Deloitte doesn't get it

Experientia's blog, Putting people first, a great site for user-centred design types, posted an article that caught my eye today.

Unfriendly technology is creating a digital divide in the workforce, warns Deloitte

A lack of user-friendly technology in the marketplace is exacerbating a digital divide in the workforce between those who can use technology effectively and those who can’t and is likely to provoke a backlash among users, according to a new Technology Predictions for 2007 report from consultancy Deloitte.

The research predicts that technology vendors will focus increasing resources on the user interface in their products this year, and adds that "certain products have become unnecessarily complex and unusable, due to the incomprehensibility of their user interface"

"Businesses cannot afford to have a digital divide in their labour force," said Deloitte technology partner David Tansley. "They need to be in a position where the vast majority of employees interact with the vast majority of the technology needed to do their jobs with little need for training."

Can't say I disagree with any of that. So I decided to saunter over to the Deloitte site and download their 2007 Tech Predictions. I wish the rest of the content was as insightful.

About midway through the report, I found this description of social networking:

Social networking, one of the most talked about new media phenomena of 2006, has been going on for many years, ever since the Internet existed. Social networking evolved from Internet-based communities of interest called Usenets and was originally dominated by technology aficionados, a group that would generally be regarded as being on the wrong side of fashionable. But with the growth in broadband penetration, as well as digital cameras and higher performance processors, Usenets have evolved into social networking, a mass market, leisure and entertainment activity.

Okay. Perhaps I'm just getting hung up on language here, but "social networking" as being a phenomena that found its genesis in Usenet? I had presumed that social networks were the visual, written, or programmatic representation of the strong and weak ties that people have amongst each other. Social networking is the ability to travel through one's personal network and increase the strength between ties (or weaken them) or forge new ones and is something that's been with us since we were in caves. The computer-networked version of this phenomena perhaps relates back to the introduction of mailing lists or Usenet, where people used computers to strengthen and expand their existing social networks, but the way it's described here seems pretty poor.

Next page, we find some more questionable content.

Social networks are the reinvented form of the bulletin board, a previously unfashionable form of Web-based communication much loved by the technology and scientific communities. The original bulletin boards served as a means for professionals and enthusiasts to exchange ideas and request help on projects. Though their use was niche, the impact of bulletin boards was significant. Much of today's software is founded on the ideas and exchanges posted on bulletin boards.

Uh, okay. Let's describe some pretty interesting complex interactions mediated through software as "basically bulletin boards." Again, is it just me or does this seem really weak? And what is with this author and their issues about being "fashionable" anyhow?

Of course, nowadays, sites like Myspace are big bucks because of the zillions of teenagers that go there, use the site, and count for advertising impressions (I'm paraphrasing the next section of their report, and for good reason, which I'll get to in a second).

And this is where it gets even better.

One of the most significant challenges awaiting media companies is dealing appropriately with the posting of copyright-protected material on social networking sites. Unfortunately, a proportion of content posted on these sites has effectively been stolen from media companies. Until now, media companies have tended not to litigate against social network sites for infringement as in many cases there was too little capital for which to sue. However in 2007 the rising value of social networking companies, or the substantial capital of the parent corporations that own them, may make social networks worth pursuing. Technological solutions may provide the answer to this problem. Technology that can search through all uploaded content, including copyrighted music that accompanies user-generated video, is perhaps the only solution for reducing the risk of litigation through searching, identifying, and removing copyright material.

This statement just came from one of the world's most powerful and influential consulting firms, in the same week, that Steve Jobs of Apple, posted these thoughts about copyright and DRM'd music.

How out of touch is Deloitte?

Apparently they answer the question:

Doing so may also help social-networking companies preserve the integrity of their business models. Advertisers, likely to be one of the main components of the social networking business model, are unlikely to want their advertisement placed next to stolen content.

To further re-enforce their feelings about stolen protected content, the PDF that I was reading wouldn't even allow me to cut and paste that text into this blog post. No, their digital document was locked down. Nice. I had to type that drivel above by hand.

Everytime I go to a Myspace page (which isn't very often, I'll admit, but sometimes I get sent a link or stumble across a pretty good one), I have to quickly hit my speaker volume control, as music starts blaring immediately. It's an embedded MP3 of the page creator's favourite band, pictures of their favourite celebrities are plastered all over the site, the flashing blinking oversized signifiers of their consumption-heavy pop-culture immersed consumer lifestyle. It's digital detritus and deeply meaningful to the creator, co-creator, and their peers. Their webpage occupies the same significance as the teenager's bedroom or highschool locker, plastered with the same imagery of their favourite bands, brands, and celebrities.

And it's not just limited to teenagers. Hell, I'm doing it here on my website, with the list of links I provide, the books I'm reading, pictures I display, topics I write about, my list of bands.

The re-mixing, re-purposing, and re-production: the socially associative power of this symbolic game is the stuff advertisers (with their degrees in neo-Marxist thought and semiotics and art-school theory) are made of. Acquiring goods, be it media or otherwise, and then publicly displaying the results, getting the consumers to do the advertising for you (wear those Nikes, flaunt those white ear-bud headphones, swing that Chanel bag), is at the heart of this big messy capitalist marketplace crapola. So much so, people have written books against it.

It's the social construction of self. It's bricolage.

Copyright? Copyright-infringement-hunting search bots? WTF?

The marketers who have figured this stuff out are way ahead of the curve, attempting to exploit and co-opt (as any good hegemonic institution will - and no you don't need to read Gramsci to understand how that works, as advertisers hijack persuasive ideas all the time to try to sell you stuff you don't need) these newly discovered techniques. The whole Unilever / Bridezilla / Wig-out thing that's unfolded in the past few days, using everyone's favourite social networking meets user-created video content super site YouTube, got that company a ton of press (no press is bad press?) when it was revealed that it wasn't real. On the more "legitimate" use of the technology (whatever that means) that OK Go treadmill video has been watched over 10 million times since July.

Yeah, we don't need or want you watching / consuming our content on these social networking sites. We're too busy preparing our legal case against Google right now, thanks.

The genie's been out of the bottle on this stuff for a long time. I don't even know why I'm getting so worked up about it, as it just seems like a complete non-starter. And the fact that Deloitte is publishing this as futures-based stuff seems really backward looking and anachronistic. Next thing they'll introduce is a technology that permits kids from recording their favourite song on the radio onto a cassette tape... The age of mechanical reproduction has been with us for a long time. The age of digital reproduction has just got going.

Perhaps I've been reading too much about networks, how they work, and the proponents of a different kind of information economy. But this stuff really seemed narrow-minded and generally pretty weak.