Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Noah Brier wrote an interesting post yesterday about how certain ideas spread virally even when people disagree with them. His examples include Sarah Palin or Wired’s “Blogging is dead” article, where the blogosphere is buzzing about how bad an idea something is, but are still spreading the original idea far beyond its original audience because they can’t resist the urge to respond critically to it. I left a comment on the post, as it relates to some thoughts I’ve had over the years, and then realized that I would need a full blog post to unpack the one paragraph I wrote. So I’m writing one.

I had this vague intuition for years that arguing against an idea still supported the idea. I never was able to fully articulate this intuition until I read George Lakoff’s work on framing, which explained how arguing against a proposition still reinforces the proposition as stated. Lakoff’s classic example is “tax relief” – even arguing against “tax relief” reinforces certain connotations, including the idea that relief implies an affliction. So referencing a worldview, even if one is arguing against it, still reinforces that worldview.

So why do people do it? I have a feeling that we are wired to play finite games, where we are trying to win the game with the rules as stated, rather than infinite games, where part of the challenge is to step back and re-define the rules (James Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games is obviously a big influence on me). So people get caught up in trying to win the argument within the context that they are given, rather than thinking about their overall picture and whether they are contributing to that. In other words, I agree with Noah’s point that “the best way to fight this kind of behavior is to not talk about it. But most people can’t help themselves.” We want to win the finite game, even when the game as framed will contribute to the other side’s success. To avoid that, we need to be thinking about playing the infinite game instead.

Getting to Yes is another framework for thinking about these sorts of issues, as it emphasizes figuring out your principal interests and focusing on those, rather than getting sucked into zero-sum positional bargaining about specific issues. If we go into a negotiation focused on winning every individual point, we may often fail to actually achieve our interests (much like Internet pundits arguing against certain issues, but only providing them more visibility and respectability in the process).

So when faced with a screed which makes us want to argue and tear down an opposing perspective point by point, we need to step back and figure out if we’re just contributing to their worldview by doing so. We need to concentrate on our overall vision and figure out whether what we’re doing is contributing to that end goal. We need to find opportunities to reframe the discussion to find points of commonality (e.g. both sides of the abortion issue agreeing that they’d like to see fewer unwanted pregnancies) so that everybody can feel like they are moving towards their goals.

Or, sometimes, we just need to accept that the other person is too locked into their viewpoint for us to be able to convince them. If their frames are so strong that all incoming information will be mapped to their frame, such that no facts or arguing will convince them, we need to recognize that and move on rather than continue to futilely waste our time. This is definitely one of the hardest skills to learn on the Internet.

Man. I really need to get back into writing regularly. There’s a whole trove of interesting territory around zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum thinking that I need to explore at some point. It’s fascinating stuff to me, and while it’s a frame that I’m probably over-applying right now, I think it has some explanatory power.

Over the past seven weeks (good golly, where does the time go?) at Google, I’ve noticed a funny habit of mine. Whenever I overhear a conversation involving something that is related to my team’s work, I drop whatever I’m working on and wander over to listen in. Now, one might guess this is due to my slacker ways and desire to gossip as much as possible, and one would not be entirely incorrect. However, I was listening to one such conversation earlier this week as two of my groupmates were trying to suss out exactly how an analysis should work, and realized that there’s more going on here.

Such conversations are where an organization’s thought processes are made visible (audible?). In other words, if an organization could be perceived as a group mind, then those conversations are the equivalent of watching the synapses between neurons firing. It’s the only way to get insight into how the group mind operates. This may sound a little wacky, but I’m inspired by Edwin Hutchins’s book Cognition in the Wild, where he extracts observations about cognition by watching how a group mind in the form of a navigation team operated. In the best case, meetings can be a reflection of this organizational cognition, an aspect which Peter mentioned in the comments of my meetings post.

So by listening in on such conversations, one can map out how the organization operates. Which assumptions are taken for granted? Who are the stakeholders mentioned regularly as needing to be consulted? How are decisions made in such conversations – is it by consensus, persuasion, or hierarchy? These sorts of observations may not be directly relevant to one’s job, but it’s invaluable to an amateur anthropologist like myself in understanding the different forces that are at work within the organization.

Even better, conversations often arise when new organizational territory is being mapped out, either in the form of current assumptions being questioned, or in the development of a response to a new stimulus. When everything is running smoothly and there’s a defined process for how to do things, there is no need for conversation as everybody knows how to do their job. But when one reaches the limits of one’s understanding, then one has to consult another person, and such consultations are where somebody like me can see how the organization, in the form of its constituents, learns. To use the framework of Latour, conversations are where we can see the organizational Collective perform the Consultation process, where it grapples with an outside influence (what Latour calls “Perplexity”). Seeing the Collective go through a round of growing and learning is exactly what I mean by saying that conversations are a window into the cognitive process of the organization.

This is also exactly the sort of fuzzy stuff that I once would have scorned as a hard scientist and logic-driven engineer. These sorts of ephemeral observations about an organization are difficult to quantify and would not have even been on my radar ten years ago. And now they are the sorts of things that capture the value I bring to an organization, as my ability to attend meetings and listen to passing conversations and extract this sort of organizational knowledge is a testament to my ever-improving observational skills. I liked Rands’s description of it as the culture chart, as opposed to the formal organizational chart. The culture chart isn’t written down anywhere and is supremely fuzzy – it can only be intuited by reading between the lines of conversations.

So that’s my rationalization for why listening in on conversations when starting a new job is important. It’s the best way to understand how an organization operates: which assumptions are stated (and more importantly, not stated), which stakeholders matter and which can be ignored, etc. And, in case you’re wondering, all this listening to conversations is why I have to stay at work until 9pm a couple nights a week to catch up on my individual contributions. Once I am more efficient at my assigned tasks and up to speed on how Google works as an organization, I hope to get my hours down to a more reasonable number.

A few months ago, I volunteered to contribute an essay to a compendium called “The Age of Conversation 2″. The first “Age of Conversation” book resulted after two editors collected submissions on the topic of conversation from one hundred bloggers and self-published the result at lulu.com. The second book, in which my essay appears, is now available at lulu for purchase. It may just be a collective vanity self-publishing project, but it will still be kind of neat for me to see something I wrote bound into a book.

Despite the help of my readership in brainstorming ideas for the essay, one of the requirements for publication was that I refrain from posting my essay here for six months. So if you just want to see my essay, ping me then.

As I am learning the lay of the land at Google, I’ve been initiating one-on-one meetings with people around me so that I can learn what they do and gain some different perspectives on what my group produces. I wrote up my notes after my meeting with one coworker, and after he reviewed what I wrote, he noted that we’d covered most of the material I wrote up in the first fifteen minutes we’d talked. The other thirty-some minutes had been much less information-rich.

He extended this observation to claim that most meetings were like that – they started strong, but then lost steam as people became fatigued. Speakers become less clear in making their points, while listeners become less able to absorb information, so meetings tend to get more inefficient the longer they go. This makes sense to me; as anecdotal evidence, I certainly noticed that by the end of the two and a half hour classes we had at Columbia, I wasn’t processing as well as I did at the beginning.

What’s interesting about this claim to me is that it assumes that the purpose of meetings is to transfer information. That leads to the question of whether other types of meetings would have similar dynamics, or whether it’s possible that some meetings might get more productive as they got longer, rather than less.

In particular, I think any sort of brainstorming meeting takes time to get rolling. The participants need time to ensure everybody is making the same assumptions and to establish common patterns of interactions. It takes time for a group to achieve the state of “flow”, where everybody is moving towards a common purpose. Despite the initial dip in “productivity” while alignment is happening, the payback once everybody is synchronized is tremendous. I’ve written about the dynamics of group flow before, as well as the importance of removing discordant elements that are impediments to achieving flow. Having come up with one counterexample, I started wondering about the dynamics of other types of meetings.

Progress report meetings are a bad idea in general, as the information is generally better sent out via other methods so people can skim what isn’t important rather than making everybody sit through everything. Admittedly, a poorly written email is more confusing than an in-person meeting since presenters have the advantage of instant feedback, but that only highlights the importance of writing clearly. To run some pseudo-numbers, an hour-long meeting attended by ten people uses ten person-hours. Let’s say the presenter could write a clear email or slide deck to present their material, but it takes them four hours to write it instead of the one hour they take to present it unclearly. Let’s also say that the clearly written material now takes people ten minutes to absorb instead of an hour of clarifications. Now the total time spent by the group is 5.5 person-hours (4 hours by the presenter, 1.5 hours by the other nine group members), for a net gain of 4.5 person-hours. Obviously, those numbers are made up, but they illustrate the point that it is often worth sacrificing the time of one person to save the time of the group.

Another type of meeting might be a consensus meeting, where people are trying to agree on a course of action. I think this is similar to a brainstorming meeting in that it takes time for everybody to clarify assumptions and make sure everybody is talking about the same thing and understands the tradeoffs of various decision options. At the same time, it also has the perils of the information transfer meeting in that the longer the meeting goes, the lower everybody’s decision making ability gets due to fatigue. So there’s a need for such meetings to be well-managed, preferably with a clear agenda making the assumptions explicit. The moderator also needs to move the meeting along when it gets bogged down in details that are irrelevant to the decision at hand, so that the decision gets made while people are still relatively fresh.

The point about moderators reminds me that meetings need to be better managed in general. Potential meeting attendees should have a clear idea of what the point of a meeting is before getting there. In an ideal world, every meeting would have a clearly defined set of success criteria, so that potential participants would know what they should expect out of that meeting, and be able to decide whether that is worth their time before attending.

Another danger of meetings is meeting creep. As another coworker observed, any regular meeting that is successful eventually loses value precisely because of its success. If a meeting is delivering useful results, influential people start attending, which induces other people to put their own items on the agenda so as to reach those people, which causes those influencers to go attend other meetings, increasing the value of those meetings, which starts the cycle again. The dynamics of meetings do not just apply to individual meetings, but also to the rise and fall of certain meetings.

I have sometimes wondered if there should ever be regular meetings, or whether meetings should only be called on a one-off basis to address specific problems. Meetings often become entrenched and keep on happening because they have always happened, rather than having a clear agenda each time. While one former coworker extolled the benefits of having regular status meetings so that everybody could check in with each other, I tend to believe that’s best handled by informal mechanisms. Admittedly, if I have to impart information to everybody in my group, a meeting is more efficient than talking to everybody one on one, but still more efficient is an email with the caveat that I have to take the time to write clearly.

I don’t really have a point here, other than to present an incomplete taxonomy of meetings. I’ve been fortunate so far in being able to duck most meetings at Google, because nobody knows I am yet. Unfortunately, as a large company with lots of smart people who want to have their opinion heard, Google has a lot of meetings. In some ways, it reminds me of being at CERN or BaBar, which were particle physics collaborations involving lots of smart people who wanted to be heard, and involved continuous meetings; my advisor at CERN had literally 40 hours of meetings a week to attend, and could only do actual physics work in the evenings. So thinking about how to make meetings more efficient might be a useful topic when I start going to more meetings myself.

Continuing on my recent theme of zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum thinking in management, today I want to discuss two different communication styles, which I am calling adversarial and collaborative.

The adversarial style is essentially the Thunderdome approach to communication: “Two ideas enter, one idea leaves.” The default assumption of the adversarialist is that the other person’s ideas are wrong. The other person must prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their ideas are right. The adversarialist believes that good ideas are forged through the crucible of conflict, and that weaknesses in an idea must be attacked in order to make the idea stronger. Adversarialists like arguments and battles; in a zero-sum adversarial discussion, if one person wins, the other person loses, so every point of discussion is a skirmish in the larger battle and it is easy to keep track of the results.

The advantage of this style is that it forces every idea to be examined. An adversarial debate sparks research, as one must buttress every point in one’s argument with solid evidence to ensure that there are no weak points that can be attacked by one’s opponent. Courtrooms use the adversarial style (prosecutor vs. defendant) to ensure that every piece of evidence is considered when determining the path of justice. The adversarial style also taps into the motivating power of competition; people want to win, and being in a battle gives them incentive to do whatever it takes to do so.

The adversarial style has many disadvantages, though. For one thing, if a discussion is framed as a battle, it creates opponents of people who perhaps should be on the same side (e.g. departments within a company), making it hard for them to collaborate towards their common goals after the “battle”. The psychological principles of commitment and consistency described by Cialdini play a role here; because we want to remain consistent with what we have said previously, once we start arguing for a side, we believe in it more and become unable to see the value of the other side. This can be destructive if the sides need to work together after the decision has been made, as they will no longer perceive themselves as sharing common ground.

The adversarial style is also destructive for morale; just as it is thrilling to win, it is demoralizing to lose. People go into withdrawal after losing, and will not be as productive. A company that has to rely on the losers of the discussion to implement the decision will probably fail, as those people will not believe in the solution and not be motivated to implement it.

One last issue with the adversarial style that specifically affects managers is that it is difficult to have a true discussion if there is a power differential between the participants. The adversarial style only works if both sides are doing everything they can to win the discussion, but most employees will not dare to contradict their bosses too often. In such discussions, the boss will consistently win, believing that their idea has won on its merits, but the idea will not really be tested until it is exposed to true competition, such as when the product idea goes to the marketplace. Reading Chip Kidd’s book The Learners reminded me of Stanley Milgram’s experiment, a disquieting example of how the presence of authority can alter people’s normal reactions beyond all recognition.

Another style of discussion is the collaborative style. Participants in a collaborative style make the default assumption that the other person’s idea is right, and they just aren’t understanding the idea correctly. When there is confusion, they ask the other person to please explain the idea again, and then restate the idea in their own words to confirm that they are “getting” it. People in a collaborative discussion build off of each others’ good ideas, working together to create something new (shades of Hegel here, where the adversarial style is thesis and antithesis, and the collaborative style is synthesis). The collaborative style assumes that all participants are working towards the same goal, and they are helping each other towards achieving that goal. It’s a non-zero-sum game – everybody can win, as the final idea might include contributions from every participant.

The advantage of the collaborative style is in what happens after the discussion. Because everybody was involved in making the final decision, they feel more invested in the result and are more motivated to implement that result. There are no losers who hang their heads afterwards; even the people whose ideas weren’t used will feel that their ideas were considered fairly as everybody took the time to understand their point. By working together, people create better ideas than when they feel obliged to stick to a side.

The disadvantage of the collaborative style is that it isn’t competitive. Because people’s egos are not on the line, ideas may not get criticized as strongly as they would in the adversarial style. Issues that would have been addressed in a gladiatorial style argument may not be seen in an environment where people are trying to build on each other’s ideas rather than destroy them. While the urge to compete and win is primal, collaboration is slightly less natural to us, so developing the habits to collaborate effectively may take some practice. There is no easy way to keep score in a collaborative discussion, so it is less appealing to those who want a quantitative way to track their status.

I have an obvious bias here. I believe strongly in the collaborative communication style. I think there may be areas where the adversarial style is more appropriate, such as between organizations or in the courtrooms as I mentioned, but within a single company, the collaborative style makes much more sense to me. When everybody is nominally on the same side, and the people involved in the discussion will have to implement the decision, having a collaborative discussion seems like it will be far more effective in the long run than an adversarial discussion where half the people feel like losers afterwards.

I also think the collaborative style is far more human – we should give our fellow employees the benefit of the doubt, to believe that they are trying to contribute something of value to the discussion. We should try to understand their point and extract the value of their experience even if we don’t initially understand. This creates a more generous and motivated environment, where everybody will feel more involved in decisions being made, and the company as a whole can only benefit.

A few months ago, I read a post calling for authors for a book called The Age of Conversation. It sounded interesting, so I put in my name and will be one of 275 people (listed below) contributing a single page 400-word essay on the theme of “Why Don’t People Get It?”

Here’s where I need your help. When I signed up several months ago, May 15th, the deadline for contributions, seemed eons away. But May 15th is suddenly next week, and because I’ve been distracted by finishing up my degree, I haven’t started on my essay yet. I signed up to write on the topic of Business Model Evolution, and could use some help in brainstorming. I have the noodlings of some ideas, but I’m sure I can do better with the help of another few people.

Also, if anybody is willing to be an editor, that’d be great as well. I would just post drafts here on the blog, but the organizers have requested that essays not be posted before the book is released.

Thanks!

P.S. Following the lead of other authors, here’s the list of all 275 contributors with links to their online presences: Adam Crowe, Adrian Ho, Aki Spicer, Alex Henault, Amy Jussel, Andrew Odom, Andy Nulman, Andy Sernovitz, Andy Whitlock, Angela Maiers, Ann Handley, Anna Farmery, Armando Alves, Arun Rajagopal, Asi Sharabi, Becky Carroll, Becky McCray, Bernie Scheffler, Bill Gammell, Bob Carlton, Bob LeDrew, Brad Shorr, Bradley Spitzer, Brandon Murphy, Branislav Peric, Brent Dixon, Brett Macfarlane, Brian Reich, C.C. Chapman, Cam Beck, Casper Willer, Cathleen Rittereiser, Cathryn Hrudicka, Cedric Giorgi, Charles Sipe, Chris Kieff, Chris Cree, Chris Wilson, Christina Kerley (CK), C.B. Whittemore, Clay Parker Jones, Chris Brown, Colin McKay, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, Cord Silverstein, Corentin Monot, Craig Wilson, Daniel Honigman, Dan Goldstein, Dan Schawbel, Dana VanDen Heuvel, Dan Sitter, Daria Radota Rasmussen, Darren Herman, Darryl Patterson, Dave Davison, Dave Origano, David Armano, David Bausola, David Berkowitz, David Brazeal, David Koopmans, David Meerman Scott, David Petherick, David Reich, David Weinfeld, David Zinger, Deanna Gernert, Deborah Brown, Dennis Price, Derrick Kwa, Dino Demopoulos, Doug Haslam, Doug Meacham, Doug Mitchell, Douglas Hanna, Douglas Karr, Drew McLellan, Duane Brown, Dustin Jacobsen, Dylan Viner, Ed Brenegar, Ed Cotton, Efrain Mendicuti, Ellen Weber, Emily Reed, Eric Peterson, Eric Nehrlich, Ernie Mosteller, Faris Yakob, Fernanda Romano, Francis Anderson, G. Kofi Annan, Gareth Kay, Gary Cohen, Gaurav Mishra, Gavin Heaton, Geert Desager, George Jenkins, G.L. Hoffman, Gianandrea Facchini, Gordon Whitehead, Graham Hill, Greg Verdino, Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming, Hillel Cooperman, Hugh Weber, J. Erik Potter, J.C. Hutchins, James Gordon-Macintosh, Jamey Shiels, Jasmin Tragas, Jason Oke, Jay Ehret, Jeanne Dininni, Jeff De Cagna, Jeff Gwynne, Jeff Noble, Jeff Wallace, Jennifer Warwick, Jenny Meade, Jeremy Fuksa, Jeremy Heilpern, Jeremy Middleton, Jeroen Verkroost, Jessica Hagy, Joanna Young, Joe Pulizzi, Joe Talbott, John Herrington, John Jantsch, John Moore, John Rosen, John Todor, Jon Burg, Jon Swanson, Jonathan Trenn, Jordan Behan, Julie Fleischer, Justin Flowers, Justin Foster, Karl Turley, Kate Trgovac, Katie Chatfield, Katie Konrath, Kenny Lauer, Keri Willenborg, Kevin Jessop, Kris Hoet, Krishna De, Kristin Gorski, Laura Fitton, Laurence Helene Borei, Lewis Green, Lois Kelly, Lori Magno, Louise Barnes-Johnston, Louise Mangan, Louise Manning, Luc Debaisieux, Marcus Brown, Mario Vellandi, Mark Blair, Mark Earls, Mark Goren, Mark Hancock, Mark Lewis, Mark McGuinness, Mark McSpadden, Matt Dickman, Matt J. McDonald, Matt Moore, Michael Hawkins, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Michelle Lamar, Mike Arauz, Mike McAllen, Mike Sansone, Mitch Joel, Monica Wright, Nathan Gilliatt, Nathan Snell, Neil Perkin, Nettie Hartsock, Nick Rice, Oleksandr Skorokhod, Ozgur Alaz, Paul Chaney, Paul Hebert, Paul Isakson, Paul Marobella, Paul McEnany, Paul Tedesco, Paul Williams, Pet Campbell, Pete Deutschman, Peter Corbett, Phil Gerbyshak, Phil Lewis, Phil Soden, Piet Wulleman, Rachel Steiner, Sreeraj Menon, Reginald Adkins, Richard Huntington, Rishi Desai, Beeker Northam, Rob Mortimer, Robert Hruzek, Roberta Rosenberg, Robyn McMaster, Roger von Oech, Rohit Bhargava, Ron Shevlin, Ryan Barrett, Ryan Karpeles, Ryan Rasmussen, Sam Huleatt, Sandy Renshaw, Scott Goodson, Scott Monty, Scott Townsend, Scott White, Sean Howard, Sean Scott, Seni Thomas, Seth Gaffney, Shama Hyder, Sheila Scarborough, Sheryl Steadman, Simon Payn, Sonia Simone, Spike Jones, Stanley Johnson, Stephen Collins, Stephen Cribbett, Stephen Landau, Stephen Smith, Steve Bannister, Steve Hardy, Steve Portigal, Steve Roesler, Steven Verbruggen, Steve Woodruff, Sue Edworthy, Susan Bird, Susan Gunelius, Susan Heywood, Tammy Lenski, Terrell Meek, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Knoll, Tiffany Kenyon, Tim Brunelle, Tim Buesing, Tim Connor, Tim Jackson, Tim Longhurst, Tim Mannveille, Tim Tyler, Timothy Johnson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Andrlik, Troy Rutter, Troy Worman, Uwe Hook, Valeria Maltoni, Vandana Ahuja, Vanessa DiMauro, Veronique Rabuteau, Wayne Buckhanan, William Azaroff, Yves Van Landeghem

I just got back from two weeks of vacation with an inordinate amount of socializing. In addition to the normal catching up I do with friends in the Bay Area, I also attended a wedding which brought many friends from out of town. It was delightful to hear what everybody is doing, and to pick the brains of the smartest and most wonderful people I know.

In all of the talking I was doing, I noticed that I felt that I had the most interesting conversations when I was just talking to one or two other people for an extended period of time. After some reflection, this shouldn’t have surprised me. It’s another version of the communication catastrophe that companies face as they grow. When in a party atmosphere at one of the wedding events, everybody’s time is spent giving the “two minute recap” of their life. You form a group of a few people, each person gives their recap, and by the time you start talking about something else, the group has broken up and reformed with different people. The conversation flow is constantly being interrupted.

But during the times when I reserved a few hours to go hang out with specific people, I had some great conversations where we dug into some really interesting ideas that will inspire several blog posts going forward. I’ve discussed the idea of better living through conversation before, and those ideas were reinforced here. Spending a few hours with the same person or people allowed us to get past the two minute recap, and into the life issues confronting us. It also allowed the conversation to drift to topics of mutual interest, which were specific to the people involved in the conversation. The conversations I have with Person A will be different if we are alone, if we are with Person B, or if we are with Person C, because the overlapping interests will differ. In a party environment, the groups shift too fast to discover those overlaps.

I need a balance of both kinds of interactions. While I was in the Bay Area, I was generally structuring my day with a few hours of one-on-one time with people before heading out to a big group dinner or event. The deep meaningful conversations are inspiring but somewhat exhausting, whereas the shallower social interactions provide the phatic communication that maintains social connections. I think either one alone would be unfulfilling, but the mix works for me.

I wonder if there are ways to structure our environments to encourage that sort of mix. Perhaps a workplace with an open cubicle plan to enable background social awareness that also offered plenty of small meeting rooms for one-on-one conversations. Getting this mix right may be one of the reasons I loved living at TEP – the boisterous dinners where all were present contrasted with the late-night conversations in various rooms. I’m not sure how to change my living environment, so for now, this post is a reminder to make sure I don’t fall prey to thinking that socializing only means going out with a crowd.

P.S. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the great benefits of writing this blog is that it lets me launch into those deeper conversations more quickly, both because it lets me skip the two minute recap, and also because it enables others to find the areas of overlapping interest. I’ll be chatting with somebody and they’ll say “Oh, I read this post of yours and it got me thinking…” Sometimes it won’t even be that direct – just an awareness that I think about these sorts of things and bringing up issues of concern to them. So I appreciate the conversations this blog spawns both directly and indirectly.

I had a minor epiphany last week after my friend Jocelyn posted a quote from our conversation at dinner on my Facebook wall. For those of you not on Facebook, the wall is a single-threaded discussion board, where people can write comments to you that are visible to others. One of the reasons I didn’t “get” Facebook was that observing something like the wall from outside a community was meaningless. The comments were disjointed and without context, and I didn’t see how they were interesting… until I got one myself. Jocelyn’s comment preserved our conversation in a more substantial form, but it will only have meaning to those of us who were at dinner – it requires knowledge of a separate context to make sense of the comment.

This is part of a larger trend in society to expand our conversations and communities across multiple forms of media. This post is informed by having read the Transmedia Storytelling chapter of Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins, where he describes The Matrix as follows:

The Matrix is entertainment for the age of media convergence, integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium. The Wachowski brothers played the transmedia game very well, putting out the original film first to stimulate interest, offering up a few Web comics to sustain the hard-core fan’s hunger for more information, launching the anime in anticipation of the second film, releasing the computer game alongside it to surf the publicity, bringing the whole cycle to a conclusion with The Matrix Revolutions, and then turning the whole mythology over to the players of the massively multiplayer online game. Each step along the way built on what has come before, while offering new points of entry.

What Jocelyn’s wall post made me realize is that conversations in general can no longer “be contained within a single medium”. We have so many options for expressing ourselves, and for having conversations with our friends, that restricting ourselves to a single medium no longer makes sense. We might start a conversation by phone, follow up by email, use instant messaging to arrange a meeting, have a conversation in person, and recap the conversation in Facebook.

One possible disadvantage of such transmedia conversations is that it requires carrying our context with us. I can’t depend on the media to give me cues about how the conversation has developed when the conversation has spanned across several forms of media. So when I get a text message on my phone, I have to remember what I was last talking to this person about, and figure out the frame of context myself, whereas on the phone I could ask for clarification, or in email, my previous email might often be quoted. This may be a generational thing, though, as I think that younger generations growing up in a world of transmedia will have less difficulty with keeping track of their various contexts, as they will not know a world where it could be otherwise.

A similar constraint on these conversations is the lack of traceability and history. I really like email because I can use quoting of an incoming message to frame my reply, and keep a stored digital copy of what was said for future reference. I often get frustrated when looking at an old email that refers to an IM or an offline conversation because I can’t reconstruct what triggered the reference – the conversation that was part of my context at the time is long since forgotten and I have no way of recovering it. I can see advantages to this form of built-in information decay, but I also think we will lose our history. I can’t imagine future historians being able to track their subject’s thoughts and conversations in the way they could fifty years ago by reading their subject’s letters, as so much context will be lost.

Another disadvantage is that these conversations are impenetrable to outsiders. They don’t make sense from outside the community, because only the community is following the conversation across all media (one might call it “media hopping” in analogy to frequency hopping). This may be an advantage in some ways, especially for teenagers trying to develop and assert a new identity without interference from their parents and community, but it makes the barrier to entry into the community higher. One has to earn the trust of everybody in the community to get included in the conversation. Otherwise, one suffers from the experience we’ve all had where somebody says “Don’t you remember what they said? Oh, right, you weren’t there.” where “there” can be a place, a mailing list, a web-based discussion board, an IM chat room, a friends-locked LiveJournal post, etc.

Understanding the transmedia nature of the conversations helps because it makes me realize that it’s not that I’m “old” in not “getting” a new medium, it’s that I’m not part of a community conversation using that medium. New communities are springing up around each form of social media, and many communities are spanning across several media. Having a surfeit of media options provides people with more options for expressing themselves. People that like to write essays can have a blog, people that express themselves through pictures have Flickr, people who think in one-liners have Twitter, people that represent themselves through their networks have LinkedIn or Facebook, etc. And communities can integrate all of these to express themselves. Much like I might represent myself by a particular combination of fields, a community might define itself by the media it uses to trace its connections.

Of course, the next step is to think about how one might try to design the form a community will take by the media used to maintain it (e.g. mailing list vs. web discussion board vs. closed Facebook group), but I’ll leave that to someone smarter than myself.

I’m a couple weeks late in commenting on the post where Joel explains why he doesn’t let people comment on his posts:

When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.

I tend to agree with Clay Shirky’s response, which Joel mentioned, where he says:

…the sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale. If you are operating below that scale, comments can be quite good, in a way not replicable in any ‘everyone post to their own blog’.

As I wrote in what I know about blogging:

Having comments is a good sign. It means that the blogger is trying to start a conversation, and is interested in more than just hearing themselves speak. One of the great achievements a blogger can attain in my eyes is to be the seed around which a community forms.

When a blogger is starting out, comments are wonderful. They indicate that people are reading, and that people care enough about what they’re saying to respond. That’s obviously not an issue for somebody like Joel, who’s got hundreds of thousands of readers. But for those of us that are nowhere near the A-list, comments are a great way to see what our readers are thinking.

I also disagree with Joel’s contention that all comments should be placed on one’s own blog, rather than with the post in question. I much prefer seeing all the discussion on the post in one place, rather than trying to follow a conversational thread all over the Internet. I’m also more likely to contribute to the conversation via a comment. I often leave paragraph length comments on other blogs that I would never post to my own blog, because setting the context for my reply would be annoying, and I don’t feel the paragraph response deserves its own post.

The usefulness of comments depends on whether one is looking to create a conversation or a community with one’s blog. If so, making it easy to continue the conversation is essential – that means keeping all the comments in one place, not scattered across the web, and not requiring registration to post a comment. On the other hand, if one is blogging to express oneself, perhaps comments are not appropriate because they might create an environment where one feels uncomfortable saying what one wants. I personally love getting comments – comments have spurred some of the best posts I have done on this blog, as the commenter extended my ideas into new and interesting directions.

Separating the comments from the post also makes it impossible for those who arrive at a post much later (as often happens in Google-world) to see what has already been suggested. For instance, if I post a question asking for advice about a topic, I’d prefer not to be getting emails two years later saying “Did you think of X?” when X was suggested by the first responder. When I was using blogging software that did not support comments, I actually had a year where I asked people to comment over on my LiveJournal, and it was a mess. I regret not being able to go back and easily associate the comments with the posts.

That being said, Shirky’s point that scale matters is a good one. Once the audience size reaches a certain point, the community experiences what he calls The Tragedy of the Conversational Commons, where the temptation to hijack the audience for one’s own purposes overcome normal communitarian tendencies. Preventing such hijacking requires immense resources – think of the security present at sporting events and how it’s ineffectual at preventing streakers.

At small scales, one can manage such antisocial tendencies by careful curation of comments. I obviously remove all spam comments with the help of the Akismet plugin for WordPress, which intercepts hundreds of spam comments a day. I haven’t had to remove any “real” comments, but if a discussion degenerated into flaming and personal attacks, I would have no hesitation in deleting those comments.

I find it interesting that the appropriate comment policy flip-flops when the blog reaches a certain scale. The behavior feels like that described by Inside the Tornado, where the perfect strategy for one business development phase is a disaster in the next one. When a blog is small and struggling to gain an audience, engaging the audience and providing them a voice is essential in building a community of readers. At some point, the blog goes through a phase transition where no amount of curation can keep up with the chaos of the audience rampaging through the conversational commons, and at that point, comments become a detriment.

Issues like this make social software very difficult to write. The appropriate behaviors in one situation don’t match the appropriate behaviors in another, and social software is not currently able to handle such nuances. Perhaps the software tools have to change between the small scale of bloggers like me and the A-list bloggers like Joel. The designers of such software also have to identify what people are trying to do with the software, which will be difficult since the reasons people have for blogging are as varied as the bloggers. I’m enjoying watching as these social software tools evolve, in addition to being co-opted and adapted, to meet the needs of people.

I went to the nextNY happy hour last week, which got me thinking about the different ways in which people network.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but lists a few of the archetypes I have come across at such events.

What interests me is finding an event structure that can accommodate all of these different networking styles and goals. Different event formats lend themselves to different networking styles, as I discussed in my post about Meta-Brainjamming. A happy hour is great for the connector or the “personal relationship” networker, but it’s less amenable for the agenda networker, who’d prefer to break off conversation if it’s not useful. Conferences might work better for that type of networking as there’s always the excuse of a session to attend. Round robin one-on-ones like the BrainJam had would be great for the Rolodexer, but annoying for others.

What kind of networking do you do? What advantages and disadvantages do you see in it? Before going to a networking event, do you assess what you are trying to get out of it, and whether your goals are compatible with the format of the event?