Category: network

Cluetrain: Any Dream That Ships Without A Mouse, Ships Broken

Published May 2, 2009 by cgerrish

On the tenth anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls had some thoughts about clue number 71. Click the link and read them yourself, it’s worth the effort. My takeaway was that we have lived in a world where we have to subscribe to vendors, but vendors don’t have to subscribe to us.

71. Your tired notions of “the market�? make our eyes glaze over. We don’t recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we’re already elsewhere.

In prehistoric times, there were three networks that locked down the channels of attention. These focused audiences provided a large target to whom they could sell the equipment required to enact the American dream. It was a dream pre-dreamed for us by professionals experienced in the business of dreaming dreams.

When the audiences began wandering off, spending their attention on dreams not listed in the handbook– the new imagery was incorporated. The channel had one direction so it seemed as though the dream manufacturers had tuned in to the spirit of the times. New images appeared in the dreams, although something wasn’t quite right.

When you control a uni-directional channel, you can overplay your hand. But, of course, the channel doesn’t really only go one way. And what can be co-opted by one set of players, can result in subliminal blow back on another frequency.

Tw*tter has distracted a sizable section of the audience from the crumbling remnants of the prehistoric attention focusing machines. The new channels are now being flooded with celebrities to refocus the audience’s attention. The analysts and consultants are conspiring to brew up a formula that can painlessly transport the brands to the new medium with their self-dreamed power and status intact. It doesn’t do to tell the powerful that the basis of their power is dissolving without providing an escape route to the next peak poking through the clouds.

The brands have sent their robots to follow me on Tw*tter. They’ve analyzed my tweets and have determined that I’m a customer– or potentially could be one. They’re listening to my broadcasts and sifting through them to build a profile to create an automated relationship. The polarity of the channel has been reversed. The brand subscribes to me– but I’ve yet to set the terms of that subscription. I can choose to reciprocate and subscribe– or I can block a brand that gets out of hand. The brand has its legacy communications channel that can be correlated with the new channel. They’re hoping this new combination will be more powerful than ever.

We are what we do with our attention.
– John Ciardi

The cognitive surplus of our attention has been held spellbound for decades. Ten years ago, when Doc Searls said “we know we’re already elsewhere,” he paired that with the reaction “our eyes glaze over.” In other words, we withdraw from the world with which we’re confronted. In the ten years since, we now listen to Clay Shirky say, “any dream that ships without a mouse, ships broken.”

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Adam Smith, Power Laws and the Social Networks of the Ant Colony

Published April 29, 2009 by cgerrish

To support a conjecture in the world of humans, we often point to the natural world as some kind of final arbiter. “You see, this is the way it works in nature, therefore this is the way it is.” Aesop’s fable about the Ant and the Grasshopper has been used in this way in political circles for years. The social behavior of ants and bees has also been of particular interest to those of us thinking about the complex digital social networks emerging all around us. We take the folk wisdom of Aesop as gospel, and using that tool, we make an attempt at interpretation. Ants are industrious, collective and coordinated. If only people could join together in such a natural kind of cooperation. It’s only our human foibles that prevent this return to Eden.

Meanwhile, Anna Dornhaus, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has been painting ants. She does this so that she can track the individual behavior of a particular ant. Despite the anthropomorphism of Aesop’s fable, we tend to think of ants as a swarm of ants– as a collective. In a fascinating profile of Dornhaus by Adele Conover in the NY Times, we discover that:

“The specialists aren’t necessarily good at their jobs,�? said Dornhaus. “And the other ants don’t seem to recognize their lack of ability.�?

Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task — collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item — while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.

A few days ago I was re-reading Clay Shirky’s blog post on Power Laws and Blogging which describes the distribution of popularity within the blogosphere. In his book, Here Comes Everybody, he expands this idea of self-organizing systems and power law distributions to describe how things generally get done in social networks like Wikipedia. Aspects of the process have also been described by Yochai Benkler and called commons-based peer production.

Shirky’s work combined with Dornhaus’s gives you a view into the distribution of labor within the commons of a social network. Benkler’s “book” The Wealth of Networks is a play on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and in Dornhaus’s experiments we find some interesting contrary data to Smith’s conjecture:

My results indicate that at least in this species (ants), a task is not primarily performed by individuals that are especially adapted to it (by whatever mechanism). This result implies that if social insects are collectively successful, this is not obviously for the reason that they employ specialized workers who perform better individually.

As Mark Thoma notes, Adam Smith cites three benefits from specialization:

The worker would become more adept at the task.

The time saved from not changing tasks.

With specialization, tasks can be isolated and identified, and machinery can be built to do the job in place of labor.

As we begin to think about the characteristics of “swarming behavior” within digital networks, we can now start to “paint the ants” and look much more closely at how things get done within the swarm. Digital ants may all behave identically, but ants as we find them in nature behave unpredictably. Rilke notes that “we are the bees of the invisible,” but is a bee simply a bee?

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Unknown And No Longer Optional

Published April 28, 2009 by cgerrish

In his first address to Congress, our new President said that a college education was no longer optional. Education is a high priority and an important driver for the recovery of our economy. When we talk about a “college education,” we seem to know exactly what we’re talking about. We know about the Ivy League schools, the great technical schools, the football schools, the party schools, the medical schools, the law schools and the business schools. We need to learn to learn, and that’s what a college education seems to be good for. If adaptive behavior is the key to survival in a changing environment, then learning how to adapt would be a requirement for prospering in uncertain times.

Just we all seem to agree that everyone must have one– that it’s no longer optional, Mark C. Taylor throws the whole thing into question. I’m sure he doesn’t question that we all must have one, he simply questions what a college education is– or rather what it should be in this emerging network culture. He outlines his ideas in a piece for the NY Times. In brief, here are his six points:

Restructure the curriculum, beginning with the graduate program and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structures like a web or complex adaptive network.
Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years, each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. Possible topics might include: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.
Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting.
Transform the traditional dissertation. Do not write traditional traditional papers or graduate theses, rather develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games.
Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained.
Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Tenure should be replaced with seven year contracts, which like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed.

Is our emerging network culture really still emerging? Oprah is on Twitter. The Web is already primarily social and is moving fast. The public relations and marketing industries are scrambling to transform themselves to be operational in a two-way many-to-many network grid. Our students are already networked. Imagine if our universities were not only institutions of learning, but also learning institutions– adaptive in the mode we intend our students to be.

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2-Way Asymmetric Networks: Robots Call Me All The Time, Yet I Never Call Them

Published April 26, 2009 by cgerrish

lobster_phone

There are a number of stories that have been running through my playlist recently. The theme, the question, has to do with what I call spammable identity endpoints. With the growth of dual one-way asymmetric follow networks, I wonder if we are creating new communications channels that will make the phone number and email address obsolete?

Here are the stories:

Avital Ronell’s “book” called The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, opens with a description of our relationship with the node of the Network that the telephone represents:

…And yet, you’re saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly. Your picking it up means the call has come through. It means more: you’re its beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt. You don’t know who’s calling or what you are going to be called upon to do, and still, you are lending your ear, giving something up, receiving an order. It is a question of answerability. Who answers the call of the telephone, the call of duty, and accounts for the taxes it appears to impose?

Bruce Sterling may have said something resembling the following at the recent SXSW:

Connectivity will be an indicator of poverty rather than an indicator of wealth.

There’s a story about how cultural norms are solidified and passed to the next generation:

A room contains a researcher and a small stool. Hanging over the stool is a banana on a string. The researcher wears a white lab-coat and holds a fully pressurized fire-hose. An arbitrary number of monkeys is released into the room.

Sooner or later one of them will make for the stool to try and grab the banana. Yet as soon as that monkey climbs the stool and approaches his prize, the researcher lets him have it with the hose. And not only does that monkey get it, but all monkeys in the room (whether they touched the banana or not) get sprayed. After soaking them roughly for a few moments, the researcher turns off the hose.

Perhaps another monkey gets brave or hungry. When he climbs the stool and touches the banana, the researcher lets him have it. And as before, all the monkeys also get doused, whether they moved towards the banana or not. Repeat this process enough and, after the group has suffered enough soakings, the following effect should be noticed: Should any monkey make for the stool, the rest can be counted on to beat him silly before he reaches either it or the banana, sparing themselves. After awhile, the group avoids the banana even as their bellies growl.

Now say the researcher removes a monkey and brings in a new one to replace him. No big surprise, one of his first actions might be to make directly for the banana. And of course the others won’t allow this, for if he should make it they all get sprayed again. They administer a beating to the confused newcomer, until he learns not to near the stool.

Should the experiment continue, perhaps after replacing every monkey in the original generation, one can even remove the researcher. The descendants enforce the social order even though they may never been sprayed or even know about the researcher. By now no monkeys have directly experienced the hose, and in fact no white-coated danger exists, yet still their options are self-curtailed. There is no risk in the banana. Yet they avoid it, none quite certain why.

I’ve heard this story from Clay Shirky, although I can’t seem to find a reference to it (either on my book shelf or on the Network). So I’m going to make something up that Clay might have said:

Marconi invented radio as a means to enable ship-to-shore communication. The intention was to create a one-to-one communications network. It turned out that anyone with a radio listening device could hear the broadcast. In a network with only two radios, transmissions were scoped correctly as one-to-one. On a network with a broadcast radio and many radio receivers– just add some commercials selling soap, and you’ve got modern broadcast radio.

The network transmission characteristics of a technology make an imprint on our cultural practice. We all know that we couldn’t survive without the telephone and email. Going back to the telegraph and the telegram is not an option. We have a unique phone number and email address so that we can reached through the network. We make these identity endpoints findable, so that if it’s important, you can call us. The relation is two-way asymmetric — if my identity endpoint is known, it can be called. For instance, robots call me all the time, and yet I have very little desire to call robots. Although, I suppose I could.

If Twitter had a presence status indicator and full-duplex voice transmission enabled through the direct message channel, how quickly would it replace the telephone? Skype is already the largest international telecom provider in the world. Could a dual one-way asymmetric pub/sub communications network supercede the current network where robots can call me any time they are directed to do so? Or has this already happened, and are we just scrambling to put together the documentation of how it works…

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