It seems that, when leaders are pressing hard to achieve their goals, people in the trenches will develop ways of ignoring all but the most direct of orders. And for good reason.
In the trenches in World War I, the Germans and the English were not continually fighting. Instead, they developed a complicated system of co-operation that meant neither side sustained heavy losses unless the Staff Officers had ordered a charge.
From Cyril Connolly …
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.New Statesman, 1933.
… selflessy brought to you by me …
If you haven’t had a look at gapingvoid yet, you might want to. There are moments of brilliance … like this
There’s a good article by Robert Cialdini in HBS Working Knowledge: Leadership called “What Lovers Tell Us About Persuasion”. [Thanks to Scott Moore for a) his interesting post and b) the pointer].
In romantic relationships, there are broadly three types of negotiating techniques: do-this-or-else, I’m-rational-so-agree-with-me, and we-are-a-couple-and-so. Of these types, by far the most successful is the last, where one of the pair will start the discussion by affirming the relationship. As Cialdini puts it,
Back in the 1960s, the brilliant media commentator Marshall McLuhan observed that often in the realm of mass communication, “the medium is the message.” I’m willing to claim that often, in the realm of social influence, the relationship is the message.
And he goes on to make the (sensible) point this we-are-a-couple-and-so approach is successful not just in romantic relationships, but in relationships full stop.
A few other things caught my eye:
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Over at Functioning Form, Luke ties a number of things together and muses about what he calls Web-log Continuum Sparklines[Thanks to Foe’s del.icio.us feed for this]
A simple Web-log post continuum sparkline could plot the current post a reader is viewing, the previous posts it references, and the later posts that reference it. This paints a picture of where the current post originated (what ideas it draws from), and where it went (how those ideas evolved).
I love the idea of organising posts in a more topic-oriented way , but while I’m exceedingly tantalised, (Mr Kipling), by the grace of these little sparklines, I’m not sure they’ll give me enough of what I want … what are hot topics among friends I know/colleagues I respect/feeds I subscribe to etc. Still, it’s very much a step in the right direction and almost certainly larger than I think!
A couple of interesting discussions have caught my eye recently. One is about unkind communities and the other is about alternatives to the “mainstream”. It’s how closely these are related that has got me thinking, because it seems that as soon as you “dare to know” what is going outside the mainstream and start rooting around in a network’s tail, you can expect, at least initially, to get stung.
Unkind Crowds
Anil Dash has picked up on the poor treatment of David Hailey and says how there are
more and more examples of people just getting browbeaten by the blogosphere
Later on, in Anil talks about the value of perspective and notes that
Being too “in the trenches” on a topic seems to lead people into saying polarizing things, or into demeaning or dismissing those who disagree with them.
He’s spot on. I’m slightly suspicious of the way people invoke “the Wisdom of Crowds” in some of these sorts of conversations. (It seems increasingly to be in danger of being an “exception proves the rule”, blind faith type of comment. If you sit down and think about it, of course a rule’s being broken doesn’t prove it. Quite the opposite. And if you sit down and think about it, of course not all crowds are wise. Witch trials, apartheid, lemmings … and so on.) Anyway Surowiecki was at pains to point out that crowds seem only able to be wise when they are indepedent, decentralised, and diverse.
But what if the further you delve into the tail, the less likely you are to find ‘wise’ communities, communities that have these three features?
Comments(1) | Thoughts on blogs, Creativity, fear, groups, prejudice, scale social computing Christopher Allen has written a good, well-researched post on the evolution of social software as a label - from Bush’s Memex to the present day. It’s worth a read - as usual with posts on Life With Alacrity, it’s thorough and thoughtful.
In response, Danah Boyd, who by her own admission is more than a little underwhelmed with the term, makes a sensible, grounded comment.
“In CMC, the focus is on the communication with the computer and its role as mediator being a description to the primary activity: communication. With social software, the adjective is describing our focus: software.”
She then wonders whether “social software” is in fact anything new.
Its usage has grated me because folks use it as though a revolution has happened. We’ve been building software that can be labelled as “social software” for a long long long time. Why are we acting like giddy children who just found a new toy?
Hmm.
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Just got the beta of Google Desktop Search. Looks spiffing - especially like the search for instant messaging.
More geo-tools, this time from Nasa.[Thanks to Sudhakar for the link] Mission Control have developed a fantastic tool called World Wind.
“World Wind allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) elevation data to experience Earth terrain (or any planet with the data) in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there. Virtually visit anyplace in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps or along the African Sahara.”
Makes you feel slightly like an MI6 agent, zooming in on the suspect. Sort of. Just a little bit.
This looks like a neat tool from the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute [found via Marc Eisenstadt, who’s guesting at Stowe Boyd’s Get Real]. The map below should show all the locations of people accessing Monkeymagic. [If it doesn’t then you won’t know because you aren’t reading this!]
In The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon (whom Autonomy helped make famous) highlight 3 levels of communication problems:
Level A: The technical problem.How accurately can the symbols of communication be transmitted?
Level B: The semantic problem. How precisely do the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning?
Level C: The effectiveness problem. How effectively does the received meaning affect conduct in the desired way?
They map neatly on to three semiotic distinctions of Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics.
A. Syntax = Grammar and the forms of language
B. Semantics= Syntax + “Meaning”
C. Pragmatics = Semantics + Context
We’ve got the TCP/IP, the internet/Web (level A). We’re getting the Semantic Web (level B). And I want the Pragmatic Web (level C).
Because that’s where the problem of effectiveness starts getting addressed.
[UPDATE: I want, never gets …]
Here’s an idea:-
What if, at the company you worked in, you had a system similar to del.icio.us, which bookmarked items of interest etc. And on that system, rather than having just “and 42 others” as the cue to who else found something interesting, you had “and 42 others(2 marketing, 3 HR, 7 IT Support, 30 other)”.
Any obvious cons to this?
I’ve just been asked what the Latin or Greek root of “serendipity” was. I didn’t know, thankfully. Its root, according to the OED is essentially the old name for Sri Lanka, “Serendip”
A word coined by Horace Walpole, who says (Let. to Mann, 28 Jan. 1754) that he had formed it upon the title of the fairy-tale “The Three Princes of Serendip”, the heroes of which “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”.]
It was a happy fortuitous discovery for me.
Having a little tea break and saw this, which appealed to my cryptic crossword side [via Matt Jones@del.icio.us]
WordCount is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.
Look up “deferred” - it comes in at number 9943. And either side of it, you get “reorganisation” and “frustrating”. Says a lot.
In this morning’s Independent there was an article about maths, sex and dating. Clio Cresswell, a maths whiz at Australia’s University of New South Wales, has written a book on the subject - aptly called “Mathematics and Sex“.
The book’s backcover states that
Revealing the ways in which math can help unlock the secrets of love, lust, and life’s search for the ideal partner, this intriguing text covers topics such as dating services, dating as game theory, the mathematical logic of affairs, and the numbers behind orgasms.
Now, the article I read gave five “love doctor” rules. While these may be of interest for those trying to find leurve, my first reaction when I read them was “Hmm, relationships, the rules might apply to feeds too”. (My second, quickly after, was “Shitbags, not everything is about social software”.)
Anyway, the Rules of the Love Doctor (and some knee jerk reactions to they might apply to feeds and the like) are as follows:
read on »
Friday night saw me pottering off with friends to to the theatre, but with an abnormal amount of dread. The show, on at the Battersea Arts Centre, had the worrying title “Thalidomide! A Musical”. And the flyer I had, from the overly-talented Nat Steed, went as follows.
A PC free musical with a short armed punch. Set against the 60’s drug scandal this is a love story with show tunes, love songs, dangerous drugs and monster baby tangos…..
These scratch performances incorporate flash animation, projection and Fraser’s trademark intelligence, humour and passion.“Yes I’ll love him without any qualms, he’ll my guy and I’ll be his arms”
As they say in Spain, blinking flip.
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