This is not about me.

A new post from Nic Hodges helped coalesce some of my recent thinking about social messaging and social networks. Nic talks about how two-way, conversational media is now becoming as involving and entertaining as, say, '60 Minutes'. And a lot more entertaining than 'Girls of the Playboy Mansion.' No, really.

Why is this so? How can smileys out-engage boobies?

The simple answer is that rediscovering that real people’s real lives can be entertaining, informative and engaging too.

But the complex-erer answer that I don't yet have any evidence beyond a strong gut feel is that documenting the events in your life - and how that changes you - is an activity that doesn’t only gain you an audience, it also helps you define and refine who you have been, are currently, and are becoming.

Defining who you were/are/will be is as compelling as it gets.


Girls of the Playboy Mansion: come on, seriously, you can't tell me this is entertainment...

Your identity isn’t just who you are now. It’s a vector, or a series of curves perhaps. It starts in the past, charting your passage through the events and ideas you’ve experienced and your reaction to those events and ideas.

That vector passes through the present, and that’s what we see of someone and usually think of identity. But the present is only the thinnest possible cross-section of your identity and in isolation gives only the slightest suggestion of who you will become as you continue on into the future.

I think social messaging and social networking is so fundamentally engaging because it gives us an opportunity to capture key moments of our identity as we move forward in time, leaving a documented history behind us, interwoven with the events, ideas, and people we’ve been introduced to along the way, and leaving evidence of how we’ve been influenced by them.

My prediction: browsing real people’s lives and documenting our own for others to browse will be the new entertainment hit for the 2020s. Partly because network television quality can sink no lower, partly because social messaging and social networking is just plain fun.

But mostly because, way down deep inside, we're learning about ourselves. 

And nobody's more interesting than me. Or you. Unless you happen to be me.

Broadband bandwidth leapfrog leaves us behind again

I haven't seen a message like this one for a long time - warning me that I don't have a good enough broadband connection to get a good viewing experience. It's particularly worrying when this isn't some high-tech demonstration of bleeding-edge HD vision online. It's just a video review of a new Kodak printer by guru consumer tech columnist Walter Mossberg.

It's particularly depressing when you realise that I'm sitting on a corporate internet connection that Bandwidthplace.com says has a connection speed about twice as fast as the average Australian cable connection, which in turn is faster than the average Australian ADSL connection, which is what the average Australian is actually stuck with.

It's a fact of life as immutable as gravity that Australia remains hampered by a reactive, defensive, greedy and inefficient Telstra. We're still hampered by Telstra because we're led by governments with a maximum four year window on the world, when planning for future technology requires a 10 or even 20 year perspective.

Since Optus/Telstra cable and ADSL started rolling out Australians (in urban areas, at least) have experienced a massive increase in their average connection speed, but starting from a very low base, and at the same time as the US, Europe and Asia have experienced an increase that was greater still.

For the past five years or so, urban Australians on ADSL or cable haven't been troubled much by jittery, jumpy streams, or by content that nannies us like Mossberg's by warning us not to even launch the video. But if the Mossberg video warning is a sign of anything, it's that the world has moved on much faster than we have, and we may be about to sink back into the kind of second-world, arms-length relationship with overseas web content we used to suffer from back in the '80s and '90s.

I remember trying to produce a knock-off of TheSpot.com (dead now but there's a potted history on CNet) for Australian audiences on behalf of MSN Australia, in 1996 (or so.) An online video reality-style soap opera, TheSpot.com was something of a pre-cursor to Big Brother, in that the cast were all sharing a house and the video was shot in wobblycam over-the-shoulder reality style, although it had to be scripted and acted, if for no other reason that limited processing power made video editing and encoding so time-consuming and costly.

Our knock-off, "Friday's Beach," was almost impossible to produce. While many US viewers enjoyed TheSpot at 640x480 and 20fps, the very best we could manage, even with the cooperation of Microsoft and Telstra (used to be partners in those days) was a barely viewable 320x240 and 10-15fps - the kind of stuttervision you'd be disappointed to find in a mobile phone these days. We were forced to supplement the video content with a separately-recorded audio 'radio show' (a precursor of the podcast! ha!) as well as still photos and text diary versions of the narrative for each of the cast. That way, if you were unable to watch the video, or unable to understand it if you could get it to play at all, you could at least participate in some fashion.

Needless to say, there was no way Friday's Beach was ever going to garner a commercial-sized audience, or ever pay for its own production costs. Only one thing kept the project alive: despite all the press hype TheSpot.com received in Australia about being the future of entertainment, nobody in Australia could really watch it. So if you were interested in experiencing the future of visual entertainment in Australia at the time, you had to make do with Friday's Beach.

How depressing that we're headed that way again; that once again we'll be the poor cousins of the online world. Particularly so since in this decade, the internet really is the entertainment, education and business platform we hoped it might be in the '90s, and this time we won't just be missing out on watching six teenagers suffering broken hearts and complaining about their homework. This time it's going to have a material effect on our culture, our access to the world, and even the only thing the current government actually cares about: the economy. Horror!