The Media In 2014...From Predictions Made In 2004!

One of my favorite short films back in 2004 was one called "Epic 2014".  It was faux documentary that purported to report on the media scene in 2014.  It walks the viewer quickly through the history of the internet from Tim Berners-Lee up to 2004 (when the film was made) and then it begins to "report"/speculate about what the next ten years will hold.

If you haven't ever watched it or haven't watched it in awhile, take 8 minutes right now to take a look:



There is some silly stuff here (like Google-zon) and the video does not really hint at the rise of stuff like Facebook and Twitter (much less Instagram and Tinder...).

But the takeaway is an eerily prescient statement concerning the current state of the internet:

"At its best, edited for the savviest readers, [the internet] is a summary of the world - deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything available ever before.  But at its worst, and for too many,  [the internet] is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational. But [the current state of the internet ] is what we wanted.  It is what we chose."

I don't know of anything that is quite this well done (or this insightful) about the future of the internet over the next 10 years (leave a comment if you do!) but I suspect that much of what we will be looking backwards at will involve new technologies like the one demonstrated in the 2 minute video below from Microsoft:



In case you are curious, the hardware and software capable of doing all this is coming to you next year.

Social Media For The Soon-To-Graduate (Or How To Talk To Digital Immigrants)

Digital Immigrants?

If you are about to graduate from college, you likely think you know how to use social media.  You have grown up with it -- you are a digital native.

Unfortunately, most of the people who hold the keys to your employment post-college are digital immigrants.  This is particularly true in the business, law enforcement and national security intelligence communities.

Digital immigrants often have a surprisingly high level of expertise when it comes to networking but likely have a different definition of social than a digital native.  Likewise, there are a number of digital immigrants who arrived in the future only by way of forcible deportation and still pine for the "old country" where every copy of a classified document is printed and numbered "1 of X".

(A quick caveat:  The advice I am about to give is generic.  Different agencies and organizations, particularly within the three major intelligence communities, likely have different standards or advice.  Obviously, their guidelines trump mine.)

Given this, what should you do?  I think there are four things you can do that will at least reduce your frustration if not actually improve your chances:

Learn to use social media effectively.  Social media can be a competitive advantage for digital natives but few really know how to use it.  For example, did you know that when you apply for an internship through LinkedIn, it will tell you when someone actually looks at your application? Did you know that, in a recent survey, 98% of recruiters surveyed used LinkedIn to research candidates?

These are just a few examples of what I am talking about.  Every social media platform has a variety of bells and whistles that can be very useful to you as you look for a job and throughout your professional career.  Few students take the time to actually study and learn these tools and wind up losing out.

Use different services for different purposes.  Not all social media platforms are alike and some work better for certain purposes.  I like to use Facebook but treat it as primarily a social space.  LinkedIn and various email forums are where I have most of my professional conversations.  Finally, I use Twitter as a way to curate the web in real-time.

Of course, my interests occasionally overlap and spill over into all of the social networks to which I belong.  In general, however, I find using different networks for different purposes allows me to optimize my privacy settings.

Whatever you do, though, never forget that everything you put on a social network is theoretically or actually visible to anyone who looks.  Of all the digital immigrants who have become expert at social media, human resource people are some of the best...

When in doubt, do it old school.  One of the best lessons I learned early was, "If you don't know what the dress code is, wear a coat and tie."  If it turns out to be a casual event, it is easy to take off a coat and tie; it is not so easy to put them on if you guess wrong...

The same thing goes for using social media for professional purposes.  If you don't know what the social conventions are of a particular group on Facebook or LinkedIn, if you don't already have a history with a particular Twitter user, go formal first.  Start at the top and, just like taking off a tie, it is easy to become casual.  Make a bad first impression, though, and you may lose credibility or even access, to a crucial forum for your profession.

Social networking is as much social as it is networking.   No one owes you an internship, an interview, a job or even an answer.  More importantly, social media makes it very easy to ignore or block people who are clearly in it only for themselves. 

Ideally then, you should start early (like in your freshman or sophomore years) to develop relationships with people you can help and people who can help you as you progress in your career.  Ask yourself, "What LinkedIn or Facebook groups should I be following?" or "Who is worth listening to on Twitter?" or "Who's blog is worth reading?"  More importantly, ask yourself, "How can I contribute to the groups/tweet streams/blogs I do follow?"  Simply being a member is not enough - networking is a two way street.

Digital immigrants look at it this way:  Why should I place my reputation at risk for you?  Simply knowing of you doesn't really justify the risk.  I need to know what you can actually do.  Digital immigrants are also a little leery of things like grades and other purely numeric measures of quality.  Most of us can think both of a few all-stars who look mediocre on paper and of some paper tigers that turned out to be worthless on the job.

And if you didn't start early?  Start now.  Resign yourself to the fact that it is going to take some time to build your professional network (and even more time before that network is willing to invest time in you).  You might be able to speed the process up a bit but even if you can't, it makes no sense to continue to delay the development of a professional network.

Interactive Online Timeline Of Events In Egypt Since Mubarak Stepped Down (Infographic)

One of our students, Bridget Finn, recently put together a pretty cool product using Dipity, an online timeline tool, to show the timeline of significant events in Egypt since Mubarak stepped down. 

She intends to continue to update the timeline with a specific focus on women's issues and social media, so check back in a few days and see what she has done with it!

Egypt on Dipity.

The New HUMINT?

A few months ago, I wrote an article on the Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now).  In that article I stated that one of those things (the #2 thing, in fact) was to "run an agent network."

I equated our now everyday activity of finding and following various people on LinkedIn or Twitter to the more traditional case officer activities of spotting, vetting, recruiting and tasking agents.

While I meant that article to be a bit lighthearted, over the last several months I have been exploring this idea with some seriousness in a class I am teaching with my colleague, Cathy Pedler, and a group of very bright grad students.

The picture above gives you an inkling of the progress we have made.

In this class (called Collaborative Intelligence - "How to work in a group while learning how groups work"), we have focused our energies on critical and strategic minerals.  I have already written about this course (if you want more details go here), but suffice it to say that, recently, we decided to use our new-found skills in social network analysis to see if we could solve a traditional HUMINT problem:  "Who should we recruit next?"

Every case officer knows that their agents' value are not only measured in terms of what they know but also in terms of who they know.  Low level agents with an extensive network of contacts within a targeted area of interest are obviously valuable, perhaps even more valuable than the recluse with deep subject matter expertise.

Complicating the case officer's task, however, is the jack-of-all-trades nature of the traditional HUMINT collector.   Today, the collector needs to tap into his or her agent network to get economic information; tomorrow, political insights; the next day the need is for information to support some military or technological analysis.

Only an expert case officer with deep contacts can hope to be able to respond to the wide variety of requests for information.  In today's fast moving, crisis-of-the-day type world, the question becomes "Where can I find good sources of information ... on this particular topic ... quickly?"

Twitter to the rescue!

You see, the image I referred to earlier began as the 11 lists of Twitter users the 11 students in my class were currently following as they studied critical and strategic minerals.  The students had found these Twitter users the old fashioned way - they bumped into them.  That is, they found them on blogs or in news articles that talked about strategic mineral issues and they followed them on Twitter in order to stay current on their postings.  Since each of the students has a slightly different portfolio (the students are broken into three teams, national security, business and law enforcement and then, within those teams, each student has an area of specific interest), their lists have some common sources but many different ones as well.

The natural next question is, "Who are my sources of information following?"  Using NodeXL to collect the data and ORA to merge, manage and visualize it, the students rapidly discovered who their "agents" were following.  Furthermore, we were able to discover new people to follow -- Twitter users that many people on our initial lists were following (implying that they were potentially very good sources of information) but that the students had not yet run across in their research.

The picture got even more interesting when we merged the results from each of the students.  Once we cleaned up the resulting picture (eliminated pendant nodes, color coded the remaining Twitter users by team, etc), the students had identified over 50 new sources of information -- Twitter users who were posting information relevant to the issue of strategic minerals and vetted by many of the Twitter users we had already identified -- that we had never heard of.  You can see this more focused set of Twitter users in the image below.

While this sounds exciting (and it was, it was...), trying to listen to over 50 new voices seemed to be a bit overwhelming.  The question then became, "Of these 50, which are the 'best'?"

The traditional answer involves following all of them and then, over time, sorting out the wheat from the chaff.  Most people don't have that kind of time; we certainly didn't.  We needed another way to sort them and, thankfully, Twitter itself provides some potentially useful answers.

The first answer, of course, is to look at the number of "followers".  This is the number of Twitter accounts that claim to follow a particular person or organization.  In general, then, the sheer number of people who are following a particular person is a rough measurement of their influence and, by consequence, importance to a conversation on a particular topic.

Most twitterati don't put much credence in gross tallies of followers, though.  Anyone with a twitter account knows that only a relatively small number of their followers are actively engaged with the medium.  Some studies have also indicated that a third or more of these followers are fake or, even worse, bought and paid for.  While this is typically true on some of the most widely followed accounts and is significantly less likely to be true among the people who are tweeting about rare earths, for example, it is still a cause for concern.

Twitter again offers a solution to this problem but it takes a little work to get it.  The key is Twitter's List feature.  Twitter allows users to create lists of people; subsets, if you will, of the larger group of people a particular user might follow.  For example, I have a list of competitive intelligence librarians (there are actually quite a few on Twitter).  Lists are a way for people to follow hundreds or thousands of people but narrow and focus that chorus in a way that is most useful for them.  It allows the savvy Twitter user to filter signal from noise.

Twitter allows a user to not only look at their own lists but to know how many lists other people have created with their name on it.  This is important because it takes time and effort to create and curate a list.  It is almost certain that you have not been placed casually on a list.  Being placed on a list is an indicator of credibility; being on lots of lists even more so.  Like followers, though, the number of lists is still pretty rough and does not give the best sense of the value of a particular Twitter user to his or her followers.  Thus, while the number of lists you are on is not a bad indicator, many people like to use the list-to-follower ratio to assess overall credibility.

In other words, if you had 1000 followers and every one of them had placed you on a list, you would have a list-to-follower ratio of 1.  If only 500 had placed you on a list, then your list-to-follower ratio would be .5.  In practice, list-to-follower ratios of .1 are rare.  Based on my experience a list to follower ratio of .05 is very good and a list to follower ratio of .03 or lower is more typical.

While I am certain that there are automatic ways to collect the data you need from Twitter, we simply crowdsourced the problem.  Dividing the list into 11 pieces, we were able to quickly and accurately collect and deconflict the various data we needed including number of lists and number of followers.  In the end, we were able to rank order the 50 top Twitter users talking about Strategic Minerals in a variety of useful ways.  In all, including the teaching, it took us only about 6 hours to get from start to Top 50 list (For the complete list and more details go here)..

And here is where the analogy breaks down...

Up to this point, we were able to fairly confidently connect traditional HUMINT ideas and activities with what we were doing, much more quickly, using Twitter data.  The analogy wasn't perfect but it seemed good enough until we put the students -- the "case officers" -- into the network.  They stuck out like sore thumbs!

Case officers in traditional HUMINT networks need to be working from the shadows, pulling the strings on their networks in ways that can't be seen or easily detected.  Trying to lurk on Twitter in this sense just doesn't work, however.  My students, who are following many people but are not followed by many, became very obvious as soon as they were added to the network.  The same technology that allowed us to rapidly and efficiently come up with a pretty good first cut at who to follow on Twitter with respect to strategic minerals, allows those same people to spot the spammers and the autofollow bots and the lurkers and even the "case officers" pretty easily.

Back in my Army days we used to say, "If you can be seen you can be hit.  If you can be hit, you can be killed."  Social media appears to turn that dictum on its head: If you can't interact, you can be spotted.  If you can be spotted, you can be blocked.

It turns out, it seems, that the only way to be hidden on Twitter is to be part of the conversation.

Attitudes Towards Social Media Non-Users And Some Interesting Privacy Watchdog Sites

I have a team of students (very bright students, of course) who have been taking a hard look at social media and the risks of both being involved and the risks of not being involved.

They have come across lots of data (Key Finding:  It is highly likely that social media people LOVE to talk about social media (High confidence)), but we have not been able to find out one thing:  Do people who use social media sites (like Facebook and Twitter) think that people who don't use them are weird? I don't necessarily mean weird in a pejorative way (though I am certainly interested in that interpretation).  It could be just sort of a reaction, like when someone says, "Oh, I don't have a Facebook account" and someone else would automatically think, "That's weird."

So, before I talk more about it more, answer the Swayable below:


Here's what I think we'll see:  A small but significant percentage of those that answer the question will say, "Yeah, it's weird."  If I could gather details, I would guess that there would be a fairly strong correlation between those that think it is weird and age (with younger people thinking it is weirder, obviously).

What is really weird, though is that we can't seem to find anyone who has asked this question before.

Changing the subject a little (but not much), I also wanted to highlight two sites, one old and one new, that provide an interesting insight into the subject of privacy in the age of social media.

http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/

The first is the wonderful What They Know courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.  This site lets you explore the privacy settings of some of the most popular apps for IOS and Android phones.  You can see a screen shot of part of the site at the right but you owe it to yourself to visit the interactive and a bit disquieting site.

The other site, Privacyscore (See screenshot below), is new but seems like it would be particularly valuable to anyone who searches the web (i.e. everyone).  The site can tell you, based on its own rating system, on a scale 1-100 (where 1 is very bad and 100 is very good), how private your activities on that site really are.  So, for example, Google.com scores an 85 whereas Bing scores only a 74.   Of particular interest to heavy web users or researchers are the Firefox and Chrome add-ons that will display a site's privacy score in real time as you search.

http://www.privacyscore.com/

If You Think You Understand The Role Of Social Media In The Arab Spring Uprisings (And Particularly If You Don't), Watch This Video...

 

This video is an hour long and, frankly, I didn't think I would have the time this morning.  Started watching nonetheless and became riveted by one of the most cogent explanations of the role of social media in activism I have heard.  Even if you disagree (and this is not my area of expertise so I hope those that do disagree will do so in the comments so we can all learn), it is well worth the hour it takes to watch.

(Many thanks to my friends at Sharp for this!)

Evaluating The Reliability Of Social Media Sources, An Amazing Technology Roadmap And Reagan's Visual SFARs (Link List)

I love having friends and alumni that send me interesting links and this week contained an extraordinary crop!  Here are three of the best things that happened to cross my desktop:

Some of the Ushahidi Deployments

How To Verify Social Media Content.  We have known for some time how to evaluate online sources for credibility in a general sense (See Dax Norman's thesis and checklist here.  Not only it is a brilliant piece of research, it is also the only such document designed by an intelligence analyst for use by other intelligence analysts).  When it comes to understanding how to evaluate social media sources, however, the question becomes much trickier.

Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and previously co-directed Harvard's Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning (If you are not familiar with the crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, stop now and go here).  He has had extensive real-world experience with social media sources in the hundreds of uses of the Ushahidi platform in crises world-wide and he has translated that experience into an outstanding list of hints and tips for evaluating social media (Twitter specifcially).

While his insights into evaluating social media are born of this experience rather than more rigorous statistical analyses (like Dax's), his findings ring true and certainly operate as an excellent general purpose checklist until the science catches up. 

http://envisioningtech.com/

Envisioning Emerging Technology For 2012 And Beyond.  Through a series of serendipitous accidents, I have worked on a number of projects looking at technology trends. 

While I normally start with Gartner on these types of questions, I have just added Michael Zappa and his excellent work at Envisioning Technology to my short list of go-to sources.

The technology roadmap he has built is awesome (you can see the compact version to the right but I strongly recommend you take a look at the interactive version here (Note to Michael Zappa:  If you are going to make it Creative Commons, you might as well make it embeddable as well...Please!)).

Ronald Reagan: Intelligence and the End of the Cold War.  Finally, I like to emphasize the importance of production skills for my students with a variety of stories about high-level decisionmakers who preferred their intelligence in "alternative" formats.

For example, John F. Kennedy had the President's Intelligence Checklist (the PICL -- analysts who worked on the product were said to work in the "PICL Factory").  Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, liked to see some of his intelligence, at least, in the form of short videos.

(Note:  One of the kinds of analytic report writing we teach at Mercyhurst is called, generically, the Short Form Analytic Report, usually pronounced "Ess-Far".  When this type of report contains more visual elements than written ones, we call it a visual SFAR, hence the title to this post).

Many have speculated that this was because Reagan was an actor and naturally gravitated to film but, whatever the reason, it is an interesting lesson in the importance of producing intelligence -- that is, the ability to fully communicate the results of analysis to the decisionmaker that the intel unit is supporting.

You can see the full report here or watch the videos on the CIA's YouTube channel (!).   I have embedded my favorite (because I lived through it...) below: