Neil just wrote a monster of a post on social media – or whatever you’re enjoying calling it this week. In true Perkinian style ;) it’s incredibly thorough and well thought through. Have a read.
It covers a lot, but one thing jumped out at me, which relates to my last post about the Iranian green-twitter campaign.

Neil writes:

“I think one of the most useful ways of thinking about your audience is through the level of engagement and interaction they have with what you’re doing. The internet is a does medium. It’s not for passive consumption, it’s about interaction.”

And his diagram helped to tell the story:

But in reference to this diagram, he goes on to admit that:

Using the phrase ‘outer edges’ is potentially misleading – people may be as engaged with what you do here as anywhere else.

I agree (although the word engaged might not quite be right). Assuming the passive-to-active spectrum is linear is too simplistic. I immediately thought about what I wrote yesterday and I added this to Neil’s comments:

Things are perhaps most interesting when active and passive collide. They’re terms that are historically opposite, but now there is a new kind of behaviour that one might call ‘passive doing’ – participating with almost zero investment. Which hyper-connectivity and intuitive tools have made easy.

I know, I know. It’s a bit wanky to make up terms like ‘passive doing’. But you get my point. I sub-consciously (and in true binary style) succumbed to seeing the Iran campaign as ‘faux activism’. I think my discomfort was that it looked like it was trying to be a ‘doing’ thing, when actually it isn’t.

The web is full of passive doing. Because ‘doing’ simply means clicking nowadays. And in the quest to incentivise people to participate, I think maybe these things are being dressed up to make them feel more significant. ‘Exhale twice to show you care’ etc.

Anyway.

Tags: behaviour, newmedia, observations, quotes, ramblings