Interview with Suw Charman-Anderson on Social media, organizing, and government

Thanks! I hope that I'm the beginning of a trend - there are so many people doing really cool stuff over on this side of the Pond.

Blogging is intimately intertwined with what I do, but really I earn my living because of my blog, rather than directly from it. I work as a social media consultant, helping businesses in the UK and US understand how they can benefit from Web 2.0 applications such as blogs and wikis. I focus primarily on the use of social software in business communications, particularly internally, and explain the how the tools work, what they are useful for, and how to plan and execute an implementation strategy.

I get most of my clients through word of mouth, and I'd say that my blog, Strange Attractor (strange.corante.com), plays a fairly big part in that. I write there with my husband, Kevin Charman-Anderson, who is a journalist and social media expert. We're a very bloggy household!

Having said that, I have just started a new blog called Kits and Mortar (kitsandmortar.com), which is a commercial blog about planning a green, self-build house. It's only a month old, and I'm in the middle of doing a deal to get some advertising on it. It's a bit of an experiment for me, to see whether or not it is still possible to earn a buck or two blogging about subjects that you're passionate about. So far it's had an amazing response, with lots of people sending me links and leaving comments.

But Kits and Mortar is more of a side-project, and I can't imagine me giving up consulting soon. I enjoy it too much! Indeed, over the four years since I started as a blog consultant, the market has really matured a lot, and there's more demand for my skills than ever before. Clients are telling me know that they don't see the adoption of social media as optional anymore. They know that they have to learn to better collaborate and communicate, or they are going to lose out to their competitors. It's not just about marketing anymore - these are important business tools.

I've always had an interest in languages, and in particular the Celtic languages. We used to go to Cornwall on holiday every year when I was a kid, and I became fascinated with the place names and their meanings. Places like Luxulyan (from Lok-Sulyan, 'cell or holy place of St Sulyan) or Halzaphron (Als-yffarn, 'hell cliff') just sounded so much more interesting and romantic than names like Bournemouth or Wimborne that I had grown up with.

I went to the University of Wales, College of Cardiff to study geology, and started to become interested in the Welsh language. Years later, I started to learn it, and just never really quite got round to stopping. It's a truly beautiful language and there is a vibrant Welsh language culture, including some fabulous music in forms you wouldn't expect to hear in Welsh, particularly hiphop. There's a very strong learner culture too, with lots of very well written books aimed specifically at adult learners. That's great, because although I'm quite fluent if we're chatting about dinner, formal literature is still a bit beyond me.

Despite being very English - no one in my family is Welsh and I grew up on the South coast of England, quite far from Wales - I love Wales and the Welsh language. It's a very important part of my life, and of who I am.

Before I worked as a music journalist I worked in science publishing, on a number of bi-monthly journals. Part of my job was to have our authors complete copyright waiver forms. It made me very uncomfortable to ask people to waive all rights in their work, but I wasn't quite sure why.

When I became a music journalist, I started to see first hand the issues around copyright, and how important it was for musicians to understand exactly what it was they were signing over, for how long, and to whom. Again, it made me uncomfortable to see musicians signing away all their rights, frequently without getting very much in return.

But it wasn't until I was introduced to the work of Lawrence Lessig and, in particular, his book Free Culture, that I realised what it was that had been disturbing me for so long. The way that Lessig talks about culture, knowledge and sharing really opened my eyes and made me feel as if I had to do something. And the more I talked to my fellow bloggers, the more I found people who felt the same way I did, and who could teach me more about the different digital rights issues that we face at the moment.

The sheer scale of the problems we face as a society, in the UK, the US and everywhere else in the world, is daunting, but the internet gives us the tools to organise and to do something about it. We just need to encourage people to engage with the issues and to take the relatively small actions, such as writing to your democratic representatives, which will help us solve some of these problems.

I don't think blogging is going to change much over the next few years. It's settled in fairly well culturally, and whilst I'm sure there will be refinements to the technology I don't think that will have a major impact on the way that the tools are used, either by the media or the general public.

I'm sure that we will see major refinements in video conversation tools such as Seesmic, and we'll see more multi-tool clients that can pull in content from many different sources and combine it in new and meaningful ways, that is all already happening.

The audience has been growing, and will continue to do so as more people get online, and as those who are already are introduced to social tools. For that reason, I think it's unlikely that we'll see a crash in blog usage, although I wouldn't be surprised if certain social networking apps showed a decline as audiences get bored and go elsewhere.

I think e most interesting question to ask is, What happens when all of this is normal and a part of the fabric of every day life? The technology's not as interesting as the culture. On the internet, that culture's thriving, but in the mainstream media, it's just not there yet.

There are still a lot of journalists who simply want to be provocative, rather than thought provoking. And many just don't want to engage with their audience in any meaningful way. There's the risk that, as Web 2.0 becomes more mainstream, the people with the real understanding of it (but little or no political power) get sidelined and those without the chops take control and regress us back to the late 90s.

The game has changed significantly since I first got online over ten years ago. Back then I don't think many people really thought about personal data too much, we just did whatever we were interested in.

Now, though, there are so many ways that businesses and governments alike can gather, mine and share data, we really have no idea what information is being gathered, by who, or for what purposes. We really do need to put our foot down en masse and tell companies that our data is our data, not theirs, and that they need to respect our privacy. Whether that is by boycotting businesses or websites with a poor record, or by writing to businesses or our elected representatives to explain why we are unhappy about what they are doing, we need to all get more involved.

And the excuse that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is an increasingly inaccurate one. Businesses gathering data on your web surfing habits could sell the data to health insurance providers, who jack up the premiums for anyone caught Googling certain keywords, for example. And governments using data mining can end up 'creating' suspects from thin air, simply by using a dodgy algorithm in their pattern matching software.

So privacy - what data you give to whom, and how you hold companies and governments accountable for what they do with your data - would be at the top of my list of things that people should engage with.

Overall, I think that governments and non-profits are much slower to investigate and adopt social software than business, and I think that's almost completely down to the different cultures prevalent in those sectors. Government thrives on inefficiency and knowledge-hoarding, and non-profits tend to be over-worked, under-resourced, and reluctant to spend money on something that they can't immediately see the benefit of.

That's not to say that there are no government departments or non-profits embracing social media, but it seems to happen where there is an incumbent evangelist promoting the idea to his or her colleagues. I think it'll be a while before the cultures change enough for it becomes commonplace.

I think that music and science are more similar than they seem: they are both about personal expression of ideas and the enrichment of society. We can't value one above the other. And just as the world cannot be studied without the works of all those scientists who have come before, music cannot be written without the influence of previous composers and musicians. Both disciplines rely on sharing, reuse, and the ability to make derivative works. That's why there's a Science Commons as well as a Creative Commons.

But that's by the by, really. Copyright does not exist to protect personal expression, but as an economic tool to encourage that expression. The idea is that by creating a limited monopoly over a piece of work, people would be encouraged to create more, knowing that they had control over its exploitation for a set period of time.

The problem now is that the creative industries have attached unwarranted "moral" arguments to copyright in order to try to bolster their position when it comes to lobbying for more rights. They have become locked into a downwards spiral of increasingly outrageous land-grabs which do existing creators no economic good at all, and which stifle future works. That are, essentially, shooting the goose that laid the golden egg for the sake of a quick omelette.

Yes, it was a lot less congenial than most of the web conferences I usually go to. There seemed to be a lot of tension, but I think that's indicative of the industry as a whole. Small ISPs feel like they are fighting for their very survival; large ISPs and telcos are fighting for control; internet activists are fighting for the freedom to use the net without impediment; and consumers are simply fighting for an honest deal at a reasonable price. There are a lot of opposing view points, driven by a lot of opposing motivations, and that's bound to cause some friction.

In an ideal world, I'd like to see more honesty, transparency and conversation around key issues like broadband penetration, net neutrality and network capacity, but I'm afraid that's a pipe dream. We're back to the problem of clashing cultures again, and that's a big hairy problem to tackle.

Clay Shirky recently said that when the technology becomes boring enough, it becomes socially interesting, and I feel that we're starting to get to that place now with blogs, and wikis aren't too far behind. The functionality of blogs and wikis is pretty much sorted, and the major areas of development are in usability and integration with other tools, not adding superduper new abilities. We're getting to the point where all you need in order to blog is literacy and to know what an URL is. Wikis still need better wysiwyg editing, but they too are moving towards an accessibility horizon where they go from being specialist tools to being suitable for the general population.

When that happens, you can take the technology out of the equation and focus on the people, on the cultural aspects of Web 2.0. That, to me, is what's most fascinating. How are these tools, which encourage sharing, conversation and communication, going to affect business, government and non-profit culture? In many ways, these existing cultures are fundamentally broken, with the emphasis on rewards to the individual resulting in unhealthy internal competition, which then negatively affects the company's ability to function efficiently within its marketplace. Social media can help change that. The question is, who's brave enough to let it?

Thanks for the opportunity to chat, Dave! It's been fun!