Author: JP

I’ve now finished reading the whole essay and all the comments. Fascinating. Lanier says some very interesting things, as do his critics.

• I could regurgitate all the things said and summarise them for you, but that’s not my style.
• I could write a long impassioned response to the essay, pretending to be learned enough to join the luminaries that have already done so. But somehow that doesn’t grab me either.
• I could try rewriting Cluetrain within a single post, but that’s hard for a person whose precis at school was three times the length of the passage to be summarised :-( So I won’t do that.

What I can and will do is try and articulate why I find social software of value, both as an individual as well as when participating in a group, be it family and friends, firm, or even society…..And thereby seek to refute Lanier’s two main points: the apparent loss of valuable individualism and the risk of generating aggregated pap and then making decisions using the pap.

• As an overlay on the internet and the web, social software is first and foremost about connecting people. It allows you to connect to people you don’t know; with collaborative filtering, it allows you to connect to people with similar interests, but not necessarily similar views.
• This is very powerful, since you are able to converse with people who care about similar things; mutual admiration societies, while a risk, tend not to form, because the similarity is about the interests rather than the views held about those interests.
• Networks form as a result, networks bound by relationships between people.  The conversations between connected individuals become micromarkets, a patchwork of distributed, often overlapping, groups. People participate in these markets because there is a strong sense of community, yet with individual freedoms retained, even enhanced.
• This communal bonhomie allows a number of very powerful things to happen; people give freely of their time and of their skill, with nothing to gain but respect and recognition from their micromarket, the peers whose approval they see as valuable; people help each other, work with each other; people teach each other, learn from each other.
• All this is about individuals working together. Not the technology. What the technology does is reduce the barriers to entry, reduce disenfranchisement;  reduce the search costs and connection costs; allow the conversations to persist and be searchable and findable; provide a rich context; have low maintenance costs; where relevant, allow people to work in small groups bringing their communal, often amateur, expertise to bear on lots of small problems. Massively parallel meets EF Schumacher.
• As the people experiment with the technology, new processes emerge; many of these processes are necessarily lightweight and non-intrusive, in order to preserve the individual freedoms as well as the communal value.
• The distributed nature of all this also makes other things happen; it allows a community to respond faster to things as a result of three characteristics; small agile groups; networked non-hierarchical relationships; low barriers to entry.
• The people, the processes and the technology, taken together, are slowly forming a new culture. A culture where traditional governance models are inappropriate, where co-creation is common, where communal ownership is the norm.
• This is not just about Wikipedia or even just about the Blogosphere. Social software is about people and relationships and conversations and markets. Enfranchising people to do things they have never been able to do, some of which their forebears could do (but on much smaller scales).
• Social software is explicitly about the individual and about preserving the individual, but in the context of the groups that individual belongs to. The technology allows us to scale all this, and as a result we need to build better tools. Tools better at publishing, at searching and finding, at connecting, at aggregating, at filtering and even at visualising. Today’s tools are a good start, no more than that.
• The experimentation phase we are in has already paid great dividends, Wikipedia is a good example of that. And there will be a number of serendipitous communal finds as we continue to experiment. Finds that relate to rediscovery of communal arts and crafts, art and music, that relate to new ways of learning and teaching, that relate to new forms of creativity, new ways of being rewarded for individual and collective creativity. Finds that relate to better understanding of ourselves and our ability to look after ourselves, repair ourselves, enrich ourselves.
• We need to continue experimenting. And for that we need open minds, soft hands and a willingness to work together without seeking to polarise opinion through sensationalism.

Mea culpa.

Usually I read The Edge. As with First Monday, it is one more place on the web that I go to in order to find things that challenge me, that teach me, that stop me from seeping slowly into inertia.

But for some reason, probably sheer forgetfulness, I subscribed to First Monday from the get-go, but not to The Edge.

So it took Steven Levy and Newsweek, via an article headlined Mao’s Revenge,(for some reason the online version is headlined Poking a Stick Into the Hive Mind to alert me to Jaron Lanier‘s essay last May, on Digital Maoism. I find it hard to figure out why I didn’t see anything about it anywhere else, given the importance of the debate and the nature of the participants in that debate. So mea culpa again.
Two asides. One, I couldn’t resist linking Lanier’s name to his wikipedia entry; there is an imp in every one of us :-). And two, what I am doing is itself a departure from the Information is Power mindset of old. I am meant to keep these sources to myself and then appear wise and learned while regurgitating stuff from my secret sources. That’s what the old model was about. Hidden sources. Privileged access. Exclusions. A sham wisdom. In the blogosphere we opensource not just our ideas but also all our sources. Because we don’t need to rely on such trickeries as hidden sources.

I need time to read through all that has been discussed, by enough luminaries to fill an Ivy League faculty and more. There’s a lot of useful stuff in there, stuff I believe some of you will enjoy digging through. So dig away.

If I haven’t finished reading it, why am I breaking from my norm and just linking to the stuff? Because it’s now in the mainstream, as a result of the Newsweek coverage, and we need to act. Collectively :-) Before the mainstream accept his view as the norm. Because they will. I can see reprints being ordered now and becoming part of every enterprise pantheon on social software. Unless we respond.
I like a lot of what Lanier usually says. But this time he brings his guns to bear on all the traditional criticisms of social knowledge and citizen media: lowest common denominator; dumbing down; propaganda; hive mentalities and drone thinking; the whole shooting match. And, sadly, he agrees with the critics. Thankfully, he too has critics, and the Edge does a good job in putting their points of view across.

Please do read it if you’re at all interested in the subject. I promise to comment in detail sometime soon, for whatever it’s worth.

Let me end by saying that any medium of expression has the capacity to be subverted into a propaganda machine. The internet is not a medium of expression, it is a place. A marketplace. Of conversations. And so it has a capacity for dissent that is unrivalled.

That’s why crowds can be wise. It is in the capacity for dissent, and the free exercising of that capacity, that collective wisdom is formed.

I am intrigued by the regular convergence of comments on aspects of social software on to a single, critical topic: The role of the expert.
Whether I look at the “quality” comments, the lowest-common denominator ones, the “dumbing down” ones or for that matter the questions on the ontology of encyclopaedias, somewhere in my head they are all the same.
It’s all about the barriers we raise about being “qualified” to be an “expert”.

Imagine a world where venture capitalists refused to fund a start-up unless the founders all had university degrees. Know any large companies founded by college dropouts? :-)

Imagine a world where you couldn’t be a musician unless you’d done your time at the right academy or ecole. Know any talented musicians who had no formal training? :-)
History is littered with examples of prodigious talent without formal qualifications. Qualifications yes. But not formal ones. The world is richer as a result.

Too often “expertise” is associated with (a) formal qualifications (b) years of experience (c) the weight of being “published” and (d) various tests for competence and ability covering intelligence and emotion and cognitive ability and what-have-you.

These are all good indicators of expertise. Some are very good indicators of expertise. But they should not be considered necessary, or, for that matter, sufficient, conditions for being considered an expert.

Know any experts who turned down the Beatles? Know any experts who said that Fred Astaire couldn’t sing or dance? Know any experts who forecast a world market for maybe five computers? Know any that did not believe that a home computer was a good idea? Or that the internet was a passing fad?  :-)

There is no magic formula for talent or for expertise. But passion and motivation and perseverance and  access/enfranchisement go a long way. Every one of us is, or can be, a student for life, and a teacher for life. We all have a responsibility to ensure that the passion and motivation are allowed to be fruitful, and for that we need to ensure open access.

Ontologies can create unnecessary anchors and frames. Subjective elements creep in whenever we try and define expertise, particularly in the study of society. Too often definitions turn out to be dinosaur defences. There is a consilience taking place, a battle between the disciplines. Let’s not behave like the monarchs and priests and doctors and lawyers, and for that matter, IT professionals, of old, did.

As I said earlier, academic qualifications and experience and publishing history and test scores are all good indicators. In many cases they are very good indicators.

But they are not the only indicators. And should not be used to raise the wrong barriers.

Many years ago I used to watch Hill Street Blues regularly (I know, I’m sad that way….). So as we enter a phase where we’re all going to participate in, learn from, implement, iterate and adopt and iterate again the right governance standards for social software, I’d like to quote Sergeant Phil Esterhaus, played by the late Michael Conrad:

Hey, let’s be careful out there.

Following the Aaron Swartz post, some of the comments and discussions I’ve seen on the web suggest that people think there is no real difference between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias, in terms of how they are produced.

This is wrong. And dangerous.

Three critical differences need to be preserved, they are key distinguishers of what makes social software “social”.

These are:

Contributor selection
Subject selection
Capacity to show dissent

In Brickipedia, the editors choose the contributors. In Wikipedia the contributors choose themselves. This is very powerful.

In Brickipedia, the editors frame and anchor the topics. In Wikipedia the contributors choose to write what they’re passionate about. Also very powerful.

In Brickipedia, there is no capacity to show dissent. In Wikipedia, dissent is visible. This is the most powerful differentiator.

Of course there is also a difference in the way Bricki and Wiki contributors get rewarded, but I feel that this is less important than the three I’ve mentioned above.

We must preserve this. Motivated people selecting themselves to write about things they feel passionate about, and able to show agreement and dissent as well.

Read Cass Sunstein on Democracy and Dissent if you’re interested, I am currently travelling and unable to point to the right references. I’m sure Google will oblige.

Following the Aaron Swartz post, some of the comments and discussions I’ve seen on the web suggest that people think there is no real difference between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias, in terms of how they are produced.

This is wrong. And dangerous.

Three critical differences need to be preserved, they are key distinguishers of what makes social software “social”.

These are:

Contributor selection
Subject selection
Capacity to show dissent

In Brickipedia, the editors choose the contributors. In Wikipedia the contributors choose themselves. This is very powerful.

In Brickipedia, the editors frame and anchor the topics. In Wikipedia the contributors choose to write what they’re passionate about. Also very powerful.

In Brickipedia, there is no capacity to show dissent. In Wikipedia, dissent is visible. This is the most powerful differentiator.

Of course there is also a difference in the way Bricki and Wiki contributors get rewarded, but I feel that this is less important than the three I’ve mentioned above.

We must preserve this. Motivated people selecting themselves to write about things they feel passionate about, and able to show agreement and dissent as well.

Read Cass Sunstein on Democracy and Dissent if you’re interested, I am currently travelling and unable to point to the right references. I’m sure Google will oblige.