Examining Clubhouse through the Linkedin lens
A little bit busy this week, however, I have been tweeting short threads as a form of note-taking of my stream of thoughts on Clubhouse and the digital and audio media in general. With very little editing for clarity (sorry), please find the consolidated notes below:
Headline readers
“Twitter has bred a generation of headline readers,” I quoted from a video by PsychIRL. Print media (newspapers, specifically) lays out everything on the broadsheet. You see the headline, the lede, the images, the pull quotes in front of you. Online articles cannot compare – you need clickbait headlines to get you to click, and then you still have to scroll.
Audio is an opportunity, not disadvantage
As a journalist, I love the audio medium precisely because of how limiting it is. It means you really need to be a good communicator in that medium because if you lose your audience, they’re gone-gone. There are no visuals to aid comprehension or text to refer back to.
That said, its limits are also what makes it one of the least accessible forms of communication, which is why as someone who has done podcasting for years, I advocate for transcripts. It may sound like it’s counterproductive or defeating the purpose, but it makes a difference.
Text originally written for reading and text written for or transcribed from an oral delivery are different and are understood and processed by the consumer differently.
Many auto-transcription services are available, your use of them can help machine learning algorithms detect bad actors in the audio medium that is still poorly moderated. It is not the only solution, but it is one of them.
Clubhouse is audio Linkedin
See: Clubhouse Bio Generator. This is a generalisation. Nonetheless, Linkedin deserves the scrutiny that other social media platforms are subjected to when it comes to spreading misinformation, as I have written in The 18th Block, because within the cultishly influential corporate cult(ure)s and life coaching hacks is the ability to institutionally create and propagate an infodemic.
Remember that Linkedin, as harmless (or at the very least, cringey) as it may be to many, is also the place where Katie Jones – supposedly a senior researcher at a DC think tank but in reality, a deepfake account – was created to carry out covert work to gather intelligence on American targets.
By the way, the security expert who investigated and uncovered the ruse, Munira Mustaffa, will be one of the individuals that I will be interviewing in the coming weeks for The Starting Block, so email me with any questions for her. Meanwhile, thank you to everyone who has filled up the interview form, yes, I am still collecting potential interviews.
The Clubhouse app and the rise of oral psychodynamics
“It’s written/print culture that’s the recent historical anomaly, and still a minority of the world,” writes sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. “Transcripts do not allow for understanding oral culture or its pyschodynamics.” There are so many great thoughts laid out in this brilliant piece:
In contrast, some spoken forms (like news anchors) are actually products of print culture: they speak in a way nobody speaks. What most TV anchors are doing is reading writing out loud. That’s print psychodynamics, not orality.
In other words, oral culture is not suited to certain kinds of knowledge accumulation and legibility of the world, some of which is necessary to hold our institutions together. And this underappreciated transition is certainly one big reason for the current tension in this historic transition: because of technology, oral psychodynamics have broken through at scale, and we are trying to manage them with institutions that operate solely through and within print/written culture.
Can anyone moderate podcasts?
An excerpt from Ashley Carman’s reporting for The Verge:
Moderation isn’t a simple task, and even platforms like Facebook and Twitter routinely get it wrong. Audio presents an even tougher challenge. For one, new content rapidly streams into the space. A report published this month from podcast marketing company Chartable says 17,000 shows launch weekly, and to moderate them would mean scanning audio, whether that be with actual human ears, transcripts, or software, and then discerning whether they cross the line. This assumes the companies in the space even care to moderate.
“It’s quite hard to do it at scale,” says Mike Kadin, founder and CEO of the podcast hosting platform RedCircle. “We would have to transcribe everything, maybe, and apply some automated filters to look at everything. A: that’s expensive, and B: even if we could get everything in text, I don’t think a computer can understand the nuance of some of these issues, so it’s super challenging, and we do the best we can.”
The issue with Clubhouse is that it’s ‘podcast,’ but live. And fact-checking after the fact is not effective. Simply look at misleading tweets that go viral, and compare that with the number of retweets of its corrections – they rarely reach the same mass.
Why hot new social app Clubhouse spells nothing but trouble
From John Naughton, for his column on The Guardian, taken in parts:
There’s the contact-uploading requirements mentioned earlier which, as one commentator put it, are not only “telling the app developer that you’re connected to those people, but you’re also telling it that those people are connected to you – which they might or might not have wanted the app to know.”
Then there’s the discovery that Clubhouse makes unencrypted recordings of the conversations that take place in its virtual “rooms” (which are, it claims, subsequently deleted if nothing untoward has happened in the conversation).
I could go on, but you will get the point. Clubhouse reminds one of Facebook in its early days: starting out as an exclusive network and then gathering the masses into its giant data-hoovering machine before morphing into a threat to democracy. We’ve seen this movie before. So here’s a topic for a conversation: are we up for a rerun?
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading Thrashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood by Jo Freeman. When you read this, replace ‘trashing’ with ‘cancelling’ and ‘sisterhood’ with ‘progressive/left’.
I’m watching First Draft’s playlist of bite-sized tips and tricks to verifying content found on social media.
Chart of the week
From the Chartable report mentioned above, showing a 280% growth in the creation of new podcasts in 2020 compared to the previous year: