But after receiving a follow-up threat from my daughter (“i dont care if they request you. say no. i will be soo mad if you dont unfriend paige right now. actually”), I started worrying that allowing parents in would backfire on Facebook.
Obviously I’m not the only person who finds the ‘double click dictionary’ *feature* of the NY Times site to be incredibly annoying. I wonder if they’ve tested this to see if anyone actually likes it…?
..the ideal recommendation system would be able to take into account my own understanding of how similar or dissimilar I am from the people in my network…cp[and]… might be called “collaborative micro-filtering.”
It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I’m an enthusiast of online social networking (well, ok… offline social networking too, but I find online particularly interesting). It’s something that I’ve invested probably hundreds of hours of time in, just participating - creating profiles, making friends, maintaining contacts, sharing information.
But, why do this?
I’ve always found online social networking to be both emotionally and intellectually rewarding, but I’ve never quite understand my compulsion to stay connected in this way, and *why* it felt so valuable. Traditionally, the behaviours associated with building and maintaining a social network online would be considered frivolous and unproductive. Something you do when you probably should be doing *real* work.
In the last few weeks I’ve come to understand that it is a whole lot more than that.
Last week at Reboot, Stowe Boyd was sharing his ideas about ‘Flow - a new consciousness for a web of traffic’. Stowe was talking about your time being a shared resource. He said ‘It’s important for your network that the network as a whole makes progress’. This is why we should be available and responsive to our network. As such, time that we invest in building our networks and sharing resources within our network is not unproductive time. We are as strong and as knowledgeable and as connected as our networks are. Our networks actually allow us to be more effective, and more productive than we would be if we were more traditionally productive in an isolated way.
‘Productivity is second to connectivity’ as Stowe said.
I’ve just started reading The Play Ethic by Pat Kane where I’ve found Pat using Game Theory to illustrate the same idea. He cites Robert Wright and his book Non-Zero. Wright says that there are two kind of games: zero-sum games (win/lose, like tennis) and non-zero-sum, which are more like an economic exchange or a vibrant community. ‘Non-zero-sum games increase the rewards for all those who commit to participate in the exchange over a long period’.
When I think about social networking in these terms it makes a lot more sense to me, and takes on a whole new level of validity. I participate in social networking online because I reap rewards from it, as do others within my networks. The thing I like about online social networks is that being involved with them is so pleasurable that it’s taken me this long to become consciously aware of this effect.
Compare that to traditional ‘networking’ (I’m picturing a room full of people I don’t know with whom I’m supposed to swap chit chat and business cards in the hope that they’ll call the company I work for and give us work) … I’ll take online any day.
And, from now on, I’ll feel less guilty about time spent Twittering, Flickring blogging, and accepting FaceBook friends. It’s just a new way of being productive.
My spreadsheet is great for analysing open sorts - it manages participant results, helps you explore the data and does some basic statistical analysis.
‘You’re probably used to doing certain tasks on your Windows computer in particular ways. This page shows you how to accomplish the same tasks on a Mac.’ This is exactly what I need right now Thanks
Iterative design isn’t design by trial and error. Iterative design is a process of continually improving not just the design, but also the problem your design is trying to solve. via David Malouf
The knowledge worker (the executive in Drucker’s quote) goes after individual productivity; the web worker after group-based, collaborative, wisdom-of-crowds productivity.
this great little ladder graphic to explain the distribution of participation by dividing the world into creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives:
Despite popular theories posed in research papers and popular literature, early man was not an aggressive killer, ..”Our intelligence, cooperation and many other features we have as modern humans developed from our attempts to out-smart the predator,”
Generations last the length of time of one phase of life–the same length of time as a turning. Like turnings, generations also come in four different archetypes, defined in “The Fourth Turning” as Prophet, Nomad, Hero and Artist.
I spent some time last week at the fabulous Reboot conference and was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to share some ideas around concept of Ambient Intimacy, which I continue to find fascinating. It was great to have the opportunity to develop and share my thoughts.
I’ve shared my slides on SlideShare although I’m not sure how much sense they make on their own… I can’t seem to work out the ‘notes’ functionality that I think (or perhaps imagined) that Slideshare has, so I’ll give you a quick overview of the concepts here. (Note… this is definitely the Cliff notes version. I have heard rumours of a video… if that materialises I’ll try to post a link here… this post isn’t intended to give you all the detail of the 40 minute talk tho!)
Soooo… as you probably know, Ambient Intimacy is a term to describe that sense of connectedness that you get from participating in social tools online that allow you to feel as though you are maintaining and, perhaps in fact, increasing your closeness with people in your social network through the messages and content that you share online - be it photographs or text or information about upcoming travel.
There are lots of other terms that people have used to describe this kind of connected experience including Situational Awareness, Hyper-Connectivity, Hive Mind, Social Presence, Distributed Co-Presence etc. I still prefer Ambient Intimacy because it combined the human ‘ickyness’ of ‘intimacy’ with the distributed and non-directional nature of ‘ambiance’.
I talked about the ethnographic research that came out of Japan about teenagers using text messaging to create techno-social spaces that allowed them to remain connected despite geographical distance and it’s uncanny similarity to the current experience of tools such as Twitter or Jaiku. And then took it back even before the internet and mobile phone, back to our primate days when we socialised by picking fleas. Of course, we ended up using language as a more efficient means of socialising… tool that facilitate Ambient Intimacy that allow us to further amplify our social chatter possibly allowing us to maintain social groups greater than Robin Dunbar anticipated, perhaps.
Perhaps not tho’, because for people to count in your ‘MonkeySphere’, they need to be multidimensional - that is, more than a Twitter username or a FaceBook profile. Just like when you were a kid you could be surprised to find your teacher in the supermarket or in a restaurant - it had never entered your head as a child that your teacher could be anywhere other than your classroom!
So, in the end, as Dunbar theorised, it comes back to the neocortex and your ability to recall and assimilate all the information about your fellow primates and how they fit together in your tribe. My neocortex isn’t up to more than 150 (Dunbar’s number), I suspect. Is yours?
I talked a little about the difference between self presentation online and offline, and how maintaining your ‘image’ offline is much more hard work that maintaining it online - how often maintaining it online is as much about omission than anything else eg. only Twittering when you’re doing really cool stuff. This, for me, leads to questions about authenticity & trust. Are these people online really your friends? And how do you *know* this if you don’t know them offline?
So… what is Ambient Intimacy good for? I think it’s incredibly good at providing phatic expression online. Phatic expression being the language we use for the purpose of being social, not so much for sharing information or ideas. It’s like the virtual ‘what’s up?’ or ‘how’re you doing?’
There are a million places on line for you to develop and expound upon your life changing thesis, but for me, Ambient Intimacy is the village green of the global village.
David Weinberger calls it Continual Partial Friendship. Johnnie Moore says that it ‘exposes more surface area for others to connect with’. I think it can be incredibly powerful.
What I’ve noticed is that Ambient Intimacy is quite polarising. For as many people that love it, there are plenty who intensely dislike it. There are two key issues at play here, I think - the first is the idea that the communication is actually not high value at all, and perhaps even causes cognitive dissonance and stress. This is an idea that Kathy Sierra posited in her post ‘Is Twitter TOO good?’. Many people find the idea of communications that weren’t particularly created for them and don’t necessarily require their attention somewhat distasteful. All of this periphery communication can also mean that we are in a state of Continuous Partial Attention, and not achieving the state of flow that our brains like so much.
I think that we need to take some personal responsibility for perhaps switching off the feeds if we know we’re liable to distraction and we need to maintain focus. I also love David Weinberger’s take on this, which is that ‘it helps that the volume of flow is so impossibly high that there’s zero expectation that anyone is keeping up. ‘hey dude, what didn’t you know that? I like twittered it two days ago’ is just not a reasonable complaint’.
Of course, there is a challenge for designers of current and future applications to help support us in maintaining focus when we need to without disconnecting us from our network. For me, this is all around design interpretations of ambiance. Having just enough impact to create an effect without being overly demanding and needy.
Even just being at Reboot and having some great conversations has helped me develop some more thoughts about Ambient Intimacy, in particular the economics of it within a network. I’ll be writing up some of those thoughts in the very near future.
UPDATE: if you’re reading this via RSS you may not be able to see the slides I’ve included above. Check them out on the blog or go see them on Slideshare.
Thanks