Category: Four pillars

I’m one of those soppy sentimental types who had “a football in his throat” and cried when watching Love Story in the early 1970s. I’m the kind of person who enjoyed listening to Herman’s Hermits. I can remember going to the cinema to see Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter with my brother in 1968 and loving it. I still enjoy listening to No Milk Today, My Sentimental Friend, I’m Henry the Eighth I am, There’s a Kind of Hush, just to name a few of their songs.

And “I’m Into Something Good”.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Many years ago I remember reading a book called “Tip On a Dead Crab” by William Murray. Great title, and a pretty good book as well. The thesis behind the title was simple: You took a bunch of crabs with numbers on their backs, put them into a basket, then unloaded the basket near a stake. The crab nearest the stake after a minute was the winner.

Why did I find this fascinating? Because until then I lived with the received wisdom that gamblers wanted to know about guaranteed losers, not winners. A tip on a winner meant nothing; what you wanted was a tip on a loser: a horse that was going to be pulled, a dog that had been nobbled, a team that was going to throw the game.

The theory ran like this: Claiming that something was going to win was worth nothing; everyone would say that. But claiming that something was going to lose, that was different. It was useful information, you could bet on the best of the remainder of the field. If the field only had two in it (like in soccer or boxing) even better.

So the best tips were about losers, not winners. Except when it came to dead crabs.

Sometimes, when I see what’s going on around me, I get the feeling that too many people think that way. That the best tips are about losers. And as a result, everyone’s a critic. What a shame.

Even when I was young, I never really enjoyed criticising people. I was happy to use my feet and vote my feelings that way. If I didn’t like someone I didn’t have to spend time with them. If the food at a restaurant was bad I didn’t have to go there again. If a film wasn’t worth watching I could walk out and not recommend it to anyone.

Now, as I’ve grown older, I fail to see the point in criticising people. We all have beams to cast out of our own eyes before we get involved with the motes in others’ eyes. So why criticise them? Why don’t we build them up instead?

When it comes to reviewing things like books and films and music, why don’t we spend time telling people about the things we liked, rather than spend a great deal of time trashing the things we didn’t like?

It’s easy to criticise. Much harder to say good things. Good things about a person, a novel, a song, whatever. Particularly good things about a person.

We all use phrases like “constructive criticism”, yet too often that translates to “we’re cool about dishing it out but not okay about taking it”.

Of course criticism can be useful, especially when provided constructively and as part of a relationship of trust and openness. In places where trust has broken down, of course there is a place for a different form of criticism: whistleblowing. Of course generalisations are odious.

But.

What would the world be like if we spent time encouraging each other rather than the opposite? Think about it.

You rarely see advertisements that extol the bad things about a product. Ads are about recommendations. This isn’t wrong per se. The wrongness comes from the fact that the recommendation is being made by that which is being recommended in the first place, so there’s a bias.

Endorsements are a little better, but only a little. Tiger Woods may know a lot about golf, but that doesn’t mean I have to trust his brand of consultant.

In the age of television, in a broadcast paradigm, all this was understandable. But in the age of the internet, in a network paradigm, it is no longer so.

We keep getting told that the new world is about recommendations. In a world that revolves around recommendations, the absence of a recommendation is telling. So if you don’t like something or someone, just withhold your recommendation. There is no need to criticise.

I want the people I trust to tell me what’s good, not what’s bad. Telling me what’s bad is easy, everyone does it. The scarcity that I’m prepared to pay for is to be found in the good things, in the people who can tell me about good things.

Take Kirkus Reviews. When it comes to books, I really value their views and comments. But I don’t go looking for the reviews that pan books. Instead, I spend time searching for the books they recommend, particularly those that receive “starred reviews”.

Take Christianity. The etymology for “evangelism” is about sharing good news, not bad.

I want to know about the plumber who turned up on time and did the job well, the restaurant that dazzled, the song that made hearts sing, the book that couldn’t be put down, the film that was spellbinding.

I want to know what’s good, not what’s bad. In the age of advertising, the brand was meant to do this. In the age of the internet, the personal microbrand (as I’ve heard Hugh describe it) can do this, but only if it is made up of unbiased recommendations.

There’s a lot of noise out there. There’s an abundance of gossip, of opinion, weighted towards the bad. Who’s bad. What’s bad.

In the early days of the Web, everyone used the tool to talk about the bad. Criticising, ranting, flaming, outing. Whatever.

More and more I tune out the bad stuff. I’m interested in the good. Life’s too short.

[And if you feel like, you can criticise this post and call me Utopian or whatever :-)]

Update: I just love Gapingvoid’s latest print-to-be: Ordered it straightaway. Why? Because I’m into Something Good.

I loved this video: Melvar and Lien building a physical scale model of their web site.

And I think there’s a very important lesson in this. For too long, too many of us have assumed that people who excel in virtual worlds are useless in physical worlds. Get a life before you get a Second Life, that sort of thing.You know what I mean. But we’re wrong, very wrong.

I remember reading a Pew Report which indicated that the super-communicators in the emergent generations actually spent more time face to face with their friends than the rest of the population.

We have to keep remembering this. When Generation M, the mobile multitasking multimedia millenials, spend time online, they’re not sacrificing face time with their friends and family.

They’re sacrificing TV time. And advertisement time. And everything else that goes with it. Particularly when you compare them to earlier post-TV generations.

So they’re going to do what we never managed to do enough of. They’re going to choose what they do in their leisure time. Choose whose recommendations they trust. Choose whom they spend time with. Choose who they share their intentions with. Choose.

[It should come as no surprise that I found out about this site and project via Scott Beale, who knows a thing or two about virtual and physical worlds. Thank you Scott.

Stu Berwick told me about this via Twitter: Stimulus Watch. What Stimulus Watch does is to take the list of “Ready-To-Go” projects published by the US Conference of Mayors, convert them into a wiki and thereby empower readers to comment on the projects, enrich the data, “vote” on the projects.

There’s lots to like about the initiative. The UI is simple and intuitive, at least for me. The projects are actually listed before decisions are made. Descriptions are intelligible in the main, and contain useful information beyond budgets, such as job-creation. In each case the question posed is simple: is the project critical? Here’s an example:

I touched on some of this in my Clay Shirky at the ICA post. One of the key issues that came up that day was the issue of identity, how to make sure that the right person voted, how to make sure that the person voted once and once only. This is not resolved here either. But it can be.

There are a million people out there who will criticise this thing to bits. Let me not be one of them. I like the transparency. I like the fact that someone has invested time and effort to take public domain information and make it more shareable, more enrichable, and as a result perhaps a little more comprehensible. I like the simplicity of the UI, a search-based front and a consumable wiki. I appreciate the existence of an excel file with all the source info, available for download.

For democratised action to have any meaning, citizens need to be informed. The more informed they are, the more likely it is that their action will have value.

The availability of tools like Stimulus.org is a good sign. [One of the first things I am going to do is to mutate the tool in order to make it useful for enterprises to prioritise their projects!]. The very existence of the data in a downloadable form allows for mashups to be created with relative ease, particularly those with geographical overlays, as in this example taken from epolitics:

There’s a long way to go, many problems to solve. But there are encouraging signs. Views?

PS it is worth going to stimulus.org just to read Jerry Brito’s paper on Hack, Mash and Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency. You can find it in the About Us section.

When I look at the digital implementations of social networks of today, they appear to have a core made up of five things:

• a directory or address book
• the ability to group people in the directory
• support for different modes of communication between people
• the ability to schedule meetings between the people
• a way of notifying changes to the four things listed above

Membership of groups and subgroups; multimodal communication; meeting and event scheduling; notification of changes; all these have existed for centuries. We can probably draw a line from jungle drums and smoke signals through the invention of the telephone all the way to e-mail and IM and communities like Bloomberg chat. None of them created the kind of noise and buzz generated by the social networks of today. The question is why.

I think there are three reasons:

• Standardisation
• Persistence
• Exposure

Standardisation. Historically, social networks did not scale. They didn’t grow easily; their geographical coverage was limited. In the digital realm, some of these problems are done away with, there is greater standardisation. In the past, all we could do was to interconnect islands of community. But the communities remained communities, distinct and separate. What is happening now is that we are moving beyond the interconnect paradigm; new, virtual, communities transcend the physical and cultural and linguistic separations of the past. It’s no longer about being interconnected. It’s about being connected.

Persistence, as in persistent communications. It’s been around for centuries as well, from the time man learnt how to draw. Again, you could think of persistent communications as having been around for a very long time, but as distinct and separate islands. Disconnected from each other. Today’s social networks seem to be powered on today’s esperanto, primarily English-based, but evolving as a mishmash of influences of multiple languages. Evolving, alive, as any language should be. When I look at my twitter feed, it is multilingual. By choice. After all, I choose to follow the people I follow. Again, in language, it looks like we used to be interconnected, now we are connected.

There’s something else happening with persistence. We’ve had persistent communication for a long while, but not searchable retrievable communication. In the digital world, our communications are Tivoised; archived and replayable at will, free-text searchable in many cases. This too moves us from interconnected to connected, it helps us all understand more about other languages and dialects and usages.

And finally we have exposure, openness. APIs and their equivalent. What do I mean? It’s what is represented by facebook as a developer platform, what android represents as well from a slightly different perspective. A way of building things for a community to use, without having to belong to that community in the first place; without having deep knowledge of that community. Most importantly, an ability to build things for a community, things that lower the friction of communication and scheduling and sharing and belonging. Moving us from interconnected to connected.

Sounds like semantic argumentative tosh, doesn’t it, my harping on about interconnected and connected? Perhaps it is. But there’s something in my head that won’t let go of this notion, that things are different now, that these differences are caused by the drivers of standardisation, searchable persistence and exposure. That the effect of these drivers is to allow people to be connected in ways that were not possible before, on a global, multilingual, multicultural basis, with tools that allow asynchronous and multimedia communication. That the catalyst to move all this forward at breakneck speed is the concept of the open multisided platform.

Instead of standardisation, persistence and openness I could have just said one word: the internet. Instead of describing the distinctions between interconnect and connect I could have said just one word: the internet.

It’s all about the internet. And the new possibilities afforded to us.

The possibilities are tremendous, possibilities for doing harm as well as good. So what we’re doing now is learning. About those possibilities for  good and harm. How to handle privacy and confidentiality, both personal as well as corporate. How to keep this new area safe for children, and for parents. How to deal with the avoidance of lock-in. How to empower humans “at the edge”. How to take the friction out of current social practices, practices we see at work and at home. How to make sure we don’t disenfranchise people by accident or design. How to derive value from all this for education, for health, for welfare, for government. How to use all this to become better stewards of this earth.

That’s what all the buzz is about.

Learning how to do good with these new tools, and how to avoid evil.

And on the way there, finding out how to make all this available to everyone in an affordable, sustainable manner.

Just musing. Comments? Views?

I spent a little time reading this Pew Internet survey on Twitter and Status Updating.

It feels strange to be close to the edge of this classification:

Twitter and similar services have been most avidly embraced by young adults. Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

I think the key trends are that Twitter users are racially and ethnically more diverse than the population at large, and that they are more likely to be using wireless devices and smartphones. Of course, as the report suggests, this may be due predominantly as a result of the relative youth of the Twitter user. But I think it’s more than that.

I think we need to recognise that Twitter lowers barriers to entry, reduces the cost of participation. Which means more people get enfranchised, are able to take part. Twitter is not necessarily about high speed internet connections and industrial strength desktops. I think there is a class of person who is attracted to Twitter just because of that. Nothing to do with age.