Does asymmetric tweeting work? or will we see “natural deselection?”

Phillie Casablanca recently observed via Twitter that “following @gapingvoid and @scobleizer is like listening to one end of a telephone conversation. When they’re on a conference call.”

I found this comment fascinating. As far as I can make out, the primary reason Phil would get this sensation is because he’s unable to see the tweets that Hugh and Robert are responding to, and as a consequence he’s unable to place the context in which these two are tweeting.

Why is this the case? This will always be the case where two people have asymmetric connections in any social network that works like Twitter works. In fact, where you have gregarious and extreme social animals like Hugh and Robert, if anything the effect is accentuated. If Hugh has twenty times as many people he’s talking to, when compared to Phil, and their overlap is 5%, then you see what happens. 95% of the conversations that Hugh is in are only partially visible to Phil, and Twitter is colourless without context.

Yessirree, Twitter is colourless without context. It becomes boring, insipid, tasteless. And ultimately very frustrating.

So what does this mean? I wonder. There are a number of possibilities.

One, people de-friend those who exhibit this contextless behaviour. [Please understand, this is not because either Hugh or Robert are choosing to make noise by posting often. This would be a wrong interpretation. It is only because they are in more conversations with more people that such an effect happens. And that per se is not wrong.] Let’s call this “natural deselection”.

Two, people learn to filter this effect manually, develop a scanning habit that learns to skip the contextless tweets.

Three, twitter itself gets a granular control facility that allows people to balance out the gregarious. Not sure how it will work, but there could be a possibility that a person is restricted to seeing the tweets between a friend-pair provided both sides of the conversation are friends. But then this would only work in the open @person conversations.

Four, the twitter topology itself shifts towards a trusted network model, where friends of friends are friends as well. This may be unattractive to many early adopters.

I for one don’t care. I think it is right that I am symmetric about my connections, anyone who follows me I will return the favour. So far I haven’t refused anyone once they pass a simple sanity test which consists of a quick scan of their friends,  tweets and blog page where available. If there is no information available, I wait.

I believe there is a lot of serendipitous value in Twitter, value that I don’t want to throw away with the wrong rules. So I won’t be deselecting people as yet, I want to learn more about this medium and what it can do.

Early days yet.

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To Laughter: My toast to all of you for 2008

2007 has been a good year for me. There is much I have learnt, much that I have enjoyed.

And one of the things I have enjoyed, and enjoyed tremendously at that, is discovering Randall Munroe, via my son.

If you haven’t done so already, start reading xkcd. Here’s an example:

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If you have, but you didn’t know Randall wrote a blog, check this out.

And if you’ve done both already, but you’ve never seen Randall, then take a look at this video of him speaking at Google.

So goodbye 2007, the year I discovered Randall Munroe. And thank you Randall Munroe, for making me laugh, so often and so easily.

Laughter is good. Let’s all hope for more laughter in our lives in 2008.

Musing quietly about “literacy”

“I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books afterwards.”

James Boswell, quoting Samuel Johnson in Life of Samuel Johnson

I love that quotation; by all means replace the word “English” with whichever language you prefer, the sense is what matters to me. [Incidentally, my thanks to Joan Downs of New York, who referred to the quote in a letter to the Editor of the New York Times a few days ago, thereby making it serendipitously accessible to me for this blog post]

It was January 1972. I was in Class 8D at St Xavier’s Collegiate School, Calcutta, the school year was just beginning. We had a new form teacher, Mr Desmond Redden. (Calcuttans will understand why he was nicknamed “LalMurgi” from the day we met him). Mr Redden was unusual, to the extent he had just joined the teaching staff at the school; whereas the 40-strong class he faced were, on, average, 5-year veterans of the school, and quite used to being with each other. If the school practised streaming, it was not visible to us as students; every year, we would notice that a few students went to another class, and a few joined us. The bulk of us stayed together from infancy through to the time we selected subjects for what was then our “Senior Cambridge”, our University of Cambridge Overseas Examinations Syndicate Ordinary Levels, to give them their full name.

Anyway, to the point of this post. Mr Redden met us for the first time, and it was likely to have been more daunting for him than for us. And to break the ice for the first class of the first day, he asked a number of us what we did during the Christmas break. When it came to my turn, I told him I played games with the family, lazed a lot. And read comics. Lots of comics. Every day.

He went ballistic, and was more than just scathing about my reading habits. Made a big deal about how reading comics was a treasonable offence, how it spoilt a person’s grasp and command of the language and corrupted his writing ability. I was young enough to feel ashamed; red-faced, tears in my eyes, hot-flushed, that sort of thing. Still standing up, hoping the ground would open up and eat me alive. You know that feeling? Happened to me a lot when I was young, probably built character or something like that.

A few minutes later Mr Redden was done with the icebreaker Part 1, and went on to Part 2. Analysing his portfolio, looking at what he “knew” about the children in his care. Looks like we have a fine soccer team, can do better on the cricket, and so on. And then he said something like “I’m particularly delighted to know that we have at least one serious creative writer in the class, someone who won the school short story medal while still in Class 7, unheard of. Well done. Who is it?”

It was my turn to stand up, and yes, I was gracious in my victory. To be fair to Mr Redden, that was a one-off; he was a good teacher and kept us together and motivated for a fine school year. But his antics on day one help me illustrate the point that Johnson was making.

My parents were very liberal in their approach to children reading at home; every week, we had a man come to the house, a travelling one-man library service for books and magazines. And comics. Lots of comics. In fact our name for the guy was Comic Wallah.

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This travelling Comic Wallah was a wonderful invention for us. His name was Mullick, I think his children still run the shop on Free School Street. He was still alive and at the shop when I last went there in the late 1990s. He’d come home every week, with books (ranging from Agatha Christie through Erle Stanley Gardner and Max Brand to even Mills and Boon) and magazines (from Time and Newsweek and Life and The Saturday Evening Post through to Woman and Home and Women’s Weekly and even “glamour” mags. And comics (mainly American, but covering all the genres).

You have to imagine all this coming into a house that had a lot of books already, and quite a few magazines on subscription. And newspapers galore. [In fact, ever since I was 12, we used to have TWO copies of the Statesman delivered home, along with the Amrita Bazar Patrika and the Hindustan Standard; why TWO copies of the Statesman? So that my dad would have a pristine copy of the Times crossword awaiting him, while the other copy was first-come-first-served competed for by me, my brother Anant, cousin Jayashree and aunt Vijju).

So we were brought up to read anything first, just to establish our love of reading. We were left to our own devices to figure out what was good and what was bad, with little hints thrown our way. What kind of hints? Collaborative filters. I watched what my dad read, and followed suit. What my older cousins read. What their friends read. So I moved from Perry Mason to Pynchon, from Max Brand to Mailer, from Christie to Chaucer. My way. I read what my elders read.

And what they recommended. We didn’t have reviews. We didn’t get sold to via advertisements. We didn’t have television. While we did have commercial radio, there were no related ads there either.
Over time, we learnt what we should read and what we shouldn’t.

But.

More important than anything else, we learnt to love reading. We’d read aloud to each other; it was normal for me to walk into a room and hear someone quietly guffawing, if guffaws could be quiet. it was normal for us to “fight” to be next in line to read a book; sometimes this involved bartering favours, sometimes it could even get mildly physical.

That love of reading has stayed with me. With my siblings. With my cousins. And, from what I can see, it has found its way into the next generation. Not by force but by example.

We just loved reading. I remember when I saw a children’s film called Short Circuit sometime in the 1980s, where a robot called “Number 5” turned out to be alive. Now this robot went around everywhere muttering “give me input, give me input”. That’s how it was at home. And we so enjoyed it.

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Today, things have changed. Apparently people don’t read as much as they used to. But maybe they do, if we count all the ways people can read today. So let your children read online if that’s what attracts them, let them read comics online, news online, whatever. Just as long as they learn to enjoy reading.

While they learn to enjoy reading, teach them how to read. What not to read. How to spot poor writing. How to spot pornography. How to spot perversion. How to spot brainwashing. How to avoid all of them.

It used to be said “It is better to teach a man to fish rather than to give him fish”.

I think there is a parallel in reading, particularly in reading online. Teach your children how to filter, don’t just impose filters on them.

And all the time, help them learn to enjoy reading.

Freewheeling about being Private in Public

As the name of this blog suggests, I was born and brought up in Calcutta. I have no way of knowing for sure, but it seems reasonable for me to assume that my core thoughts about privacy were formed during the 23 years I lived there.

It’s a crowded city. A lot of middle-class people live “vertically”, in highrise apartments. My family were no different; while the number of people at home fluctuated between 7 and 12, the floor area remained at the 1500 sq. ft. mark. So you could say we were densely packed at home.

The school I went to may have been thought of as elitist, but it was no different from many others when you look at the numbers. Around 40 students per class, 4 classes per year, 1500 students in the school. Normal. Dense.

Most people I knew used public transport, which was plentiful. And dense.

Amidst all this denseness, the sense of community was very high. And it was normal for things to be communally owned. Particularly at home, ownership was something associated with a family and not a person.

This sense of community pervaded everything we did. We tended to play together, study together, work together, laugh together, cry together. Memories of home, of school, of college, all revolved around spending time with others. And eating.

Even the food we ate was communal; easily stretched to accommodate more people. The adda was really a physical blogosphere.

No surprise then that our identities were also communal; who we were quite quickly became a function of family and neighbourhood and occupation and employment. [In this particular case, when one looks at naming conventions, there was no real difference between east and west. Maybe the difference came with affluence and with disruption of the social fabric, as single-person dwellings and single-parent families became more common in the west].

Communal ownership. Communal identities. Communal rites of passage and communal meeting places. All in an environment where everything was densely packed: the home, the school, the neighbourhood, the workplace, public transportation, the city itself.

Against this backdrop, you can imagine how intriguing I found concepts of privacy when I turned up in the UK. Of course we had privacy in India, but not the twitching-net-curtains variety. Much of our privacy was what we made of it, and it was out in the open. There was nowhere else.

So maybe it’s an environment thing, maybe it’s a culture thing. If that’s the case, then the results of a recent Pew Internet study, entitled Digital Footprints, make interesting reading. I quote from the summary (my emphasis):

Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago. However, few monitor their online presence with great regularity. Just 3% of self-searchers report that they make a regular habit of it and 74% have checked up on their digital footprints only once or twice.

Indeed, most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that information. Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online.

Maybe things are changing; that’s what I am trying to work on.

Now there are a hundred experts out there working on this, so why would I be arrogant enough to think I can do better? Don’t worry, I’m not. I try my best to read what they have to say, and to discuss it with as many of the experts as I can meet. Those active in the Identity space tend to be accessible and gregarious, which is a good thing.

The difference between what the experts are doing and what I am doing is one of perspective. I am asking myself the question “what happens if I take my beliefs on abundance and scarcity and overlay that on public and private, if I start thinking that abundant equals public and scarce equals private?”

That’s the question that keeps me awake when I want to be kept awake. I’m too old to be kept awake any other way, I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. And often do.

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Brooding about “secondary orality’

Last night I referred to this article in the New Yorker, and promised to revert to it today. So here goes.

The central premise is worrisome for someone like me, brought up in a culture of reading: that it’s not just my biased perception, people really are reading less. Why worrisome? Because of the implications of such a state of affairs, implications that I hadn’t considered deeply enough.

Here are some excerpts from the article, let me try and encourage you to read the whole thing:

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.

No effort of will is likely to make reading popular again. Children may be browbeaten, but adults resist interference with their pleasures. It may simply be the case that many Americans prefer to learn about the world and to entertain themselves with television and other streaming media, rather than with the printed word, and that it is taking a few generations for them to shed old habits like newspapers and novels.

In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.”

As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

We never had a television at home, and for sure that influenced my reading habits and those of my siblings. I don’t particularly like the idiot box; I tolerate it for period drama, sport and humour. Wherever possible, I’ve switched to the laptop or handheld device. Part of this switch was driven by my not liking broadcast media. But another part was this need to balance graphics with text. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an endless diet of pictures alone creates modern cavemen.

When graphics entered the hitherto text-based world of computing, I loved it. Not by sacrificing text,  but by augmenting text with graphics. [When I speak at conferences, where listening aids are called for, I tend to use a mixture of words and graphics, a word or phrase supported by a picture or two.]

I’ve never experienced anything other than a literate culture, so I was fascinated by some of the observations of what an oral culture represented. My thanks to Halley Suitt again for pointing this article out to me, there is now something else for me to research and learn about.

Much of the article intrigued me; some of it fascinated me; and some of it worried me.

The most worrying thing, from my perspective, is the apparent increased risk of groupthink and herd instinct. I had never considered the secondary orality issue before. I think it’s so important that I’ll repeat the quote here:

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

The world has enough bigots and narrow-minded people and intolerant people already. I dread to think that we could be creating an environment where there will be more such people. If that is what TV 2.0 is likely to mean, then I guess I need to consider moving. To Mars maybe.