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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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Golly. Three months without posting. But things have calmed down at work, I took a few days off for Burning Man two weekends ago, and I slept most of this past weekend, and, hey, look, I have things to say again. Well, actually, I’ve had things to say for months, but not the energy to write them up after work. And it didn’t help that I felt like I had to write something _really_ insightful or amazing to justify posting after such a long drought. But that’s silly, so this week I’m going to try to post multiple times to try to start the habit back up again.
I had a small-world moment with a friend I was meeting at Burning Man, where we discovered multiple separate paths through social space by which we could have known each other (otherwise known as small world syndrome, where it seems like new people we meet always know people that we know). I’ve talked about small world syndrome before as an example of reality coefficients, where our social worlds are so small because we only interact with people who share our view of reality.
I also had a large-world moment a few weeks ago, when I attended a housewarming party where I really only knew the host, putting me in a large room of people where I didn’t know anybody. And I chatted with several folks and realized that their social world didn’t overlap with mine at all except through this one friend we had in common. It was an interesting experience, as what little social time I have had outside of work over the past year has been spent with my close friends, so I’d been enveloped in my small world. It was good for me to step outside it and remember there are all these people I don’t know, whose worlds might be interesting and worth checking out.
I think there’s value in both experiences. Being in a small world is comforting – it provides a place where our values are reinforced and where basic worldview assumptions don’t have to be defended. But it is also limiting in preventing us from having new experiences, from challenging our beliefs – it makes it more difficult to grow. Part of the reason I moved to New York was that I felt like I was in a rut in the Bay Area, where my world had gotten too small, so it was time for me to step out into the larger world.
However, being in a large world has a separate set of issues. It does provide challenges and new experiences, but it also requires one to be always “on”, which can become exhausting. Some people thrive on the constant shiny newness, but I am not one of them. That was one of the reasons I moved back to California, with the goal of taking what I’d learned about large-world living in New York and balancing it with my small worlds in the Bay Area.
We choose the mix of small worlds and large worlds we live in. Some people choose to live within a small world their entire life (e.g. somebody living in a small town, or somebody who spends all their time on one interest like sports or video games), prioritizing comfort over growth. Others choose the large-world life of novelty, traveling the world, constantly throwing themselves into new situations for the sheer thrill of it. And every possibility in between is available, with small worlds and large worlds overlapping in interesting and unexpected ways, such as becoming the common element between multiple small worlds.
I also think it’s interesting that we call out “small world moments” when we find a surprising social connection that makes the world smaller, but don’t similarly call out “large world moments” when we step into a new and different world. I suppose that’s because “large world moments” are the default, as we don’t expect to know strangers, and our brains are wired to remember exceptions. But it might be good to observe the “large world moments” as well, to remind ourselves that the default expectation is the default for a reason.
I don’t really have a point here, but thought it was interesting to contemplate both why the world is occasionally small, and, more regularly, large, and how we can choose the mix of small and large worlds that we live in. And it is a choice – it’s up to us to change our worlds when they are not currently suiting our desired identity (if we change our environment, we change who we are). We design ourselves by choosing our context, and we must choose to be active designers.
I flew up to my parents’ house yesterday, and our plane came in late due to storms. Over the intercom, the flight attendant said that there was “a newlywed couple in row 14 trying to make a tight connection to their flight to Amsterdam, so if rows 1-13 can please let them through before getting up, they’d really appreciate it.” I leaned over to my sister, and said that such an appeal would never work, as I’d seen it fail on a couple other flights. My sister said she’d seen it work several times, and, in fact, the first 13 rows did stay seated until the couple got to the front of the plane.
I was trying to figure out what was different about this time versus the other times I’d seen it fail, and realized that it was the specificity of the appeal. On the other flights I remember, the flight attendant said “We have several people trying to make close connections, please let them through”, and that appeal had no effect, as everybody considered themselves to have close connections, so everybody got up. What was effective this time was that the flight attendant had framed it as a story – the one-line story of the couple trying to get to Amsterdam reified them in our brains as “real” people. The story also invoked our social sense, and made us defer to them as we would for any member of our community.
To give more background on my thinking, my post on the ultimatum game explores how our brains react differently when we have a one-off transaction with somebody (where we try to get all that we can from that transaction) versus how we react when we are part of a community (where fairness becomes a factor as we’ll have to interact with them again in the future). I also argue in the following post that we can use stories to expand our “monkeysphere”, the number of people that we consider to be “real” people as opposed to strangers who we distrust and/or take advantage of.
Making people persons by associating stories with them comes up in many different situations that I can think of:
It takes practice to remember to treat others as people, and not as puppet players on whom you are projecting your own fears and hopes. I still fall into the trap of ascribing my own stories to other people and assuming the worst or best, and being surprised either way. Learning to treat others as real people in their own right remains a goal towards which I strive, and I think it’s an essential skill to learn in a massively networked world where we are always interacting with people outside of our own core community.
What do you think?
P.S. A friend’s new blog, Made of Happy, has a neat star rating WordPress plugin, and when I inquired about it, she said it was GD Star Rating, so I just installed it. Now you can provide feedback on my posts without the trouble of having to come up with a comment!
My last post on faking it engendered some discussion that made it clear I hadn’t communicated my point very clearly. To paraphrase one uncharitable commenter, one interpretation is that I’m looking for ways to justify my tendencies towards self-aggrandizing attention-seeking egotism. And there’s certainly an element of that, as I thought I covered in that post before discussing more interesting possibilities to me. But I think there’s more going on, so I’m going to take another shot at explaining some of the context going on here (or dig myself deeper in my delusional attempts to justify my bad behavior).
If I wanted to learn a foreign language like Spanish, should I study in private, learn from books, and only dare to speak it in public once I have achieved full mastery of grammar and vocabulary? Of course not. The best way to learn a foreign language is through immersion: start speaking it among other speakers even if I’m doing it very poorly, and learn by the hilarious mistakes I’ll make in trying to communicate in that language. But more experienced speakers will get the essence of what I’m trying to say, and correct my mistakes, and that practice is how I’ll improve my command of the language. To connect this to my last post, one could call such practice “faking” one’s knowledge of the foreign language.
Joining any new group or community means learning a new language. Just because it is English and not technically a foreign language does not change this fact. If you’re playing ultimate frisbee and somebody yells “Force away!”, that has a specific meaning for everybody on the field that is not immediately obvious from the English meaning of those words. If you don’t respond appropriately, your teammates will start yelling at you, as I found when I was learning ultimate while playing pickup games. Just like the beginning speaker of a foreign language, I learned from those mistakes, and improved my speaking and comprehension of “ultimate frisbee language” through practice.
The same overloading of common words is true of scientific and professional communities. Part of the reason graduate school takes so long is learning to speak the language of one’s professional community. Each field of study requires a set of unique domain knowledge. The community could just coin neologisms for any new concept, which does happen, but more often, existing words are repurposed for this domain-specific context. For instance, if you ask a biologist, an engineer, and a programmer what a “platform” is, you will get three different answers, as we found out once when we spent an entire day at Sciex sorting out confusion around that word. Using jargon inconsistent with the community usage will cause miscommunication and demonstrate one’s lack of understanding of the field.
Mastering the language of a given community is, in some sense, equivalent to mastering the system of thought used by that community. The practices of the community become embedded in the language, such that the two become tightly intertwined. Those who try to use the jargon without understanding the knowledge community will be exposed as charlatans as they will use words in combinations that make no sense to the insiders – I’m always entertained by how offended engineers get when bad tech speak is used in TV shows and movies. The converse may not be true, though; those who understand the system of thought will generally be able to communicate what they mean even if they don’t share a common language. For instance, doctors who speak different languages like Spanish and German would probably be able to work together just from the shared context of medical practice.
As another example of the strong relationship between language and thought, I continue to be fascinated by framing. If I had called my last post “practicing it” instead of “faking it”, I think I would have gotten different reactions from readers, as “fake” has negative connotations, implying the claiming of unearned mastery, and “practice” has positive connotations, implying that such mastery is earned. I chose the less charitable word precisely because I was aware of the egotistical way in which my behavior could be interpreted, and thought that the language choice would indicate that awareness. Alas, my communication was not successful, or possibly too successful, in that the framing of the behavior as faking activated an emotional context of unfairness I could not overcome. I should have known better, as I’ve read George Lakoff’s work on framing, and know that using emotion-laden words creates a powerful context which is difficult to override with logical debates (a lesson the Democrats have still failed to learn). And so I learn from this practice experience, and will write more effectively next time.
To take a quick detour into philosophy, I need to read Wittgenstein at some point because it seems like his concept of language games is very similar to this. Because the same word can be repurposed to many different uses depending on context, language is more like a game being played within a set of rules and we’re choosing which rules to use at any given time. Depending on which community we are speaking to or which context we are in, words take on different meanings – to use the example from that web page I found via Google, a boxer could either be a pugilist or somebody who puts things into cardboard boxes, and until I give you the context, you have no way to distinguish between those two meanings. And as a further aside, that’s reminiscent of superimposed wave functions in quantum mechanics that later collapse once an observation is made to provide a context, but that gets way too trippy, so I’ll leave that for another time.
Hopefully this further elucidation of the context of my thinking places my last post in perspective. I’m currently embarking on a severe test of my ability to grok new forms of thought and language, as my first day at Google was yesterday. Trying to get up to speed on a large organization with a very distinct way of speaking and doing is going to be a fun challenge for me. We’ll learn whether my practice in trying to cross disciplines over the past decade translates into this new context, and whether this skill is generalizable or not, as I believe it is.
I have a bad habit of trying to fake knowledge when I don’t have it. Whether the topic is world politics or art history or technology or postmodern sociology, I like to pretend that I am knowledgeable on the topic and keep on talking. This habit drives some of my friends crazy, as they feel that it is tantamount to lying. One of them asked me why I do it last month, and while I took a crack at an answer at the time, I’ve been thinking about the question and have some more thoughts.
My friend suggested that my faking was a hubris-laden attempt at being a know-it-all. And I think that’s part of it. Through high school, I could know it all, mastering all subject areas to which I was exposed. I was a champion “Scholastic Bowl” (aka Quiz Bowl) player, answering questions from math to literature to history to biology to physics. Even though it’s patently ridiculous for me to now pretend I can be an expert in all of those disciplines, a bit of me still clings to that youthful self-identity, and keeps on trying anyway.
And yet I’m perfectly happy to concede my own ignorance when confronted with somebody that clearly knows more than I do, so it’s not purely an ego thing where I’m trying to assert dominance. There’s something else going on here. After thinking about it some more, I think it’s actually tied into my identity as a generalist.
Part of being a generalist is understanding different subject areas well enough to effectively communicate with practitioners of that subject. That means not only speaking the right jargon, but understanding the structure of thought associated with that subject, and the mental connections that practitioners make. Without this framework understanding, the generalist will not be able to effectively translate into and out of the subject. For instance, physicists are grounded in a quantitative view of the world, so trying to communicate with them in terms of verbal abstractions will be ineffective; mathematical approaches will work better. On the flip side, biologists are more open to fuzziness, as biological systems are much less predictable and temperamental experimental subjects, so qualitative observations are acceptable.
So when I’m faking knowledge on a topic, I’m practicing my skills as a generalist. Do I understand the structure of the subject well enough to keep up my end of the conversation? It’s a test of my mastery of the jargon, of the basic concepts of the field, of the way in which practitioners communicate. If I am not called out as a fake, I pass the unspoken test, and am accepted as one of the community. If I am called out (as my friend once memorably did in a conversation about art history when she said after five minutes “Wow, you know way less about this than I thought you did!”), I can review what I did wrong which helps me improve my understanding of the communication within that subject.
Understanding the language is also an essential element of being accepted within a community. I’ve written about this before with respect to ultimate frisbee culture, but it’s true of any community. Each community has its own jargon and cultural touchpoints, and knowing what those are is part of what it means to be a community member: Chicago Cubs fans are scarred by references to Bartman, classical music buffs have opinions about Mahler and Mozart, certain nerds talk in Star Wars quotes. My ability to learn the basics of the jargon and the culture of many different communities gives me the freedom to travel between those communities as a social butterfly, cross-pollinating between them.
Faking it is also a good way to find out if I’m talking to somebody who actually knows a subject. They’ll be able to catch me out on a topic, which becomes an opportunity for me to learn from them about that topic. This may not work, as many people are too polite to tell other people they’re wrong or full of crap. MIT tends to foster an adversarial conversation style, where mistakes are leaped upon, but more genteel members of society just nod politely and change the subject. So that’s a potential problem with faking it as a means for discovering expertise.
So does faking knowledge on a subject make me a charlatan know-it-all, unfit for society? Or does it make me a generalist, developing my ability to communicate between communities? What do you think?
I’ve been meaning to get around to reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow for a while now, and finally got around to it recently after downloading it to my iPhone (thanks, Stanza!). The most recent trigger to read it was from Tara Hunt, who is writing a book called The Whuffie Factor using a term from Doctorow’s book.
Whuffie is an idea stemming from Doctorow’s examination of “reputation economies” and “post-scarcity social dynamics”. In the book, all physical needs are satisfied for free, health is guaranteed, etc. So how do people compare themselves to each other? What do they strive for? The answer is “Whuffie” – essentially a numeric indication of reputation. If you see somebody rudely push somebody else aside, you indicate a debit on the pusher’s Whuffie. If you see somebody do something notable or impressive or selfless, you indicate a credit. People with high Whuffie numbers are more respected and tend to be leaders as others defer to their “Whuffie”.
“Whuffie” is basically measuring social capital, but in a publicly visible easily adjustable way. You can see why this concept would interest me, given my social capitalist post from a couple months ago. In the circles of society where I typically hang out, it matters less how much you make or what you have bought – instead, people are judged by what they contribute, the fresh ideas and perspectives they bring, and what they are building in the world. In other words, social capital matters more than fiscal capital.
From a purely capitalistic perspective, this “economy” doesn’t make much sense – it violates capitalistic assumptions to do things to impress others without necessarily having a path towards extracting fiscal value. And yet, it turns out that the things done in this way sometimes create much more value than projects designed to extract ROI (return on investment). When Hugh MacLeod drew the Blue Monster cartoon for Microsoft, he did it as a one-off because he thought it expressed an interesting idea, never thinking it might turn into a consulting business as other companies try to hire him to create a similar cartoon to express their brand. Many of the “A-list” bloggers didn’t start blogging to get famous – they started because they just wanted to share their opinion with the world. It’s a peculiar paradox – doing something for intangible rewards can sometimes pay off in tangible rewards, but only if you are not doing it for the tangible rewards.
Building social capital involves approaching interactions from the perspective of what one can do to help others. It has to be done from a selfless perspective, because we humans are reasonably well-trained in detecting ulterior motives. It’s like using the techniques of Dale Carnegie – when used for good purposes, they increase the value of the interaction for everybody, but when used for selfish reasons, they are often perceived as clumsy attempts at manipulation. Trying to calculate every interaction in terms of how I can benefit is going to limit my upside, whereas trying to do good for others creates the potential for much bigger wins.
To take another perspective, this ties into my theme of non-zero-sum thinking from earlier in the summer. Trying to help others creates the possibility of “growing the pie” of finding solutions that help everybody rather than just oneself. Trying to be selfish may ensure a larger fraction of the pie, but limits the size of the pie. Building social capital is an exercise in building “non-zero-sum-ness”, to use Robert Wright’s term from his book Nonzero (which I will read one of these days, honest!).
I was going to add a disclaimer here that this idea of building social capital may only make sense in affluent developed societies, but I’m not sure I believe that (disclaimer: the following paragraph is a wild extrapolation based on nothing resembling facts or research). The cohesion of villages has a lot to do with social capital, as people know they will be judged long-term by how they behave towards others. They can’t just up and move away to escape a toxic environment they have created, so they have a better sense of the long-term. Also, without the capitalistic urge towards me-me-me, villagers are less concerned with “keeping up with the Joneses” and more about what will build their standing long-term in the community. I’m reminded of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which explores the powerful resonance of gift-giving in myths throughout many different cultures, where those who hoard are punished and those who give are rewarded.
I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this concept, but I feel like there’s an important idea hidden somewhere in here about how social capital and non-zero-sumness interact and what that implies about how I should be behaving. I guess I’m also trying to figure out a responses to Adam Smith capitalism where the “invisible hand” will make the system work if everybody diligently pursues their own self-interest. I think that we are seeing the limits of that system, and I’m trying to understand what the motivating assumptions of a new system would be. In a future post, perhaps I will figure out how one might design a company around such a “Whuffie” system to create the proper incentives for employees to think of the long-term and of others rather than hoping the “invisible hand” will take care of the company.
P.S. I realize I never actually mentioned the book itself. The book explores how the quest for “Whuffie” influences several characters in a future Disney World run by “adhocracies”, fluid networks of people who have chosen to help run the park (remember, nobody has to work in this future scenario). It was a quick, fun read, but the idea of “Whuffie” as a motivating factor in society was the most interesting concept to me.
I live in the future.
I don’t mean that in any sort of wacky time-travelling sci-fi sense, but in the sense implied by the William Gibson quip: “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” I live in a world that’s a few years ahead of the mainstream. My friends were the geeks with Palm Pilots and cell phones and laptops before they became ubiquitous. We were the ones downloading digital music before iPods made it easy.
Sometimes I forget that my world is not the mainstream. Here’s an example – I’ve been amazed that more websites don’t have an iPhone-specific interface. The ones that I know do are Google, Twitter and Facebook. But the rest of the sites on my typical rounds (sports sites like ESPN or community sites like LiveJournal or even Internet standards like Yahoo) don’t. And I can’t understand why these sites would be so short-sighted. After all, half the people I know have an iPhone! Why wouldn’t these sites be catering to this massive population…oh, right, my friends are not representative of the mainstream.
That last statement needs to be modified, though – my friends are not representative of the mainstream now. There’s a reason my community is consistently living in the future – it’s because we shape what the masses adopt. We are the early adopters of technology, recognized by our other friends and family as the ones that have done the research and figured out what the useful gadgets are. We make the recommendations that drive adoption and help certain technologies cross the chasm into the mainstream.
Companies that think they are making the wise financial move by not investing in “fringe” technologies because they are a small percentage of users are missing out on the chance to influence these early adopters. To take an obvious example, if you go to any conference of leading thinkers these days, the vast majority of presenters will be using a MacBook. Most of my friends are Mac users now, except for the ones that are constrained by work obligations. Any software company that wants to capture future mindshare needs to support Macs. The same holds true of Firefox support, as nobody I know uses Internet Explorer as their default browser. Even though the overall percentages are small (8% for Mac and 15% for Firefox adoption), the percentages among the technology influentials are far higher, and their impact on future adoption needs to be considered.
As an aside, this dichotomy presents an interesting question – should companies target the mass market of Microsoft and IE or the leading edge of Mac and Firefox? It’s another instance of the perennial dilemma for companies: deciding whether to allocate resources towards short-term or long-term results. Of course, whenever presented with two choices, you should ask why not both, and that’s what many companies are doing by moving to the web (although cross-browser compatibility is still an issue).
This idea of living in the future is a powerful one to me, and one that came up again this week in a conversation with Wes. If I know I’m living in the future, then I should be able to figure out a way to leverage that fact. If I can identify problems that are facing my community now, I have a few years to devise a solution before those problems will be faced by the mainstream and create the market for that solution. It’s a tricky forecasting problem, as I have to identify the problems that will cross the chasm and actually be an issue for the mainstream. For instance, information overload is an issue for me, with 130 feeds in my RSS reader and dozens of emails a day from a variety of mailing lists. But it’s unclear that most people would ever face these issues – heck, less than 10% of people today use an RSS reader.
Another example of an issue I face that may not ever cross the chasm is keeping track of a geographically distributed set of friends. It seems perfectly natural to me to still be in touch with college friends scattered across the country, but I wonder if that’s as much of an issue for others. For instance, I suspect most of my high school friends ended up in the Chicago area, so if they want to visit old friends, they can just do so. So the adaptations my community has made, taking advantage of Internet technologies, free long-distance on our cell phones, and cheap air travel, may not be necessary for most people.
One example of a problem that may be useful to the mainstream is the mobilizing of weak ties. This is a problem that LinkedIn is starting to solve for job-searching, as it lets people find out connections they have to target companies of interest. But we need tools like that for everything in our life – “Who do I know that has the answer to my question?” Even in Google world, we still need to consult expertise. Sometimes the answer is obvious (if I have a home repair question, I call my friend Batman), but other times, somebody may have expertise that you are completely unaware of. I wonder if there’s a way technology can make visible the latent knowledge in other people’s heads.
Another example is a phenomenon that BJ Fogg is calling mass interpersonal persuasion in a comment he left on my post. It’s the idea that the tools of persuasion are being democratized, that anybody can create an application that goes viral and is seen by millions of people (the students in his class created Facebook applications that were collectively getting a million views a day by the end of the term). This is a fascinating development – the next step beyond the democratization of publishing and organization that Clay Shirky describes may be the democratization of persuasion. I don’t really know how this will develop yet, but it’s interesting to me, and one of the advantages of being connected to the people who will be mapping and creating the future.
Speaking of which, another topic that came up when talking to Wes is this phenomenon of feeling like something new is important, without quite being able to describe why. Wes asked why I was so interested in Jane McGonigal’s work and I couldn’t quite articulate it. The idea of games as a medium is clearly important to me, and her work is pushing in all directions to understand what makes a game good and how the same principles can be applied to more serious purposes like Peak Oil. The same holds true of other friends like Squid Labs – people who I respect doing interesting things, even if I don’t always understand where they’re going. To some extent, I feel like I’m on a similar path – I can’t quite articulate the generalist path (even though I keep taking stabs at it in this blog) but I feel like at some point I’ll be able to look back and say “Oh, I see how it all fits together now” in a nice retcon. Again, by the time somebody can justify what they’re doing in terms of mainstream values, it’s too late – they’ve crossed over into the mainstream. So much of the interesting stuff in society is being done by people that you question “Gosh, what the heck are they doing?”
As usual, a wandering post, somewhat centered on the idea of “living in the future” and the implications. Most of this post was written on the bus up to Cornell, and then I added a few closing paragraphs this morning despite staying up too late last night. But I wanted to get it posted before the festivities begin. Happy Fourth of July to those who care!
LP’s comment on my Social Objects post made me realize that I needed to clarify what I meant by “social”. My last post drew a bunch of new readers (thanks to Hugh Macleod’s Twitter) and I could see how my position might have been misinterpreted based on that post alone.
The crux of the comment was rebutting my claim that everything important is social, citing writing, reading, studying, and exercising as solitary activities that provide meaning in an environment without distraction. I think I was unclear about what I mean by “social”. It’s a bit funny to me to be called an extrovert, as I’m a person sitting alone in my studio apartment writing to the Internet, which is pretty much as solitary and introverted as it can get. To be clear, I agree completely that solitary activities are important; I need several hours of alone time a day or I get really cranky. And, as the commenter observes, there are many things that are only possible alone – certain activities like coding or writing require no interruptions and the undisturbed time necessary to get into what CsÃkszentmihályi would call Flow.
However, I still hold to my original point, which is that our communities are what create meaning for us. Even those that are not social in an extroverted sense need to have their identity validated by other people. They may participate in online games or communities. They may belong to a poetry club. An extreme example is somebody like Ramanujan, who worked alone with nobody understanding him, until he sent off his theorems to Hardy as somebody who could evaluate his work. He didn’t have any way to judge himself, to decide if he was brilliant or crazy, until he found a community that validated his results. Even mathematical proofs, a solitary activity, required social validation to imbue the work with meaning.
To take a Klosterman-like hypothetical, what if one could achieve one’s greatest goal but not be able to tell anybody about it? I would have a very hard time with it, and I don’t think I’m unique in that respect. Even if our great experiences were done alone, they achieve greater meaning when shared with the people we value. As several of my classmates said at commencement, the program didn’t feel done until we had the closure of the ceremony where they could stand up in front of their families and receive a piece of paper, even though all the work had been done a week or two before.
Another example is rites of passage. One does not go through a rite of passage in secret and not tell anybody. The rite of passage must be performed in front of the community and acknowledged by the community to have meaning. This is true of commencement as noted above, bar mitzvahs, promotions at work, or anything else I can think of. The rite of passage is not the specific actions that are performed – it is the performance of those actions in the eyes of the community and the actions do not have meaning without the community’s acknowledgment.
I may be overplaying the social community angle, but I think that communities are the building blocks of identity. When we say who we are, we express it by which communities we belong to: I’m an MIT graduate, a technologist, a geek, a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc. We may have different personas within those communities, but the intersection of all of those communities defines our identity. So I believe that we can’t construct meaning for ourselves without relying on those communities.
There are millions of events happening in the world at any point in time, and our communities filter that stream by telling us what’s important. In a broad generalization, Republicans watch Fox News, Democrats read the New York Times and listen to NPR. Their reality is defined by which events those media cover and the spin that is placed on those events. Things that may be important to one community may be meaningless to another; for instance, most of my friends don’t care at all that the Cubs are in first place, whereas that is fairly important in parts of Chicago. Information and events only have meaning as threads that bind a community together (e.g. the way a friend and I used to sprinkle our conversation with quotes from Buffy).
I hope this clarifies some of what I was talking about in the previous post. I sometimes forget how my world view is somewhat non-standard, and that I need to articulate and clarify the assumptions I am making, rather than expecting readers to pick things up from context. Being in my brain means I can drill down into greater detail on any particular point, but I tend to stay at the top level and infer the rest (see: Generalist) which can be confusing to others. If you’re curious about my thoughts about how community impacts identity and everything else, see the community tag of this blog.
P.S. One of these days I’ll get back into a blogging rhythm, but this week was a bit crazy at work and I was zonked a bit from being on West Coast time. I also need to catch up on some book reviews here. Ah well.
[author's note: I wrote most of this post nine months ago, but never got around to finishing it. It seemed an appropriate companion to my recent series of "Social [X]” posts, so I added a couple paragraphs to the end and am posting it.]
I was reading a gapingvoid post, and saw this wonderful quote (for reference, gapingvoid is the blog of Hugh MacLeod, who’s using social media to advertise for a wine company among many other things):
The main thesis is that it’s not the wine per se that is interesting, it’s the conversations that happen around the wine that is interesting. And that is true for all social objects. People matter. Objects don’t.
I love this quote because it gets at an idea that is very important to me, which is that nothing matters without people. I never got around to writing a This I Believe essay, but my premise was going to be that the most important thing in this world is the connection we make with each other. All of the objects and experiences in the world are means by which to satisfy the end of connecting to others.
Why do sports matter? Sports are just grown men playing kids’ sports, and yet we are willing to pay for the privilege to spend hours watching them. But it’s not about the sport itself, or the game. It’s about the connection with the other fans, about the instant communities that watching sports creates.
To illustrate this point, imagine somebody that cared about a sport that nobody else cared about – let’s say javelin throwing. This hypothetical person obsessively follows javelin competitions, can quote stats of the top throwers, etc. Most of us would consider this person to be a loser, and borderline insane. And yet they’re doing nothing different than fans of sports like football or baseball – they just don’t have the community in place to validate their behavior. Being a sports fan without connecting with other people is pointless.
I’m trying to think of objects or experiences that don’t qualify as “social objects”. Even though purely individual experiences like riding a motorcycle down the Pacific Coast Highway can be enjoyable, they only mean something when we share the story of the experience with somebody else. When we get a nifty new toy, we don’t keep it to ourselves – we want to show it off to our friends. When we find a new restaurant, we want to take others to it or at least tell them about it. We watch movies and read books and are disappointed when others haven’t because then we can’t talk about our experience with them.
I think that this social object concept can change the rules in a market. One of the reasons that the Nintendo Wii has been staggeringly successful is that Nintendo realized that gaming was not about the game, but about the social experience, and designed the Wii accordingly. Apple’s renaissance has a similar tone. Saturn was initially successful because they realized that a car wasn’t just a car, but an experience and a community which they bolstered by hosting homecoming events for Saturn owners to meet. Rock Band has been a recent phenomenon that illustrates that the games that people most enjoy are the ones that they can play together.
The Internet has been a boon to making these sorts of connections. No matter how obscure your passion is, there’s a community for it on the Internet. Sports of all kinds, crafts, do-it-yourself, hipster music, social software, Buffy the Vampire Slayer – okay, those aren’t particularly obscure, but they are the ones I know about.
This gets back to a point I made in my social technologies post – when social and technology mix, it’s the social that is interesting. We’ve been focused on the physical technology, but it’s the newly possible social communities engendered by such technology that change markets (and possibly the world!). Twitter/Facebook/LiveJournal are interesting because now I have an ambient awareness of my friends that enables me to maintain communities with them across physical boundaries. I know more about my friends that keep up such accounts regardless of where they are than I do about friends that live in the same city as me. These technologies are changing our communities and creating new ways for these communities to interact with themselves, and that sort of meta-interaction will accelerate the evolution of communities.
Hugh Macleod has continued to emphasize the importance of social objects – he believes that any marketer whose product isn’t a social object is in big trouble. See Social Objects for Beginners for another take. I’m more interested in the change in viewpoint when we stop focusing on the object, and focus on the connections the object creates. I could get really esoteric now and explain how this all relates to actor-network theory, but I’ll refrain. I’m also not sure how to tie this into creating new social technologies or what this has to do with social capitalism. Maybe one of you will make the connection for me.
I spent the weekend at BarCampNYC3, an unconference in the mode of the BrainJams I once attended. It was great to meet a bunch of new people, including some nextNY folks I had never met in person, and to get the chance to talk about interesting topics for a couple days.
One session I attended early in the weekend was led by Joe Fernandez, on how to measure influence in the social web. This started a great discussion, as we first had to agree what influence meant. The marketers in the room translated it into how much money can we make from this person’s recommendation? If Bob has 1,000 readers, but only 5 of them buy the product, and Alice has only 10 readers, but 7 of them buy the product, who is more influential? Bob’s got the bigger audience, but Alice has more influence, as measured by the dollars.
We also discussed social influence. What does it mean to be a thought leader? Somebody mentioned the Fast Company article on whether the idea of Influentials is valid. Somebody (not me!) brought up Clay Shirky’s new book. Rohit Khare mentioned his work on leveraging not just the social network, but also the documents as rated by that network (which makes sense when we realize that documents only have value when creating a connection). Lots of interesting ideas floating around, and Sanford Dickert suggested that we do another session to try to come up with a better definition.
On Sunday, Sanford led a session where we tried to derive an equation measuring influence. Sanford’s background is in robotics, so he was applying systems theory and feedback loops to the problem. We spent some time discussing what the equivalent concepts of inertia, friction, and dampening might be (we came up with the acceptance of the current worldview, the difficulty of forwarding a new idea/concept on, and the natural decay of interestingness of a new idea over time as possible analogues).
Sanford led a later session on “Web 3.0″ where he tried to build on these ideas of influence, and what that would mean for designing social applications. One marketer in that session suggested that marketing was making potential customers want what you have. I thought that was too simplistic and Machiavellian, but it got me thinking.
I realized that this might be a good situation in which to apply actor-network theory as a framework for thinking about this problem. Actor-network theory is all about evanescent indirect connections between people that need to be re-established. It’s also about how every element in the network has an effect on every other element – all participants are “actors” in that they have an effect on the network. Objects that have no effect are not actors and can be removed from consideration. But there are rarely direct connections between network endpoints – all effects must be traced through mediators which can alter the message in surprising ways. Actor-network theory is about observing the network and tracing the connections between different actors and seeing the effects of mediators.
So I started mulling the idea of trying to trace the network between the product on one end and a customer on the other end (my notes from the session say, in contrast to the earlier claim, that “Marketing is building a connection between the product and the person”). The product has certain characteristics, the marketer advertises some of those characteristics, the newspaper reviewer might write about the product and its characteristics, a friend might read the reviewer and think highly of the product, and mention it to the eventual customer who happens to have a need for a product like that.
I wanted to write up these ideas this evening, so I went back to review my posts about actor-network theory from years past, and discovered that I had already written a post on applying actor-network theory to marketing. Clever of me, eh? Go read that post now.
One thing I don’t address in that post is how to create a mathematical model of influence. I was talking about it with Sanford later, and suggested that it’s a tricky problem because influence is such a personal thing. I may be influenced more by a famous person like Oprah or by my good friend. Also, a person’s influence is not invariant – I may trust my geek friend for a recommendation on which laptop to buy but not at all on where to eat. So the model would need coefficients of influence for each connection between nodes on each topic, with those coefficients varying depending on results.
I wonder if a neural network might be the way to model this sort of thing. Our brain can be modelled as a collection of neurons, each of which influence each other with certain coefficients that are strengthened or weakened based on how well their outputs contributed to desired outcomes. Perhaps our networks can be modelled in the same way. This would play into my idea of cognitive trust, where I suggest that once we trust other people enough, they’re just an extension of our own brain. I certainly have people like that, where I don’t even bother having opinions on certain topics like cuisine and fashion because I can always call my friends to get a more informed opinion. In some sense, my outsourcing of taste is the ultimate in influence.
I really need to find the time and energy to do some programming. It wouldn’t be that hard to create a toy model of an influence network built off a neural network model. And it would be interesting to see how that model corresponded with real world tastes. Maybe I should throw it at the Netflix data to see what happens. But that might have to wait for the summer when classes are over.
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Official book site, including the full text in PDF format
Amazon link
Solove is an associate professor of law at the George Washington University Law School who blogs at Concurring Opinions. Being involved in the blogosphere has given him a unique perspective on how new social technologies are pushing the boundaries of what existing law covers. This book, subtitled “gossip, rumor, and privacy on the internet”, is his exploration of some of those issues.
It was interesting reading this book immediately after Here Comes Everybody, in that Shirky’s book explores the capabilities that new social technologies are enabling, whereas Solove’s book explores the accompanying risks and consequences. Shirky tells us about all the great ways in which we can collaborate to create new content and publish it worldwide. Solove reminds us that when we can publish, so can everybody else, which means that your reputation can be destroyed with a few clicks from a malicious source.
The book starts with the story of the “dog poop girl”. A Korean teenage girl was on the subway when her dog pooped. She was asked to clean it up, but refused. Twenty years ago, people in the subway car would have cursed her under their breath, but the incident would have been forgotten within a few days. What happened instead was that somebody snapped her picture with their cell phone, and posted the incident to a popular Korean blog. The picture and post went viral, crossed into the mainstream Korean media, and she became infamous throughout the country, harassed wherever she went and forced to drop out of university because of the shame.
The following paragraph from the book is the central issue that faces us:
There’s a paradox at the heart of reputation – despite the fact we talk about reputation as earned and the product of our behavior and character, it is something given to us by others in the community. Reputation is a core component of our identity – it reflects who we are and shapes how we interact with others – yet it is not solely our own creation… Our reputation depends upon how other people judge and evaluate us, and this puts us at the mercy of others. Our good reputation can quickly be lost, with deleterious consequences to our friendships, family, jobs, and financial well-being. We must all cope with the fragility of reputation, the delicate porcelain vessel that carries our ability to function in society.”
Solove titles one of his chapters “The Digital Scarlet Letter” to indicate how we can be branded with shameful behavior online. If we do something that somebody else thinks is inappropriate, they can call us out in a blog post, and our indiscretion will be forever archived and searchable from Google. And if the story is entertaining enough to get passed around (as did Aleksey Vayner’s ludicrous video CV), then your story will become a punchline to people who would otherwise have never heard of you, an aspect of your past that you can never escape. Solove tells us of a world where we can never live down our past indiscretions, where every mistake we have ever made can be magnified and used to shame us.
Some might say that people like the “dog poop girl” deserve to be shamed, that if they behave that way in public, it is appropriate to shame them in public as well. But who gets to decide what behavior is shameworthy? Should the person get a chance to explain their behavior? And is it fair to punish them with the irretrievable loss of their reputation without some sort of due process?
When the means of publication were valuable and restricted to only a few outlets, we could assume that information published about others was likely to be true, as the punishment for libel was the loss of the right to publish, and newsworthy, as it wouldn’t be worth publishing otherwise. Those assumptions do not hold true with free and easy Internet publishing. There is no incentive to check for truth, and any perceived slight can be published without rebuttal.
Solove brings up excellent questions about reputation and privacy in the Internet age, but I was disappointed in his proposed solutions. It’s not surprising that this lawyer proposes law as the appropriate response, but Solove did not convince me. He suggests that we need more torts for loss of reputation, and for breach of confidentiality. He does note that informal mediation and arbitration should be the first steps in redressing a perceived wrong, and that lawsuits should be the last resort. But given the glacial speed at which legal precedents evolve, I’m nervous about using it as the stick by which we create the social norms that guide us through this world of new social technologies.
I think that our best bet is to wait for social norms to evolve, rather than depending on the clumsy tool of the law to preemptively shape those norms. I think that our expectations have not caught up to the technology capabilities yet – we don’t have an intuitive sense that our words, published on a blog intended for just our friends and family, can suddenly go viral and be read by millions, many of whom have no idea of the context in which those words were written. We haven’t developed the skills to read virtual cues, or the ability to articulate those virtual cues in a way that makes it clear to our social brains what the appropriate behavior is. Most people now understand that private email should not be forwarded to a list of thousands. We need similar norms to develop around our publications and public actions – just because something is not inside our own homes does not mean that it is meant to be broadcast worldwide. The transparent society may be coming, but we’re not quite there yet.
I highly recommend this book as a thoughtful exploration of some of the troubling issues associated with the rise of new social technologies. While I don’t agree with Solove’s conclusions about how to address those issues, I appreciate his asking of the questions, and I will be curious to see how our society answers those questions.
Thanks to danah boyd who recommended this book last month.
