Geeks vs. Users

In my relatively short working career since my undergrad degree, I have worked in various roles broadly in the area of media and communications.  The last three of these have involved a lot of work on websites; coordinating, improving, completely re-working them.  This means I have had the questionable pleasure of working with website developers many times.

There is always a sense of promise and excitement when you are discussing changes to a website. Little things which have always annoyed you can be resolved – and because developers have specialist knowledge, it’s like someone doing your homework for you.

Except that like someone doing your homework, there are sacrifices to be made in return.

Worst Nachos EVER!

With apologies to anyone who knows/loves a website developer, they are on a completely different – and somewhat bizarre – planet.  My usual analogy is the comic geek from the Simpsons. I know it’s really unoriginal to use an archetypal nerd to illustrate my feelings for a software developer, but I have met about 6 in my life, and everyone of them reminds me of that character. Very often, they barely manage to hide their disgust at having to talk to someone who does not speak a computer language (I’m not sure if you say ‘speak’ HTML, but that’s what I’m saying, and it only supports my point).

Anyway, this rant was inspired by a tweet I just saw from Jay Rosen at NYU, who wrote:

Geeks lack empathy for users and most users lack geek. Meanwhile, designers make it look good. Usability eludes them all.

This might be a little simplistic, but it does summarise the dilemma of dealing with developers, and how to do it well.

Generally, if you are working as an editor, or consultant, or coordinator on a website, you have to act as a translator between developer/customer or geek/user.  And, because the geek, user, and designer all lack an awareness of usability, that has to be your primary concern.

Image: Worst Nachos Ever by Elvissa. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence.

Update: In related news, this article from A List Apart, ‘Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus’.

Links: The media future and modern publishing

Well, it has been a while, but I have a good excuse. I have spent my semester break in Iran, where there is internet (cafes are inexplicably called ‘coffeenets’ though have no coffee…) but it is fairly slow and all manner of sites are blocked. More on that later.

In the meantime, here are some links from the last couple of days:

• ABC’s Mark Scott has predicted the future of media, and unlike Murdoch, has his head well and truly out of the sand. It takes a bit of time to read, but is worth it.
• A lovely New Yorker humour piece about the brave new world of publishing in the digital age.
• Somewhat related to the Mark Scott speech in terms of the attitude of media organisations towards the new media world, is an interesting discussion about the social media policies of NPR vs. The Washington Post by Michelle McLellan and also by Steve Buttry. As McLellan put it, the old guard sees social media as a ‘hazard’, where as NPR sees it as valuable. Reading through the two excerpts, I thought the difference between the two policies was a little overstated by these bloggers; except that NPR does explicity encourage its journalists to exploit the potential of social media.

More on Iran to come…

Paywalls and new media

A couple of things I’ve listened to/watched here that talk about the demise of newspapers, the idea of paywalls, and the potential of new media.

The first is from Telstra’s blog (which is often cited as an example of a corporate blog that works) nowearetalking, and is a discussion with Tim Burrowes who publishes the media and advertising site Mumbrella:

The second is a link to ABC’s PM, which yesterday had a short report on Murdoch’s push for newspapers to establish paywalls.

What was most interesting about this discussion for me was the idea that News Ltd bosses in the US were looking at creating a consortium of media owners to start charging consumers for content – so they’d all be in it together. After all, paywalls won’t work if only one site or group of sites is doing it and people have alternatives.

Apart from being- as Alan Fels points out in the PM report – anti-competitive, this solution seems disingenuous to me.

My reasons for doubting the power of paywalls are theoretical, but then again, so are the mogul’s reasons for believing in them. The success of new media and digital technology as a whole is based on the fact that it is accessible and infinitely replicable.Charging for the majority of content online goes against both those instincts.

To use the phrase Murdoch applied to himself, this is a policy thought up by digital immigrants. They seem to be missing the point: that you can’t control the internet. It’s like Eliot Bledsloe from Creative Commons Australia said once: “Copyright – get over it.” Granted it was a different discussion and he was being slightly facetious, but in terms of online content, the same principle can be applied. Perhaps “exclusivity – get over it” or at least “if it’s exclusive it better be almost perfect.”

Or maybe you can go against the free will of the digital format – I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. Paywalls certainly work to a certain extent for niche websites or sites to which people assign a moral as well as informative value ( I’m thinking of Crikey when I say this – I believe that their subscribers see them as an important voice in the media landscape, even if they don’t read it every day).

But what Murdoch is proposing is that we essentially lock up one of the major activities undertaken on the web, news sourcing. Won’t that annoy anyone who has accessed news for so long for free? More than that, I think it will annoy people who are digital natives, because they live their lives online for free – free blogging software, free music listening, free email, free photo sharing – and this will seem like an affront to that way of using the web.

One way I do see it working in Australia, though, is that you could charge more for a combined subscription to the site and the print copy to be home delivered. I’d certainly buy one.  Either way, I hope they come up with something.

Not just a trending topic: New media in South East Asia

The role of Twitter in the unrest following the recent Iranian elections was a phenomenal demonstration the infinite potential of digital media and the web for populations without an alternative voice, and was widely discussed in the Western world.  Yet this moment was a small part of a much longer and wide-reaching story about new media providing voice and access to otherwise under-scrutinised situations.

In the last 20 years, new media outlets have not only changed the nature of journalism in their countries, but also provided vigour for democratic processes and influenced political outcomes along the way – a phenomenon repeatedly demonstrated in South East Asia.

Last year the South East Asia Centre for E-Media held their annual conference for new media practitioners in the region. The conference was attended by participants from Burma, Timor-Leste, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Aceh among others – this list of countries encapsulating a range of media environments all of which involve a level of censorship, and varying levels of political stability.

The Centre was started by the publishers of Malaysiakini, the only independent media outlet in Malaysia and an important example of the influence of new media in Asia in recent years. It was launched during the 1999 Malaysian general election, taking a gamble on a loophole in Malaysian censorship law which did not cover online media.

During the 2008 election, which saw the ruling coalition win but suffer the worst losses in recent history, Malaysiakini overtook all other news outlets in popularity as it reported minute-by-minute results  and provided much-needed coverage of opposition news as well as that of the incumbents. The outlet’s popularity at this time not only reflected voter sentiment across the country but most likely affected the choices people made about the ruling party which had never faced such scrutiny.

Similarly, the importance of Burmese news media outlets in exile were highlighted by a specific crisis  – in this case Cyclone Nargis – yet this was only one part of a longer history of reporting on otherwise unseen events in Burma.  Mizzima News (based in India) and The Irrawaddy (based in Thailand)  often rely on images smuggled out of Burma to maintain a gaze on the ruling junta in their country. Their Burmese readership is largely outside of Burma (less than 1% of people in the country have internet access) and their coverage not only provides essential news for those living away from home, but is also a comprehensive source for events that aren’t accessible for mainstream outlets, including those in the West.

The conference was all about supporting online news outlets of all sizes in their work because the hosts know better than most how important free media is in encouraging truly democratic processes.  From risking their lives to overcome repression, to simply enriching a country’s political discussion, these outlets produce fairly phenomenal journalism considering the budget and conditions under which they operate.

This is the revolution which theorists have been talking about since the creation of the internet and continue to herald when a crisis occurs, yet let’s not forget that it is quietly happening all the time.

Some independent South East Asian new media outlets:

Burma: Mizzima, The Irrawaddy

Thailand: Prachathai, Amana News Online (I volunteered at Amana for a year which is how I came to be at the conference)

Singapore: The Online Citizen

Malaysia: Malaysiakini

East Timor: Timor-Leste Media Development Centre

Cambodia: Ka-Set

Philippines: Bulatlat

Update: I also found this video about Free Speech Online from MediaShift. It talks about censorship and the importance of the web for free speech in Iran, China and the USA.