The Future of Textbooks

My employer, Grand Rapids Community College, is one of two schools taking part in a pilot program being offered by the Follett Corporation (the entity the college outsourced its bookstore services to several years ago) to rent textbooks to students as opposed to forcing students to buy them, which could result in a savings of over 40% in some cases.

It's likely Follett is being forced into this position by online services like Chegg.com which offer textbook rental and are quickly gaining popularity.

Given how much dissatisfaction there is out there with textbook prices, I'm amazed this didn't happen sooner (though the used textbook market and meta-search engines like BigWords.com have helped keep text prices lower). That same dissatisfaction could provide the momentum that gets the open source textbook movement going.

It's an uphill battle (as California is finding out), but if academics could agree on a universal platform upon which to develop them, open source textbooks could be the future. Think of it: a world where everyone has access to free textbooks created by the brightest minds from around the world on any given topic and proofed by thousands of pairs of eyes. If published on a flexible base (like XML), they could be turned into digital texts (or students could pay a third party to print a copy for them), they could be readily turned into versions for students with disabilities (braille or audio), pushed out to mobile devices, or incorporated into enterprise course management systems like Blackboard.

Interestingly enough I don't think traditional textbook publishers have to disappear in an open source model. They could sustain themselves by focusing on the ancillary textbook material for faculty: translation services, banks of test questions, suggested classroom activities, exercises, multimedia teaching aids, video game modules, etc. - the opportunities are limitless.

Privacy in the Age of Social Media and Radical Transparency

Bruce Schenier at Wired wrote an excellent piece ("It's Time to Drop the 'Expectation of Privacy' Test") about the need to drop the "Expectation of Privacy" test currently used as the primary case law that determines the constitutionality of government action. He cites some of the analysis and proposed alternatives from Daniel Solove, Orin Kerr, and Jed Rubenfeld.

It is crucial that the US take concrete efforts to address this issue; more information is being created (in 2008, 4 exabites of unique information was generated - more than all of the data created in the preceeding 5,000 years), digitized and held (potentially indefinitely), this will only become an increasingly dire concern. This is especially true when one considers the spectre of a privatized federal intelligence-gathering infrastructure.

The problem becomes apparent, too, when one thinks of how defamation law works given the "public figure doctrine." Under the current model, private citizens are affored more protection than public figures. But what constitutes a "public figure" in the age of social media? Does simply creating a MySpace profile qualify? What about publishing a Twitter feed?

In the book Born Digital (which I'm reading), the authors (John Palfrey and Urs Gasser) run through the lifecycle of a child born today to illustrate how vastly more data is created and available about them than in any generation in history - and how decisions that will affect the rest of their lives are made without their consent by unwitting parents.

In the area of government and civil rights, there have already been abuses of the warrantless wiretapping power that the Bush Administration claimed for itself as the administration illegally wiretapped journalists and aid workers. Perhaps the solution to this lack of privacy is more transparency: what if we requried the federal government to publish online a list of all of its active surveillance investigations? The argument that such information should be protected because it would alert criminals/terrorists to the investigation is moot because they already assume this is the case, and this might dissuade the government from abusing its power.

In the area of social norms, we're running up on some terrible uses of existing criminal law with respect to privacy - like those protecting sensitive populations like minors as teenagers are being prosecuted for sending or holding nude photos of themselves. (These prosecutions pervert the spirit of these laws becuase they're in place to protect the victimized population; they're not meant to be applied when the victim is the perpetrator).

I'm increasingly convinced that the future lies not in restricting access to information, but in protecting society after the fact in a world where everything is transparent. We should be asking ourselves what we can do to render harmless private information about us that might be disclosed (because we must assume that it will be). What will this look like? It will change everything from how we validate identity, to how we educate/prepare children, and it will likely fundamentally alter our societal/cultural mores.

"Fool us Onc...": Why Social Media Renders Most Marketing/Advertising Worthless

When it comes down to it, most marketing/advertising (and a lot of public relations) in the modern era is about fooling people. Fooling them to infiltrate their social sphere to influence them, fooling them to thinking they need things that they don't, fooling them into thinking that one product is better than another.

So the model goes, you think of a new way to fool a bunch of people into paying for your product/service, they get wise, they stop paying, you think of a new way to fool them into paying for your product/service (and lather, rinse, repeat as needed). It's a dance.

That model is only economically-viable when you're able to fool a large number of people at once for a relatively low cost. In an environment saturated by ubiquitous technology and social media - that model fails because the costs and barriers change. Even if you figure out a way to game the system, the lifespan of that new tactic is extraordinarily short because people are now always networked and communicate with each other. The lifespan is so short that it's a fraction of the length of many advertising / promotion campaigns, so before you can even get the word out - the verdict from the audience is already in.

Here's how it works:

First, it's increasingly difficult to even find the people you need to fool. People are opting out of the traditional mass media in droves, so one must spend vastly more resources piecing together an audience of any considerable size. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

Second, once you do find a way to reach your audience, they've become highly tribal and have set up discourse communities with increasingly-esoteric communication codes to police their membership. The time you'd invest learning the communication codes of a discourse community in order to infiltrate it isn't worth the comparatively small payoff of the tiny "Long Tail" audience you reach. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

Third, even if you find the audience and learn their language - if you disappoint them (either with a product/service that doesn't meet their needs or that is inferior), you stand to lose them forever. Worse, if you disappoint them enough, they may tell their other tribes about you. [Translation: Big cost barrier.]

That's the bad news.

The good news is that there's a world of opportunity for good products/services (as Jonathan Coulton will tell you) provided by organizations that are responsive and accountable to their stakeholders, and the barriers are lower than they've ever been. There are even opportunities for big companies, provided they're willing to stop trying to fool themselves (and customers) into thinking that they can be all things to all people and they're willing to shrink down to the size that best serves their stakeholders. (Seth Godin just expounded on this point in his blog).

Ragan Communications: OMG. Epic. Fail.

My co-worker (not me) has apparently been receiving solicitations like this from Ragan Communications:

>>> On 3/5/2009 at 4:46 PM, wrote: Dear Derek‚ Are you on Twitter by any chance? I am writing to ask if you'd follow me. I know: It sounds a bit cultish. But hey‚ I gotta walk the talk‚ don't I? I promise not to pester you with boring tweets. This link (http://twitter.com/mark347) will take you to my page. Just hit "follow" under my picture. I hope all is well with you‚ Mark P.S. Are you coming to our Corporate Communicators Conference in Chicago this May? Is anyone else from Grand Rapids Community College? P.P.S. As always‚ I'm looking for story ideas for Ragan.com. Let me know if you guys have made any breakthroughs in your comms department‚ OK? Just hit "reply" to this message to get by the usual gatekeepers. Remove yourself from this mailing list. ( http://www.ragan.com/savicom_unsub ) This has been sent to you by: Ragan Communications 111 E. Wacker Dr., Suite 500 Chicago, Il 60601 Contact us at 800.878.5331 or employeecomm@ragan.com.

There are a number of problems with this email aside from the fact that it's addressed to the wrong person; (1) The author wrongly assumes that I know who he is (and further, that I actually believe him when he says he hopes things are well with me). (2) "Grand Rapids Community College" is clearly not a corporation - so why would its employees be attending a "Corporate Communicators Conference?" (3) Somehow I just don't buy that they're interested in any "breakthroughs" from my "comms department," or that I'm going to get special access to them by replying to the email. (4) I checked out the Twitter feed and it's full of boring promotional tweets (and even more boring sub-tweets from followers).

This is an unfortunate example of how profoundly misunderstood social media is by the traditional mass media communications machine. The 'establishment' (for lack of a better word) continues to think that social media is just another channel to pump the same messages through. It's not, and as the faux pas above illustrate - not only is the message rendered ineffective - it actually stands to do damage to the organization by revealing it as disingenuous. It's like watching a pocket calculator try to pass the Turing test.

I'm no rocket surgeon, but I think that rather than wasting time with bulk email Mark should be working on his craft and producing a Twitter feed, podcast or blog worth reading to influence opinion leaders and early adopters. If he's good, I'll hear about it and subscribe on my own. That new paradigm is what frustrates organizations stuck in the past (the GOP is a primary example of this right now): they actually have to produce a worthwhile product that meets the needs of a segment of the public that has money to spend on it. They can't count on slick marketing campaigns anymore because it's no longer affordable to patch together large enough audience with enough repetition for that approach to work on.

PRSA just published a piece in PR Tactics which gets some things right, but still reinforces some of the mistaken perceptions about "using" social media (mostly as a result of trying to explain it to those who still don't grasp it and can only think about in outmoded terms).

The bottom line is that one doesn't "incorporate" social media - one must live it. Any level of sincerity and transparency less than that is doomed to fail because those using social media are so adept at sniffing out inauthenticity.

If an organization is not willing to fundamentally re-think every aspect of its operations in response to social media - it shouldn't participate. But that's okay; not every brand is congruent with approach demanded by social media and for the forseeable future there's still place for those organizations to continue operating. If they want to have a future though, they should at least be closely watching discussions about themselves in social media and evolving the capacity to transform themselves.

A Hurdle for Citizen Journalism: Lawsuits

As the Poynter Institute notes, lawsuits against bloggers are on the rise going from four in 1997 to 89 in 2007. While the number seems small - it's a disturbing indicator of what will likely be a rapidly-increasing trend as advertising revenues continue to decline and the mainstream media is increasingly unable to return the higher profits demanded by stockholders (forcing staffing and budget cuts to news departments).

Corporations, having lost their bid to turn the Internet into a medium like the conventional media (where wealth controls one's level of access) by overturning Net Neutrality, are invariably going to seek out alternatives to preserve the control they exert over the traditional mass media. That means lawsuits; and frivolous lawsuits at that - knowing that bloggers lack the legal protections afforded to journalists do (being shielded behind the masthead of a newspaper that can afford to fight off "junk" lawsuits alleging defamation or copyright infringement).

This is one of several major hurdles to "citizen journalism" being able to take over in the wake of the declining quality of the mainstream for-profit news media. Another hurdle often cited is the lack of formal training for most bloggers (who do not frequently observe the standards journalists do which are designed to preserve objectivity in reporting).

It will be interesting to see what happens as this trend worsens. Will citizen journalists band together to form a consortium (which might maintain legal protections for member journalists who pay dues and agree to adhere to a certain set of standards)? Will legislation be introduced (or will case law be interpreted) that grants bloggers immunity from this sort of suit? Time will tell.

Regardless of the outcome, it will be interesting to observe what happens - and it will bear directly on how the First Amendment is interpreted in the forseeable future.