..." It reminds me a little of the device Whitman uses in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" when he's directly addressing future city dwellers making the same passage across the East River:

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;	25
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d. Those lines always choke me up as well -- but Whitman always does that to me. But political speeches almost never do. But maybe that, too, is about to change.

My Political Forecast

I've been meaning to write something about the Obama candidacy for a while now, and just haven't found the time, so now that it's the day of the Iowa caucus I thought I'd just jot down a quick thought and prediction that I've been pretty convinced of for the past month. And that prediction is that Obama is going to win it all -- Iowa, the nomination, the Presidency. And I think it ultimately comes down to the fact that he is a rare combination in American politics, in that he is both the "emotional" choice and the "electable" choice. The whole concept of an Obama presidency is just intrinsically inspiring, particularly after the last two terms. And yet at the same time, all the polls suggest that he's the candidate who can beat pretty much any Republican in the field -- unlike Hillary. All the independents in my extended family would vote for him in a heartbeat, and they'd never vote for Hillary. Everything I've read suggests that this pattern is going to repeat itself all across the country.

Traditionally, we've always had to make a tradeoff between the emotional and the electable choices -- "Sure this Howard Dean campaign is exciting, but the guy's never going to win a national election, so let's go with the politically experienced war hero." But with Obama the two sets overlap: you want the guy to win, and he also has the best chance of winning.

So there it is -- we'll see where things stand tomorrow. (My Iowa prediction last year turned out to be dead right, for what it's worth.) The other thing I've been thinking is that it's entirely possible that the Clinton campaign is going to implode quickly -- it's entirely possible that she could start the primary season with back-to-back third place finishes which would be a stunning early defeat. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we had an Edwards/Obama race by Feb 6.

My Year In Cities

I've always liked Jason's "year in cities" recap that he posts at the start of a new year, so I thought I'd follow suit with my own list. Multiple visits are indicated by a number in parentheses after the city name. Interesting to see here that San Fran beats out DC (my original hometown and where my parents still live). Also, note that the multiple Vegas trips were all for speeches and not blackjack/strip clubs.

I haven't compiled this list in the past, but I think this would certainly be at least tied with the last year or two in terms of the volume and breadth of travel. (Both those years were book tour years, unlike this year, which adds at least six or seven cities to the list.) I can imagine that this data would be really interesting to look at over a twenty-year period, charting both the changes over time, and the overall distribution.

If you are a good friend of mine living in any of these cities, and I didn't manage to say hi on my way through, rest assured that my layover in most of these places was as short as humanly possible, given that my wife was at home with the three kids.

Brooklyn, NY
Washington, DC (6)
Grand Cayman
Helsinki, Finland
San Francisco (7)
Las Vegas (3)
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida (2)
Orlando, Florida (2)
Palm Beach, Florida
New Brunswick, NJ
Indianapolis, IN
Minneapolis, MN
Boston, MA
Edgartown, MA
Los Angeles, CA
Manchester-By-The-Sea, MA
Clemson, SC
Pittsburgh, PA
Shelter Island, NY (3)
Providence, RI
Rochester, NY
Salt Lake City, UT
Birmingham, AL
Barcelona, Spain
London, UK
Chicago, IL
Montego Bay, Jamaica