Mind the Gap

By Brian Sacawa

I have a website. I have a blog. I tweet. I have also been spotted on delicious, Flickr, and MySpace. So I think it’s pretty obvious which side of the “whuffie” argument I come down on, and I have a theory about non-adopters. I think the anti-whuffies fall into two categories: the ‘scaredy cats’ and the ‘resisters’.

‘Scaredy cats’ refuse to engage with this technology not because they’re frightened of technology–quite the contrary, many of them use technology to make their living/art–but because they’re frightened that the transparency this brings to the creative process will allow others to steal their ideas. And since those idea poachers will likely be plugged into the latest social networking gimmick, they will be able to put the stolen ideas out there first and pass them off as their own.

‘Resisters’ are those who are probably sorry they didn’t adopt social networking applications early, either because they thought it wouldn’t last or because they didn’t want to be seen as jumping on the bandwagon. And now that these things have become ubiquitous, they continue to resist because they don’t want to be seen to have gone along just because many others have. They feel the need to separate themselves from the pack by being ‘different’ and not embracing these applications, stubbornly so, probably to the detriment of their careers. (N.B. Though I’ve personally embraced quite a few social networking applications, I am a Facebook resister partly for the reasons stated above and partly because I feel like my cobbled-together virtual existence is Facebook-y enough even though I’m not plugged into their network.)

To the ‘scaredy cats’, I say: Get over it. You have control over what you put out there. You can still conceal and manage the flow of your own information. (If you need help with this, look to the government for some strategies.) Maybe somebody will appropriate some of your ideas, but wouldn’t that be flattering?

To the ‘resisters’, I say: Get over it. Your peers in the musical community, and indeed all of America, will not think you are a sell-out easily swayed by the latest fads just because you start tweeting.

By Molly Sheridan

In the good timing department, Anne Midgette weighs in on the classical music community’s applications of technology in this morning’s WaPo.

The sad thing is that neither of these camps seems to have a very sophisticated idea of what “new technology” actually is. In classical music, new technology generally means either the use of video projections during performance or anything related to the Internet. The problem is that people on both sides of the argument — those in favor of new technology and those opposed — start equating new technology with “cheesy,” when the whole point is that it can enhance the experience rather than making it stupider.

Well that’s it in a nut shell, isn’t it?

Full article is here. The take-away: “What classical music audiences and administrators too often forget is that all these new technologies are mediums, not messages: How well they work depends entirely on how intelligently they’re used in the service of what they’re trying to communicate.”

So what do we think is a sophisticated, enriching use of the technology in the performing arts? What have you seen out there that impressed? What would you like to see?

UPDATE: Meanwhile, that other dinosaur, print media, give these mediums an honest fighting chance. Check out the Social Sun.

By Matthew Guerrieri

Am I the only one that finds it funny/odd that so many Web 2.0 terms
sound like they should be characters on a kids’ TV show? Whuffie,
Twitter, Flickr, Wiki, Bebo, Plurk, Yelp–I feel like I’m naming the
Lost Boys. And I think it points to something about Internet
interactivity: the services are, at least initially and sometimes
exclusively, driven more by the gee-whiz novelty of the technology
rather than filling an actual need. Reading The Whuffie Factor,
I similarly sensed a solution in search of a problem. I noticed that
both of Hunt’s key points–that online social networking covers an
enormous, unignorable demographic swath, and that social capital will
translate into financial capital–were illustrated anecdotally, not
comprehensively. The case studies were interesting enough: obviously,
some entrepreneurs have been able to leverage social networks with
some success. But every time the book moved into its broader
don’t-miss-the-boat rhetoric, it felt a little like a salto
mortale. And I think it’s because the book is studiously ignoring
the quirky limits of social networking.

I find Twitter the most
fascinating of these platforms, because a) it’s the first piece of
well-known technology that kind of makes me feel like a cranky old
geezer, which is even more fun than I had imagined, and b) it’s an
unusually pithy example of how Internet technology is full of hidden
restrictions that make the Internet a lot less stylistically universal
and democratic than we like to think. I’ve been reading Hegel lately,
which gives rise to an easy Hegel-on-Twitter joke:

The
object has the form and character of thinghood, i.e., is independent:
but self-consciousness has the conviction that this independent
ob
1807 from
Jena

One could certainly argue that a
140-character limit might have made Hegel a little clearer, but that’s
the way the man wrote, and, by design, the style is inseperable from
the content. More importantly, though, it’s a style criticism that’s
based not on aesthetics, but on the technological limits of Twitter
itself. Now, all language is limiting in this way, but it’s normally
nowhere near this restrictive. (For perspective: everyday English is
flexible enough that I can be meaningfully networked, even through the
screen of translation, printing, and physical distribution, with a
long-dead German without much trouble.)

This is an extreme
case. But think about the shift from the old classical-music industry
structure to an online classical-music industry structure. The old
system was plauged by inequities based around aesthetics. But the
inequities of the new system are based around the technology that
holds up the system. I’m not sure one is better than the other. As
someone who loves a lot of, well, unpopular music, my spider-sense
started tingling as soon as Hunt started talking about the 80/20 rule.
Is this argument going where I think it’s going? Yes! Yes it
is.

Finding out what your customers need, then designing
for the features that most of them need, while cutting the extra
features that only some of them need, will help you design your
product for your wider audience…. This builds more whuffie for you
as those customers spread the word that they love your product because
it’s so easy and straightforward to use. (p. 86)

Pick any
musical genre you want, and it won’t be hard to come up with a list of
pieces for which cutting the extra features that only some listeners
need would take away everything that makes that piece special.
(Real-world example: iTunes’ distinction between 99-cent tracks and
longer, “album-only” tracks, which leaves those 20-minute symphonic
canvases at a marketing disadvantage.) This is not to say that online
networking can’t be a boon to musical entrepreneurship, but there are
some genres and styles that lend themselves more readily to it; for
the rest, I think the necessary decision between changing style or
waiting for the technology to catch up somewhat blunts the sweep of
the book’s prescription.

Then again: I’m still skeptical just
how well social capital translates into actual profit. An awful lot of
Hunt’s case studies are Web 1.0 companies integrating a social
networking element into their already fairly mature business model. I
kept thinking of Burger King and McDonald’s–Burger King has spent the
past couple of years rolling out an elaborate, attention-grabbing
marketing campaign with lots of online interactivity and social
network presence. McDonald’s has stuck largely to boring traditional
advertising. Guess
who increased their market share? Hunt mentions the cautionary
tale of Federated Media (which includes Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow’s
site) taking money from Microsoft. But this spring, they
did it again, taking money from previously-criticized Comcast.
Mea culpa: just more anecdotal evidence. But maybe whuffie is
harder to monetize than Hunt is letting on.

By Molly Sheridan

Embracing the chaos of community means letting go of the need to plan everything and the fantasy that you can control any given situation. Instead of building up plans and structure, you should be building flexibility and environmental awareness into your campaigns. You need to be hyperaware of your surroundings and be able to tap into opportunities as they arise and that you never could have predicted.

–Tara Hunt, The Wuffie Factor

What’s the biggest secret you have?

Often when I speak with reticent artists/arts organizations about their online presence, a lot of their fears make them sound like presidential candidates about to appear on national television: I can’t talk about this, what if that person says that. And I have to wonder: Just what are they doing in there that, if every passerby on Central Ave. knew about it, would be damaging? Seriously, what’s the worst thing we could find out about you (and if it’s that juicy, maybe we should make a side project out of it)? What’s the outcome of professional transparency you most fear? Am I being naive here?

Which leads to another point (and a bit of a personal rant): the culture industry is not the military. There is no real reason to reinvent every website and social networking tool that comes down the pike, but I watch cultural institutions try to do just that over and over again. That may offer more control and precision, but why do we seek these qualities in this area of our work? Are those really our top goals when it comes to building bridges with our communities? Reinvention of the social wheel is expensive and counterproductive because it cuts us off from the larger community–the very thing most of us are combating in the real world. Few organizations are that interesting that a person would only want to play on their exclusive playground. We do not need Audiencer and PatronBook when in many cases the originals will server our purposes quite well if not exactly. The Metropolitan Opera may need a specialized ticketing system, for instance, but most of us probably could be using the simpler services that sell tickets to a lot of different events. A universal access point like this is important because people who may never have thought about coming to hear your symphony have the chance to stumble on the fact that you’re playing Berlioz next week and consider it.

This “let the experts work for you” course of action is also exponentially more cost effective and easier on overworked/inexperienced staff members. You don’t need to hire and coach and monitor a web developer to develop a specialized website that will showcase your activities: Just pick a template offered by WordPress and add the necessary plugins. Let their employees do the R&D sweating every time technology lurches forward again. Your audience will trust you because your materials will always feel up-to-date.

As Hunt outlines in the quote above, the online public square/marketplace requires flexibility and creativity that, as members of the so-called “creative class”, we should be uniquely positioned to excel at. It’s particularly suited to low-budget/no-budget operations with a dream and a message and personally invested staff members (even if that’s just you). If you actually have a few dollars to do what you do and are feeling protective, take a deep breath and peel a few fingers off the rope you cling to every day: You can do this well if you think about it. And as Hunt and Shapiro have extensively illustrated, the rewards are more than worth the risks. You can stay inside your box if you’d like, but that’s arguably an even riskier venture. Like it or not, we can’t stop: We’ve come too far.

By Marc Weidenbaum

The non-fiction book we’re yapping about, The Whuffie Factor, takes its key word, “whuffie,” from a science fiction novel by Cory Doctorow. That book was Doctorow’s first published novel, and it feels very much like a first novel, especially a first sci-fi novel. The book is titled Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and it’s jam-packed with seriously cool ideas, follows a fairly simple plot with relatively off-the-rack characters, and comes to a close that’s all too quick and none too satisfying.

So, in the end, the primary purpose of Down and Out seems to be not the plot, not the characters, but those ideas–many of which are tossed off with a bubbly, rapid-fire, the-future-is-now headiness fitting to the book’s setting. (At least those ideas are what it does best, and what Doctorow seems to have invested himself in most. That said, fans of his most recent, and I’d say best, novel, Little Brother, will find in Down and Out some nice precursors to what made Little Brother so good, especially the protagonist’s penchant for acting without fully thinking things through.)

Anyhow, that setting is called the Bitchun Society, a newly revised world–in the near-ish future–in which social capital (what everyone calls “whuffie”) has, as far as I can tell, entirely replaced any other form of compensation, and in which the virtual world has so come to be the real world that humans regularly “back up” their brains (as we do our hard drives, or at least are supposed to) and drop them into new clones, thus extending life for, well, as long as they want.

As in any science fiction, that’s a leap of faith that Doctorow requires the reader to take, but to his credit, he takes it himself, with a degree of seriousness that is something of a (purposeful) downer. What he says in the book is that those folk who had trouble adopting to the Bitchun Society mode (to the economy of social capital, to the technological gift of near-eternal life) didn’t really have much say in the matter, because by definition…they all died off.

They headed to the woods, literally or figuratively, stuck to their philosophical guns, and died the natural death that their ancestors had died. Meanwhile, the (apparent) vast majority of inhabitants of the world adopted the Bitchun mode, and that is the norm when the book opens.

The (largely online) social capital that Tara Hunt discusses in Whuffie Factor requires a much smaller leap of faith, with little of the dire seriousness that circulates around it in Doctorow’s book (for example, one of the secondary characters in Down and Out spends much of the novel not so much contemplating suicide as working toward suicide).

Or does it? I wonder if artists and organizations today risk self-exile from the broader world of culture if they do not embrace the facts of online culture.

I’ll focus, for the moment, just on retail. Once upon a time, almost all records were sold in record stores. A good record store, like a great specialty shop or the deceased Tower at its best (full disclosure: I was an editor on Tower’s Pulse! and Classical Pulse! magazines and its web-based publications for many years) was where music was sold, jazz or pop, classical or Latin. Customers found out about music in their lives and inside the stores, talking with clerks, and purchased those records in stores.

Today, both those lives (at least as defined as the interactions between individuals) and sales are taking place increasingly online. I do personally believe that as in Down and Out, there’s no turning back. The world we inhabit today is not so drastically altered as the Bitchun Society, but it is altered, so much so that we can’t quite see it because we’ve experienced it in real time. Things move quickly. I re-read Down and Out (originally published in 2003) in advance of this discussion, and was humored to find the word “twittering” in there, since he was using the word in its original sense, in advance of the launch, in 2006, of what is now a near-ubiquitous form of interaction, a form of interaction that is emblematic of the kind of communication that Hunt is evangelizing.

I’m not sure what option there is other than embracing the new form of communication. What Hunt does best in her book is provide people and organizations practical examples of how to–and how not to–embrace it.

By Molly Sheridan

As happens sometimes when traveling via Amtrak, I had a frustrating experience at the ticket window last Monday. Several things Tara Hunt outlines in The Wuffie Factor triggered ideas I wanted to apply to the arts, but I was so inspired by her discussion of harnessing the power of user feedback to improve pretty much everything, I decided to try out my newly gained knowledge and email Amtrak’s customer service. How would this effect everyone’s whuffie? Well, let’s see how it goes.

When I had a problem at the reservation desk, the service representative I got on the phone told me to complete my travel and then contact customer service, so first thing Tuesday morning I emailed them this (you can skip this part if you don’t care about the details):

Subject: Travel Feedback

Dear Amtrak,

Yesterday, I was scheduled to travel from New York to Baltimore, the second leg of a round trip ticket. When I decided to return to Baltimore early, I checked the Amtrak website to make sure a ticket for an earlier train was available at the same price, but as I knew I would have to see a station agent in less than an hour to exchange my already printed return ticket, I did not then also *call* to reserve a new ticket. (Because machines automatically print both tickets, I already had the second one and could not change my reservation online.) When I got to the window, the station agent informed me that the price had gone up $25 and that there was nothing she could do about it. This system makes no sense.

I would advise correcting the machines to print only one trip ticket at a time to make reservation changes less complex and time consuming for customers and Amtrak staff.

I would appreciate a fare refund on my return trip equal to the last-minute fare increase.

Thank you for your consideration,
Molly Sheridan

I thought this was a pretty fair request. I offered a suggestion on how to improve the experience, rather than just bitching, and–just like my father taught me–I asked clearly and politely for what I wanted to redress the situation.

About an hour later, I received this reply.

Thank you for contacting us.

Unfortunately, we cannot refund the difference between the two fares. All fares are subject to what is available at the time the actual reservation is made.

Please note that you can always book your departure and return trips under two separate reservation numbers. This way you would only need to print one ticket at a time.

I hope this information is helpful.

Seriously, it ended with “I hope this information is helpful”–as if I couldn’t have come up with those answers on my own. I mean, I didn’t honestly expect that they would refund the ticket difference or change the machines just because I made the suggestion, but this cool, generic response kind of stunned me, and I wasn’t expecting how irritated it made me. I have endured countless train delays and interactions with several nasty train staffers, sat through hours of engine failure, and was once a passenger on an Amtrak train that struck a truck and then sat in dark chaos for more than an hour just 10 minutes outside of Baltimore. Still, I continued to ride. By the time I actually complained, I had a stockpile of hostility pent up. They couldn’t have known that, of course, but it was enlightening to me to think about in terms of all kinds of interactions of this nature.

For me, this illustrated just how right Hunt is in her analysis of responding to customer feedback in today’s online marketplace. When you try and open a line of communication and you get the distinct impression no one is listening to you, as a customer or audience member, right or wrong, I can see why it would take a great deal to fix the relationship. Now, it’s personal. Maybe everything is.

This got me thinking about how I make and respond to suggestions in the cultural community. Do I slam doors, even when I don’t mean to? Where can I and where should I be going for feedback about how I can do my work better and encourage others? I know that there are artists and arts organization that get nervous around issues of transparency because they don’t want to demystify the art to the point that it’s no longer the magical experience audiences have previously enjoyed. But I think there’s a pretty significant line between enjoying relationships with the people themselves and deflating the art itself through TMI. And open lines of communication bind us together at a time when audience building is often what we claim is our first priority.

This week at the suggestion of composer Alex Shapiro, the Blogger Book Club takes on The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt. Thanks, Alex! I hope it will really open up the chance to think and talk about how music and the related industries we each have contact with are embracing technology and social networking for better and worse. Every time Hunt wrote “business” I mentally substituted “cultural institution” and, whether I agreed with her or not, the ideas popped off the page. Now, here’s Alex to get us started…

By Alex Shapiro

Those of us who are musicians and composers might think that we’re in the music-making business, but we’re actually in the relationship-making business. In this regard, we’re no different than anyone in any business you can think of which relies on others to use or purchase one’s wares. Each of us is selling all sorts of things that have little or nothing to do with the actual product we are touting, whether what we’re offering is a piece of music, a piece of furniture, a piece of real estate, peace of mind, or even a piece of ass. No, I’m not equating composing with the oldest profession in the world, although I suspect that more than a few of my colleagues have occasionally felt that to be a generous description. But the two do have something significant in common: an attempt to connect with a willing, paying audience.

As artists, we may think that we are selling the product that we create. But in this day and age of what I term “the published life,” in which many of us have a ubiquitous online presence that shares information about everything from our latest opus on our website to our latest ham sandwich on Facebook or Twitter, the truth is this: we are the product as much as our art is the product. The creator and the public perception of him or her, have become an undeniable part of what’s being sold. Even those artists who spurn the enpixelated self-promo world remain subject to its effects, since potential fans interested in their work immediately head to Google to embark on a little due diligence. The jig is up: in the 21st century, whether we choose to don our pajamas, hide in our garrets, and ignore it all, or don our pajamas, hide in our garrets, and participate, the perception of who we are–or at least who we appear to be–is as important as the essence of what we create. Sometimes, even more important.

Enter “whuffie.” Thanks to Cory Doctorow, a number of e-geeks have begun to use the word, which refers to the currency of one’s professional reputation. Author Tara Hunt took it upon herself to delve right in and explore the phenomenon in her thorough book, The Whuffie Factor. In many ways, whuffie is nothing new at all: since the beginning of time, relationships, the perception of people, and their reputations have been what have driven human interaction. There are now two new components: the technology at hand that we use to accomplish this, and the global reach of that technology. Instead of one little village in a cozy Kyrgyzstanian corner knowing about Alex’s Fabulous New Piece due to word of mouth, now Alex and her nifty piece have the potential to be known to millions with one click of a cheap plastic button on a computer keyboard. I’d call that progress, for any artist looking for a fan base, and hoping to get paid in more than just a barter of one donkey and a bushel of potatoes.

I speak publicly about this new way for artists to get their work out into the world to anyone who will listen. My cats know the spiel well. I’m fortunate to have platforms, live and in print, on which to throw down my soap box and shout about the joys of a happy, moat-less castle of art-making that is less dependent on surly gatekeepers than ever before. Living on a remote island that few have even heard of, I’ve become an odd, if functional, poster child for all this newfound e-joy. And yet, I am deeply aware that it takes a significant perception shift for some artists to embrace these concepts.

Adherence to tradition has much to do with some creators’ resistance to change, as emerging artists coming from academic institutions often have professors who tout degrees and grants as the foremost approach to creating a music career, and are taught virtually nothing about publishing, copyright, web presence management, and other staples related to an ability to generate income from their art. Nothing is wrong with this if the artist is not intending to support themselves to a notable degree from their music. But if they would like to make music their professional career, a sense of entitlement will probably be less useful than an understanding of enterprise. Obtaining degrees and grant funding hinges on external efforts and requests. Building whuffie is generated from within, and becomes the currency of a self-administered “grant” program that pays us back throughout our lives.

Artists have every right to be skeptical as they view the the tricky balance between the quality of their creation and its perceived worth. The latter can be judged on aesthetics and content, or solely on a rumor. The arbitrary and sometimes unfair nature of these judgments can make us cringe, because we’ve worked hard to develop our talents to a point where we believe they should be appreciated on their own terms for their intrinsic worth. Yet in a world where people are far more likely to glean the buzz about someone’s work before they actually, or ever, hear the work itself, it may be naïve for an artist seeking paying fans to compartmentalize the creation of the art from the hype about it. In a fully interconnected world, it is nearly impossible to separate the two parts of the process. And this is where Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor kicks in.

One of the limitations of the new music world is its self-referential nature, whereby accepted norms are…accepted norms, and fewer participants think outside of the taco shell. I find myself most stimulated and inspired by the observations of those who are not part of the arts scene, who see the larger trends in society and in the way people communicate. Right now, a working knowledge of the gestalt of the internet and a sense of abundance and global scope when thinking of who might listen to our Nifty New Pieces, may be the best antidote to the scarcity and tribulations of grant monies. Tara Hunt offers what I think is a very solid overview of the huge concept of what it is in this moment, with the tools we have, to build relationships that will build a career. That she is not specifically discussing the small niche of new music but rather the broad world of business, is a boon to artists who want to understand who our listeners are and how we might reach them. Our paying audience is not only each other: it is people from everywhere in the world, many of whom until now would never have been able to find out about us and all our musical niftiness. Whuffie rules.