The Kitty Genovese incident in 1964 is as famous as it is shocking. 38 neighbours stood by as she was raped and murdered - stood by and did nothing, not even call the police. Research has been done to examine why this “bystander apathy” might happen, and reasons such as diffusion of responsibility have been given. What I think is more interesting is that research has also been done that hints at how to cure it.
Zbigniew Lukasiak’s wiki http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/kwiki.cgi?UseTheWholeSpectrum has an interesting chart on media types and their dimensions
asynchronous communication <-> synchronous communication (mail versus Instant Messaging)
push <-> pull (mail versus blogs)
mass media <-> private communication
topic centric <-> user centric
document based <-> message based (WikiIsDocumentBased). A document based communication can be easily extended by adding comments to use the message side of the spectrum.
Last night at dinner, a merchant banker called John Stancliffe told me how companies he worked with used to cope with “overload” before there was email (in the 1960’s at least)
For groups of a hundred - there or thereabouts - managers/directors could be on top of everything that their staff were doing and the decisions that were being made. Beyond that, three factors made the process unwieldy.
Matt Whyndham has recently (I think) started his blog Double Loop. He
“is interested in making strange projects work a little better. This means thinking about the management of complexity, technology, knowledge, people and all sorts.”
Looks like it should be interesting.
Ideas Bazaar is always interesting. In a post called Names, memes and cultural evolution, they pick up on an Economist article about memes. One Dr Bentley of University College, London
is finding that random copying seems to drive many forms of cultural change, from patterns on ancient clay pots to preferences for breeds of dog.
It’s all good meme stuff. In the comments, though, Marisa Wilson makes one of the best points I’ve heard in while.
read on »
Abundance of information may not always be good for the brain. For mine, at any rate. It seems to encourage a wish to be spoon-fed.
Letting others think for you has always been a seductive pastime, and its allure hasn’t diminished. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a German scientist and satirist, suffered from the same problem, and joked
I love to lose myself in other men’s mind’s.
When I am not walking, I am reading;
I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.[Source]
Recently I spent a couple of days searching for previous thoughts on a little problem I’m working on.
read on »
Tom Davenport, in October 2003, wrote:
I’m more confident than ever about the importance - and the difficulty - of addressing the topic of knowledge worker productivity. Just remember: It’s the Next Big Thing, and you heard it here first.
This sort of statement drives me mad. CIO magazine may be more glamorous than, for instance, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Monsieur Davenport a well-known figure, but please … shouting loudest just isn’t the same as being first. The ideas may well be great ideas, but a little bit of humility, a little bit of “there are lot’s of people cleverer than me”, and a little bit of attribution will always be preferable to “ME! I WIN! I THOUGHT IT FIRST!”. But, sigh, I suppose it won’t always get you fame.
Tea, one lump, please. Make that two lumps.
This tea-break quiz result told me:
You are a GRAMMAR GOD!If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Ain’t that the troof…
Matt Jones has picked up on a Robert Scoble post on User-centred RSS. And he’s asked a couple of questions I’m spending a lot of time thinking about at the moment.
Has there been any serious user-research and investigation of RSS from a user-experience or information science point-of-view?Or has anyone looked further outside that to ‘pain-points’ in people’s everyday lives where an rss-type delivery of information or services might bring benefit?
Well, a) not that I know of, but b) they’re great questions. Really great questions. And ones which, albeit at one remove, I’ve been thinking about a lot for this research project I’m involved with.
read on »
Just to say for less typing, I changed the address of this blog to:
blog.monkeymagic.net.
(But can still be reached via www.monkeymagic.net/blog)
Group-forming activities help release the brain’s natural opiates. “Grooming” - as in social rather than haircuts - gives us a natural high. This, at least, was what Robin Dunbar (of 12, 50, 150 fame) was saying on the radio this morning. It made me wonder whether the flipside of this collective bliss was essentially a drug war.
read on »
Old (as in 1999), but interesting article here by Charles Sieloff.
What I liked about it was the idea that there are two sides of “knowledge provision”. One is concentrating on making information/content etc more valuable, more relevant and more helpful; the other is ignore the benefits of that information and instead focus on how to make sure the costs of paying attention to information are lowered, both for individuals and for groups.
Put another way, let’s say the value of a “knowledge system” is V, then there is an implicit equation for working it out.
V(ks) = V(info) - Cost(attention to info).
And the ways to maximise the value of the system? Concentrate on improving the value of the information, concentrate on reducing the cost of paying attention to it, and both together. Erm, easy as falling off a log.
It’s been a while. Server problems, dead laptops and the like have put a bit of a dent in things. Anyway, still alive, and missing blogging, so what I thought I’d do is this.
1) Not worry for the moment about stylesheets/MT Templates not quite working, but post anyway. Things will get back to normal, but apologies now for any odd looking pages
2) Redo old posts in batches. I’m having to do this by hand at the moment, and it’s taking a good deal of time. What I am doing is cleaning them up a bit - getting rid of typos and the like. If anyone is still syndicating this, then I’ll post to let you know what’s old. Titles will be “Reposting old stuff” and “Stopped posting old stuff” to help filter it out of your aggregators.
What I would like to do is say a big thank you in public to Johnnie Moore for thoughtfully offering a helpful hand, and to Matt Whyndham. Thanks chaps.
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