Digital Media

IBM’s Philippe Borremans had an interesting perspective when it came to using social media in a company setting. It seems like for a big company like IBM it would be easy to get trapped into making a lot of requirements for blogs and podcasts, but it seems like IBM employees have a lot of leeway when it comes to information sharing. By having general guidelines, employees have a better understanding of what the company finds acceptable and by keeping social media “social” the company allows employees to be creative and move the company forward.

Probably one of the reasons that IBM follows the trends of their employees is because they would not be able to keep up if they tried and would probably hamper progress by trying to do so. I think Borremans is wise to realize this. He also realizes that pushing people to use the available platforms does not help people progress. If employees are using social media it is because they see a use for it in the work that they are doing. By trusting the employee to make a judgment on what tool they use to convey a message, they are also giving the employee more responsibility and thus more is at stake for the employee with regard to the company’s future.

 Boremanns also makes a good point in saying that not every company will have the same needs when it comes to social media. Some may have stricter security concerns that make wikis impractical.

Besides internal communications, however, there are also external communications. Stuart Smith says that social media can help build a trusted dialogue with consumers. Employees are the best ambassadors of a company and providing the channels to communicate will help employees’ voices be heard.

Discussion questions:

1. How can smaller companies use social media?

2. Are there drawbacks of using social media tools such as wikis and RSS?

3. Should social media be monitored? If so, who should monitor it?

1. Should the U.S. try to catch up to countries with better infrastructure? If so, how?
2. How important is symmetry? Will people need faster uploading speeds in the future?
3. Does UW have user-owned initiative?

One of the eye-opening facts that I knew before reading this article, but which still catches me off guard, is how far behind the United States is when it comes to telecommunications infrastructure. “Providing ubiquitous gigabit networks in the United States,” an IEEE-USA CCIP paper, points out that the U.S. “seriously lags in satisfying the needs of the world’s strongest economy.” Like most developed nations, the U.S. has become an information society, with our economic well-being based on our ability to acquire and send information quickly. It seems like the government would want to foster development of this information in whatever way it can to promote economic stability.

Right now, it is still expensive to have a high-speed connection. When communities make high-speed access more readily available, more people have the opportunity to improve their standard of living through educational opportunities and access to information and health-care delivery. Individual communities have been able to make some headway where the national government has failed. Downtown Spokane has wi-fi available to everyone and companies such as Boeing have a corporate gigabit network. I think user-owned initiatives will eventually lead the way in bringing Internet access to communities as a whole.

While it’s important that private companies such as Verizon are experimenting with fiber, I think there need to be more incentives for installing fiber so that it won’t just be the wealthy who are able to have the benefits of fiber connections. The speeds that this paper talks about are mindboggling to me, but I can see where they will be needed in the future with the increasing popularity of video and other applications that need a high-speed connection. The importance of symmetry also becomes apparent when I look at the popularity of sites such as YouTube, that people use to upload their own video. These sorts of sites will only continue to grow in popularity and it will be important for users to be able to upload information as fast as they can download it.

As Kimberly Appelcline reminds us, we have all probably heard plenty of bad storytelling. I can think of one acquaintance in particular who begins to tell a story, but will start to give background information and then go off on a tangent causing a simple story that could be told in about 30 seconds to go on for about three minutes. It’s a good reminder that everything in a story should have a purpose for being there, even if the reader doesn’t discover the purpose until much later in the story. It also emphasizes the need for editing. What might seem important at the time may later become useless with a change in plot or focus.

On the other hand, it’s important for the reader to be able to visualize where the story is taking place. A detail here and there, especially those that appeal to the five senses, can help to place the reader into the story. If my character passes a bakery, maybe he or she catches a hint of cinnamon and yeast wafting through the window. Mmm, I’m getting hungry. Setting makes readers more involved in the story and they become more vested in the conclusion of the story.

Appelcline also points out that a story needs to have build-up to keep readers’ attention. When there is some sort of tension in the story, readers want to know what is going to happen. They need to get that pay-off at the end of the story for continuing to read the story.

These can be more difficult with nonfiction writing, but definitely not impossible. Sometimes it just takes paying more attention to the way people act and describing the setting they are in – rather than using their words only – to create a scene in readers’ minds and help develop the character of the person being interviewed. There are plenty of tensions in real life and it’s easy to find out a person’s backstory just by asking. (People love to talk about themselves!)

When I think about design, I usually think about something that is born from the creative region of the brain. But like so many creative things, design usually is based within some sort of framework – even if the framework is used unconsciously.

Jean Vanderdonckt’s “Visual Design Methods in Interactive Applications” lists various visual techniques that can be used to make information accessible to readers. Using a framework, it is easier to determine if the technique being used will indeed reach the audience that it is expected to reach. Whether it’s physical techniques such as balance and symmetry, or photographic techniques such as stability or stress, we as users are comfortable and find harmony when certain techniques are used. We feel comfortable when designs are balanced and symmetrical, and when we can predict where items will be.  

Vanderdockt makes the point that the target audience will help to determine the impact a screen has on the users. If the target audience is a “traditional” audience then visual techniques in the domain of harmony should be used. If a more “nontraditional” audience is targeted then visual techniques may be more effective if they create contrast.

The tradeoff between usability and the desired visual impact should always be considered. As we have learned in previous readings, people like conventions. When we try something new to create contrast it’s possible to violate conventions and decrease usability. It is possible to be creative while still following conventions.

Many of the same principles of writing for the newspaper that I think about daily at work are relevant to writing for the Web. There are several similarities between Web readers and newspaper readers. Web readers are scanning to find the information they want. While newspaper readers are probably not as focused about what they are looking for, they too want to get the day’s news and information as efficiently as possible.  

 An inverted pyramid style of writing allows readers to read the most important information in the story at the beginning and then determine how far they will continue to read. This can be combined with what Nathan Wallace calls multi-level writing on the Web to make pages easy to scan. It’s very tempting, and sometimes necessary, to post stories that are printed in the paper onto the Web without thinking about the ways that readability can be improved on the Web. While this would probably be too much work for a newspaper in which content changes daily, there are some aspects of multi-level writing that would be practical to implement.

For example, the reporter could make an alternate first sentence if the first sentence in the printed newspaper does not make for a good summary sentence. They can also break up text by adding informative subheads, which can help readers who are scanning the article. Bulleted lists would also scanners find information easily.

 I’m an expert at cutting stories down to their essence. This is important for Web writing because readers aren’t looking for a lot of unnecessary information. They want every word and every sentence to contribute to the focus of the story. This is important to remember because, unlike when I am writing for print, on the Web I have an unlimited amount of space in which to write. However, my readers do not have unlimited attention spans.

 George Klare’s readability principles were a good reminder that a writer must think about who will be reading the material and write appropriately for that group. You don’t want to have a site that targets patients and then use a lot of medical jargon in the material. On the other hand, doctors will expect what they are reading to use terms correctly and to have the results of research backed up by the methodology.

 Discussion Questions:

1. What makes a page easy to scan on the Web?
2. How can long, narrative pieces be made more readable on the Web?
3. How can you test for readability?