Snapchat: Off The Record

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Contrary to much research, and despite lots of clever product design, digital life curation is not quite so all-consuming.

Snapchat – which enables users to exchange picture messages that self-delete within a few seconds of receipt – just raised a $60m funding round at a valuation of $800m, and is now carrying almost 200m daily snaps.

Public / Semi-public communication creates a greater cognitive overhead than private, ephemeral communication.

It’s not surprising, then, that some choose to opt out of platforms on which they feel a need to curate, and opt in to platforms on which curation is barely possible.

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Reference:

Garde-Hansen, J. (2009). My memories? Personal digital archive fever and Facebook. In Save as… Digital memories, ed. Garde-Hansen, J., Hoskins, A., and Reading, A.. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.135-150

Full text: http://ds.haverford.edu/fortherecord/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Garde-Hansen.pdf

The strange case of Newbury and Maidenhead

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Newbury and Maidenhead nestle quietly west of London. Neither has a professional football team, neither is a hotbed of cutting-edge consumer tech, and neither has >100,000 inhabitants.

So when my team launched a Facebook football game, we were rather shocked to see them in the list of top 10 places where our players lived.

Scoreboard focused on the English Premier League. Each week users would predict the results of the upcoming matches, and every Friday we made a show in which two pundits pitted their wits against the wisdom of the crowd.

We were big in Asia because I spent money reaching Asian football fans, who are under-served when it comes to everything other than the live matches. But Newbury and Maidenhead – what was going on there?

The questions stumped me for weeks until I stumbled across an academic paper: The Spread of Behaviour in an Online Social Network Experiment, published by Damon Centola in Science (2010) and summarised here by MIT.

The paper looks at the spread of behaviour through two networks of equal size and containing an equal number of connections, but with rather different structures.

The first network has regularly-spaced nodes (nodes = people), and no real clusters. The second network has a small number of dense clusters, with only minimal connections from one cluster to another.

In which network do behaviours spread faster?

It’s the second. Why? Because in order for behaviour to pass from one person to another there need to be multiple stimuli. So a well-spaced network will transmit behaviour more slowly than a clustered network, because in clusters there are dense interconnections between a small number of people. If one friend suggests I watch a new film, I might nod politely. But when a second and third say the same thing, I really start to listen.

We must have hit upon a densely-connected network of football fans in Newbury and Maidenhead. One or two started playing, then invited friends to play, and soon those inside the network must have been receiving multiple invitations and decided to give it a go.

If we did that project again I’d spend the whole marketing budget targeting very specific groups of potential players – and I’m sure I would get more bang for each buck.

The British comedian Norman Wisdom is a hero in Albania. Maybe one day there’ll be a statue of Scoreboard presenter Dougie Anderson in Newbury and Maidenhead.

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Reference:

Centola, D. (2010), The Spread of Behaviour in an Online Social Network Experiment. Science 329(5996), 1194-1197

Summary: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/social-networks-health-0903.html