Facebook reminds me of that. Mouse clicks not emotions.

In 1994(ish), I got my first modem. And to connect to the internet, via Compuserve, I could hear the dialup, and the connection. It sounded much like the old tape drive. And while I listened to it, waiting to connect to people miles away from me, I’d get a similar sense of excitement at the World Wide Web I was about to be able to stumble through and explore.

In 2003(ish) I started blogging. There was no noise, but I still had that excitement. It amazed me to be able to read people’s thoughts, from London to North America to Iraq to India, and then later to meet some of them. The world started to seem a lot smaller.

This morning, again there was no tape-drive noise, and again things were quick. I’ve become inured to it, I suppose. I expect a certain level of service, in the same way I expect running water from the taps, or electricity from the wall sockets.

But when I fired up Skype and I got that weird popping sound, I remembered the digital crackling noise. And not for the first time it struck me quite how astonishing it is to be connected. My friend Rajesh has just come back online after lunch in Mumbai, and the bloke in the US whose forum software I’m looking at is probably still asleep. And to briefly stop and think about how different their surroundings are from mine, how talented they are, and how far away they are drives home an often forgotten point.

It’s a huge world, I’m a miniscule part of it, and I feel very lucky to be connected, and excited to be stumbling my way through it.

Anyway, back on the testosterone supplements soon.

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.

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.

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.

five-year-old cafe added free Wi-Fi when it seemed their customers wanted it a couple of years ago. It initially brought in more people, she said, but over the past year “we noticed a significant change in the environment of the cafe.” Before Wi-Fi, “People talked to each other, strangers met each other,” she said. Solitary activities might involve reading and writing, but it was part of the milieu. “Those people co-existed with people having conversations,” said Strongin.

But “over the past year it seems that nobody talks to each other any more,” she said. On the weekends, 80 to 90 percent of tables and chairs are taken up by people using computers.

There’s some interesting further commentary on the Crumb Trail concerning the interplay of on and offline conversations. Notably, a great post by Wade Roush on the why’s and why not’s of backchannelling at conferences, and a thought-provoking one by Stowe Boyd on why “Continual Partial Attention” is the ethical thing to do in today’s world, despite arguments that interruptions are bad for the brain.

A while ago I wondered whether social software was mimicking the coffee-shop dynamic, and Simon Roberts over at Ideas Bazaar had some great things to say on the same topic, taking a more cross-cultural interesting slant. What is curious about the Seattle Coffee Shop (real world) example above, is not that they don’t talk. I think they do, just via laptops, blogs, etc. What’s curious to me is that, even though a lot of the roles of the old-fashioned coffee shop get subsumed by their online variants, people still go to coffee shops (rather than staying at home). The coffee can’t be that good, can it?

Equally, from Wade’s post, people still go to old-fashioned talks, even though these are increasingly typed/podcasted/whatever but when there they don’t fully listen.

It’s bizarre. And if mobile phones, ICQ, Skype, backchannelling is about relationships, as Stowe says, then surely they’re about human relationships. And if they’re about human relationships, then isn’t it odd that it seems to be turning traditional real world social hubs into ghost towns?

One of the better holiday reads was Anthony Burgess‘ Enderby series. (If you don’t know the books, Enderby is a hapless, balding, toothless middle-aged poet who writes his best work on the lavatory. He is hounded by women, and has chronic dyspepsia thanks in part to the psychological damage inflicted on him by his step-mother).

Anyway, one page got dog-eared for the following bit.

Enderby, thanks to his unwitting involvement in a notorious sex-film, has been invited to be a visiting professor of poetry by a US College and is managing to insult nearly everyone.

One of his callers, who had once termed him a toothless cocksucker (that toothlessness had been right, anyway, at that time anyway), was always threatening to bring a tomahawk to 91st Street and Columbus Avenue, which was where Enderby lodged. Also students would ring anonymously at deliberately awkward hours to revile him for his various faults – chauvinism, or some such thing; ignorance of literary figures important to the young; failure to see merit in their own free verse and gutter vocabulary. They would revile him also in class, of course, but not so freely as on the telephone. Everybody felt naked these days without the mediacy of a mechanical mode of communication.

It was that last sentence that I thought merited the dog-ear. And as serendipity had it, a couple of hours after the dog-ear my cliff-path walk took me past a nudist beach. Not a phone in site.

On the other hand it is bad, because – sigh – it seems like a sign that my head is disappearing up my arse.