David Weinberger has an interesting thought.

Knowing has been primarily a way of seeing the simplicity behind the world’s apparent complexity. But now as a culture we’re busy complexifying everything we can. E.g., blogs take a simple idea and turn it over and over in their hands, poking at it, trying it this way and that, connecting it to that other thing over there.

Are we complexifying things? Or rather, are we complexifying things more than any of our forebears?

I’m not sure. I tend to see all the turning, poking, trying and connecting that blogs et al. afford as the process of proving an idea, whether that idea is complicated or not.

And extrapolating from a base case of one, I suspect people still want to know things in the traditional sense, to see the simplicity behind the world’s apparent complexity.

For me, the advantage of everyone being able to do this together is that the breadth of our combined cultural and educational backgrounds is both a great forge for new ideas, and a powerful, rigorous testing ground.

The disadvantage, though, is that, as you engage in this process you cannot help but be aware of how much more complexity there is in the world than was apparent, and how hard it might be to see any simplicity.

Ho hum.

April 26th 2006 | Comments(2) | Thoughts on complexity, philosophy simplicity

Social Loafing is an interesting phenomenon. From what I can work out, it was first discovered by a German called Max Ringelmann. He had people alone and in groups pull on a rope attached to a strain guage to measure the pull force.

What was surprising was that the sum of the individual pulls did not equal the total of the group pulls. Three people pulled at only 2.5 times the average individual performance, and eight people pulled at less than times the average individual effort. The group result was much less then the sum of individual efforts. That’s what’s called the Ringelmann Effect.

This goes against the notion that group effort and a sense of team participation leads to increased effort. Interestingly, it’s not a co-ordination problem either (like people pulling in different sub-optimal directions). In the 1970’s a researcher called Ingham reran the experiment, but with rope-pullers blindfolded and duped into thinking that others were pulling. A similar drop-off in effort was found.

What’s fascinating here is that the decrease in individual effort has motivational causes. The more people working on something with you, the less you will pull your weight. And that’s not just in tugs of war, it’s in brainstorming[.ppt file], in blogging - in any group activity, however good the communication.

A couple of months ago, Lee Bryant mentioned he felt that the amount of transformational thinking out had dried up abit.

“Back in 2003, my aggregator was full of ideas and what I would call ‘transformational thinking’ - exciting stuff that had clear potential to change the way we live and work. Now, aside from conference reports and notes, some of which continue to inspire (and the now traditional annual posting by Clay), there is less new thinking around. To be fair, this is partly because more of us are focusing on implementing things - doing not thinking - and that is to be welcomed … but it would be refreshing to come across more original thinking in what we blog about.”

That certainly rang some bells. It may just be that new ideas take a long time to germinate, but alternatively, perhaps the perceived lack of new ideas around is an effect of Social Loafing? Perhaps as we feel more connected, and as we try to solve similar problems together, each of us does less? (And perhaps, if left unchecked, that becomes apathy?)

If that’s true, then there’s a motivational problem. There may be more, but three possible causes of people’s loafing and lack of new thinking are that they feel

• others will do it for them,
• there are sufficient ideas to be getting on with, or
• others aren’t putting as much effort in as they used to so why should they.

So how do you mitigate that? It all seems to come down to individual recognition, and making people feel that they are identifiable. There are various ways Billy Blogger can get his “I’m me” fix: server logs, services like Technorati and Bloglines based on trackbacks and comments. But there’s a big hole between server logs and trackbacks and comments (and therefore the services built on top of them).

I read a lot of posts which I like, but most of them I don’t comment on, or don’t blog about or don’t post to del.icio.us. And let’s say Billy’s posts are in there. How does he know that I’m giving him any individual recognition?

Well, he could root through the server logs. But a) he might not find any clear evidence that I liked it, and b)if he’s like me he’s find that kind of depressing. (I don’t know what’s spam, what’s accident and what’s genuine recognition, and, to be honest, it’s kind of depressing to find yourself acting in such a self-absorbed manner. ).

What might be better is to have a quick, one-click way for me or any other reader to indicate to Billy that “yes, I read this and thought about it”. They won’t necessarily be good thoughts, and won’t necessarily be bad thoughts. But Billy will get a definite indication that his post has been read and Billy’s contribution has been recognised. You never know, that might just be the chivvy he needs to stop loafing and think that new big thought that excites you.

April 20th 2006 | Comments(3) | Thoughts on Brains, connection, motivation, psychology RSS

“A lot of folks who are blogging “experts” talk about blogs in a way that scares the hell out of normal business people.”

Anil Dash

Yup.

“In 1999, the World Bank conducted a survey amongst 60,000 people living on less than a dollar a day.

When asked what they felt would make the greatest difference to their lives, the number one answer, above even food and shelter, was access to a voice.”

Source -
Participatory Video

Helen Goulden, as is her habit, hits the nail on the head in a short post called “Equity of Access, Equity of Content”.

“With the government increasingly paying attention to the ‘digital divide’; the growing gap between those you have access and exploit new technologies and those who don’t (either because they don’t see the need, or don’t have access to skills and equipment), and the emergence of local and community TV, it strikes me we need to pay attention not just to attempting to provide skills and access but also equitable access to rich media content production.”

And she points to Participatory Video and Our Video as ones to watch.

Would be interesting to see what Lloyd “Podcast” “Noah” Davis thought about it all, when he’s not off hunting nurturing and caring for snowmen.

April 12th 2006 | Comments(2) | Notes on digital divide, participation, TV voice

Anjo is progessing apace with his tOKo tool, which aims (I think) to give some analytical clout to questions such as whether or there is any “knowledge transfer” between blogs. It’s intriguing stuff.

Spurred on by Ton’s call to arms, I sent Anjo my MT export to add to the experimental data. [Read the directions at Anjo’s blog for how to send him data]. Anjo quickly sent back the following picture (thanks Anjo!):

(click for a larger version)

Interesting to compare the map with the one I’d done a while ago based on my blog keywords and SNA. tOKo makes me much more of a poet, and to be honest, that’s fine by me! (Especially as Anjo’s work is likely to be far more rigorous than mine)

I have to admit I don’t fully understand it, but Ton mentioned that all the results will be explained further at BlogTalk Reloaded - seems like another very good reason to go.

April 11th 2006 | Comments(2) | Notes on Anjo, connection, maps, social computing, tools visualisation

Peter Pesti is using Google Maps in a nice way. He’s mixed up the Google API with night time satellite shots from NASA to give you images like this.

It made me think of an old 1994 Al Gore speech, where he quoted Nathaniel Hawthorne’s comment that

“By means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time … The round globe is a vast … brain, instinct with intelligence!”

Wonder what the relationship is, if any, between connectivity and people burning the midnight oil? My guess is that there’s a reasonable correlation. And if there is, and you agree with the Hawthorne image, then you could almost view the pictures as a PET scan of this big brain we live in.

Of course, as Jack Vinson and Bill Brantley have pointed out, connectivity ain’t the same as knowledge or intelligence. And nor is it the same as global mental health.

Ho hum.

Antonella Pavese has some interesting things to say in a piece called The social life of humans and machines: How to design for the social interaction | AntonellaPavese.com

“Designing an interface for a successful social interaction is not about adding faces, voices, and injected personalities. It’s not about using chat, videoconferencing, or other fancy technological tools. It’s about being able to recreate the social experience that satisfies people’s need to be listened to, guided, persuaded, cheered, and reassured. When we started paying attention to the qualities of the social experience, a miracle happened: people started to love our design.”

“Nonlinear dynamics is central to the future of science. Chaos theory revealed that simple nonlinear systems could behave in extremely complicated ways, and showed us how to understand them with pictures instead of equations. Complexity theory taight us that many simple units interacting according to simple rules could generate unexpected order. But where complexity theory has largely failed is in explaining where the order comes from, in a deep mathematical sense, and in tying the theory to real phenomena in a convincing way. For these reasons it had little impace on the thinking of most mathematicians and scientists.

Here, it seems to me, is where sync has been uniquely successful. As one of the oldest and most elementary parts of nonlinear science … sync has offered penetrating insights into everything from cardiac arrhytmias to superconductivity, from sleep cycles to the stability of teh power grid. It is grounded in rigorous mathematical ideas; it has passed the test of experiment; and it describes and unifies a remarkably wide range of cooperative behaviour in living and nonliving matter, at every scale of length from the subatomic to the cosmic. Aside from its importance and intrinsic fascination, I believe that sync also provides a crucial first step for what’s coming next in the study of complex nonlinear systems, where the oscillators are eventually going to be replaced by genes and cells, companies and people.”

- Steven Strogatz, Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order

From Peter Merholz’s closing remarks at the IA summit [via Blackbelt Jones]

“Think of an architect. They design the space. People flow through it, meet in it, contribute to it.! With that model, the bulk of information architecture currently on the web isn’t really architecture — it’s some form of hyperdimensional document organizing. We’re not creating a space that people move through, and engage with. We’re classifying material to be retrieved. But with web 2.0, we are providing an architecture — a space, a platform through which and upon which people move, contribute, and change…”

… is that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. For sure, sometimes I want the right information and the right time. Train timetables to Oxford, what wires go where on an extractor fan.

But I also I want to find things that are challenging, books that make me think, music that’s surprisingly good, things that are outside my frame of reference, but close enough for me to appreciate, indicators that I’m getting it wrong (again).

Searching for those things is hard. It involves my willing to be open to the new, and it involves other people, who know me or who can at least empathise, whom I trust, and whom I respect to help me narrow down what I’m looking for. It tends, rather than involve the Google’s of this world, to involve relationships.

And a whole heap of failure.

[I recently read a book called Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. It’s an astonishing autobiography of a man who’s been heroin addict, slum doctor, escaped prisoner, Australia’s most wanted man, Indian mafia member and Mujahadeen fighter. In it, he talked briefly about black markets - he was involved in the currency side of things. And much of what he said - creative locksteps, how these markets come to be and the like - sounded very similar to me to issues networked organisations have to deal with.

This is my (probably overlylong) effort to thrash out some of the analogy and see if there’s anything to learn from it. This post is my trying to nail down the characteristics of a black market that I think are helpful to look at. The next is an attempt to show how those characteristics apply to today’s networked organisations. Both may be stretching the point]

BLACK MARKETS: WHAT THEY ARE AND WHAT CAUSES THEM
Black or underground markets are so-called because they operate in the dark, out of sight of the law. Arms dealing, drugs trafficking, alcohol trade in America’s 1920’s and ‘30’s speakeasies, and selling butter to Doris next door during rationed years of World War II are all examples of these markets in operation. This notion of visibility comes up again and again.

The economist’s explanation for them is that they develop:

“when the state places restrictions on the production or provision of goods and services that come into conflict with market demands.”

- Wikipedia

There are, of course, forces beyond the state’s control that can restrict the provision of goods (hurricanes, droughts etc). In general, however, the reasoning is that the more laws there are, and the heavier the constraints, the stronger these black markets are likely to become. Any economy that has rules or regulations has the potential for black markets, so it’s no real surprise that they are present in every economy today.

TYPICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Various connected black markets characteristics stand out for me:

1. decentralistion,
2. risk,
3. trust,
4. spread,
5. cost, and
6. boundary effects.

While the Prohibition Era in 1920’s America may not be wholly typical of every black market, it does help to highlight these (I’ve made liberal use of this as a source).
read on »

Right - the end of my self-imposed 3 month no blogging stint is over. And am looking forward to seeing what’s changed, if anything, around these parts.

April 04th 2006 | Comments(4) | Asides on monkeymagic