About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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I just realized I don’t have an “About Me” page on this blog. You can get a sense of who I am from reading the various posts and browsing the archives, but I figured it might be handy to have an introduction post. This is partially inspired by skimming through Derek Powazek’s book Design for Community, which emphasized the importance of making the people behind the site real. So…
I’m Eric Nehrlich. I call myself an unrepentant generalist.
What does that mean? It means I specialize in nothing. Or everything.
My being a generalist is partially aptitude (I learn fast so I can pick up new ideas quickly, and I have enough mental models that adding more is easy), partially limitations (I don’t have the focus necessary to dive deep into a subject for five years, as I found when I tried to be a grad student), and partially interest (I like talking about everything). The phrase “Unrepentant Generalist” is a reminder to myself to glory in rejecting specialization, and to explore where this generalist path leads. I use this blog to help trace that path, recording my thoughts on everything from cognition to community to conversation to design to management to media to philosophy to politics to stories.
I didn’t mean to be a generalist; in fact, I had planned to be a specialist. When I was a kid, I decided I was going to be a particle physicist because I was a big nerd and wanted to be Richard Feynman when I grew up. I did a high school science fair project at Fermilab, went to MIT where I worked on the Superconducting Super Collider over the summers, did an internship at CERN, and went to grad school at Stanford to work on the Stanford Linear Accelerator. But instead of studying physics all the time like my compatriots, I was singing in the chorus, playing volleyball, going to various talks, running the alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer FAQ, etc.
So I left Stanford to try a different specialization. I had always liked computers even after taking several CS courses at MIT, and friends and advisors often wondered why I chose physics over computers when I had a knack for getting computers to do what I wanted. Since physics hadn’t worked out, I went to work for a friend as a software consultant. Working with a variety of companies taught me about software, but taught me even more about people. I learned that the best technical solution was not always chosen, and that clients rarely asked for what they wanted, so I started to see the limits of being a specialist.
I then joined Signature BioScience, a highly interdisciplinary startup developing new instrumentation for drug discovery. Working there gave me a unique insight into the dynamics of an organization, as the software I developed had to reflect the interests of everybody from engineers to testers to biologists to physicists to managers. I eventually grew into a “union foreman” role, representing the interests of employees to the management team, as I had worked with all factions of the company and understood their issues. And I began to see my value to Signature was not my specialized software expertise - it was my ability as a generalist to meld different viewpoints into a coherent synthesis that happened to be expressed in software.
Signature BioScience unfortunately went bankrupt due to some poor decisions by the management team. The failure of Signature as a company showed me how even a great technical team’s efforts could be wasted by key management decisions. I realized that the value I could bring to an organization by improving its management would easily dwarf any technological contributions I could make, given the multiplier effect of management decisions on the rest of the organization. And my skills as a generalist were well-suited to management, as managers have to balance the interests of their group with those of the larger business, so it requires the ability to see from multiple perspectives.
With this in mind, I moved to New York in 2006 to join a Software Management Training Program at Fog Creek Software, and concurrently completed a M.S. in Technology Management at Columbia University, a degree that is similar to an MBA but with a focus on using technology strategically to serve the business.
Upon completing the program, I decided to move back to California to work for Google in Mountain View. I will be an analyst on a sales finance team that develops revenue forecasting models to help Google executives make decisions. I was drawn to the position because I get to use both my quantitative skills in building the models and my generalist skills in that the models are built on understanding everything from the technical product decisions being made, to sales and marketing strategies, to what customers and competitors are doing, to the larger economic and business environment.
(last updated August 2008)
If that didn’t satisfy your curiosity, here are some links to other versions of me:
Invitation
Now it’s your turn. I’d love to be introduced to any or all of my readers. Feel free to do so in the comments, or send me an email if you’re too shy. Say who you are, why you read this blog, and anything else you want to share.
I watched the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica this morning. This wouldn’t be surprising except that I don’t get the Sci-Fi channel, which broadcasts that show on Friday evenings. I watched it over at hulu.com, the video site started by NBC (which owns the Sci-Fi channel) after they pulled their content from iTunes last summer.
What’s interesting is that NBC lost money from me in this process. I had been paying $2 an episode to watch Battlestar Galactica last year on iTunes. On hulu.com, I watched it for free, except for a total of two minutes of advertisements, clumsily sprinkled throughout the episode. I can’t imagine that the advertising revenue they are getting is worth more than the cut of the $2 they got from iTunes. So how does this make sense? It doesn’t to me. And there are a few other questions about television that don’t make sense to me either.
Why doesn’t HBO have an online portal where I can see their shows? I want to see the final season of The Wire. I don’t even get basic cable, so it would cost me $40/month to get the “standard cable” package, and then another $15/month to get HBO on top of that. It doesn’t make sense for me when I just want to watch one show. I went to iTunes but The Wire was not available there, even though I would have gladly paid $2 an episode. Heck, I would have paid $5 an episode which is comparable to their DVD pricing of $50 for a season); after all, I pay $10 for a two hour movie, and an episode of The Wire is much better than most movies. But HBO had no way for me to give them money in exchange for watching a specific show as it is released (I have to wait for the DVD).
Why do all broadcast networks have an online video on demand service now? I love it as a consumer. If I forget to tape a show, or if two shows I want to watch are on simultaneously, I can just go to the network’s site a day later and watch the show I missed. Most sites even store four episodes so that I can catch up on a series if I lost track for a few weeks. NBC has the entire run of Friday Night Lights online to try to build viewership. While it’s tremendously convenient, I don’t know how it makes sense economically (NBC doesn’t even put advertising in their online episodes).
I suppose one possibility is that the networks are using online rebroadcast of their content as a way of gaining access to a highly profitable market segment, which would be people like me that have broadband video connections and the tech savvy to even want to watch a TV show online. The problem I see with this explanation is that they don’t have any way of targeting me currently. I don’t login to hulu.com or to the network sites. So unless they start delivering advertising interspersed with the show, they’re not making money, and given typical online advertising rates, I don’t know if they’d be profitable even then.
I have been waiting for years for the “a la carte” option of television to become a possibility, where I can pay for just the content that I want to see and nothing else. I wanted this as a cable subscriber - I hated paying for the entire cable package when I really wanted just four channels. I want this as somebody who follows specific shows - I got into television as a result of becoming a Buffy fanboy, and still have an instinctive revulsion for the idea of flopping on the couch and “seeing what’s on”. The funny thing is that I would be willing to pay more to get what I specifically wanted - while the cable company charges $40/month for 40 or 50 channels, I would pay $10/month happily for the 4 channels I actually wanted. I know the economics don’t work that way (the channels I want cost more because they are higher profile) but I hate the idea of paying for something I’m not using.
I was excited by the advent of iTunes video, as it seemed like I could finally pay for only what I wanted. I’ve been following The Shield and Battlestar Galactica on iTunes because those are shows on cable channels I don’t get. I would have happily paid for The Wire if given the option. But with various content producers like NBC pulling their content from iTunes so that they can go their own way, it does not appear as if iTunes will be the “a la carte” solution I had hoped.
I wonder how much of my disappointment is because I’m decidedly atypical in my television consumption. I used to use a VCR and now use a DVR to ensure that I only watch shows that I want to watch. So I record shows, and play them back at times convenient to me, generally skipping the commercials. I’m a nightmare for the traditional television advertising model in the sense that I both time-shift and skip commercials. My viewing habits ensure that I am an advertising money-loser, so the “a la carte” solution would seem to be the only way to make money from me.
But I’m guessing most people aren’t like me when it comes to television (the Nielsen ratings back up that assertion). Most people come home from work, flip on the TV and watch whatever’s on. They surf through the channels available to them, rather than focus on specific shows. And when they do focus on specific shows, they don’t set their Tivo - they make sure they’re home to watch it. A digital analogy would be that I’m one of the minority that uses an RSS reader to follow blogs, where most people just go to a site when surfing to see if there’s new content.
Beyond the “a la carte” subscription model, there are a few other possibilities for how television gets made in the future. One possibility is a donation culture, where customers donate money to get the next book or record produced. I’m not sure that scales to the amount of money necessary to get a television episode produced, though.
Another intriguing possibility that may be what the networks are thinking is using content as a loss leader. ValleyWag had a recent article suggesting that “Recorded music is no longer a product, but advertising”, where artists should give their music away as advertising for things they can actually sell, like t-shirts and concert tickets. Perhaps television episodes could now be used to increase the power of the brand, with the actual money being made from DVD sales and other merchandising. Again, this seems unlikely with the much greater money necessary to make television than music.
Another possibility that occurred to me after posting is that networks may still consider the TV show aired in its normal time slot as the franchise. The video on demand on their sites and sites like hulu.com are merely designed as ways to bolster the original broadcast. This way, if I miss an episode, I can catch up and not feel like I missed a key plot point. Or I can watch a few episodes online and start watching a show that I might not have otherwise (this is how I started watching Friday Night Lights). The network assumes that I will then start watching the broadcast version so they can get their advertising revenue that way. But this assumption is headed towards breakdown as people become more comfortable with technology options like DVRs and video over the internet, which is inevitable as the net generation grows older.
I don’t really have answers. I’m not sure I’m even asking the right questions. But it’s an interesting topic, and I wanted to write about it while the hulu.com/iTunes discrepancy was still fresh in my brain.
I love being part of teams. When I’m on a good team, I work harder, I get more done, and I enjoy the activity more. My biggest career achievement thus far was achieved as part of a tight interdisciplinary team. And yet I’ve often been part of teams that never jell, and are ultimately more frustrating than inspiring. What are the qualities that make a team work, and what can prevent good teams from forming? That’s what Katzenbach (whose work I previously enjoyed in Real Change Leaders) and Smith investigate in The Wisdom of Teams.
The book is filled with inspiring stories of teams that came together under dire circumstances and achieved amazing things. Katzenbach and Smith use these stories as a way of organizing their observations about how to create high-performance teams, from details of how to get people to exchange an individual focus for a team focus, to the characteristics of good team leaders, to how to get a team unstuck from obstacles. But let’s start with determining what a team is.
The authors define a team as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” These are the key components to creating what they call a “real” team, as opposed to a group of individuals who are working together. They studied teams in dozens of organizations and determined these were the common elements among the teams that were highly successful. So let’s take a closer look at these characteristics.
The CellKey team which I enjoyed so much had all of the characteristics of a “real team”. We were 12 people, each with different skills, who were trying to build this completely new instrument. MDS Sciex gave us short-term performance goals in the form of “phase-gates” where we had to prove the viability of our research in order to continue moving forward with product development, but we held ourselves mutually accountable to a higher standard than Sciex did. And we achieved more than I would ever have thought possible when we originally started experimenting with cells in a back room at Signature.
One surprising lesson from this book is that an emphasis on teams does not create teams. No amount of team-building exercises or team initiatives will create teams… unless there is a focus on strong performance. The first “uncommonsense finding” in the prologue states that “Companies with strong performance standards seem to spawn more “real teams” than companies that promote teams per se”. When the stakes are high and things absolutely have to get done, the normal way of doing things breaks down as being too slow to change and react, so teams emerge as the method to reach those performance goals.
This observation reminds me of a paper on innovation that Scott Berkun recommended, which said that the way to spur innovation was to set a goal that was impossible to achieve by normal methods. People don’t think of new ways of doing things unless they are forced to by circumstance - why take the risk of trying something new when the old way will work? Similarly, organizations will cling to hierarchy and bureaucracy unless they absolutely have to achieve more than they have been; teams emerge to save the day.
I have to admit that I’m not entirely convinced that teams can be manufactured by applying the principles described in this book. As the Peopleware authors observe, team building is more about removing the obstacles to the team forming. I think that the observations of Katzenbach and Smith fall into a similar category - these are necessary but not sufficient conditions for a team to emerge. I suspect that you could do everything mentioned in this book and still not have a team form because of a personality conflict or some other detail.
I recommend the book as a good way to reflect on how high-performance teams can be cultivated within an organization. It’s also fun to read about teams that conquer all the obstacles before them - the epilogue tells the story of the “Killer Bees”, a basketball team in Bridgehampton that competes for the state championship every year despite a male student body of less than 20. But they work hard, they play as a team, and with an entire town rooting for them, they somehow overcome the odds to succeed. Stories like that continue to inspire long after the book is done (which isn’t surprising, since it fits all of the Made to Stick rules of being simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and in the form of a story) and only add to the enjoyment of the book. Thumbs up.
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
I went to New York Bite Club last weekend. Bite Club is an underground eating club which serves gourmet dinners in private apartments around New York. It was excellent. I highly recommend it.
It was an amusing process to get into the dinner. I had to apply online at their site, and then exchanged a few emails with the organizer. Then to ensure my seriousness in attending the selected dinner, I had to drop off a cash deposit - it was fairly odd to walk into an office building, go into a random office, and drop off an envelope full of cash to a receptionist with a knowing nod. I was then sent an email with the location, with the warning “IT IS VERY IMPORTANT that silence is maintained while walking through this hallway. All noise can be heard by neighbors and that can bring a lot of attention to our operation, which isn’t going to be acceptable.”
Saturday night finally arrived. I got into the elevator with three other people. We realized we were all going to the same floor, and grinned sheepishly at each other. We walked into a typical New York apartment with the main room filled with tables and chairs, and a couple people working feverishly in the kitchen. We were assigned seating (the organizer had tried to balance the tables with appropriate dinner partners). I was at a table with a Wall Street trader and a manufacturer’s representative. We started talking, but our thoughts were on the food to come.
The night that I went was a 7-course winter tasting menu with a wine pairing (click on any picture for the Flickr set). It was _fantastic_. Comments on most of the courses:
The thing that amazed me was that this was not a specialized kitchen - this was a regular New York kitchen. They brought in extra dishes, an extra set of shelves to hold them, and a table for prep, but other than that, there’s really no excuse for me not to be able to make such dishes myself. Well, except for lacking culinary skill.
Oh, that was the other amazing part - when we inquired as to which restaurant the chef was associated with, we found out that he just does this for fun. His day job has nothing to do with food. He just really enjoys cooking and trying new things, and started throwing bigger and bigger dinner parties until he decided to make it a regular event.
All in all, it was a lovely evening. Four and a half hours of good conversation, while being pampered with a wonderful seven course dinner, each paired with a well-chosen wine. It was pricy, but still far cheaper than a similar dinner would be at a haute cuisine restaurant. Definitely an experience I look forward to repeating as soon as I can raise the funds 
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.
Last night after class, I was skimming through my RSS feeds and saw Kevin Kelly’s post on how creators can make a sustainable business for themselves if they can get 1000 True Fans. I really liked Kelly’s take on it being more important to reach a smaller number of fanatics than to reach the mass market, as fanatics evangelize for you in a way that casual fans do not (plus they spend more).
That article linked to an article co-authored by Bruce Schneier, called The Street Performer Protocol, which suggests a way for artists and fans to securely negotiate with each other, so that fans can donate money and have some assurance that the artist will deliver a product. This is similar to the model that Jill Sobule is apparently using to fund the recording costs for her next album.
The real problem was that Kelly also mentioned that Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are doing the same thing. I adore the Liaden Universe books, and they’re posting the newest book online a chapter at a time, fuelled by donations ($300 of donations is another chapter). I said “Oh, I’ll only read a few chapters”, and the next thing I knew it was 1am and I’d read all 31 chapters (then I read the 6 chapters of the next book this morning). *sigh* I did chip in my $25 donation towards the cause, which felt good as their books have given me many hours of comfort reading pleasure over the years (plus it gets me a trade paperback edition when the book is completed and published).
I wrote about the growing Internet donation culture last year, and it’s cool to see the different ways in which it is being taken. That post mentions the different strategies people can use to get their work funded, from straight up donations to selling merchandise (T-shirts or books) to posting ads.
My favorite movie reviewer is currently struggling with these issues (see his entries on February 3rd and February 10th). He’s added several ads to his site (including a pop-under - yuck), and has been asking his readers to click on an ad or two per visit to show support. I wrote him and asked if he could add a donation button since I’d much rather give $20 directly to him than to click on ads. Interestingly, he feels more comfortable with ads than with donations, as he feels indebted if he receives donations. I don’t particularly get that, but I loathe ads.
As Shirky observes, the Internet is giving us many new ways to organize ourselves. Instead of having to go into debt with a record company to make an album, Jill Sobule can raise the money to do so from her fans. Radiohead can sell its album online with a pay-what-you-wish model. Kevin Kelly is writing his new book online in front of all of us as he tries out ideas and gets feedback. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are writing their book online, but trading chapters for donations. So many different ways to do things, and new ones are being invented all the time. It’s a pretty interesting time to watch as the “standard” way of doing things collapses because the barriers to publication have collapsed. Now it’s up to us to iterate and find new ways that suit our needs.
While introducing ourselves at the Tech Dinner Salon on blogging last week (which I really enjoyed), one of the points of information everybody included was how long they had been blogging. The newest blogger had just started two weeks earlier. And then there was me, who realized I’d been doing this for five years. My first blog post was on March 3, 2003, five years ago today.
You can look back at that first month and see how things started - every post is a one paragraph summary of a book I had read. It wasn’t until September of that year that I started writing about other things, and in November, I merged the “ramblings” blog with the book review blog.
I had actually been writing online for many years before starting a blog. I put up my first web page in 1994, and wrote several rambling posts over the next few years. I also regularly wrote up brief book summaries on that web page. But blogging software obviously made it much easier.
I first started blogging with Blosxom, where I just had to create a text file and then run a script to push it to my blog’s website. After a couple years, I started running into limitations like the lack of comments, the inability to keep drafts easily, and the fact that I could only blog from my home computer. I eventually switched to Wordpress, which has been a joy to use for the last three years. I highly recommend it.
It’s interesting to look back and see how this blog has evolved for me. It started off as a place to do quick book reviews so that I could record key ideas from books as I finished them. I then started using it as a place to rant about politics, which culminated in my trip to Ohio for the 2004 election. And now I mostly use it as a place to publish essays on a variety of topics that interest me.
It’s also interesting to think about what my blog is not.
So why do I blog? (another good question from the Tech Dinner Salon)
So where do I want to take this blog over the next five years? I’m not really sure yet. I’d love to find a way to make the sort of writing and thinking I do here more of my life, possibly even as a career path. I’ve been tossing around the idea of turning this blog into a community site for generalists, because there are too many specialists in the world. I even grabbed UnrepentantGeneralist.com recently in case I decide to move in that direction (it just points here for now).
In the meantime, I plan to continue writing here, thinking about different things, and hopefully providing a perspective on the world that you hadn’t considered.
While I’d get some benefits from writing into the void, it makes a huge difference knowing that there are people out there reading what I have to say. I think making connections with other people is one of the most important goals in life, and so I want you to know that I really appreciate each and every reader out there. Thanks for reading.
I was listening to Kevin Kelly’s Long Now talk this afternoon while out for a walk (as an aside, the Long Now talks are one of the things I miss about the Bay Area, but I’m catching up on the ones I’ve missed over the past two years by listening to the podcasts on my iPhone). I liked Kelly’s book Out of Control many years ago, and in this talk, he applies some of those ideas to science. In talking about how science is evolving, he discussed the contingent nature of Truth, and got me thinking about science as a system. But let’s start with something easier: Wikipedia.
Clay Shirky has a great quote in Here Comes Everybody, where he says “A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product, and as a result, it is never finished.” Think about what Wikipedia is. If you took a snapshot of all the articles at a given point in time and recorded it, would that be Wikipedia? No.
Wikipedia is not just the knowledge contained in Wikipedia, but also the process by which that knowledge grows. It’s the thousands of people fixing typos and subscribing to articles to revert vandalism. It’s people building on each other’s knowledge (Shirky points out that the initial entry for asphalt was just “Asphalt is a material used for road coverings.” and has since evolved into a detailed entry). Wikipedia is an evolving system that includes the people, the knowledge embodied in the articles and also the wiki technology that enables the system.
Shirky’s other point that “it is never finished” is also important. Wikipedia articles are never “done”, with no more that needs to be said. Articles can always be improved. More citations can be added. Topics can be made clearer. New information can be included.
The analogy to science is clear. Science is a process, not a product that can be “finished”. It is a systematic way of expanding our knowledge. Scientists are always looking for ways to improve scientific knowledge, by running experiments to test the outer limits of current theories. Kelly touched upon this in the question and answer period - he said he realized that science was not about discovering the Truth, because Truth is a contingent entity (shades of Latour’s “Constitution”). The goal of science is instead to continue doing science, to continue expanding the realm of questions that we can ask, because good discoveries always bring more questions than answers.
Kevin Kelly described science as an infinite game, a concept which I learned about at the Long Now talk of James Carse. Infinite games are where the goal is not to win the game, but to keep playing the game, changing the rules as necessary so that the game endures. Science keeps on evolving, not just in terms of its knowledge, but also in how it is done (see the talk summary for a chronological history of improvements of how we do science).
I love this vision of a contingent, fluid, evolving system. I don’t like absolutes, or the idea that there is a single answer, or that there is only one way of looking at a situation. This may be because that’s just how my brain works. But I think the infinite game is a powerful vision of how we should conduct our lives. It’s why I felt discomfort with The 4 Hour Work Week, as that treats life as a finite game where the goal is to win. But how would one play an infinite game in other areas of life besides science?
Built to Last is a business book designed to extract the lessons learned by companies that have been successful for decades. Yet one could interpret the ideas in that book as a guide on how to play business as an infinite game. “Preserve the core, but stimulate progress” - stick to your core values, but be willing to change everything else from your business model to the products you make. Keep changing the rules by which you’re playing towards the goal of continuing to play the game.
Preserving the core is also important in playing an infinite game. With nothing to cling to, the game spins out of control and loses meaning. Kelly was asked about “intelligent design” in his talk. I see “intelligent design” as mimicking the trappings of science, without applying the core values - the scientific method and controlled experiments and falsifiability. Creationists are trying to win the finite game of we’re right and you’re wrong, but in doing so, lose all credibility in the infinite game.
We see this cargo cult science all over the place, where people take the surface lessons and try to apply them in such a way as to win their finite game, without understanding the core lessons that are what made the original an infinite game. I’m thinking of how we are fooled by randomness, or how people imitate the clothing and affectations of wealthy people in the hopes of becoming wealthy.
Another interesting aside is thinking through the implications of the idea above that it is the process that is important, not the end result. You may recall that I am scornful at best of process in the workplace, preferring to put my trust in the resourcefulness of people. So how can I support this idea of science as a process?
My review of a Six Sigma book gives a hint: “when process is an end in itself, … it can choke an organization and prevent people from achieving what needs to get done.” In other words, when the process is viewed as a finite game that takes precedence, it is a bad thing. However, if process is viewed as part of an infinite game, where it is being used to promote core values and where the process can modify itself to improve its ability to achieve those core values, then I think process can be valuable. Science is a great example - it continues to evolve in its search for answers, answers which then provoke more questions.
This is a big topic and I need to think more about it. I should also probably re-read Finite and Infinite Games for ideas. But I really like this vision of things like science and Wikipedia being processes in a continual state of evolution without an end goal, and of how that ties into the idea of infinite games. I think there’s a powerful idea lurking here someplace, and I’ll have to see if I can tease it out. I also need to figure out if I can apply these ideas to running one’s personal life - where the goal of life isn’t to have the most money, or most knowledge, or most fame, but to have created a process by which one is continually growing.
What do you think?
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.
