Culture Archives
Just some random thoughts on being a content creator.
Whenever I tell the story of building Brand Tags, I explain that I finally decided to launch the stupid thing because I was feeling guilty about not having blogged in a while. (In the post where I introduced the idea I opened by explaining that, "In lieu of actually writing something interesting (which I haven't done in a while), I've decided to release a 70% done project.")
Just today I was feeling it again as I looked at the last time I wrote a "full entry" (which is what I call those things on the left side of the blog). It was December 31st, which is over a month ago and that post is hardly an insightful or interesting piece of writing, it's just a list of a whole bunch of blogs I steal ideas from.
None of this is to say much, except that I think it's funny that in the 21st century we have the luxury to worry about things like whether our blog audience is feeling as though we're paying an adequate amount of attention to them. In some ways it's incredibly egotistic, as if there's a whole bunch of you sitting around waiting for me to write something (which you are obviously not). In another way, though, it's the flip side of the whole "attention thing" people love talking about (I refuse to call it an economy).
As a content creator, albeit a small-time one, I feel constantly on the hook for finding interesting things to share with all of you. I scour the internet daily, looking for tidbits and ideas that are worth of your time and attention. It shapes what I read and, maybe more importantly, how I read it, as I am constantly reading with a critical eye towards insights.
I guess the point is that too little attention is paid to the effects of so many of us being content creators, since the consumption part is the topic-du-jour. Just think about how it changes the way you look at everything, even if you're only a creator amongst a tiny group of friends or family. Look at how differently you judge photos that are going to the web or how you've learned to describe experiences on Twitter.
Pretty soon we'll have a world with a billion-plus publisher/editor/creators and only focusing on the mass of content they create is probably missing the larger cultural impact of them all being this other thing that puts content out into the world.
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Is there really such a thing as an individual ant?
A month or so ago some fellow Barbarians and myself were having a conversation about bees. We all got to realizing that you hardly ever hear about predators to bees, which eventually led the conversation to animals that pretty much only exist in colonies. (For the record, a quick Wikipedia search of course turned up bears as a bee predator. You'd think all those cartoons would have taught us that.)
Anyway, we basically ended up talking about how ants don't really ever exist on their own. All their power comes from their ability to organize themselves in groups (perfectly illustrated by this video). Basically I got to thinking that the animal is the group, the individual ant is just a component, not unlike an arm or leg for us.
I mention all this because I was just reading an interview with a researcher who studied ant traffic. One paragraph in particular stood out: "For my paper I was working with Isca ants, and they carry food, like big leaves. The ants that carry food are slower; the ants who are behind have to adjust their speed to the loading ants. But it's funny--and quite unexpected--they never try to overtake the loading ants, even if the loading ants were very slow. Because the loading ants are always given the right of way on the trail, if the others just stay behind the loading ants, they took the benefit of that too." In other words, they always operate in the best interest of the group.
Now thinking of ants not as individuals, but rather as limbs of a larger being, that makes sense. They all work toward the optimization of the whole at all times (not unlike our own bodies who can redirect things to different places when needed). Not surprisingly, this makes me think about humans. What if we are just components of the larger culture?
I'm pretty sure an interesting connection could be drawn between this and what Susan Blackmore has to say in her TED Talk or Mark Earls talks about in Herd (which I really still need to read, sorry Mark). Unfortunately I'm on the train with a pretty crappy connection and having quite a bit of trouble thinking, so I'm going to put a stop to this post early. Feel free to add your two cents.
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Just having some fun thinking about being a kid.
Running across this online version of Oregon Trail made me think about generational touchpoints (as just about every American of a certain age holds a special place in their heart for this game, particularly the hunting part). Anyway, after seeing this my mind immediately jumped to a few other references that seemed worth talking about (if for no other reason than they're fun to Google).
UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT-B-A
Everyone knows this one best as the Contra Code (or Konami Code, which I guess is it's official name). I actually remember it having an extra B-A and ending in SELECT + START (the Wikipedia entry notes, "The exact sequence varies from game to game, and has been adapted to fit the button layouts of different video game consoles."). (As a total sidenote, it's worth saying how amazing Wikipedia is for stuff like this. While it may be lacking in some other, more serious, areas, when it comes to 1980s videogames, the information flows). You can now buy t-shirts that reference the code and even use it in Google Reader. (I, personally, have always wanted to use it in a piece of marketing work. No other reference, just the code.)
Hoverboards!
Anyone who remembers Back to the Future Part II likely has one memory that sticks out most of all: Marty's hoverboard. Clearly, every kid wanted one, and, according to Snopes eventually the director, Robert Zimeckis, grew tired of people asking him about how they had done the scenes and started saying it was real. The part I remember best is also covered in the Snopes piece: "A very prevalent legend that circulated around the schools when this movie came out was that some toy company had actually developed a working hoverboard, and were planning to release it as soon as the movie was out of theaters. The release of the board not occuring, the rumor was appended to be such that someone had been killed/severely injured in the playtesting of the hoverboard, and the resulting suit from the child's parents kept the hoverboard from being ever put into production." Man, we totally bought this. (Once again, Wikipedia has some more great info.)
Those are pretty much the three that pop into my head. There are a few others that I would consider in the running, but didn't quite make the cut: Drugwars (which appears to now have been recreated in an opensource version) and Bo Jackson baseball/football poster (which I'm pretty sure Nick still has on his wall).
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Okay, maybe the title's a bit much. But we're moving to a world where in many ways location means less than it ever has.
Clearly one of the themes of the 21st century is the changing meaning of location. Whether you call it the flattening of the globe or something else, the point that we're living in a more global society than ever before can't really be ignored. As someone who makes stuff on the internet this comes up quite often. Since launching brand tags, for instance, almost exactly half my traffic has come from the US and the other half has come from everywhere else, despite the site is clearly for a US audience (the brands are mostly US-centric). And I'm not alone on this one, according to this iMedia article:
Research from comScore indicates that 63 percent of the visitors to Ticketmaster come from outside of the United States, as do 64 percent of the visitors to New York Times Digital, 68 percent of the visitors to Disney Online and Expedia. More than 80 percent of the visitors to CNET Networks and Apple Computer, Inc. come from outside of the United States as well.
But it's not actually marketing I'm interested in talking about at the moment (imagine that!). Rather, I want to talk about a few interesting quotes I've run across recently that I think fit together.
First off, it's the one that inspired this entry. It comes from a 2005 Rolling Stone article about the Rendon Group titled "The Man Who Sold the War" (thanks for the tip Colin). The article is amazing, and I seriously suggest reading it. It's all about how propaganda shapes thinking and world events (specifically the war in Iraq). But it's this quote that really jumped out at me:
By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly.
"An age of global communications" is a nice way to think about it. There's no delay in information anymore. Yesterday I was talking to a colleague about the idea of asymmetrical information (the economic idea that markets behave inefficiently when one side has different information than another) and the fact that it's coming closer to being extinct. The car industry is a great place to look at this: Who walks into a showroom anymore without complete knowledge of the pricing of the car and its components (well, probably lots of people, but still). Seriously, though, this is a big deal and a big change, when everyone knows the same stuff all of a sudden markets start behaving in new ways (or actually, they start behaving in "normal" ways which just so happen to be new to us). When you play this out on a global stage what you get is a world where information is digested almost instantly no matter where it occurs. Which, of course, leads us to situations like the one the Olympics and NBC are facing right now.
By choosing to delay the opening ceremonies, NBC set itself up for a fight against technology and communication. As the New York Times article explains, "NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites." Global communications doesn't do delays, it just doesn't make any sense. Which leaves a company like NBC trying to hold onto a relic: The control of a once-local communications medium.
But again, nothing I've said is particularly new. These are all things that have been bubbling for up for at least the last five years and probably even longer. What I think is interesting is where it all goes. A few months ago Shelly Palmer wrote a really interesting article about Antigua's copyright threat to the US (in short Antigua threatened and actually distributed copyrighted US materials in retaliation to the US shutting down offshore internet betting). In the article Palmer quotes Phillip Rosedale, CEO of Second Life, saying, "in a few years telling someone you're from China will have about as much meaning as telling them your astrological sign." Palmer goes on to explain that "While even Philip agreed that that might be hyperbole, he was pretty sure that where you live in the physical world is starting to have less meaning with respect to your ability to function online."
So what does a post-nationality world look like? Not surprisingly I don't really have any idea. I mean, I think we're seeing lots of paralells in other parts of life that point in the same direction. The move from demographics to psychographics as a way to define groups seems to be a nice analog for the situation. Simply put, we are moving to a time where we need different criteria to define our universe. Play that out further and you get questions like: What happens when they find a way to help people live forever? (Or until they get bored of it at least.)
Essentially I think much of it boils down to something Faris wrote about the other day: Post-scarcity economics. Much of this discussion revolves around abundant availability (in this case specifically around content and communication) and more specifically, around the business world trying to find some semblance of balance as the ground shifts beneath them.
Pause.
Basically I don't know where else to go with this. So I'm stopping. Going to keep reading and see what I come up with, but figured I'd leave it open to everyone else as well. In my search for a conclusion I landed on the Wikipedia page for "post scarcity", which led me searching for a guy named Anthony Giddens and eventually to an excellent lecture he gave on globalization which included this:
Instantaneous electronic communication isn't just a way in which news or information is conveyed more quickly. Its existence alters the very texture of our lives, rich and poor alike. When the image of Nelson Mandela maybe is more familiar to us than the face of our next door neighbour, something has changed in the nature of our everyday experience.
So I'll leave you all with that. Thoughts, as always, are greatly appreciated. Maybe someone else can tell me what I'm talking about at this point, since I seem to have forgotten. Good night.
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Reprinting an interview I recently did on the role of identity in the internet age.
The people at Trendbüro in Germany asked if I could asnswer some questions on identity in advance of a workshop they're doing. I said I'd be happy as long as I could print it on my site as well. Since they've now published the interview (in German), I think it's fair to publish it here. This was done over two emails, so may not flow perfectly.
Your blog has landed no. 29 in Wikio's most influential blogs ranking. This is sure great for your reputation. How important do you think is reputation to the process of building one's identity?
Well, first off let me say that I don't really believe that Wikio ranking. While I am quite honored to be on the list, I don't quite understand how my site landed there.
As for how important reputation is in building one's identity, I think I would argue that reputation is just an external measure of identity: It's how other's see you and what they think of you.. With that said, I don't think you can actually have an external identity without a reputation: In the same way a brand doesn't exist if no one knows about it, your external identity is non-existent if you aren't interacting with anyone. And by interacting you develop a reputation, people think things about you, say things about it, etc.
Noah, in your blog you argue that people just like brands need to manage their identity. That's why we interact with others in order to gain recognition, which is vital to building our identity. How, do you think, will this new approach to identity building change the branding of the future?
I don't know that I argue people need to manage their identity, more be aware of it's existence. I guess with awareness comes some sort of management, but just as with brands the more considered one's identity seems to be, the less authentic.
I also don't know if I agree that "we interact with others in order to gain recognition". We interact with others first and foremost because as humans we are programmed to do so. We are social creatures, people always trot out the fact that if left untouched a baby will die, but that's a pretty incredible thing. We require human touch to survive. (I couldn't find a reference for this, so maybe it's not true. But I'm pretty sure it is.)
So now that I've said all that, I'm not sure I can answer the question . . . Sorry. I don't quite understand how this is a new approach to identity building.
With the marketplace becoming increasingly fragmented, more and more brands have to exist in niches. As a consequence, brands reach less people and hence less people know and talk about them. It is becoming harder to develop a reputation. What challenge does this pose for managing brand identity?
I'm not sure I completely understand or agree with this one, but let me give a couple (hopefully related) thoughts. Success, I believe, is a relative measure. Any absolute number has been artificially placed on the market (take platinum or gold in the record industry for instance). I think what we're seeing more is companies who are creating their own success measures. Again, looking at the music industry, if you create a record for $1,000 you don't need to sell that many copies to be "successful" (at least from a fiscal perspective).
As for managing brand identity, I expect what we'll see is more and more companies "play the field" and try a bunch of different stuff. Why not create competitive products? Big CPG (FMCG in Europe) companies get this and I think it will continue to spread.
In your blog you stress the importance for brands to manage their identity. With reputation being the external measure of identity, how and to what extent can brands influence what people think and say about them? What role does customer relationship managment play?
Well, I think brands need to start by being aware of their identity existing throughout every consumer touchpoint (whether it's packaging, advertising or customer service). It's not good enough to just say what you are, you've got to live it (not that I think this is a terribly revolutionary idea). As for customer relationship management, I certainly think this can be an important part, but it depends on both how you define it and what business you're in. I don't know how important it is for Coca-Cola, for instance, but for a company like Dell, on the other hand, it's huge.
You are one of the initiators of likemind, a networking event held regularly in cities around the globe. Richard Florida claims that some cities are becoming creative hubs where innovative people cluster together. From your perspective, how does the interaction between likeminded (creative) people influence their identity?
Well, again, I think as humans we need interaction and naturally are drawn to those who are likeminded (whatever that likemindedness may be grounded in). Clearly your community influences your identity: How you dress, the words you use, the books you read, the music you listen to, etc. I think what's new here is that more likeminded (creative) people are able to find each other. I just started reading Clay Shirky's new book and he talks about the expense (in the economic sense) of organizing groups pre-web. That's gone. We started likemind on a whim and now it's in around 50 cities around the world. We never promoted it other than occasional announcements on our blogs, yet tens-of-thousands have attended over the year-and-a-half it's existed. I expect a decade ago this would have been incredibly hard to make happen (but not impossible). While I can't say for sure, the picture I have in my head is of a much different era where creative people were the exception (or at least they thought they were): The odd-man-out in their company or community. Now, however, we're all hyper-connected. I meet new people every day from all around the world who I consider likeminded and I think that's an amazing and exciting thing.
I'm not sure I really answered the question . . . Sorry . . .
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Digging deeper into the study of how information travels through a network and just how important "influentials" are.
I don't often do book reports around here, but I just got through Duncan Watts and Peter Sheridan Dodds' paper, "Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation" [PDF] and thought it might be worth sharing some quotes and thoughts (especially since it's 36 pages of fairly dense material).
As I wrote recently their basic thesis is that so-called "influentials" are not all their cut out to be (especially by people like Gladwell and Keller). Though as they explain in the conclusion, "Our main point, in fact, is not so much that the influentials hypothesis is either right or wrong, but that it's micro-foundations, by which we mean the details of who influences whom and how, require very careful articulation in order for its validity to be meaningfully assessed." While Watts and Dodds' own work leaves me with some questions, this seems like a hard assertion to argue with. To come up with a true theory of influence, the details of influence need to be universally defined and understood.
In fact, I don't know that Watts and Dodds go far enough themselves, mainly because influence is so hard to pin down. Observationally, who influences whom and how can change on a daily basis and greatly depends on things like topic & relationship (as well, I'd argue, on outside factors like how busy the recipient is at time of influence). Watts and Dodds do acknowledge these factors, however, suggesting that "large scale changes in public opinion are not driven by highly influential people who influence everyone else, but rather by easily influenced people, influencing other easily influenced people."
This, in and of itself, doesn't seem particularly controversial. If you go with the idea that 10% of the population is influential, that leaves 90% of the population that's not. Then if you assume that, especially in the current media/advertising landscape, the influential 10% is hardest to reach because they are the most overexposed (and thus have their attention stretched the thinnest), it seems that your effort may be much better spent thinking about options. What's more, according to Watts and Dodds' research, while "influentials have a greater than average chance of triggering critical mass, when it exists ... [their effect is] only modestly greater, and usually not even proportional to the number of people they influence directly."
As they explain in their conclusion, the simplest way to understand this is to look at natural analogues such as forest fires:
Some forest fires, for examples, are many times larger than average; yet no-one would claim that the size of a forest fire can be in any way attributed to the exceptional properties of the spark that ignited it, or the size of the tree that was the first to burn. Major forest fires require a conspiracy of wind, temperature, low humidity, and combustible fuel that extends over large tracts of land. Just as for large cascades in social influence networks, when the right global combination of conditions exists, any spark will do; and when it does not, none will suffice.
Upon reading that I was immediately brought back to something I wrote about last year. My thesis in that entry was that the marketing paradigm of leading with a single message was outdated and your better bet was to create a huge array of messages (sparks) hoping that one would ignite a cascade effect (forest fire). Especially in a digital context, where message production costs are significantly lowered, why not throw lots against a wall and see what sticks (after all, measurement and fast iteration are possible).
With all that said, there is one major issue I have with Watts and Dodds work, which they admit to in the paper: They are examining interpersonal influence, not media influence. While they admit that the distinction is a bit blurry, especially in the eyes of things like blogs, they continue on with the assumption (which doesn't seem to be grounded in any research) that "the influence of the blogger seems closer to that of a traditional newspaper columnist or professional critic, than that of a trusted confidant, or a even casual acquaintance." Now I don't want to harp on bloggers, but I don't know that I agree with this thesis.
Part of what makes blogs such a fascinating communications medium is the combination weak and strong ties that can constitute a readership. While large readership blogs (like BoingBoing for example) most likely reflect a more journalistic relationship, smaller blogs like this one act much differently. Of the thousand-plus readers who frequent this site I would guess that a significant portion constitute what I would consider a weak tie (we have emailed back and forth) and a smaller portion constitute strong ties (family and close friends). This, I would assume, is significantly different than the average "newspaper columnist or professional critic" who tend to live in another realm. In other words, the availability of bloggers may change how and when their influence functions.
This, of course, is a major critique I have of most communications theory. As my sister, who is getting her undergraduate degree in communications can attest to, I get incredibly upset when interpersonal communications disregards mediated communications. In our current age, the boundaries between interpersonal and mediated communications is hard to pin down. That's because the same technologies (email, blogging and even text messaging) can be used for both broadcasting and interpersonal communications. Therefore, it's left up to the recipient to decide whether the communications is interpersonal or not. Prior to that, interpersonal communications was done entirely via one-to-one media (things like face-to-face and phone). While I'm not sure how to resolve this, it does create a major issue in all influential research because it leaves the researcher with an incredible amount of variables to contend with.
Finally, I think a discussion of engagement is probably relevant as I think it's directly correlated to influence (and when combined with reach may change things slightly). When we launched Street Mining we got two links from largeish sites, one with a very large, but more casual readership and one with a smaller, more dedicated one. While the larger site drove more clicks, the smaller site drove more signups. This, I believe, is the simplest explanation of engagement/influence I have seen: Clearly the smaller site's readers were a better audience for the message than the larger site. (Of course the lack of control in this experiment means that it's impossible to say whether it was these factors that led to additional sign-ups.)
This is an interesting paradox that I think relates to this whole influential debate and is often a stumbling block. Influence and reach are two entirely different things. While the two can be related (and historically have been), on the internet they're not necessarily. For example, we've all heard about the "Digg effect" when I site gets to the front page of Digg and is hit with a deluge of traffic. What's interesting about this traffic is that it often doesn't result in much additional long-term interest, as the audience is a large and varied one. Therefore, while the site may be considered influential from a pure mass perspective, it's influence seems much more superficial (I don't have data to back this up, but have read many discussions on the subject). I would say that while Digg has a large reach and high influence (causing the influx of visitors), the engagement of that audience is low (meaning that they visit the dugg site once and don't return). (Engagement is a bad word for this, but I'm having trouble thinking of another at the moment. If someone has a better way to describe it, please let me know.)
My argument would be that on many smaller sites the influence is deeper since those relationships tend to be stronger. This creates an interesting dynamic. While I don't know that it's statistically relevant, I do think it's worth exploring some more. Blogs and other associated media do allow people to amplify their voices to more strong and weak ties than ever before, allowing people to have journalistic-sized audiences with relationships that more reflect interpersonal communication.
I think that's about it. I hope I haven't bored you to death (I can only imagine if you've actually made it to the bottom that I haven't). Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback (on both Watts and Dodds' paper and my thoughts). Thanks for reading.
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Because we love to talk about how much things have changed . . . .
I was in a vendor presentation yesterday when the topic of WalMart came up. For anyone working in the marketing industry, this isn't a rare occurance, and in fact that was just the topic of conversation. "WalMartians," as the presenter referred to them, were the clients who had superstore tunnel vision. Eventually something in the realm of "WalMart has ruined culture" was uttered, to which I responded, "or WalMart has become culture."
Now I'm in no way here to defend the shopping giant, however, people make choices in their lives and things happen for a reason (or at least I believe they do). And while I certainly don't agree with or even like everything WalMart does or the way its changed towns and cities, I don't blame it. The way I see it, throughout the ages there have been any number of cultural forces that have "ruined things" and most of the time they haven't really.
Not sure what any of this has to do with anything, but I thought it was a worthwhile anecdote.
What's funny is that earlier in that meeting the same group had said something that I thought was quite brilliant (and in fact I thought they, a as a whole, were great). It was good to be an anthropologist, they explained, because "cultural models were always changing, but business models hardly ever were." What's so amazing about the WalMart story is it's one where the business model actually changed the cultural model. WalMart is not just a business institution in America, it's a cultural one. For whatever you want to say about them, they're the largest employer in America with 1.3 million employees (just over 1 in 300 people work for them), they've used their size and clout to lower generic drug prices and people do things like travel across the country sleeping in their parking lots. The argument to me is not whether they're good or bad, because like most things that kind of binary approach no longer works. Rather the more interesting question or observation is one around how they're using their power.
I guess the bottom line for me is that sure the world is changing, however, I don't really believe the change is any more drastic than the change in any other generation. As Rob Walker pointed out recently every generation goes through huge unprecedented change that it thinks is more huge and unprecedented than any other generation before it. In the end, however, everything settles into place and each generation is left with a handful of events and inventions that truly change the course of history.
Before I finish this semi-rant, I feel it necessary to add one caveat that may contradict everything I've said previously: I actually think digital is fundamentally different. Digital, in many ways, is a new kind of DNA or atom. I really believe it's on that level. Digital technology is the fundamental building block for most of the change we will experience in the coming years and it's unlike anything we've dealt with in this past (though to be honest, it's not even really from this generation). Previously, communication (and life for that matter) mostly revolved around analog signals: Things degraded over time and rearranging pieces involved glue. For the vast majority of humanity we have only dealt with the physical (the telegraph was invented less than 200 years ago) and now we are living in this strange world where, for some of us, the majority of our time is spent manipulating pixels. It's an amazing transition that's happened fairly quickly in terms of human history.
However, I don't feel nostalgia. Maybe I'm a techno-determinist, but I don't necessarily agree with Russell Davies when he says that we're not equipped for the world that we're going to be living in. On the contrary I think we (and Russell is a great example of this) are more equipped than ever to deal with this new world. We are adapting to a universe where knowing how to do something is less important than knowing where to find out how to do something. That's not a good or a bad thing in my mind, it's just a thing like anything else.
While lots of people are worrying about the kids staying in all day playing with their computers and their video games, I find hope in it. I believe that what we'll get is a generation more curious and prepared to deal with knowledge and information in whatever form they encounter it. I think entrepreneurialism will run rampant in the coming years as kids who grew up with Google as their door to the world believe they can build a better mousetrap.
As an anecdote, I often explain to people my domain buying justification: At $10 it's the cheapest way in the world to provide myself a spark to make an idea happen. If one of the 50 comes to life, the $500 was worth every penny. It's a world where "trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it". If there's ever been a better incentive for entrepreneurialism I can't think of it. And while I have no idea whether this makes any sense at this point because I'm ready to go to bed, I do know that it's a good thing.
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Two presentations (on networks and rebuilding cities) and a bunch of random links.
So I'm really digging SlideShare at the moment. It's a great way to share presentations and the embed functionality is pretty killer. It's pretty hard to believe Google hasn't added embedability to it's presentations yet (or has it and I just don't know about it).
Anyway, I finally got around to posting the presentation I gave when I went out to Montana in May. Here it is (if you want the PDF, download it here):
Now onto another presentation, this one comes from this month's likemind global question: "If you were to rebuild your city from scratch, how would you build it differently and what would you keep the same?" Piers was kind enough to put it into list form and we've got the full presentation over at the likemind site.
And now for some random links . . .
- Steven Johnson breaks down which authors use the longest sentences. Combatants include: Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, Seth Godin, Christopher Hitchens, Michel Foucault and Frederic Jameson.
- The Economist notes something I've been thinking for a while but having trouble articulating: "Unlike other networks, social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size. 'The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded,' says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster."
- Worried that your shotgun is too far from your bed? The Back-Up solves that by giving you a handy holder that goes between your mattress and box spring.
- The Outsourced Brain is pretty much the same article as Your Outboard Brain Knows All. In fact, David Brooks mentions reading Clive Thompson's article . . . weird. (Brooks link via Chet)
- Metcalfe's Law is Wrong. This isn't really new news, but it's the best explanation I've read. If Metcalfe's law was correct it would make no sense for networks (like Facebook or Myspace for instance) to be closed. (For more info on networks, check out the presentation at the top of this post.)
- Last but not least, one last article on network theory. This one talks about the importance of random connection in a complex network (and is pretty old).
Okay, that's it for now. Off to Jacksonville. See you later.
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Sure we may be losing our memories, but who's to say it's a bad thing?
Mostly I find nostalgia annoying. Complaining about how things used to be only moves one further away from the real issues. In other words: Change happens, deal with it.
Memory, it turns out, is a perfect topic for the nostalgic set. Ever since Plato mentioned it in Phaedrus 300 years before Jesus, people have been bitching about how the kids can't remember anything anymore.
Two recent articles stoked the flames again for me. Though both went in decidedly different directions, in each one I thought I was going to hear a story about how digital technology is killing memory and how it's a BAD thing. The first, an article on Britney Spears' miserable VMA performance from the Times includes this paragraph: "Performance anxiety, heavy drinking and even hair extensions have been variously blamed for these lapses. But why blame the victims? They are just products of a culture that does not enforce the development of memory skills." The second article comes from the always brilliant Clive Thompson and is a lot more insightful. When I started reading his Wired article, I thought I was having deja vu:
This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.
Now to be completely fair, I wouldn't call either author nostalgic. In fact, Thompson brings some real nuance to the argument and it makes for quite a good read. But you know there are people who will read each and moan about the state of things: Remembering back to the old days when knowing things was more important than knowing where to find them.
But that's not our world any longer. In the same way calculators made it hard to justify knowing how to do higher order math by hand, computer, and specifically sites like Google and Wikipedia, have made knowing vast amounts of facts seem like a waste of time.
I, happen to think all this change is a good thing. The best ideas come out of connections between disparate things. Our brains are especially well suited for making those connections, as it mirrors how we actually learn (as I understand it, neural pathways form when connections are made). What if we were actually made for a digital world?
Obviously, it's not so cut and dry. But nothing ever is. Whenever someone tells me that IM or text messaging is ruining interpersonal communications I take offense. In fact, I take offense when someone tells me that face-to-face conversation is preferable to email. It's not that I don't enjoy chatting with people in person, but rather that you can't compare media like that. We're not dealing with apples and apples. Face-to-face is great in some contexts, but email can be much better when you don't know someone so well, want evidence of the conversation or just need a quick answer.
When I saw Steven Johnson and Henry Jenkins speak a year ago, one of them (think it was Johnson, but can't remember exactly) gave a nice anecdote on this topic. In response to the violence in video games like Grand Theft Auto, he suggested that there was another very popular tradition amongst teenage boys that encourages violence and often the objectification of women. What's more, high school football is a school sponsored activity.
Nothing is ever cut and dry.
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Why refocusing on edge cases might be the best way to go.
Yesterday I was having a conversation with a few friends, one of whom works for the city of New York. She was talking about the smoking and trans fat bans here in New York and how a big part of the reason they exist is to be preventative. Health care follows a power curve: A small portion of the population drains the vast majority of the resources.
The idea of New York City's bans, then, is to turn around that situation and forcibly remove the most unhealthy aspects from the lives of the perpetually sick. It's an interesting strategy and I think it's a fundamental shift in thinking. As a society we have a tendency to treat symptoms, not causes. Just think about it: We have gum for bad breath, tylenol for headaches and, one of my pet peeves, fad diets. In the case of the last one, I was always seriously bothered by Atkins, for instance, because it didn't seem to teach people about calories (I've never read it and may be wrong). So rather than understanding the single most important factor in weight loss, people were eating a lot of cheese and then surprised when they gained weight again. (Just for the record since most of you probably don't know this, about four years ago I lost eighty pounds. I think this gives me some authority to speak on weight loss.)
Anyway, the point of all this is I've been feeling like all this stuff relates back to networks and Paretian distributions. My basic hypothesis (and this is very rough at the moment) is that we've spent the vast majority of time treating symptoms because we understood the world to be a bell curve where there was some giant average that most people fell in to. In that world, treating symptoms makes more sense because most of the people are kind of sick on occasion and just need a little Tylenol to get them through today because they'll be fine tomorrow. The thing is, that's not the world we live in. Rather, the vast majority of us are basically never sick and there are a few people who are constantly sick and draining resources. Rather than trying to treat the middle, then, organizations need to solve for the extreme.
In the article "Million-Dollar Murray" (which I just rediscovered . . . I knew I had read this someplace), Gladwell writes about abusive cops in LA. When the department charted out the complaints against cops they didn't get a bell curve with some average number of complains in the middle, rather they got a power curve: Most cops had 1 or 2 complains and a few of them had the majority of the rest. In the article Gladwell writes:
The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department. But the report also suggests that the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad cops were so bad that the institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly weren't working. If you made the mistake of assuming that the department's troubles fell into a normal distribution, you'd propose solutions that would raise the performance of the middleâ€â€like better training or better hiringâ€â€when the middle didn't need help. For those hard-core few who did need help, meanwhile, the medicine that helped the middle wouldn't be nearly strong enough.
"The middle didn't need help," that's a fairly fundamental departure. Turns out homelessness works the same way, the vast majority of homeless people are only without a place to stay for a short period. It's only about 10 percent who are "the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problemâ€â€the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridgesâ€â€it's this group that we have in mind." In addition these people are taking up a disproportionate amount of resources. It's estimated New York City spends 62 million on about 2,500 perpetually homeless people.
So what do we do? We don't throw them on the streets, but we can reassess how we spend money. Just thinking about the homeless case, when you understand that you're spending 62 million on 2,500 people you start to wonder if there might be better ways to spend the money. By focusing time and resources on edge cases and extreme conditions we may find ourselves far more successful in dealing with the problems we face in a connected world.
I don't think that's a particularly useful conclusion, but I just needed to get some of this down. I've been thinking about how to apply this stuff non-stop lately and I'm sure you'll see more. If you have any thoughts or additions please leave them in the comments as usual.
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