virtualeconomics

We live our lives in public

Jeff Jarvis today cites Tom Friedman's recent contention (NYT: due to a strategic error on their part, sub req'd) that the explosion of citizen media will alter people's public behaviour for the better. I disagree. Jeff alludes that he might do so also. Let's begin with an except from Friedman's article:

"Three years ago, I was catching a plane at Boston’s Logan airport and went to buy some magazines for the flight. As I approached the cash register, a woman coming from another direction got there just behind me — I thought. But when I put my money down to pay, the woman said in a very loud voice: “Excuse me! I was here first!” And then she fixed me with a piercing stare that said: “I know who you are.” I said I was very sorry, even though I was clearly there first.

"If that happened today, I would have had a very different reaction. I would have said: “Miss, I’m so sorry. I am entirely in the wrong. Please, go ahead. And can I buy your magazines for you? May I buy your lunch? Can I shine your shoes?”

"Why? Because I’d be thinking there is some chance this woman has a blog or a camera in her cellphone and could, if she so chose, tell the whole world about our encounter — entirely from her perspective — and my utterly rude, boorish, arrogant, thinks-he-can-butt-in-line behavior. Yikes! . . ."

Well...perhaps. If it was possible for my every misdeed to be recorded and blogged by whoever took the dimmest view of it, perhaps I would behave with impeccable consideration towards everyone I encountered. There are two less benign possibilities, of course.

(1) Everything I do might be recorded and excoriated by some nut on their blog. At best this knowledge either has no effect on my behaviour since I know that everyone is accustomed to their every action being excoriated by some nut and no-one cares or thinks any less of them for it. At worst, this encourages me to behave less considerately once social sanction becomes hopelessly weakened by misdirected repetition.

(2) Social proof is very powerful - we take our cues as to what constitutes reasonable behaviour from how the people around us behave (see, as ever, Cialdini's Influence). Being surrounded by malign misinterpretations of innocent social behaviour seems likely to encourage emulation. If I read every day how normal it is for people to cut ahead in line (even if the context is that the writer was really annoyed by the experience) perhaps I'll cut ahead more.

And I'd like to note Scott Adams' comments on Paris Hilton yesterday:

"Clearly Paris has made some bad judgement calls. When cameras are rolling, you really ought to be more careful about what comes out of your mouth, and what goes into it. But I have to wonder how many of her critics could survive continuous video surveillance and be mistaken for Gandhi. I couldn’t. I don’t like your odds either."

People have wondered for a while what will happen when the MySpace generation starts running for office with their every youthful misdeed recorded forever for posterity (Techdirt). Tom Friedman suggests that when the cameras are always rolling we'll all be a lot more careful. The behaviour of celebrities already shows us that this isn't really what happens. I think instead we'll all be a lot more confident that the awful things we do are perfectly normal.

Jobsite's advice to Gordon Brown

AND's (my employer) jobs division, Jobsite, has posted up some advice for Gordon Brown on his first day:

• Starting a new job is three times more frightening than getting married, according to working Britons
• 20% said starting a different job is among their most feared things to do, on a par with visiting the dentist
• 48% say the best way to make a good impression on the first day is to make friends with the team
• Gordon Brown's new role is rated second only to George Bush's presidency in terms of difficulty

Top 5 things to do to impress on your first day
• Make friends with your team
• Demonstrate your knowledge of the role and the business
• Arrive early or late to show your commitment from day one
• Dress to impress
• Make tea for your colleagues

Top 5 worst mistakes that you could make on the first day in a new job
• Getting drunk at lunch
• Insulting your boss
• Turning up late
• Going in with a hangover
• Going home sick on your first day

Top 5 worst mistakes people have actually made on the first day in a new job
• Getting lost in the building
• Turning up late
• Failing to identify the boss
• Spilling food or drink down yourself
• Using foul language in front of colleagues

Here's the full press release (word download).

"For god's sake stop suing your customers"

Latest advice to turnaround CEOs at media companies from Marc Andreessen. Nuff said.

Pet Shop Boys to headline a Guardian music festival in Second Life

The fact that the Guardian is holding a music festival in Second Life called Secondfest from 29th June to 1st July seems to have got astonishingly little press so far. Maybe I just can't find it. Anyway, here's Alecks Krotoski of the excellent Gamesblog telling us what it's all about at the Guardian website.

It's sounds pretty cool. Here's some guys who are apparently programming one of the tents. Here's some more details from the guys claiming to have reserved the Chill Island. And here's various indiscreet musicians seemingly breaking the news on their MySpace pages that the Pet Shop Boys will be headlining, along with Groove Armada, Underworld and others. Seems to be independently corroborated by enough MySpace musicians who are appearing to be pretty reliable information. Pet Shop Boys are an excellent choice for a SL music fest, having already done some groundbreaking stuff with the computer generated Liberation video.

(HT for the news that the festival exists to my friend Lactose, and I think news of the festival originally broke here.)

Update: there's a bit of press now: the Guardian has announced that Secondfest is happening on the Gamesblog and a search for "Secondfest" on Guardian Unlimited now returns results including this press announcement and Alecks Krotoski's guides to SL and the event (including the one I pointed to yesterday morning). Oh, and Mad has picked it up here. Though  think the first people to notice the PSB thing were Shiny Media's TechDigest around lunchtime yesterday.

Ad-skipping

The Onion on The Tonight Show airing its first live commercial since 1995: "It's amazing how TiVo has revolutionized the way we avoid watching commercials. Can you believe I actually used to go to the bathroom?"

I've said it before: TiVo doesn't kill commercials: people kill commercials.

London is drowning and I, I live by the river

If like much of the world's population you live near the sea - in London, for example, or Manhattan - you might like* this excellent Google maps hack I came across today. Someone has taken contour lines and extrapolated from them which bits of the world would be underwater if the water level rose by a given number of metres (from zero to fourteen).

Like most crises, global warming already begins to suffer from rhetoric fatigue as people wearily conclude that they've heard it all before. Perhaps if your house is under the blue line on the map this will help get the message across.
*Actually, not like would be more accurate. Find useful, perhaps.

Big Donor show a hoax: problem perfectly real

So the allegedly tasteless Dutch reality TV show in which a dying woman would select the recipient of her kidney turns out to be a hoax designed to raise awareness of the problem that in Holland alone 200 people die a year waiting for a kidney.

Transplanting a kidney from a living donor is apparently  "as safe as common elective surgeries and even beauty treatments" and six times safer, for example, than surrogate motherhood. In Iran, which absurdly enough has the only functioning organ market in the world, living donors are paid between $2,000 and $4,000 for kidneys they voluntarily donate. As with so many things, some people want to buy and some people want to sell and so what is needed is an open market - not least because, as with any prohibition, the alternative simply drives otherwise law-abiding people to consort with and enrich criminals operating under no proper safety or quality controls.

Although...in the short term I'm pretty happy with the idea that if I need a kidney I can buy one from an Iranian - Shi'a muslims in a country that's banned alcohol probably have the best kidneys in the world.

Nailing up the mailbox

Scott Adams pointed out yesterday that "I don’t even check my physical mailbox daily. I only check it when I think it might be too full for the mailman to stuff more crap in there." I sympathise, and have often wondered about simply nailing my letterbox shut. With a sign saying not "no junk mail" but simply "no mail".

Anyone I actually want to hear from emails me, texts me, phones me or leaves me a note on Facebook/LJ/etc. My bills and banking are all done online. I just got back from two weeks away and the only things that had come through the door were pizza menus, junk mail, free newspapers, "sorry we missed you" notes from delivery companies and letters from a handful of companies admitting that they've somehow screwed up the instructions I left them to transact all our business online.

If I nailed the thing shut, as far as I can see the main downside would be having to let my parents know my office address so they could send postcards there instead - the one exception to the rule that nothing good ever comes in the post. Also, the various companies who deliver me things would have to actually follow my instruction to leave them by the front door rather than drop a "sorry we missed you" card through the letterbox. My letterbox is no longer a way to receive communications I want: it's used as a get-out clause by companies I've asked to talk to me in other, more convenient, ways, and as a way of spamming me by companies I don't want to talk to at all. Any medium with that much noise to signal I can do without.

Slacker - in the footsteps of Marconi

Kevin Maney, tech commentator at Conde Nast's new ($125 million) Portfolio mag, brings us news of entrepreneur Dennis Mudd's latest innovation - Slacker.

The theory goes that many iPod owners have never bothered to update their playlist since first dumping their CD collection onto the device - a theory corroborated by the fact that all the iTunes songs ever sold amount to perhaps 3% of the storage capacity of all the iPods ever sold (big ppt by Umair). Slacker is therefore "something of a cross between Pandora and the iPod"; "an iPod-like device that can pull down music via satellite, store it, and constantly recreate playlists a la Pandora". Wow - an iPod that actually updates its playlist in realtime rather than waiting for the user to buy more music or sync with his PC.

So that'll be, um, a radio then.

When stealing isn't theft

Scott Adams blogged earlier in the week about the popular belief that copyright violation isn't stealing, later going on to admit the next day that his post had been an experiment in cognitive dissonance. If you're passionate about the legal and moral implications of file-sharing and copyright, in either direction, you should give it a look.