Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

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.

Technorati tag: barcampnyc3

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.

Over the holidays, I got in a conversation about various social technologies like Twitter and Facebook, and found myself defending them as useful (which is interesting because six months previously, I said I “dislike the minimal information content transmitted via Facebook status messages or Twitter messages”). Other people couldn’t understand the point of posting one line updates about oneself to the Internet. They thought that it was the peak of vanity to think that anybody cared that one was taking a walk, or working on homework, or any of the numerous mundane things that people post as status updates.

I tried to convey Grant McCracken’s description of phatic communication, which is the idea that the actual content of the communication is meaningless, but the communication itself is not. The communication demonstrates that a human connection exists. It’s like a tracer bullet that has no impact itself but illuminates the path that a more impactful communication could follow.

Another tactic I used to try to explain the point of one-line status updates is the water cooler chat. You see a coworker at the water cooler or coffee machine, and you say “Hey, how was your weekend?” They respond with a one line summary. You both go on your way. Or the one line summary prompts a response which starts a conversation.

A Twitter or Facebook update serves the same purpose – it’s a placeholder that often just disappears but occasionally can spark a useful conversation that would not otherwise have happened. The conversation may not happen via the status updates, as it can range across different media. This separation of the useful consequences from the status update itself may make it appear that it is useless, but the status update should be seen more as the tip of an iceberg, signifying a larger mass of social connection.

Clay Shirky observes that one reason we may be confused by status updates is that these new social technologies have blurred the line between the public and the private. He pointed out that if you went to a mall and sat at the food court near a group of teenage girls, you would overhear a conversation including gossip about various boys and who was seeing whom. The mall is a public space, but “if you were listening in on their conversation at the mall, … it would be clear that you were the weird one.”

However, with tools like MySpace and LiveJournal bringing the cost of “publishing” to zero, now those same conversations are happening online. Shirky’s insight is that when people post about their cats or the gossip they just heard, they aren’t talking to you, the random stranger listening in – they’re talking to their circle of friends. In some ways, publishing to the Internet is more efficient; instead of having to make ten phone calls to share a particularly juicy piece of gossip, a teenager can post once and reap the social benefits of breaking the news.

Publishing used to be difficult and expensive, so we assumed that anything that got published was valuable in its own right. We aren’t used to the idea that the equivalent of water cooler chatter or gossip at the mall is now preserved in a more permanent form. As Shirky observes,

“what was once a sharp break between two styles of communicating is becoming a smooth transition. Most user-generated content is created as communication in small groups, but since we’re so unused to communications media and broadcast media being mixed together, we think that everyone is now broadcasting. This is a mistake. If we listened in on other people’s phone calls, we’d know to expect small talk, inside jokes, and the like, but people’s phone calls aren’t out in the open.”

But status updates are, and it’s blurring the lines between public and private.

Our social lives would be poorer if one line status updates were the only way we had to communicate with each other. But as one tool in a growing array of social technologies, status updates serve a useful role as the virtual equivalent of the one line update at the water cooler. They can maintain connections that already exist, and sometimes even initiate conversations that would not otherwise happen.

P.S. I still don’t actually use Twitter, although knowing that I can re-broadcast Twitters on both LiveJournal and Facebook may convince me to give it a try at some point. The wacky thing is somebody else grabbed the nehrlich username on Twitter – I almost never have that happen to me, but Nicholas Ehrlich scooped me this time.

[Disclaimer: I received a free advance copy of this book for review, but would happily have bought this book from Amazon.]

I have been a fan of Clay Shirky since I first found his work. Several early posts on this blog were commentary on his articles covering topics such as process, situated software, and the semantic web. As a faculty member of the ITP program at NYU, he writes incisively about the impact of new social technologies on the communications of many to many, the title of the group blog where he posts. So I was thrilled when he mentioned that he had written a book. And after blasting through the book over the weekend, my expectations have been exceeded.

Shirky starts off with the story of a lost phone. The phone was left in a taxi in New York, but eventually ended up in the hands of a teenage girl. When asked politely to return the phone to its owner, the girl responded with taunts; after all, what could the owner do? A friend of the owner started a web page to tell the story of the lost phone. Since the phone’s data was mirrored on the cell phone website, he posted pictures that the girl had taken with the phone as well as the email address she was using from the phone. The story went viral, and thousands of people started emailing with advice, including members of the New York Police Department, and eventually the girl was found and arrested for holding stolen property.

How did this coalition of people come into existence? How could this story of a lost phone reach thousands of people and convince many of them to help find the phone? Shirky provides a guide as to how and why the world has changed in response to evolving social technologies such that the lost phone could be found in a way that would be unthinkable even ten years ago.

Shirky sets the stage by discussing the work of Ronald Coase, who wondered why companies existed. Free markets suffice to connect buyers to sellers, so why were markets unable to connect individual workers together to make products? He suggested that transaction costs explained this inconsistency. Transaction costs are the externalities associated with a market transaction, the time spent finding the appropriate people and “making and enforcing agreements among the participating parties”. If the transaction costs are high to find coworkers (as anybody who has spent time interviewing potential employees will attest), then companies make sense so that the transaction cost is a one-time cost of hiring rather than having to find coworkers for each new project.

Shirky posits that in such a world, there exists a Coasean floor, below which there are types of interactions that are impossible because the transaction costs are too high. Such activities “are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way, because the basic and unsheddable costs of being an institution in the first place make those activities not worth pursuing”. Shirky uses the example of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Hundreds of people take pictures of the parade each year and share them with friends and family, but had no way to share them with each other. In 2005, Flickr appeared and now it’s trivial to find pictures of the Mermaid Parade taken by dozens of people. A company would never find it profitable to organize this sharing of pictures, but Flickr enabled it by letting people organize themselves, an activity that would previously have been below the Coasean floor.

These newly possible activities are moving us towards the collapse of social structures created by technology limitations. Shirky compares this process to how the invention of the printing press impacted scribes. Suddenly, their expertise in reading and writing went from essential to meaningless. Shirky suggests that those associated with controlling the means to media production are headed for a similar fall. Twenty years ago, achieving an audience of more than a few dozen people required signing a deal with a publishing house, getting on TV, working at a newspaper, etc. With the global audience of the Web, everybody is a publisher, and the concept of a professional publisher or journalist or broadcaster is disappearing.

This collapse of institutions comes at a price, as it has become increasingly difficult to find the “good” stuff. Under the previous regime, quality was implied by publication, as the costs of publication meant that institutions would filter material before publishing it. With publishing costs dropping to zero, anything can be published, so we must find ways to filter for quality after publication. We are quickly developing the tools to handle this filtering, starting with Google, whose PageRank algorithm rewards pages that are linked to by others, and continuing with our communities, where we check out links that our friends email to us or post on their blogs, but we are still learning to live in this paradigm.

These new social tools are enabling new social patterns. Shirky suggests that group activities are being enabled at three levels:

• Sharing, with tools like Flickr and del.icio.us allowing us to share things with others
• Collaboration, with a primary example being Wikipedia or Linux
• Collective action, where a group of people forms to pursue a larger purpose, and uses social tools ranging from web pages to discussion groups to email lists to enable them to stay connected with each other and stay unified.

The rest of the book is filled with wonderful examples of each of these activities, such as Egyptian activists using Twitter to keep each other updated of their activities and confrontations with authority, or Belarussian protestors using LiveJournal to organize flash mobs.

I started to write up all the bits that I liked, but realized that I was just repeating everything in the book, so you should just buy the book and read it yourself. To whet your appetite, I’ll include his practical advice on how to form a sustainable social group:

Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The promise is the basic “why” for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the “how” – how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome, or at least be held to manageable levels? And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect, and what will be expected of you?”

Shirky’s book is a terrific introduction to the world of social technology, with an overview of both the social and the technological and how they are interacting with each other to form new mashups. I highly recommend it to anybody who has the faintest interest in how new tools are giving us more power by multiplying the number of ways in which we can interact with each other.

P.S. Some quotes I particularly liked:

• “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” (with the example that people my age know that the fax machine predates the Web, but have no idea about the ordering of radio compared to the telephone since both of those technologies preceded us. Similarly, teens today have always lived in a world with always-on Internet access, so the Internet is not technology to them, it’s just the world.)
• “Cities exist because people like to be near other people, and it is this fact, rather than the mere trading of information, that creates social capital. (Anyone who predicts the death of cities has already met their spouse.)”
• “The groups now adopting social tools form the experimental wing of political philosophy, a place where hard questions of group governance are being worked out.”

P.P.S. If you prefer to watch rather than read, check out Clay Shirky’s Long Now talk, where he covers some of the same material. In particular, he discusses the power of tagging to organize the world’s information without anybody actually taking responsibility for the organization.

Rock Band is a video game phenomenon. One enthusiast I know calls it the greatest in-person multiplayer game ever. Over the holidays, I played it three times in a week at three different apartments, and played it some more at our company retreat last month. So what makes Rock Band a great game?

First of all, it’s just fun. Almost everybody wants to pretend they’re a rock star, so being able to rock out with friends is a great experience. Everybody gets a prop (guitar, bass, drum set or microphone for vocals) and if you play the game on a big screen and hooked up to a stereo, it’s like starring in your own rock concert. They’ve done a good job of selecting songs with catchy tunes that most people know (who of my generation doesn’t enjoy rocking out to Bon Jovi?). But I think the design of the game is exemplary in other ways.

Rock Band enables people of different skill levels to enjoy playing with each other. This sounds minor, but imagine the experience of a novice playing a first-person shooter game such as Quake 3 with somebody that’s an expert. The expert kills the novice repeatedly, and it’s not fun for either player as the expert is bored and the novice gets no chance to improve. Compare that to Rock Band, where one player can select Easy and the other Expert, and both will be presented with game material challenging for their skill level. Everybody has fun, and when they make it through a song, they can celebrate together.

Rock Band also does a great job of continually challenging players. When playing Rock Band for the first time, you choose the Easy skill level of an easy song. As you get more comfortable, you can try harder songs at the Easy level. Once you can master the hardest songs on Easy, you realize that you can handle the easier songs at the Medium level, and start working your way through the songs at that skill level. The game offers a well-designed continuum of challenges so that there is always a next step just out of reach, so that if you try that song one more time, you might get through it. This continuous incremental achievement is gratifying and I think it is why many of my friends are so addicted to the game.

The game keeps players working towards improvement by offering excellent feedback. At the end of each song, each player is given a percentage grade showing how well they did at matching the patterns given to them. The grading is dependent on the skill level; the game is much more forgiving of being a split second off (or of being out of tune when singing) at the Easy level than at the Expert level. With the numerical grade, one can chart one’s improvement even when playing the same song repeatedly, and when combined with the range of game material discussed in the last paragraph, that offers players the challenge of always improving themselves.

The one area in which Rock Band could improve is in offering direct competition with others. While we were on the company retreat, we split up into two teams of four with roughly comparable skill levels, and took turns playing the same song to compare our scores (although we spent all of dinner arguing over what the proper way to compare scores would be). This turned out to be remarkably fun and each of us probably played our best when we were doing our battle of the bands because we were so focused. I imagine something like this is possible with XBox Live, but I’ll defer to others who would know better.

The interesting thing to me is that all of the design choices that make Rock Band excellent can be applied to management.

• Having fun is important. It may be difficult to quantify, but I believe that employees that are happy at work are more productive.
• People want to feel like they’re contributing regardless of their skill level – they don’t want to be on a team where the expert does everything and everybody else watches.
• Jobs should be designed so that they are always stretching employees’ capabilities. When they master one set of skills, introduce some new element that challenges them to continue learning.
• Consistent feedback is vital to employee satisfaction and improvement. When they know how they are doing, they have a target which they can aim to exceed moving forward.
• Competition is good. It gets people to push themselves harder than they would otherwise, and achieve results they would not achieve by themselves.

P.S. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a month, but life has been crazy. This is only the second weekend I’ve spent in New York since mid-December, and the other one was when I had class from 9 to 5 on Saturday and six hours of reading to do on Sunday. I have several posts I want to write, including catching up on my backlog of book reviews, so please nudge me if I don’t start writing more often.

Earlier today, my friends were putting their house back together after the party last night, and called me up to ask me where I had put something while cleaning up yesterday afternoon. I told them, hung up, and then thought about what had just happened. It felt almost like something out of a religious myth, where people had made a plea to the heavens for information, and their request had been granted.

I’m reminded of a similar incident last summer when Jofish and I called up our friend Bats from the Home Depot aisle to get his advice on which products we should be buying for our home improvement project. Thirty years ago, we would have been reliant on the salesperson in the store; instead, we were able to consult the most knowledgeable person we know on the subject of construction. It seemed unremarkable at the time, but in retrospect, it shows how technology has made us much more powerful. Anything known by anybody we know can be shared with us at the push of a button. Our intelligence has become multiplied and distributed across dozens if not hundreds of people.

Stories like this make me feel like we are starting to achieve the aspirations espoused by the Whole Earth Catalog when they said “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it”. While none of us are omniscient, the oracles of Google and Wikipedia certainly grant us knowledge. I can pull out my cell phone and within seconds get the answer to almost any question, no matter how trivial (at the party last night, there was a dispute over who sang “Don’t you want me?”, quickly revealed by Google to be Human League). Think about how fantastic it would look to somebody even fifty years ago for me to consult a pocket-sized device and be able to read off so much information.

On a more personal level, we have more tools than ever to know what our friends are doing. I can see what my friends are thinking on blogs and LiveJournal. I can get real-time status updates from Facebook or Twitter. I can even see what they’re doing by looking at their pictures on Flickr. For instance, pictures from last night’s party are already popping up on Facebook, and they were up on Flickr this morning, so only one day later you can see images from an event at which you weren’t present. While it may not be omniscience, it can certainly feel god-like at times.

There are downsides to having this much access to information. It’s easy to become sucked into the flood of information and never do anything with the information gained. One can easily spend all day following the exploits of people around the world (I have a particular weakness for following Chicago sports). We have created this surfeit of information following the American mottos of “More is better” and “Too much is never enough”, but it’s unclear we know what to do with this information access. If we are becoming like gods, we need to learn how to become good at it, and figure out how to turn our partial omniscience (oxymoronic?) into action.

Perhaps omniscience is not a state to which we should aspire. It’s hard to resist the temptation to gather more information in the hopes that the next piece of information will determine what we should do next. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to know everything, but instead to quickly discern the most critical piece of information and figure out how to learn that. When Jofish and I were looking for home improvement advice, we could have spent days doing research. Instead, we called Bats, and used his expertise to sort through the different possibilities quickly.

We still haven’t learned how to live with these increased powers granted to us by technology. Our cultural and societal values are still trying to catch up, as is demonstrated by the various debates over privacy with regard to Facebook and MySpace. Another example of our struggles to deal with the implications of technology is the debates over stem-cell research and the questions raised by genetic engineering. How would we behave if we had the powers of gods? How should gods behave? We may have to answer these questions over the next few decades, especially if those who believe in nanotech or the Singularity turn out to be prescient.

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.

Why does anybody use social software? I talked about some possible uses in my last post about affordances, but there’s more going on.

Grant McCracken wrote a great post about how social networks work where he describes the concept of “phatic communication”, which he describes as “communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content.” What does the communication convey? That a connection exists and that it is still present. As Grant puts it:

When I use Twitter or Facebook to say that I am entertaining my cat, no one, I’m pretty sure, gives a good God damn that I am entertaining my cat. But they are reminded that they have someone called Grant McCracken in their network. … There is a “superorganic” concept of the network at work here, according to which every small moment of phatic communications so reverberates that we are briefly and tinyly reminded of our larger network and social connections.

This concept resonates with my own experience with LiveJournal. I’m sure that nobody else is interested in reading my friends page because the updates of those people are only meaningful to me because I know them. It’s a reminder that these people exist, that I am friends with them, and that I could get in contact with them if I wanted. The offline equivalent of this maintenance of social connections is the Christmas card, where we send out a card to all of our friends just to say “I’m here, I’m okay, I’m still your friend”.

The other interesting thing about LiveJournal is that it provides me with an ambient awareness of my friends’ lives that I would not otherwise have. The things that we record in our journals are rarely important things. I don’t feel compelled to call up my friends and tell them about any of the things I blog. But because updates scroll past on my Friends page, I know what’s going on with my people in a way that would have been completely invisible ten years ago. In an amusing side effect, when I see somebody in real life whose journal or blog I follow, I sometimes don’t have anything to say to them immediately because we can’t break the ice with the half hour of conversation catching up with what we’ve been doing.

One consequence of this ambient awareness of my social network is that it requires much less work on my part to stay connected to my network. Another recent McCracken post asks what the new Dunbar number is. The Dunbar number is a postulated limit on how many social relationships people can track – one formulation explains it as the number of people you’d feel comfortable getting a drink with if you ran into them at a bar. The canonical Dunbar number is 150, but that may have been a result of the effort it took to maintain social relationships, as Robin Dunbar’s work grew out of the study of primates and the use of grooming to maintain relationships.

What if the Dunbar number was limited to 150 because there were only so many one-to-one connections one could maintain through the media of phone calls and letters? The effort required to keep up with all of my friends individually via the phone would be overwhelming – it would take all weekend. But LiveJournal and blogs let me maintain those social connections without much effort, allowing me to maintain connections that I undoubtedly would have dropped in a pre-Internet age. Because I can hold on to more connections, I wonder if my Dunbar number is greater than it would have been without such tools.

Another advantage of the low maintenance necessary to maintain social connections is that it enables me to access latent resources. LinkedIn demonstrates this power for the specific purpose of getting jobs, building on Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” work. But it works in many other contexts as well. One of my friends might post about a problem they’re facing at work, and I can read it and put them in touch with somebody who might be useful in solving that problem. They would not have known about my resource, and would not have thought to ask me specifically, but these social networks make it easy to query one’s network and find such resources.

Reviewing these uses of social networks answers the question of why I don’t “get” Facebook yet. So far there’s no close friends on my Facebook network who I don’t keep track of via other media, such as reading their blogs or their LiveJournals. Therefore the ambient awareness of my other Facebook friends doesn’t mean that much to me. And while I could leverage the larger network of Facebook for latent resources, I don’t yet feel comfortable making those sorts of requests of people I don’t know well.

I also dislike the minimal information content transmitted via Facebook status messages or Twitter messages. I’ve been spoiled by blog posts where I can read more about what is going on in my friends’ minds. I want more than just a one sentence update. Perhaps the one sentence update might allow me to track more people, but as I discussed in designing my social network, I prefer a smaller but stronger set of connections.

Okay, four posts about social software is enough. I’m ready for a new topic now. I think next week will be thoughts on media.

Following up on my last post, let’s spend some time discussing what makes certain social software sites easier to adopt than others. I’ve written about technology affordances before, but I think the affordances of a given social software site have a huge impact on its adoption. We’ll start by analyzing why I found LiveJournal so easy to adopt.

I started using LiveJournal because I wanted to read the posts that my friends had “locked” so that only their LiveJournal friends could read them. I figured I would create a free account, get accepted as a friend to those people, and that would be it. But as I started using it, I discovered more and more ways in which to use it.

LiveJournal made it easy for me to keep track of all the people whose LiveJournal posts I wanted to read. Instead of having to go to each individual person’s page, as I had been doing, I could just go to my Friends page, and get a list of what my friends have been up to organized neatly into reverse chronological order. To expand my network was also trivial. When I clicked on a person’s name, it took me to their LiveJournal profile which listed all of their friends, making it easy for me to find other people I knew.

LiveJournal gets several other details right in helping me figure out what to do. For instance, if you look at the Friends page, on the left side, it shows me my main options: Recent Entries, Archive, Friends, User Info, My Website. There are other options in various menus, but the primary ones make it clear that LiveJournal is for writing my own posts, and for reading my friends’ posts. Also, LiveJournal allows me to jump into a comment thread wherever I feel comfortable, which reduces the anxiety of public “speaking”.

Making things easy is vital in getting me to do something. Blogging software is a great example. When I first started my web page back in 1994, I had a section devoted to ramblings. I only posted every few months, though, because the cognitive overhead of having to create a new HTML file every time I wanted to say something was too much. It’s not hard to create a file, but it meant that I was doing something other than trying to write my thoughts. Once I switched to blosxom, it was slightly easier because I just had to create a text file, but when I switched to Wordpress and could start blogging with one click, things got much easier.

Good software should make it obvious what I should do first, and make it straightforward for me to accomplish something useful. LiveJournal has all sorts of things that I don’t use, like communities and tiered permissions, but that’s okay because I still get value out of it from the things I started using from the beginning. Wordpress is unbelievably customizable, but I was able to start putting up posts quickly, and only look into customization when I want to try something new.

I mentioned in my last post that I couldn’t figure out what to do on Facebook. Now that Jofish friended me and has given me some tips, I can see there was a bootstrapping issue, as none of the people I had friended were using Facebook extensively, so I had no examples of how one might use it. Facebook also suffered because I did not (and still don’t) have a compelling reason to use it, as contrasted with other new technologies:

• With LiveJournal, I wanted to read my friends’ locked posts.
• With Wordpress, I wanted a better blogging system with comments and trackbacks.
• With RSS, I wanted to keep up with dozens of irregularly updated blogs.

I’m still not quite sure what the compelling reason might be for using Facebook, although Jofish’s comment that it’s “a tool to communicate with/between late teens/early twenty somethings in or recently graduated from college” is probably closest.

Twitter is another technology I’m not sure I see the case for yet. Twitter’s big moment this year was at SXSW, where it seemed like everybody started using it. The conference setting was a perfect scenario for Twitter, as everybody wanted to know where everybody else was, so the quick updates to an always accessible communications channel enabled swarming behavior. And it seemed like there was a tipping point as enough people used it that everybody started using it because everybody else was using it. I’m still skeptical of its use in normal life, but examples like Charlie using Twitter to meet up for dinner may convince me eventually.

So what characteristics does social software need to make it easy to adopt?

• There needs to be a compelling reason to use it. I listed a few above, but there has to be a goal that convinces me it’s worth investing the time to figure out how to use it.
• The easier it is to accomplish the goal, the better. If the learning investment is lower, the reason doesn’t have to be as compelling.
• Make my friends’ actions visible and copyable. In new environments, we learn by imitating others. If I can’t see what others are doing, I’ll probably do nothing.
• Make it useful even if not all of my friends use it. If the first step in making it useful is getting all of my friends on board, I’m never going to invest the effort. I think Dodgeball suffers from this problem.
• I’m sure there are others – what are your suggestions?

P.S. Unsurprisingly, these points reflect the design principles I espoused in my Ambidextrous article.

A couple weeks ago, we had a discussion over on the nextNY mailing list about how to use social networking software such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. What was interesting to me about the conversation was how it broke down generationally – us older folks were struggling to figure out what we were supposed to do with these sites. Charlie O’Donnell suggested that for older people there was nothing to do – we have settled into our lives and already have our social networks in place, whereas younger people use such software to expand their networks while they sort out their social identity. That makes sense, but I think there’s more going on here.

For one thing, when one grows up with a technology, it is part of the environment rather than “technology”. It reminds me of McLuhan’s quote that “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.” and Douglas Adams’s take on technology adoption. People use media and technology in different ways when they consider it the natural order of things. These “new” social network sites aren’t new to the kids using them; the sites are seen as just another way to talk to one’s friends.

The expertise with which such sites are used by these newcomers is partially a result of being embedded in a community. They aren’t reading help files to figure out what to do. They see what their friends are doing, copy and adapt what they find useful, and learn as they go. The site does not stand alone, but instead demonstrates the social life of information. Those of us who are the first of our communities to explore a site have a more difficult time, as we have to figure out usage patterns from scratch.

The churn of technology also contributes to lowered adoption rates by older people. I’ve been on the Internet since 1990 and have spent time with email, mailing lists, MUDs, instant messaging, discussion boards, web pages, Usenet, blogs, RSS, LiveJournal, etc. Several of these technologies have been superceded by later ones. Having been through several such cycles, I’m less likely to invest in learning a new technology until it has moved past the hype stage into mainstream adoption. Somebody new to the scene is more likely to believe that the new thing is world-changing.

Part of the churn of technology is because each new generation seeks to differentiate itself from the one before. Baby Boomers adopted rock music and television and created the beginnings of the car culture with their efforts to escape their parents’ influence. My generation thrilled at the ability to escape from our hometowns by talking to people around the world via the Internet. Now kids see their parents using email, so they think email is for old people and use texting or Facebook messaging instead.

Learning a new technology can often mean giving up an old one. Because of the time I have spent mastering various media technologies and integrating them into my life, I am loath to give them up even if better technologies now exist. For instance, I resisted buying a DVR for years because I was convinced my VCR was good enough. Meanwhile, people entering this environment can choose the technologies that best fit their lives without considering sunk costs, much like developing countries are now skipping wired telephone networks and going straight to cell phones.

As Charlie observed, those of us with established careers and social networks have less time and desire to experiment with new technologies and integrate them into our lives. So we reject them in favor of technologies with which we are already comfortable. Charlie describes how bloggers are rejecting Facebook after using it in a unrealistic way based on their experience with blogging. They didn’t take the time to go “native”; without a community in which to observe how others were using the technology, they failed to find a use for it.

The mix of technology and community is an intoxicating one for me – I’ve been fascinated by how virtual communities form and use technology since I first logged into a MUD in 1990. With more experience, I realized that the technology matters less than the community in the process of technology adoption. A technology without an associated community withers away. A technology that can be adapted to serve communities (like Twitter) will thrive.

We’re in a time of great innovation in social software. The technology to create social networking applications is available to anyone, either through building it with open source software on a hosted server, or through sites like Ning. While I’m no longer one of the early adopters, I am watching them closely to see how new technologies are being used by those communities, so that I can adopt them later myself.

P.S. Having said all that, I still don’t “get” Facebook. Anybody want to give me a tour of how they use it?