A “Qik” way to more transparency?

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In a class last week, my friend Marguerite was talking about increased attention and transparency being required of government because of social media tools like Twitter and video uploading sites like YouTube and Qik.

This sparked a thought in my little head that may not be revolutionary, but it made an impact on me nonetheless, which is that I believe tools like Qik are a totally different step on the road of transparency and social commentary.  With sites like YouTube, it was certainly revolutionary to have video that could be made available immediately – but it often wasn’t.  Someone needed to record the video, return home and often they spent a moment or two editing if for nothing other than to shave the length down a bit and then it was loaded for the world to see.

Now, with the US finally catching up to some of the rest of the world in our mobile capacities, we’ve got the potential to go live.  No time delay, no editing, real, true live coverage by average everyday people.

I think the possibilities for watchdog groups and social movements are tremendous with technology like that.  For some reason, it is more powerful to know that what you’re participating in is happening at the moment you participate, rather than learning of it after the fact (even if it’s only 15 minutes after the fact).

Thoughts?

Sneaking Backstage and the Transparent Self

The mask Originally uploaded by xenïa antunes

Masks are a popular convention through many (if not most) cultures in the world. I think the draw toward masks is that they reflect our true nature – the reality that people are multi-faceted and cannot be presented with just ‘one face’.

More and more, however, our ability to share of ourselves – or more importantly, our inability to mask the sharing we do between different groups – is changing the way we act in society. Social media is not just a tool, it’s a cultural phenomenon and that phenomenon is one of transparency.  Go to any social networking event and I promise you’ll be more familiar with the word than you ever thought possible.

A descriptive way of explaining this is presented in the book “No Sense of Place” (by Joshua Meyrowitz). His approach is to liken our world before social media to a theatre performance; there is a frontstage and a backstage. Frontstage is where we interact with most other people and backstage is where you collaborate or prepare with the people closest to you, or perhaps even alone. A teacher will not present the same facet of himself if he is in front of a classroom of students than he would present to a co-teacher; the class is his audience and the co-teacher his fellow actor.

Give the students the ability to see through walls, however, and no longer can the teacher keep all of his backstage secrets under wraps. The internet and social media are like an increasingly capable pair of x-ray glasses – they let you see through the curtains that hang between frontstage and backstage. More people find themselves on the spot more often, like the PR person who forgot that he didn’t have a backstage way to mention his distaste for the city of Memphis. As this blogger (Maxine) so succinctly puts it, there’s a basic Catch-22 in social media.