Blogworldexpo: keynote 1
Laura Fitton, @pistachio “how dare you not be awesome” (First keynote for blogworldexpo)
Fitton, takes the stage, “twitter turned her life inside out”, “little things to make the world better”, “when everyone gets it – 4 billion handsets – then some amazing things are going to happen”. Home-bound mom, blogging, twittering, playing, brought into her life “ideas..people…energy”; but it is not “about me”. What you personally can do – if you don’t do it – then you are cheating other people as well!
Awesome – a personal strategy, but it’s about sharing and inspiring others; creativity, personal commitment, ethics, quirkiness. Social media unleashes “awesome” because it aggregates that strength and passion.
Emphasises mentoring as a key aspect of social networking.
Describing superpowers: Fitton’s is ‘being lucky’ – demonstrates (Wiseman, Luck Factor) that luck can be managed, created based on intelligence, insight, optimism.
Unpredictability of twitter; ‘what technology is twitter disrupting?’ – face book, isolation, email… NOT interrupting lack of resources. Focusing now on twitter; twitter as ‘global sensing and reporting” system; asking for mathematical tools to analyse this datastream. Twitter kills the ‘influencer’ model of mass media; Fitton doesn’t see her role as influencer – it’s the message NOT the person. (refs various ‘unknowns’ who get to be important via msg – eg photo of plane in Hudson). Big media does NOT get it.
A key message “you are not alone” (links to her personal foundations in twitter?); astute insight – socialising is huge in business, twitter is about socialising .
Really key idea about social media: you have to connect with people, your link is not about ‘driving traffic’ to your site, nor narcissistic posting; it’s about opening a space for people to gain from your insights and so on.
Conclusion: “Influence WAS attracting attention to yourself”
great keynote
Side notes
Not surprisingly, different vibe from academic conference; more open to locating pedagogic stories within personal experience; but, there’s curious synergies – while the discourse is different, this keynote is self-ethnographic research, and the presentation communicates outcomes from that research, both as summations and openings for the future. It’s also damn more entertaining than most keynotes!Keynote, both presentation and reaction, creates embodied performance of the passion and significance with which many people take to, and live through social media; there’s a nice edge to Fitton’s presentation – it’s about negotiating the potentials and actuals for individuality and ego which often have too much emphasis with the much greater impact that collective strong self-identification can bring: we can see Wellman’s networked individualism at work.
Theory in action: academics discuss the challenge of making people see that technology is not determining, but is interwoven in a kind of actor network way, both enabling and guiding, but always within social context. She mentions twitter and similar, but these are not divorced from social context; indeed twitter now stands in for a deep and sophisticated self-theory of social mediated networking – twitter is a language through which new forms of social relations are spoken or, at least, new ethics for progressive social life
The dichotomy between the influencer and the influential message approaches (she sees twitter as the second); I think there is a third component or a way of linking, since I am not sure that people are not still influential (partly through things other than twitter, but also through presence and reach). The power Fitton describes – eg getting donations from 1000s of followers – is a network power, a combination of the message, the followerers and the sender. This brings crowd-wisdom/action back into the mix.
“Twitter literacy” – excellent; it’s about an ethic of care, of the self and the environment. Literacy, online, is a more advanced version of netiquette which was always about respecting the applications and the network, not just the person. Once again, we have a deep sense from Fitton that ethical behaviour is both necessary and valuable; it is achieved/ managed by education within a social grouping not just within the self; ethics sustains environment
I sense a degree of faith (not unlike religiousity) in discussions of twitter, especially in a practical way – eg how do key twitter advocates convert / evangelise people in their companies to see how it can work – reminiscent of discussions I was involved with late 1990s about the net. Perhaps the question to ask is: what will disrupt Twitter?