Chris Willis (Footnote.com): We need to start thinking like anthropologists

Chris Willis, the co-author of the influential We Media report, and currently vice president of social media for Footnote.com (a site focusing on history-related materials) led off a session on "The Emerging Culture of the New Information Order." He stressed the importance of metaphors in organizing social media, and provided a powerful example.  Noticing that visitors to the Vietnam War Memorial often leave behind comments, dog tags, flowers, etc. which are then removed, Footnote created an image of the entire wall, and is inviting its community to use it as a platform for comments, questions, and other forms of participation and interaction.

"€œWe need to understand what it means to be human and to interact with others."  He presented (slides will be posted on the nfais.org site) an adaptation of Maslow’s hierarchy relating each stage to the related requirements for social media ("when people feel safe they start doing things"€).  Challenges include: how to manage the tension between individual and group?  How do you produce meaning from the miscellaneous?

His advice (not as simple as it sounds):

"Design to help people make your stuff better."

"Be interesting"

Comments

[Jim Schueckler]

Yes, many personal tributes are left by visitors at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. (It isn't a "war" memorial)

Those items left at the Wall are *not* discarded. They are gathered and indexed daily by National Park Service Rangers and placed into organized storage by the NPS, the steward of the Wall.

Many researchers and authors have pored over the items. Items that were left at the Wall are on display in the Americam History section of the nearby Smithsonian Institution and also at the nearby musuem of the Department of the Interior.

Thousands of personal tributes of poems, letters, photographs, and citations have been placed by on-line visitors on the web site named The Virtual Wall (TM) at http://www.VirtualWall.org