I was doing some work on the Mac, with a lazy eye on the tweetstream, when I saw a reference to this:
It looks real. It feels real. Weird, unexpected, but real nevertheless.
I wonder how they figure out whom to “follow”. Shades of Big Brother is Following You.
We live in interesting times.
Incidentally, my thanks to Gaspar Torriero for tweeting about it.
We have mail.
Maybe I should say: I have mail.
For sure I do:
There are others, but for the most part that’s what I consider to be my “mail”.
There have been many arguments about mail over the years, many I agree with, many I don’t. The grounds for argument tend to cover a few common themes:
This post is not about any of these things.
Those of you who know me well have heard me rant and rail about the potential evils of “cc” and “bcc”, two of the reasons I’ve never liked “work” e-mail.
This post is not about those things either.
So what is it about? It’s about constraints. Specifically two types of constraints:
One, the absence of Forward in Facebook:
I’ve been fascinated by that “omission”, and what I’ve been doing is dispassionately observing what happens as a result. For years I’ve been saying that in large enterprises, we have so much of “keep me in the loop” that the loops have become infinite; you get larger and larger mail lists and distribution lists and copy lists; people edit these lists, wantonly dropping people on and off message chains; people also go on holiday and therefore drop themselves off a particular discussion by not being there.
But it doesn’t matter. Much of the time, people stay in the loop one way or the other.
And, sadly, so do the decisions. Decisions often fail to generate the escape velocity needed to get away from the inertia of the infinite loop.
Much of this is made possible by the existence of the Forward button. And I’ve often wondered, what would happen if I don’t have that button. And you know something? I’ve enjoyed not having that button. Conversations take place in self-contained units, reach natural closes, avoid destructive looping. So there’s something to be said for not having a Forward button.
Two, the message size constraint in Twitter:
Again, I’ve been fascinated by what happens when I’m space-constrained. For many people, this has meant using all kinds of abbreviations and short forms and today-neologisms. I heard Paulo Coelho recently talking about the hundreds of years it took to move us from “thee” and “thou” to “you”, and the comparative speed with which we appear to be moving from “you” to “u”.
It may be the pedant in me (and there is one, dormant except for occasions like this); I have largely avoided those abbreviations. At least I think I have. Instead, I have tried to be more succinct, using fewer words, using clearer words, and avoiding the temptation of using what I consider to be hamburger words (where you chop the original words into tiny pieces and then try and compress them for speed and brevity).
Soon I will know. Sam Lawrence is running an experiment for me, taking my tweetstream, making a ManyEyes cloud of it, and comparing that cloud to the equivalent for my blog. I am looking forward to seeing how my vocabulary shifts. I will learn something as a result.
Talking about learning, I’m learning a lot about mail, and about conversations in general, from Twitter. I love the separation of the plain tweet from the @person tweet from the DM. [For those who don’t know about twitter, a plain tweet is one where I post a 140 character message to the general tweetstream, visible to all who “follow” me, who subscribe to my tweetfeed; an @person tweet is one where I am addressing a named person or person with a tweet, but all my followers can see it; while a DM is a direct message, and is only visible to the sender and the recipient.
So as we move deeper into the 21st century, I think there’s a lot for us to learn about mail. And while everyone fights about walled gardens in social networks, while subtler walled gardens emanate from “vendors” in the guise of UCC, I want to concentrate on what I can learn by watching the constraints, and our behaviour under those constraints.
Which reminds me. I quite liked the diagram at the beginning of this post.
This is a story about my grandfather’s teeth, and about the house where he took them out after meals. He died nearly fifty years ago, when I was 15 months old, so I don’t remember much about him myself. What I do remember is what I’ve been told, and sometimes it’s hard to separate the truth from the tissue.
I’m sure you’ve all had people coming up to you over the years and saying “I knew you when you were knee-high to a grasshopper” (or its cultural equivalent).
Things were different for me. People used to come up to me and say “I used to live in your house, in Lower Circular Road”. Which was a mite disconcerting, considering that there were literally hundreds of them, all claiming to have lived in the house where I was born. I used to think of them as The Hundreds, my personal and private nickname for them.
I have no idea when the family moved in to the house where the Hundreds stayed. I have a faint suspicion that my father wasn’t born there, nor were his siblings, that they might have lived in Ballygunge Circular Road at the time. [I guess I could check by calling my aunt, but it’s the wrong time in Madras]. I know that they were living in Lower Circular Road by 1946, when Calcutta was ablaze with Partition riots.
I remember stories about the house being used to shield Muslims, of battering rams being used to try and break the great door down, of cars being set on fire in the small courtyard in front of the house. [I know this to be true. In the mid-Sixties, when I used to go there occasionally after school to wait for my father, one of the cars was still around, serenely fused to the courtyard.]
So this much is known: that the family lived there for maybe 20, 25 years, and a lot of people, the Hundreds, stayed with them. My grandfather’s “Hindu Undivided Family”, which meant his siblings, my grandmother’s siblings, and all their spouses and progeny. And the same again for the next generation. Which sort of explains the first couple of hundred people who claimed to have stayed at “Lower Circular Road”. But there were more, foreigners from many lands, people about whom I didn’t know much.
We moved out of there in 1962 or so. It might have been a little earlier, but since I have musty memories of actually moving to 70C Hindustan Park Road, I have assumed I must have been at least 4 when it happened.
But the property, 116A Lower Circular Road, stayed in the family for another couple of decades. It was a huge place, maybe 120 feet across and 250 feet deep, with three floors, a terrace and a basement. At least that’s what it felt like.
Initially there were still a bunch of relatives and friends who stayed in the upper floors, while the family business took up the ground floor and basement. To be more accurate, the magazine offices were on the ground floor, while the staff canteen and printing press were in the basement. There was a large central courtyard, open and rectangular. The upper floors were built like an array of minstrel’s galleries around that courtyard, with maybe 10, 15 rooms per floor.
Memories can be hazy, so there’s much I’m hesitant about, much that I’m unsure of. A lot of what I remember is influenced by stuff I heard while I was growing up, and you know what that means. We all remember things our own way, fashioning our own realities, air-brushing our own histories with aplomb. Twisting and turning the tales we hear.
And it is with all this in mind that I relished finding this:
The extract above is taken from a publication entitled “Glimpses into the Past: Memoir of an Irish Anglican” written by someone called Roddy Evans. It’s the first contemporaneous account I’ve read by one of the Hundreds, those people who claim to have stayed in the house I was born in.
And it’s just like I imagined it was. A meal that begins with dentures extracted from a plastic soapbox; a meal that ends with the teeth left for cleaning on a plate, like shoes outside the door of a hotel room. A meal simple yet ceremonial, with family and friends and even strangers.
Thank you Mr Evans, for helping me figure out what was true, and for giving me a taste of what it was like to be one of the Hundreds. [If anyone reading this has any more to add, feel free].
1. Groups are here to stay. Period.
2. Enterprises, even governments, are nothing more than groups. Extreme forms of groups, but groups nevertheless.
3. Groups are made of people. So too are enterprises, so too are governments.
4. All this has been true for a very long time. But something’s changed.
5. What’s changed is the quality of group tools, a point that Clay Shirky makes, beautifully, in Here Comes Everybody.
6. What’s changed is the democratised nature of the group tools: they are truly group rather than individual- or hierarchical-pretending-to-be-group.
7. What’s changed is the adoption curve associated with the group tools: Modern group tools are being used by “people” first and “enterprises” later.
8. So for the first time enterprise group tools are actually being designed and stretched and proven and used by the people who will use them in the enterprise. Before they enter the enterprise.
9. The people aren’t ready for enterprises. And the enterprises aren’t ready for the people.
10. The battleground is “security”. And “confidentiality”. And “privacy”. And “identity”. And “control”. All one and the same thing, actually.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about. What are the implications of my trying to derive value from Linus’s Law in an enterprise? In government? How do I get “enough eyeballs” on something?
That’s what I’ve been thinking about. What does it mean to be “private” in an enterprise, particularly a regulated enterprise? People who work in investment banks are used to “loss of privacy”: calls recorded, e-mails scanned, that kind of thing.
You may have noticed that I’ve been somewhat quiet as far as this blog is concerned, just one post since late February. Simple reason. I had a bout of ‘flu at the end of last month, and felt disproportionately tired ever since then. As a result I’ve been trying to do less and sleep more; as the saying goes, trying to act my age rather than my shoe size.
Well, it paid off. I’m back, and rarin’ to go. Brimming with stuff to discuss with you. Stuff you will see over the next week or two.
Thank you for your patience.